In just five years' time, Maya's 3D animation software had become ubiquitous in the film industry for animating photoreal characters such as Gollum. Photo credit: Pierre Vinet/ New Line Prods. © 2002.

Autodesk's Kevin Tureski remembers the night five years ago at the Motion Picture Academy's Sci Tech Awards dinner when he stepped up to receive a statuette for the development of Maya. In just five years' time, Maya's 3D animation software had become ubiquitous in the film industry, employed for animating photoreal characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. At the time of the Oscar presentation, Tureski was head of Maya engineering at Alias|Wavevront. He accepted the award alongside company president Doug Walker, and like a true Canadian hockey fan, the Toronto-based Tureski likened the achievement to "winning the Stanley Cup."

Maya's Sci Tech Oscar (technically, an Academy Award of Merit) put Tureski's team in rarefied company. Since 1930, little more than three dozen scientific and technical achievements have been honored with this level of recognition. Pixar's RenderMan has garnered a statuette, but that went to key scientists behind the software. Maya earned the Oscar for Alias/Wavefront as a group, which was unusual.

But as Tureski observes, "The Academy committee saw that there were so many talented people who contributed to Maya. It represents hundreds of man-years of development."

In the five years since earning that Oscar, Maya has continued to build its reputation as the 800-pound gorilla of 3D-CG for motion pictures. Weta Digital's work on King Kong, ILM's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and Sony Pictures Imageworks' Spider-Man franchise are among the recent examples of Maya's prominent position at digital effects studios. Since being purchased by Autodesk in 2006, Maya has enjoyed the major marketing muscle and R&D support to extend its influence, and the company is marking Maya's 10th anniversary with the release of Maya 2009. This latest version builds on key areas of functionality that the software has been known for, including lifelike animation through Maya Muscle, and simulated effects like smoke and spray through Maya nParticles. In the evolution of Maya, you can see a through-line for the evolution of 3D-CG itself.

Maya's Foundations
Maya was built on a technical foundation laid by two seminal CG software companies from the 1980s, Toronto-based Alias Research and Santa Barbara-based Wavefront Technologies. Alias and Wavefront separately had been honored with lower-level Sci Tech Awards, and the companies' purchase by Silicon Graphics led to the creation of Alias|Wavefront and the unveiling of Maya 1.0 in 1998. Based on the Sanskrit word for "illusion," Maya was launched on the SGI/ IRIX platform, the preferred hardware of the major visual effects houses at the time. A Windows NT version followed, foreshadowing the trend towards creating high-end 3D-CG on personal computers.

In the early days of Maya, Chris Landreth's films were test pieces for the software. This partnership culminated in Landreth winning an Oscar for best animated short for Ryan. © 1380098 Ontario Inc./National Film Board of Canada.

Tureski remembers all of this personally. He joined Alias in 1987 and became director of engineering for the company's Power Animator software. Tureski recalls that the philosophy that guided his group back then -- and which continues today -- was to work with artists who could "road test" their software during its development. A favorite artist was Toronto-based Chris Landreth, a 2004 Oscar winner for his Maya-animated short film Ryan. Tureski recalls, "Chris Landreth had worked with us previously to create The End with Power Animator." The End earned an Oscar nomination for Landreth and led to an even more ambitious piece of character animation -- a surreal short called Bingo. "That was really the test piece for Maya 1.0," explains Tureski, who co-produced the festival-award-winning film. The face and muscle animation of the lead character and the atmospheric effects in Bingo presented a level of realism that was a calling card for what Maya could do.

"Chris worked from 1996 to 1998 on Bingo," explains Tureski. "It proved that Maya was truly capable of being used the way that our movie customers were going to use it. We wanted to do that ourselves before releasing Maya, to prove that it could be done." And Tureski notes, "We've continued to work with Chris. We're working with him right now on a short called The Spine." (This film is currently slated for release in early 2009 through the National Film Board of Canada.)

Tureski, who's currently director of product development for Autodesk Media and Entertainment, has continued to lead the development of Maya, and possesses a deeply informed perspective on how Maya figures in production pipelines today.

Previsualization
When Maya arrived on the film industry scene a decade ago, the idea of using such a high-end animation tool for previz would have seemed extravagant. Today, with Maya capable of running on personal computers, Tureski reports that a lot of users create previz in Maya. "It's affordable. Maya Complete is 2,000 bucks and you can run it on a laptop. A 'Maya Ninja' can take it on-set and just bash stuff out."

Since winning the Oscar, Maya has continued to build its reputation. The Maya-based software “CityBot” rebuilt New York City floor-by-floor, section-by-section, block-by-block in King Kong. © 2005 Universal Studios.

Tureski cites companies such as Halon Ent. and The Third Floor as examples of those who are taking advantage of Maya as a previs tool. "Firms like that can really make the production pipeline much more efficient, because previs provides a good understanding of creative intent. You're really solidifying ideas of camera blocking or character design. You can use Maya to previsualize characters at low res and then build them up, and we do see a bit of that. But predominantly it's an efficient way of locking in an idea."

Modeling
This is an area of the typical production pipeline where Tureski believes Maya is especially well-grounded. "I think if you look back at Maya 1.0 we had quite a legacy with Alias Studio Tools and Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer. Those were very capable as surface modelers, so we had a quite high bar to hit in terms of modeling. I think Maya was able to draw upon those technologies and we were able to bring the market really a complete solution for modeling from day one."

"We've continued to build from there with subdivision surfaces," adds Tureski. "We pushed hierarchical sub-d surfaces really hard, but we found that our customers said, 'Just stick with the sub-d surfaces themselves. That's the way we want to work.' So that's where we've ended up putting most of our effort."