A Short History Of Maya

Firstly, I would like to say sorry for not keeping to the schedule of my posts that I promised in my last blog post. Due to some college circumstances I had to miss my promised time and will have to change my schedule from posts on the days I said to "Two Posts A Week At Random Times". I hope you understand. But alas, welcome to my second post where I will give you a some what short but detailed history Of Maya. Autodesk's new Maya program had its first stable release in July 26 2016. Maya was originally a next-generation animation product based on code from The Advanced Visualiser by Wavefront Technologies, The code was ported to IRIX and animation features were added, the porting project codename was Maya. Walt Disney Studios took up an interest in Maya back when they began production on a new  project called "Dinosaur". Disney requested that the User Interface of the application be customisable so that a personalised work flow could be created. This was a particular influence in the open architecture of Maya, and partly responsible for it becoming so popular in the industry. The tool is mostly used for  generation of 3D assets for use in film, television, game development and architecture. As well as generating objects it can also animate them and add realistic particle effects such as dynamic hair and fur for example.

Maya is also equipped with its own cross-platform scripting language, called Maya Embedded Language (Or, MEL for short.)  A lot of you may be asking for pricing on Maya which I will now inform you of. Firstly if any of you are considering trying before buying, Maya comes with a one month free trial. After entering your email address, Autodesk will then send you a product activation code along with a link to the download of the software. Once your free month is up, the software will no longer function and instead give you prices for buying of the software. Some students in different courses across the world can also access a three year free subscription to Maya 2017 (the newest version). After these three years are up the same thing occurs with the free product. As for prices, a monthly subscription to Maya will cost 200 euros per month. 1 year 1600 euros, 2 years 3040 euros and finally for 3 years 4320 euros, it really makes you think that those students who get it for free for three years sure are lucky. The price of Maya may be a scary thing for some people but at the end of the day Maya is probably the best tool for 3-D objects. Here is a list of some of the films that use Maya: 

• Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 
• Hugo 
• Real Steel 
• Rise Of The Planet Of The apes

As you can see most of these films are award winning and well praised for there special effects. It really goes to show that the price may be steep but it's worth it in the end. That about wraps things up for this blog post, for the next one I will take you through a brief tutorial on how to create a lemon being cut in half via Maya.