May
15
Alias|Wavefront To Release Maya for Mac
Long-awaited
elease previewed on OS X
by
David Nagel
Senior
Producer
Alias|Wavefront
has formally announced plans to bring its 3D animation and visual effects
software—Maya—to the Macintosh platform. What's more, the company
previewed it today at the Worldwide Developers Conference running on Mac
OS X. Few details were available as of press time.
In a released statement, Alias|Wavefront said: "The addition of Mac OS X validates the power of the new Apple operating system to support the most advanced 3D graphics application available today."
Apple reciprocated Alias|Wavefront's sentiment. Steve Jobs himself said, "Maya for Mac OS X will be the premiere 3D application on the Mac." No comment yet from NewTek or Maxon, whose competing products, LightWave and Cinema 4D, have been supported on the Mac for some time now.
Maya offers NURBS and polygon modeling and includes the following components:
- Artisan, an integrated brush interface for digital sculpting and attribute painting.
- Paint Effects—paint technology for adding natural detail on a 2D canvas or in true 3D space.
- Character animation tools for general keyframing, expressions, Inverse Kinematics (IK), character skinning and advanced deformation tools.
- Dynamics—integrated particle system plus high-speed rigid-body and soft-body dynamics.
- Rendering—film-quality rendering with advanced visual effects and interactive photorealistic rendering.
- Application Programming Interface.
- Invigorator, an EPS importer for bringing text and other Adobe Illustrator files into Maya.
Maya Complete for Mac OS X will be released in early 2001. Details on pricing and availability will be announced prior to shipping. NT, SGI and IRIX versions sell for about $5,000. For more information, visit http://www.aliaswavefront.com.
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