The New Maya Sets Sail
by Max Sims
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.
This natural scene was created
using Maya
by G. Mundell, P. Roy and M. Kitchen.
Courtesy of and © Alias|Wavefront.
Maya Artisan
The second most significant product Alias|Wavefront
has introduced is the supremely cool Artisan. This advanced module of Maya
permits artists to sculpt with brushes and tools much easier than the tedious
pushing and pulling of CVs (Control Vertices). The tools can be used with
a tablet or a mouse. In many ways, this gives greater leverage to an artist's
ability to draw or sculpt, not to the true techie. The key tools are the
sculpt surfaces, paint select CVs, paint weights and MEL script painting
tools. The artist is given a circle with a normal to the surface and paints
on the actual surface geometry picking CVs and modifying them. The sculpt
surface tool pushes or pulls the surface based on the brush settings. The
key distinction is that this is not a texture or displacement map but the
actual surface. Paint select CVs are the 3-D equivalent of a lasso pick,
like in Adobe's Photoshop. Painting weights permit cluster (CV groups)
weights on geometry. An example would be: a cape on a character could be
set to a heavy weight on the shoulders and a lighter setting at the edges.
A wind force would blow the cape by using softbody dynamics whose animation
would transfer to the weighted clusters. The real mind-blower is script
painting which allows MEL scripts to make custom results. A piece of geometry
can be captured and emitted from the brush, for instance, buildings for
a city or variable sized trees.
Workflow Paradigms
The current trend in digital studios is to breakdown the work between specialists
to finer and finer categories. At ILM modelers are divided between "hard"
and "creature," as well as Modeling TDs. Maya's openness to MEL
scripting and the C++ API at first impression tends to favor the very technical,
in order to get at the higher level functions. Less technical people, however,
are being hired by studios because of their innate artistic skills. Maya
programmers can set up a character UI that would leave only key framing
and posing slider bars to let an animator just animate. This would hide
the inevitable complexity of the matrix of possibilities Maya offers. My
personal opinion at first was that the TDs had won the battle between science
and art. Upon closer inspection and use of Maya, I feel that even an art
school type like myself could use MEL scripting. The standard tools offered
are more than enough to accomplish complex character animation. Release
1.0 does not offer all the tools in the entire Alias|Wavefront product
suite, therefore my cut of PowerAnimator and 3D Studio Max will still be
used for advanced modeling or polygonal tools for games. The backwards
compatibility with PowerAnimator 8.0 is excellent with only very minor
things changing due to the new architecture.
Ruby's Saloon is one of two in-house productions
being created using Maya by the in-house
development team at Alias|Wavefront.
Courtesy of and © Alias|Wavefront.
Animation Features
Maya's first iteration is geared for serious
character animation. All the advanced cluster technology from PowerAnimator,
sculpt tools from Explore and Flexors from Kinemation are combined in Maya.
Lattices, sculpt objects and clusters can be layered and re-ordered. Wrinkle
tools and bind skin permit more realistic surfacing for animating models.
Overlapping Flexors drive deformations by transformations of one or more
joints. It is ideal for animating muscles and skin. Stitch surfaces remove
gaps between adjacent surfaces and keep them continuous during animation
even when they are deformed. The skeleton and inverse kinematics tools
are similar to PowerAnimator 8.5 with handy, direct manipulators.
The Maya F/X package is a combination of Dynamation and PowerAnimator software
particles. The best feature is the ability to render on graphics hardware
with commensurate speed increase of the graphics board. Display mode controls
include texturing, line smoothing, geometry mask, multi-pass rendering,
anti-aliasing with edge smoothing control and motion blur using a hardware
accumulation buffer. Rigid body dynamics are standard in the base Maya,
while soft bodies are in the F/X module. Soft body dynamics are great for
cloth simulation or even Jell-O. The particle systems are fully integrated
and extensible, therefore the combinations are endless. The rendering is
completely rewritten lacking only interactive photorealistic rendering
(IPR) and depth of field cameras which are to come in future releases.
The unique rendering component is shading networks. Shared textures and
materials within shading networks avoid inefficient duplication and can
be recombined to make complex results. The hardware acceleration allows
artists to see where the shadows will fall precisely and many times faster
than in other packages. The graphics performance of SGI's O2 and Octane
are fully exploited in this software.
Last Impressions
Maya is a turning point for Alias|Wavefront. It is the first of a truly
new codebase that major software companies are starting to release. Autodesk's
3D Studio Max was the first to evolve. The latest version boasts 1,000
new features due to the advanced architecture. Microsoft's Softimage will
be next with Sumatra. Maya will hopefully be able to do the same, now that
the architecture is easily extensible. MAYA will also come to the NT platform
sometime after the SGI version. This is a considerable proposition from
a perception standpoint. I still feel that UNIX is more reliable and robust
in production, while the O2 platform has excellent graphics and costs around
US $6,000. The pricing is comparable to Softimage products though considerably
more than Studio Max. By the time one buys all the plug-ins and gets the
system running, I feel that the faster interaction with Maya makes up some
of the difference.
The cost of the capital equipment is not the greatest consideration for
a digital studio like mine. The quality of results and the time it takes
me or my staff to get it done factors heavily into the equation. On a simple
checklist all three vendors have similar features but I still prefer Alias|Wavefront's
rendering, aggressive technology advancement and speed of use. The key
benefit of Maya is how much faster an artist can get work done. The user
interface and hardware shading alone permits me greater interaction with
my work. Maya Artisan is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. It
would take days to push and pull CVs to get a character's subtle details.
Now, it will take a little longer than drawing it on paper.
The only true complaint is the complexity of having so many tools at your
disposal. The big studios that can afford a staff of TDs, programmers and
animators will be able to get more out of it than small shops or studios
of one. The ability to combine and remap nodes to attributes may be the
most daunting paradigm. Excellent animators may not have the time and resources
to create higher level controls that are relatively easy to do. As I like
to say, "It's easy...Once you know how."
Max Sims is the principal of Technolution, a digital studio specializing
in entertainment and design visualization. He has written for the Price
Waterhouse EMC Tech Forecast, Millimeter, and ID Magazine.
He has used Alias|Wavefront products for almost nine years.
Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor
by sending an email to editor@awn.com.
Table of Contents
Feedback?
Past Issues
[about | help
| home | info@awn.com
| mail | register]
© 1998 Animation World Network