Maya 4 Shown at E3

(May 21, 2001) Alias|Wavefront, an SGI company, displayed its recently unveiled Maya 4 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Maya 4 is the sixth major release of the company's professional 3D animation software and hosts numerous enhancements and optimizations to help improve the product's overall ease-of-use and efficiency. Moreover, new technologies for game content development have been created, including architectural support for per pixel shading and advances in polygon mapping and editing. The Maya software is currently available on Windows, IRIX, Linux and will soon be available on Mac OS X.

"With its patented dependency graph architecture and powerful art and animation toolsets Maya has become one of the dominant technologies in the game development market," states Tom Harper, Product Manager, Games/Interactive at Alias|Wavefront. "Maya 4, with its advanced technology for creators of next-generation games, will continue that legacy. Support for pixel and vertex shaders will allow programmers to modify the drawing of objects in Maya's 3D viewport while workflow enhancements will improve the productivity of Maya artists and allow new users to quickly get up to speed. In addition to these powerful new features, Maya's open, extensible, API gives game programmers access to the data they need and provides the entire team with a strong pipeline based around a unified, flexible environment."

Per Pixel Shading
With the needs of next-generation game developers in mind Alias|Wavefront has extended the Maya 4 API so that Xbox, PS2 and GameCube developers can integrate state-of-the-art vertex and pixel shaders directly into the Maya viewport. This hardware shading technique, compatible with all OpenGL extensions on all cards, will allow game artists to closely match the look of their assets as they would appear on consoles such as Xbox, PS2 and GameCube.

"Project by project, Angel Studios has been steadily migrating to Maya," says Angel Studios Cheif Creative Officer, Michael Limber. Angel Studios is responsible for titles like Resident Evil and Smuggler's Run. "Our creative staff loves the intuitive and customizable work-space, the professional tool set, the robust scripting language and API, and the high caliber of art talent it attracts. We're really looking forward to the new features in Maya 4, especially the per-pixel shading ability which will let us directly visualize game platform hardware shaders within Maya itself. Now our artists will be able to test, iterate and refine assets much more quickly and efficiently."

Maya 4: Enhanced Ease of Use
One of Alias|Wavefront's major goals with Maya 4 has been to enhance the software's ease of use and general usability. Focused improvements have been made throughout Maya to ensure that the process a user goes through in order to learn how to complete a task is easy to accomplish. To that end, Maya's feature set has been expanded in a manner that substantially optimizes and streamlines production workflow. Managing the workspace is now accomplished in one click using the customizable panel layouts and toolbar controls. Quick access to the expanded Maya Paint Effects brushes and the new shader library gives users an efficient method of launching into production. Beyond UI, enhanced context sensitive help and Instant Maya books with easy-to-follow examples will prove invaluable to new and intermediate users.

Maya 4: Advances in Animation
New enhancements to the Trax non-linear motion editing technology include time warping, character merging, drag and drop and character set editing. New character animation features include easy FK/IK switching, switchable Euler and Quaternion rotations, motion trails and ghosting along with a powerful new Jiggle Deformer which automatically creates secondary "character fat/muscle wobble" animation without dynamics.

Games Related Features
Maya 4 contains several advances in areas crucial to the development of video games and interactive media. Because game artists spend the majority of time texturing, Alias|Wavefront focused a great deal of attention on the Maya polygon texture mapping and editing tools, adding dozens of new features and workflow improvements to this area.

Pricing and Availability
Maya Complete 4 will be priced at $7,500 (US) and include modeling, rendering, animation, dynamics, Artisan, Paint Effects and MEL, an open interface for programming and scripting. Maya Unlimited 4 will be $16,000 (US) and includes Maya Fur, Maya Cloth and Advanced Modeling features. Maya Builder 4 will be priced at $2,995 and include polygon modeling, texturing and animation capabilities for level editors, games tool programmers, and web applications. [Prices are indicated in US funds and will vary outside the US.]

Alias|Wavefront plans to offer favorable upgrade pricing from current versions of Maya and will provide free Maya 4 upgrades to customers who purchase Maya Builder, Maya Complete, and/or Maya Unlimited after April 23rd, 2001 and prior to the ship date of Maya 4. Maya 4 is scheduled to ship in June 2001.

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