New Maya Demo Reel

[dmcgrath]

Its an advertisement, and therefore is held to no standards whatsoever. The company makes no fradulent claims about their product. And third party plug-ins, although not listed, are typically acceptable as a means to an end.
On the other hand, if RMan had a demo reel, they would need to specify what modeling and animation software was used to make it. I think...

Many of the car commercials you see on TV today are using CG cars. A new Nissan(?) one comes to mind. Where it starts out just showing the taillight and a camera spinning around it. There is no mention of a of a CG effects package being used, but it is obvious to a trained eye.

[JasonA]

Its a tricky issue. While I agree that dmcgrath is right in terms of the "legality" of it, it IS a bit misleading to the browsing consumer. Shows you can't measure a product by the pretty pictures people might post. but its like alot of other ads too so its not like they're being any more unethical about it than any other product maker.

Just goes to show you really have to do your research on a product before buying, else you could get caught with your pants down.

[DesignDawg]

First of all, I don't think the Nissan ads have any CG cars in them. If you're talking about the ones I think, you are, that's pretty clearly all shot with real cars on a white cyc and then just moved around in post.

Second, and I need to post this somewhere else, to get attention, but.... ONE of the shots on that demo reel, I'm almost 100% sure, was NOT done in Maya at all, but rather in Lightwave.

It's the shot with Artoo flying through the air with his little rockets. I remember reading an article a while back where that shot was specifically pointed out to be an all-Lightwave shot.

And I'm a Maya user, so there's no "Lightwave R0x0rs" fanboyism clouding my memory here.

Ricky

[RobPowers]

JasonA said "its not like they're being any more unethical about it than any other product maker."

Jason,

I would tend to disagree with this. I think if you view several of the other 3D software maker websites, you would see images that are produced almost entirely within their software. Softimage and Lightwave comes to mind. In that I mean the modeling, animation, lighting, rendering is all done with an unmodified and non-propietary version of the software. I know there are exceptions and plugins used some times with all of the packages but I am talking about the fundamental difference in workflow between these packages.

Rob Powers

[JasonA]

yeah you're probably right Rob, sorry I said that kinda loosely. I guess I feel a bit dis-enchanted with most software manufacturers these days so I'm almost getting used to the half-truths and implied statements.

It is unfortunate that A|W doesn't come out at the end and say a disclaimer or whatever, or else offer a breakdown FAQ of the demo reel say on their website.... for consumers so they can see what part May plays in the clips in the demo reel. Still they're probably worried people will be turned off to see a huge software list in addition to the 3D app..

Really they should have a "demo" reel of work done 100% in maya. I think the clip that Alex Alvarez made for their SIGGRAPH presentation was all Maya (but don't quote me on that) and was probably a fairer representation of Maya capabilities right out of the box.

[JasonA]

Oh and DesignDawg, yeah I think you're right about the artoo shot in EP2. I heard it was Lightwave on a mac.

man if thats true, then thats one hell of a booboo for A|W to be putting that in their reel :shame:

[Sp7777]

Well the reel is a thing put together to show the nice things maya was used in.

The gallery however shows many things maya alone did.

[m.d.s.]

I think I have seen it already or at least most parts of it in a previous Maya Demo Reel ... it's like a déjà vu.

But one thing really makes me wondering. There wasn't a single shot of Ice Age in the 2002 demo reel. Alias Wavefront was really showing off that project and there is also a costumer story with Blue Sky Studios on the A|W website. Thats kinda strange :hmm:


ciao
martin

[Jac]

I don't want to start a flame here, and no I don't work for Alias | Wavefront or own a copy of Maya (although I'd like to some day). I do however own a copy of Lightwave. I just wanted to say that it's kinda unfair to be claiming that Maya is mis-representing it's capabilities because it's using Renderman and custom scripts (although the R2D2 was done in LW, and that should be taken out of the reel). Is the native Maya renderer as good as LW's or Mental Ray? Absolutely not (IMHO), that's why they use Renderman. Even a lot of the earlier movies that were created using Softimage were actually rendered in Renderman as well. Softimage didn't necessarily offer that information voluntarily. But I think that A|W recognizes this and that is why they are bundling the Mental Ray renderer basically free of charge. Mental Ray is right up there in terms of quality of output. Would you still be declaring that the reel is mis-representative if all of the images/animations were rendered with Mental Ray, even though it's included with Maya (like Softimage)?

But I'm curious. What if Newtek were to promote Lightwave with a reel that included animations that had models created and/or rendered in LW, but were actually animated in Project Messiah, or worse (gasp) Maya (like the Jimmy Neutron TV series). Would you say that Newtek was mis-representing LW? If so why? LW was still used on the project. One of the biggest promoted movies for LW was Driven, but there were actually two studios that worked on the movie, and one of them used 3D Studio Max! Did Newtek mis-represent LW there?

What about Softimage. It was used to create the game Riven from Cyan. But they also used plugins like Lume Tools and lots of other custom shaders. Did Softimage mis-represent their product?

Also keep in mind that A|W doesn't specifically say that everything on the reel was created with Maya (after all, they still had to have some sort of Non-Linear Video Editing, Compositioning and file compression programs to create the reel and output it to Quicktime). This might be a technicallity, but do you always tell your prospective clients who view your demo reel that you used Lightwave to Model and Render, Sasquatch for hair/fur, X-DOF for Depth of Field, Real Flow for fluids, Project Messiah to animate, and Adobe AfterEffects for compositing? I don't know of many artists that volunteer the information. Again, just my $.02

[CG.p]

I thought Ice Age was a big old festival of custom code.

With all the custom code that Maya is just holding together kinda makes the kingston ad for "memory that was in the computers that made Titanic" seem less of a stretch.

:)

[Jozvex]

Hmm this is weird, I've had this exact 'new' demo reel on my hard drive for months...

[Ckerr812]

Originally posted by RobPowers
The reel looks great but I wonder, Is it possibly more appropriate to call it a "Maya with Renderman and special proprietary coding" demo reel. It seems a little misleading to make people think that most of these shots were animated and rendered with Maya "out of the box". In the industry when you create your demo real you are supposed to outline exactly what you did on a shot. For example, If you were only the animator but didn't do the lighting or modeling you must specify that. Individuals are held to this standard - why aren't larger companies. What do you guys think?

Rob Powers

Umm..No, I would call it a demo reel that shows what a large team of very talented people can do with Maya.

If they were to produce a demo reel by just out of the box standard that would be the same as showing what a paint brush can do by just painting a stroke on the canvas. Maybe they should include a break-down of the shots.

The demo reel is to show the possibilites, (as with any marketing or advertising) of maya and what you could do if you have the talent and money.

[dmcgrath]

By DesignDawg...First of all, I don't think the Nissan ads have any CG cars in them. If you're talking about the ones I think, you are, that's pretty clearly all shot with real cars on a white cyc and then just moved around in post.


Are you sure they weren't CG cars? That taillight that is spinning around, and then the showing of the "real" car, looks like CG to me. I could always be wrong, it doesn't bother me.

:beer:

[ThirdEye]

Is this reel free for dload on the web?

[plotz]

Here's the R2D2 Article.

http://mag.awn.com/index.php3?ltype=all&sort=date&article_no=1416&page=1

Wether it's the same shot or not I don't really know.

As far as the reel goes, I thinks it's a perfectly acceptable demo of animation capability. There's a ton of excellent animation represented. Even if you showed the same pieces in flat shaded renders, it would still be impressive.

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