mac and maya. any good ?

[log0n]

I'm using a PB17 and it's working fine for me. I can't imagine Maya being too functional on a 12" screen, but I think it would be Ok w/ a 15" (1280xsomething widescreen).

[Ice Czar]

Originally posted by log0n
I can't imagine Maya being too functional on a 12" screen, but I think it would be Ok w/ a 15"

thats OK I'll just stick with dual 21" ers :p

I assume its primarily modeling your looking to do
youd be paying a serious premium for a poor rendering choice

[fsanimate]

Maya works and looks great on our macs at school, then again anything looks great on a 23in. LCD. Man, I love those computers.

Brian

[Vertizor]

Just keep in mind that there's no Maya Unlimited for Mac. There are other plug-ins to add similar features (hair/fur via Shave & A Haircut) I don't know about fluids and soft body dynamics though.

[splintah]

is apple ati the same as pc ati ?

because in pc ati and maya isnt too good

[Novakog]

Maya rendering is EXTREMELY slow on a Mac. In fact, from what I've heard a Dual 2 Ghz G5 is about as fast a P4 2 GHz. However, asside from that, Macs are very stable and IF you're not doing high-quality rendering on it (which won't be very good on any laptop anyway) then by all means go for it.

ATI cards I would guess would run well with Maya on Mac. The reason is, on PC, ATI cards are completely focused on DirectX and suck in OpenGL, but Mac's only have OpenGL so I would imagine the drivers are more stable.

Don't quote me on either thing though (I'm not 100% sure), look up some benchmarks for the rendering speed thing (and let's see if some people who actually are running Maya on a Mac with an ATI card will post).

[mayakindaguy]

Maya 5.0 and under for Mac is honestly not so good. Any type of rendering gets really slow on Macs and the cards on Macs from what I know currently still aren't so great. The worst is when your scene gets cluttered and oh boy, break out those layers and start hiding your whole scene. It will lag even when you're in your panel view while working. However, Maya 6.0 is supposed to fix these issues and performance is significantly boosted.
Either way though grafics cards on a laptop aren't going to be very good and you're not going to do anything but light work on it.

Reminder: I am not trying to take away from Macs. They are great computers however, my experience with them and Maya is just not very good. Especially as stated above, the G5 which is still not able to use the full capacity of its cpus has the performance of a mid range gaming PC rig and is not in the ballpark compared to its PC workstation counterparts. However, I have heard that Pixar does use Mac computers in much of their work. Either way, the bottom line is just know and expect what you are getting performance wise, but those slim and sleek laptops are very hard to pass up.

[Novakog]

Originally posted by mayakindaguy
However, I have heard that Pixar does use Mac computers in much of their work.

I've said this before: don't you think that could be slightly influenced by the fact that Steve Jobs is the CEO of both Pixar and Apple?


Also, does Pixar use Maya? They CERTAINLY don't use it for rendering (they use renderman), and I would bet Renderman would be VERY fast on Macs because of that special optimization.

Like you said, I'm not trying to bash Macs, they are good hardware wise and definitely have some software areas which they excel at (Macs are awesome at editing/compositing), but most companies don't develop and optimize software for them enough and so it makes the performance sub-par.

[splintah]

rendering:
i got a dual 3ghz pc at home so no worries

i just need a notebook thats stable in maya, stylish and good quality

i guess i will go for the 15,2" 1,5ghz ati9700 128mb ram

altough i am still not shure about ati and maya
but the opengl thing is pretty convincing

[Ice Czar]

Originally posted by splintah
rendering:
i got a dual 3ghz pc at home so no worries


then why in the world would you want to incur the dual platform licensing (Mac + PC) for Maya?

or am I missing something?

Originally posted by mayakindaguy
However, I have heard that Pixar does use Mac computers in much of their work.

not really, Pixar employs the PC for all the rendering, the Macs are for the front Office, the Management, bean counters ect

originally posted by ZaonDude

Choosing the Best 3D Rendering Application for Your Needs (New for 2004)... (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=105172)

Computer Hardware: What's Fast and What's Not. When purchasing a workstation and determining which platform to learn 3D on, look to the present (and to some extent the future); not the past. Learn to separate what was fact only a few years ago from what holds true today. Not long ago, SGI hardware was tops in the 3D field; nothing could touch it. Today it's the slowest solution imaginable and a dead-end career choice. Even huge FX houses such as Industrial Light & Magic, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Pixar who have untold millions of dollars invested in SGI hardware pipelines are aggressively switching to Intel-based PC machines. Most of those aforementioned studios have almost entirely completed their move to PC technology. Today, Intel/AMD technology is a clear-cut winner in sheer speed-to-cost ratio. The fastest scalable server 'workstations' are still Sun Microsystems and SGI supercomputers, but these have price-tags so high that 3D software is no longer practical on them. Macs are awesome machines and excel in many areas?but not 3D rendering speed. They come in a distant second, and even Steve Jobs (CEO of Pixar as well as Apple Computer) knows that and has directed his Pixar Animation Studios to employ Linux on Intel-based rendering machines instead of Macs for Pixar film renders (though in the front office for all non-3D needs they exclusively use Macs, of course). Also, remember that in hardware your CPU and memory translate to your workstation's rendering speed whereas your video card (and to a minor extent your CPU) handle your onscreen viewport performance. That is, with few exceptions a fast video card does nothing for final rendering speed. Understand the difference.


and the full article is also posted at zaon.com
Choosing the Best 3D Rendering Application for Your Needs (New for 2004) (http://www.zaon.com/company/articles/3d_rendering.php)
a must read ;)

[colintheys]

Dude,

Let me make a suggestion. If you have a PC desktop, you dont want a mac laptop. It will forever be a pain in the #$#@ getting stuff between them. If all you want is a nice laptop that can run Maya, get a PC. There are plenty of really sweet PC laptops that will run maya pertty well for less $$ than a mac. I, for instance, have a 15in Acer Travelmate 800 and i love it. I get 5 hours on the battery modeling in Maya and the thing is sick (or was for a year ago when I got it) At work for normal applications like webdeisgn+wordprocessing+photoshop, I routinely run for 10 hours on one battery. I didn't even by the extra! The only downside of this machine is bad wifi... VERY bad wifi. However, if you do your research, you should be able to get a really nice pc laptop for less $$ and get more performance anyway. Cnet has a nice overview of current laptops. The last round of G4 laptops were good, but I'm not so wild about the current ones, they seem to be getting slow and suck down the battery pretty fast, although they have nice screens.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.