"With Autodesk Maya, everything we created for VIVA PIÑATA was under artist control," said Lee Musgrave, head of art at Rare. "The artists were able to custom create the piñatas' paper fur with Maya's open-ended MELScripts, Also, the plants and trees inside VIVA PIÑATA are all organic and grow in different ways depending on where they are planted. If the player plants a tree, and then plants another one beside it, the plants stunt their growth to avoid merging into one another. To do this, we ran each plant through a script in Autodesk Maya that told it how to grow and interact with other organisms. Not having to create the plants' growth patterns manually saved us a lot of time -- about a months' worth of repetitious work."

Autodesk Inc. (www.autodesk.com) is wholly focused on ensuring that great ideas are turned into reality. With seven million users, Autodesk is the world's leading software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment and wireless data services fields. Founded in 1982, Autodesk is headquartered in San Rafael, California.