Alias|Wavefront announced on April 10, 2001, that next month it will be releasing a Maya exporter plugin that will transfer content into Macromedia Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio software. The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter plugin will provide an export solution for the rapid refinement of content for the soon-to-be-released 3D version of the Shockwave Web platform. The plugin will be available for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. Peter Ryce, senior director of product marketing at Macromedia, remarked, With the development of the Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter, Alias|Wavefront will deliver a high bandwidth connection between Maya and Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio. Maya is a widely used solution for the creation of high quality 3D content and Macromedia is pleased to provide the means to deliver that content to the Web through our new 3D enabled products, Director 8.5 and the Shockwave Player. According to Mike Wilson, director of Maya Interactive at Alias|Wavefront, 3D content delivery is an iterative process with repeated exports and modifications necessary to assure top compatibility, performance and appearance in the target player. The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter is specifically designed to enable rapid iterations between Maya and Director. Wilson stated that, The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter checks the Maya scene for compatibility with the Shockwave Player and then suggests scene optimizations that will improve performance. Moreover, it keeps track of changes and injects only these, as opposed to the whole scene, on subsequent exports -- the result being that data conversion, which normally takes a number of minutes, is reduced to seconds. This function alone will quickly add up to hours of production time saved with the Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter solution. The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter will be available to all Maya users at no charge. As of May 2001, the plugin can be downloaded from the Alias|Wavefront Website at www.aliaswavefront.com.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
