By Emmanuel Henne (Emmanuel) (145.254.225.173) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 01:56 am:

Hey,

our old friend MAYA will be awarded an Academy Award for pushing the boundaries of CG in the movie production...
have a look at CGChannel....


Later,
Emmanuel

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 04:25 am:

Yeah, yeah. I wonder when someone will be game enough to render somethiing on Maya.

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (202.57.94.174) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 04:40 am:

give credit to where credit is due. and it's due to those people who develop stuff ON maya, not maya itself. weird.

By Timothy M. (Cim) (152.163.189.134) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 09:03 pm:

Alias/wavefront buying Academy Awards now.... Where will it end!!? :-)

By Panikos (Panikos) (213.149.179.151) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 09:19 pm:

Tim, do you read my mind ?

By gilbert figueroa (Gilbert) (65.35.78.24) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 09:44 pm:

i like to be realistic, Maya is a great package and maybe deserves an oscar, Maya, XSI even 3DMAX has some advance features that makes LW look primitve, I love LW, but if price wasnt an issue i wonder what package i will realy buy,
i dont know, may be XSI?


Gilbert

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (202.57.90.135) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 12:02 am:

maya is a great package. so is lw. what's arguable is whether or not a|w deserves credit for 'pushing boundaries' with their software. evidently they're werent the ones who developed the awesome effects software used in the stuff we watch. they did develop the platform to run those programs. that's what they did.

this'll be a good discussion. though i care not much about who gets what oscar.

By Larry Shultz "SplineGod" (Larrys) (209.178.191.106) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 01:08 am:

Yea,anyone here going to buy Maya because it got an oscar?

By Earl Wilson IV (Earl) (12.224.242.21) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 01:54 am:

The Academy Awards are bogus nowadays. Nothing special in winning when they're rigged to please their sponsors. Even if Maya (its native package) had revolutionized the special effects industry (which I firmly believe is a ridiculous statement), you can't give an Oscar to a tool - you give an Oscar to an artist (of some sort). Next they'll be giving Oscars to the cameras rather than the directors...

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (202.57.90.135) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 04:10 am:

"Next they'll be giving Oscars to the cameras rather than the directors..."

maybe panavision ought to be given an oscar. he.

By Emmanuel Henne (Emmanuel) (62.104.211.64) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 05:47 am:

First, I think that SoftImage would have been more likely to get an Oscar than MAYA.
SI has been there longer and has made the ground for all the high end apps that came afterwards.
LW got an Emmy long time ago, I dunno what kind of arguments the jury uses here, but MAYA lives of its plugin programmers and third party renders, I find it unfair to give credit to manpower instead of true value.

By Jeff (Pixelmonk1) (156.80.138.177) on Friday, January 10, 2003 - 11:43 am:

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Thursday, January 09, 2003 - 04:25 am:


Yeah, yeah. I wonder when someone will be game enough to render somethiing on Maya.
---------------

it's already been done.. next? Regardless, you don't need to render something in Maya when there is outputs for Renderman and Mental Ray. Think out of the box... they did.

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (210.14.16.84) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 12:56 am:

"I find it unfair to give credit to manpower instead of true value. "

i dont understand what you mean by this... who is "manpower" and what is "true value."

"LW got an Emmy long time ago, I dunno what kind of arguments the jury uses here"

well, just coming from me.. it is the same thing. software has nothing to do with emmys or oscars. but look, it aint my trophies to award so "bahala sila". award whomever they want..

(LW got an emmy?? for what? "easiest to use software"? just kidding.)

By Earl Wilson IV (Earl) (12.224.242.21) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 02:13 am:

Hey, can my Wacom tablet be given an Oscar??

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (210.14.24.115) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 02:46 am:

yea sure. here you go. . that simple. ;)

By Emmanuel Henne (Emmanuel) (62.104.211.66) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 06:21 am:

"I find it unfair to give credit to manpower instead of true value. "

i dont understand what you mean by this... who is "manpower" and what is "true value."

------
What I think is that if something is rewarded is has to be something EXTRAordinary.
I find it spectacular that LW was used in Ep2, for modeling animation and rendering.
Now, MAYA was just as a platform to plug in all those inhouse plugins John Doe will never have access to, the same in LoTR.
LW is from a small company with very limited ressources, with enough money and people You can pay You can pretty much do anything, but achieving something despite small budget and devleopment team is something that should be rewarded.
MAYA is from a company that has a lot of programmers and a large budget, and STILL there is the need for 3rd party renders, model plugins etc.
So, I think that A/W and MAYA just do not deserve it, its just another marketing nonsense.

So, WHAT did MAYA achieve anyway to deserve an Oscar ??
This:
"To Alias/Wavefront for the development of a 3D animation, dynamics, modeling and rendering production tool known as Maya.

With its significant and dominant impact on the motion picture industry, the Maya software package offers a robust and widely used commercial visual effects tool with a rich infrastructure for extension and customization."

If THIS is the reason, then LW would deserve one, too.It can claim the same features, plus a lower price, a smaller dev team etc.

By Lernie D Ang (Faulknermano) (210.14.21.144) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 08:13 am:

i see what you mean emmanuel.

By chris golchert (Cgolchert) (208.188.16.211) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 - 01:56 pm:

> Yea,anyone here going to buy Maya because it got an oscar?

No, but "we" aren't always the ones that make that decission. There are plenty mindless suits that think buying Maya will gold plate any turd.

Look at most of the really bad CG commercials on TV. I bet people wanting to produce those would jump at "the software that won an oscar for Spiderman/etc..."

By arthur argote (Archiea) (68.164.66.82) on Sunday, January 12, 2003 - 04:48 pm:

Well, I have always seen LW as your personal animation system.. So LW is to maya what a laptop is to a server/desktop.

I believe Maya deserves the oscar, even with SI in its company. Maya is being rewarded for being a foundation that many studios can build upon. this is where features vs flexibility factor in. in one case, yes, the renderer may not be as good, but most studios use renderman. So in this repect, Maya's output is irrelevant.

I think what makes maya earns its kudos is how ANYONE with enough money and brainpower can create a virtual production pipeline tailored to their task. This is invaluable in large production.

Meanwhile, LW's self contained feature set ensures individuals and studios a fixed, yet more or less complete, pipeline. this enables the budget and time challenged artist access to a wide range of features to produce their content. So while I can do fur with LW, I can only do worley's fur. what if I need fur that has snow or water on it? Well, I'd have to work within the parameters of the feature set, my ingenuity, and my time/budget. Perhaps I may have to modify my script to accomodate possible limitations. With maya, you ENGINEER your solution. The ends define the means, not the means defining the ends. This flexibility and this creation of a creative/technical infastructure is worthy of an oscar, IMHO.

By chris golchert (Cgolchert) (208.188.16.58) on Monday, January 13, 2003 - 12:29 am:

>I think what makes maya earns its kudos is how ANYONE with enough money and brainpower can create a virtual production pipeline tailored to their task. This is invaluable in large production.


Microsoft should get one too then. I'm guessing most of the systems that these "breakthroughs" were done on were running Windows. Some might have been Linux, yeah, but some of these CG breakthrough may have also been done with LW/Max/SI.


I don't really think you would see as many people being bitter about it (software loyalty aside) if Alias didn't make as many claims about their software while it was really the studio's programers using it as an API base.


..But then this year's Oscar looks like they are on crack anyway....