Alias|Wavefront, producers of
accredited character animation and visual effects tool Maya, have announced
a significant upgrade to the product; an upgrade which brings important new
tools to 3D animators and effects artists. Version 2.5 comes complete with
Maya Paint Effects: a revolutionary new tool which allows artists to create
and animate stunning organic and painterly effects almost instantly. Paint
Effects features an extensive library of 2D and 3D preset brushes, which
can be used to create a virtually unlimited number and variety of real and
surreal organic forms such as hair, trees, flowers, feathers, fire,
lightning and stars. Also new to Maya comes Maya Builder, a tool set aimed
at maximizing performance for games designers and programmers. The new Maya
Builder software includes the polygonal modeling and texturing tools found
in Maya Complete, award-winning Maya Artisan features, Maya's Embedded
Scripting Language (MEL), and the full Maya API. Using Maya Builder, game
developers can customize Maya to suit the needs of their production,
letting them access Maya's internal data structures for use in writing
translators or custom plug-ins. For a software upgrade released so soon
after a previous version, Maya 2.5 has an immense amount of new features,
many of which are geared towards fulfilling the needs of the ever more
demanding games industry. Maya 2.5 is shipping now at a starting price of
US$7,500 for the complete version, and US$16,000 for the unlimited version.
Maya Builder has an SRP of US$2,995. For more information visit
www.aw.sgi.com .
