Downloaded the app yesterday night and installed it. Then I called Autodesk to get my floating licenses. There seemed to be a problem with their system as it was only giving out Maya 7 license. Had to wait till tonight to get the licenses for 8. Now Maya8 is running.
Steffen
I downloaded it last night. I installed it and it said I needed to go to Autodesk.com etc to download the AutodeskWebKey program thing. I downloaded and ran that and it said it didn’t find or failed to work or whatever. I closed it down and opened Maya 8 and it seemed to work fine. Apparently something worked disagreeing with what that thing said?
Probably way different then the mentioned problems in this thread but just thought I would throw it out there…
Hey people, still no joy with Maya 8, had this back from support yesterday,
“I have to get you a license that you can install manually. Please bear with me while I work with the people that can update the license database.”
and then this,
“The SPAR form that you submitted will be processed, but the group that does that is requesting that we give them a bit more time to do so. We’re dealing with a rather large volume of requests at the moment, it may not be possible for them to get back to you within 24 hours. We appreciate your patience.”
Looks like no Maya 8 for another day :sad: will post any info i get, sounds like there’s no quick fix tho, will probly just have to wait for the manual license.
Ho hum,
L8rs people.
Hi people! Just 2 questions:
How can i see if my Dual Core is 64bit? and to rum Maya8 64 i need XP 64? (sorry if they are stupid questions)
think its safe to say in what ive been dealing with is to just go the manual approach. Now i wait…
by the way even though not being able to use maya i had a read through the documentation… and i a way it makes me happy to not have a ton of new features. It put a smile on my face to see them revisit aspects implemented before and tidy them up. From what i would say the grunt of the big 1.0 version up is in the background… not in new tools. There is a list of performance improvements which i wouldnt be surprised was a heck of work if not complete rewrites of elements.
it always pissed me off having a ton of new features that i only need 10% of the time and still have tools that i use 90% of the time being zillion years old!
Regarding the comments about fbik - if its not done right its not worth doing at all… and with motionbuilder around till autodesk release a truely complete and useful fbik system - i dont want it. Ill just learn motionbuilder!
oh anybody know if rpf has been added… couldnt find anything in the docs. i will cry if i have to wait another year for it.
word up on polys:
soft select has color feedback
paint select is in the tool menus now
artisan has component feedback
split poly will cut acrossed multiple edges if u select only the first and last point to cut
Transfer Attributes is going to be very powerful…was able to move vertices and the UVs would follow in order to avoid any UV distortions from tweaks -just like max.
redundant commands are optimized…extrude component will encompass all components.
you now have the option to customize your own menu modes (rendering, polys, animation etc)
i like this:
“Weve added Scatter attributes to the Anisotropic, Blinn, Lambert, OceanShader, Phong and PhongE surface material nodes in the mental ray section. By tuning these attributes, you can blur the diffuse component of that particular shader creating the look of subsurface scattering (on surfaces like skin, wax, leaves and gel).”
and:
This tool has been moved from Modify > Surface Sampler to Lighting/Shading > Transfer Maps.
You can now create an ambient occlusion map using the Transfer Map tool.
also, from the few hours i spent into it, here’s a more complete new poly options (actually the Polygons MenuSet features)
Mesh and Edit Mesh separate menus with
-Insert Edge Loop has on the fly adjusting of the number of splits
-Add Divisions now has Quadratic (the old stupid edge/face subdividing algo) and the new UV subdividing (a hell better than the quadratic since you can specify the number of divisions for U and V)
-Select Shortest Edge Path Tool
-Bridge tool with:
*linear bridging
*curvature based bridging (very cool)
*curve based bridging
*Taper graph, twist control
-Merge tool now allways merges if you only select 2 vertecies (hehe very handy option :))
-Merge Edge Tool has new edge positioning options
-SoftMod with color feedback and Volumetric Fallof and Topology Based Fallof (Finaly!)
-Split Poly Cuts even if you skip edges (a huge time saver)
-similar commands unified
-Move Compont finaly works in any select mode
-Menu Set customisation (hehe, now finaly i could make a Plugins MenuSet where i put all the plugins custom menus :))
-Subdiv Proxy has a separate Menu with options like:
*toggle visibility between proxy and smooth
*show both proxy and smooth
*crease tool (with enhancements)
*remove Subd Proxy Mirror (leaves only the base proxy, unmirrored in case it was mirrored)
-enhanced calculation expressions for the Attribute Spread Sheet / Channelbox.
I see that you can now even type %5 in the channelbox and it automatically puts the right result in the respective channels
-new Normals separate Menu with all the needed options inside (didn’t have time to see if those were enhanced)
-new Color separate Menu (it also has a Set Vertex Color Key tool, don;t know if it’s new though :D)
-Create UV’s separate Menu (with enhancements as i see)
-Edit UV’s separate Menu
-Select separate menu (with all the goodies inside
-you can now switch the renderer between OpenGL/D3d/High Quality (the first two need to be compiled though, but their c++ source is included with maya). This will be really cool in the near future since peeps can write their own viewport engine, even a game engine can now be integrated as a renderer i think 
oh, and what i like is that the whole menus were rethinked and reorganised. It’s a hell easyer to access thing now 
i surely missed something, this is just a quick inspection of the tools i did this morning
hehe, almost forgot, on the HowardB scene i’ve encountered an FPS doubling, that ROCKS!!
in maya 7 i got 14-18fps and in Maya 8 i got 29-32fps with no driver change at all!!
though it seems the boost only comes in complex scenes, with many objects. On a simple scene i didn’t get a notable boost
correction: hehe, i didn’t turn the nurbs surfaces to high quality 
Now i get 22-23 fps in maya 8
so, it looks like all the small enhancements anyone wanted for years are pumped into Maya 8
omg… there is a diect x engine for maya now… did i get that right???
I remember getting 8-10times the speed improvement in rotating a model in max in directx over opengl maya.
Im so happy one of my students learnt how to compile :applause:
Why the heck isn’t Alias marketing those features properly? I’ve heard ten times more impressive stuff from platinum members than I’m reading on Autodesks press page.
Thank god, they’re doing a lot of tweaks - All of that stuff sounds really nifty and useful.
Thats because the 3dsMax OpenGL driver sucked. And the Alias one was godly being a part of SGI you would hope so
I have the same issue, but it seems that my maintainance had expired. Seems like our reseller and Autodesk need to talk to get my maintainance updated.
I mean the model in maya chugging 3-4fps in max, was totally fluent and lighting fast… not max dx vs. max opengl.
oh man… stereographic maya. That sounds to die for!
PS. mhovland, is Sam J over with their with you guys at the mo, he’s my bro but i cant locate him at the mo, last I heard was he was on the move or something.
Bummer dude, yer, so annoying haing Maya 8 just sitting there, lol. Hoping the maintainance dude gets back to me today but guessing that it’ll be another day till anything gets sorted. Doh.
Just need to save up for 64 bit now 
my alienware MJ 12 is away being fixed, hopefully if they drop it they’ll give me a nice new 64 bit one. Neeeever gonna happen. lol