Bingo, a software demonstration project created by Chris Landreth using Maya, will be screened at SIGGRAPH '98. Courtesy of and © Alias|Wavefront.

On February 1, Alias|Wavefront is beginning to ship their latest animation software, Maya and Maya Artisan. Maya runs on Silicon Graphics hardware with R4000 or higher processor, 24-bit graphics and OpenGL native preferred. Maya will perform significantly better on current generation hardware, i.e. Silicon Graphics O2 and Octane. Sometime after it will run on Wintel/NT, as well as the forthcoming SGI "Visual PC."

Alias|Wavefront's position and ubiquity in the high-end animation market responded to customers needs by listening and designing for their production paradigm. Their aggressive technology agenda and desire for character animation lead to opening up the tools even more so than Power Animator or Dynamation. On first impression, Maya seems like the amalgamation of TDI's Explore, Wavefront's Kinemation and Dynamation, as well as Alias PowerAnimator. Many of the familiar features are there, but the salient point of Maya is the ability to remap relationships on the fly. The system architecture was written from the ground up for maximum performance. There is no longer 1980s legacy code that hampers development or simple features like a universal undo.

Three main architectural components of Maya are the Dependency Graph, MEL scripting and a C++ API. The dependency graph can be distilled to nodes with attributes that are connected. The power of this is the artist's ability to reconnect or remap relationships on the fly. This permits features like animatible construction history or using surface normals to be generated by an entirely unrelated animation. I find this alone brimming with creative challenges. The next most accessible feature is MEL scripting. MEL stands for Maya Embedded Language. It is the command and scripting language that can be utilized for creating a custom UI or repetitive set of commands. I come from an artistic background and see its usefulness but won't get into it as deep as a TD (Technical Director) would. The Maya C++ API permits Plug-in or custom development for proprietary tools.

Production Testing
Alias|Wavefront has developed Maya with two in-house productions. One is Ruby's Saloon done by the in-house development team and expert users. The other project slated to be completed by April for SIGGRAPH submission is Bingo, directed by the Oscar-nominated Chris Landreth (The End). He has recorded Greg Kotis' Disregard This Play from the Neo-Futurists Theater company and will lead a team on demonstrating Maya's capabilities. The clown image shows a new level of naturalistic human representation that Landreth has pursued in his art.

A small group of beta sites, including this author, have been participating in the Maya Development Partners Team. Based on a great deal of beta testing and resulting input, Maya has been through a lot of changes which has resulted in a delay of introduction. However, the stability and changes were worth the wait. Contrary to the beta agreement a great deal of production work has already been done. Dan DeLeeuw of Dream Quest Images is using Maya for the forthcoming Mighty Joe Young. Derald Hunt is currently animating Adventures of Spiderman, a Universal theme park project, using MEL scripting to animate easily Octo's extendible arms and hands. Daniel Hornick and Rob Aitcheson, formerly of Alias|Wavefront, can open up 160,000 frames of motion-capture data and deal with the complete skeletal hierarchy. This would choke any system currently available. Loren Olsen from Rhonda Graphics presented a commercial that involved a very heavy model of the complete city of Phoenix and was able to manipulate it, shading it, in real-time. Rhonda Graphics' spot, Running Scared, for golf company Ping used particles as sprites of grass while a hole eluded the golf ball. Maya production work has also been broadcast on Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict.