QUOTE(lordarka @ 08/26/06, 08:09 AM) [snapback]246206[/snapback]
- Do you find Maya to be easier to learn than Lightwave?
Yes, but you probably will not! its like comparing a jet plane witha a car. Prepare for a major culture shock, mayas designed for those that know EXACTLY what they are getting at, or sit within a 100 m of one.
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- Do you find it to be more stable/less buggy than Lightwave?
Hard to say, everything ever written is buggy. Lest put it thisway theres not a single computer program on earth that does satisfy me fully. Maya just comes as close as you can get.
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- Is it as feature-rich as Lightwave?
ligtwave is like a empty platter compared to the feature feast of maya. This is not necceserily a good thing whan you do the switch. Prettymuch the only thing in lightwave thats worth the hastle is the renderer.
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- Is there an internet help resource for Maya that is run by Alias? (i.e a forum populated or moderated by Alias/Autodesk staff... Newtek has such a forum for Lightwave, but I am pretty much fed up with the limitations of their product at this point).
Atodesk killed it off. But the remains are still there. But mayas manual is very good if your techy enough to be able to read it.
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Some general questions...
- How complex of a model can Maya cope with? How many polys? How many textures? I feel like my system is loaded with ample memory, and Lightwave doesn't even use all of it before it crashes mid-render.
Well thing is unless your operating sytem is a 64 bindows or linux you couldnt use more than 3 gb for any application anyway (on a properly configured computer that is if you didnt enable it its not on). This would also applys to lightwave. As its a general computer limitation. Same applies to older instalations of OSX.
maya 8 is 64 bit but not on mac! So your memory is of no use anyway. on osX maya has the standard 32 bit prog memory cap.
Anwyay you cant just slap more memory on and asume it helps. it does not, in general unless you know it will work it wont.
Polycount? who cares I dont render out polygons anyway, but micropoly dice paramatrics. Anyway a biref test on a slow medicore for 3d pc shows i can have some 3-4 million tris on screen (update tested on 64 bit and could push MUCH more till my gfx card refused to put them on screen). in the software. However what i see dont limit what i might get.
ive rendered out scenes that have had 6-8 million polys with mr tesselation time yes but i needed a whole lot of eingeneering to pull it off.
Prman ive sent some 20 million tris to trough maya and it chewed them off. Not supprising tough because it allways dices stuff into milion ranges anyway.
However i dont usualy sent such poly mosters as a well placed norma/disp map does the same at much less overhead + it prefilters right, renders faster and ultimately has more visual quality for considerably less rendertime. So whuy would i want to in frstplace.
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- Does Maya take advantage of hardware 3D accelerators?
Yes, you cant run maya without one.
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- Is there a Universal Binary of Maya coming soon?
Who knows, no mention of thsi is in the air. They are probably waiting for some information ofn where the platform is going. mac trasition is very painfull for code people.