Maya 8 Release!

#101

just a quick note about the primitive tools. You don’t “have” to create primitives with click and drag. That’s just one way to create them. Also modo and silo have these type of modeling features wich I find to be very powerful.

#102

I actually like the feature, am i the only one?

OT: I’m just wondering, how could anyone freely move from one to another 3d package? First, its not free (cost a bomb for me). Secondly, I dont decide which package to use, my boss does. So I fully understand of those whiner, coz they have to stick with it, either they bought it or they have to deal with it in their company. When someone start comparing with other package, someone would go, “if you like XSI (or other package) so much, go f**king use it!”. DUH! How often we can choose which software to use in our company. But anyway, ‘do the things you love, else love the things you do’.

#103

I REALLY would like to have some peoples problems!
BTW: Edit Mesh uses less screenspace.

#104

Oh my goodness…I did it…I got the ancient parallel port dongle to work on Win64 after all this time!!! It stumped Alias support but after a few hours of exploring the internet I found out that you just need to install these random drivers:

http://www.safenet-inc.com/support/files/SSD722WIN64.zip

Hooray!!! However all that got me is Maya 7 running on Win64. Still need to request a new Maya 8 license but that’s ok.

#105

Is there any special difference in Maya 8 UI?
Is the Att. Editor smaller?

#106

To be honest except for the exchanged icons I can not tell a difference to Maya 7
and the Attribute Editor still takes appr. 1/3 of my screen.

#107

some mentalray notes, after some usage:

-the new Final Gather (with automatic mode) seems much better than the previous 3.4 one. The same scene that took ~28 minutes in mray 3.4 but without glossy shaders (with glossy i think it should have taken more than one hour), now took ~35 minutes but full of glossy surfaces/reflectivity (and the FG quality seems better, sharper). Not to mention, no more “Emiting another 15000 fg points for blabla region” messages with the auto mode, hehe :slight_smile:

-another cool thing is that the new Area Light seems faster than the previous Point Light/Spot Light hybrid Area Light and also they fixed some of the limitations of the older one (on the other hand it has some MEL AEtemplate-related bugs, hehe :D)

-it seems that the Mayatomr guys will add geoLights in the next version, since some of the code for that is allready implemented (it even has the UI built into some MEL files, but its not exposed to the UI).

-one thing i need to mention though is that maya cannot display custom shaders into the viewport nor the hypershade (though in maya 7 i could make them be displayed in the hypershade with a MEL hack, so it might be true for maya 8 aswell). Other than that, it seems you need to remake some mentalray shading networks, if you open an maya 7 scene, in order to get them displayed in the viewport.

-maya doesn’t seem to have Zap’s archviz shader that max9 will get (or maybe it’s still under beta?), hopefully the next version will get it, cause that shader rocks badly :slight_smile:

#108

Well before freaking out, you need to explore Maya better. To diactivate the new feature “click and drag for creating the primitives”, just go to Create>Nurbs or Polygon (whatever you use) Primitives and uncheck the “Interactive Creation” and here you go. Will be creating one sized boxes as always before heh.

Hmm in Maya 7 it’s Chamfer Vertex and Bevel (for Faces and edges). And in Maya 8 it’s Chamfer Vertex and Bevel (for faces and edges). So to me it looks quite the same.

I don’t think that Edit Mesh instead of Edit Polygons is such a huge difference i find now Maya is better organized and many things are way easier to find and saves you a lot of time.

And i personaly find Max’s feature creating primitives with clicking and draging very powerful. And it gets even better than that. You can leave the option “Interactive Creation” on and you can only click once in any place in viewport and it creates an object there (with the parameters assigned in options beforehand). So i’m honestly really happy about this feature and i’m a Max and Maya user ;).

#109

About the shader problem, all u have to do is duplicate the shader network and delete the old one, and voila it works!

#110

-the new Final Gather (with automatic mode) seems much better than the previous 3.4 one. The same scene that took ~28 minutes in mray 3.4 but without glossy shaders (with glossy i think it should have taken more than one hour), now took ~35 minutes but full of glossy surfaces/reflectivity (and the FG quality seems better, sharper). Not to mention, no more “Emiting another 15000 fg points for blabla region” messages with the auto mode, hehe

How to change Finalgather mode? Thanks

#111

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=388692

i’ll add them directly to the Render Settings window tomorrow if i’ll have some time :slight_smile:

About the shader problem, all u have to do is duplicate the shader network and delete the old one, and voila it works!

hah, thanks for the tip! :thumbsup:

#112

Sorry, I am not mad about the features, I am mad that they made this release more like Max. I would rather see new features, not transfered tools. This release should have been Autodesk Maya 7.5. Then with release 8 have some big new upgrades like gigapoly core :smiley: and create teapot button:rolleyes: I guess I was expecting more new things, not old max refurbished tools.

I am sticking with 7.0 till renderman and melstudio plugins are compatible with 8.0 hint hint to pixar and digimation.

#113

I realy like they finally fixed the extrude; you can now just extrude a profile along a curve with angles (non tangent) and your geometry won’t get distorted :slight_smile:

I like the new interactive placement (also for spotlights etc), but it’s nice you can disable it as well :slight_smile: it’s something you dont want to use all the time.

One annoyance i discovered so far was the (new?) nurbsCylinder when you use interactive placement. The caps are nice, but the way the object is now, it’s nasty with some nurbs modeling. The caps are parented with a seperate transformnode under the nurbCylinder transform, which also has the cylinderShape as a child. It doesn’t work well with trims, fillets etc. (or you have to remove the caps, or directly select the Cylindershape or ‘rearrange’ the entire cylinder)

[edit]I was a little too quick; you can modify this behaviour in the Optionbox[/edit]

In the win32 release, batchrender.exe has the LargeAddressAware flag by default, so you don’t need to mess with editbin anymore. It can use more memory (break the 1.7 Gig limit up to 2.?? if you use the /3GB boot flag).

#114

  1. what’s more retarted - being able to place and size an object at once or doing two more operations to get what you want - DUH.

  2. get over it: www.dictionary.com

    chamfer     n : two surfaces meeting at an angle different from 90 degrees [syn: bevel, cant] v 1: cut a bevel on; shape to a bevel; “bevel the surface” [syn: bevel] 2: cut a furrow into a columns [syn: furrow, chase]

BTW, chamfer is a MUCH more standard term - look at almost ALL CAD software for a ‘bevel’ command - you won’t find it.

Go over to XSI already if you’re not happy (you won’t, BTW)… seems like you have more issues than Max 8 (oops! - MAYA 8). Good luck with that… and thanks for the rant - it’s fun to watch!! :wink:

#115

Yea, I lost a few projects to Max’s crash and corrupt feature. So when I see Maya start integrating max features I get worried that it will get the crash and corrupt file feature.

I never once noticed the chamfer vertex until now, wow, I need to stay out of the script editor and use tools already made.

cadd obviously uses the same terms that max uses because Max was derived from cadd, hince the z up.

#116

That’s just stupid, seriously. I’m NO fan of max. I dispise that piece of crap, but max does have a lot of good features that maya does not, that maya needs. Just because maya may get some of max’s features does NOT mean it will get the same crashes. Max and Maya are two completely different programs.

#117

OMG … You trying to give me nightmares, thats why I hate Max … its like a CAD program! I hope Maya doesnt go down the same path!

I also have to agree … Click and drag primitive objects … isnt very helpful.

#118

I’ve already got the download version of Maya 8 but I can’t install it due to some license issue. I am not sure why, but I already have Maya 7 up and running on the computer, but somehow, Maya 8 cannot detect the license file… Well, I’ve approached my dealer that provided my original disc version of Maya 7 about this problem. He’s working on it while I chew my nails in anticipation hahaha.

As far as expectations go, I’m really really interested in 1 thing that has so far been lacking in Maya. The ability to continue working on your project while running a test render in renderview. As it is, the moment you click out of the renderview, Maya effectively freezes until the end of the render, or until you abort it. This sucks. Cinema4d has a nice implementation that works. I wonder how they did it…

I don’t think that it’d be in this version of Maya as no one so far has mentioned anything along those lines.

Terence

#119

You could do it as a batch render instead, you still can’t see it progress, but that would allow you to keep working at least…

#120

I think that has to do with the GUI, because with any externally executed renders like turtle, RMFM, or MR batch you can still make use of your maya viewport, its just that when you render inside of maya things will pause until done.