Alias/Wavefront has announced , the latest version of its Oscar award-winning 3D software. The eighth release of its flagship software now offers four distinctive options for rendering: the Maya software renderer, mental ray for Maya, a new Vector Renderer and a Hardware Renderer, which allows users to choose the image creation method according to the task at hand--wither a photo-realistic design visualization or a toon-shaded Macromedia Flash Vector graphic for the web

Maya 5 now offers all rendering options in a single unified interface and workflow. The new Vector Renderer allows Maya artists to create content in popular graphics formats such as Macromedia Flash (SWF), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), Adobe Illustrator (AI) and SVG. Maya 5 includes new tools for polygon reduction and editing and extrusion. Maya Paint Effects can also now be drawn as, or converted to, polygons.




Maya Complete is priced at $2,000 and includes modeling, rendering, animation, dynamics, Maya Artisan, Maya Paint Effects, mental ray for Maya and Maya Embedded Language (MEL), an open interface for programming and scripting. It will be available to purchase in May 2003. Version upgrades for Maya Complete are priced at $900 and $1,250 for Maya Unlimited.

by MacNN Staff