Anyone use either of the two 3D program I just mentioned? One of my booth duties at Macworld will be running either (or both, my choice) of those apps on half my demo station. The problem? I've never used Maya (I have a tutorial DVD to watch - been through about 20 minutes of it so far) and I last used Lightwave some six years ago - and only in a limited fashion (the menu system has only gotten more unintuitive).

If anyone has any experience and any good ideas for simple stuff that would make a half-decent demo (or pointers to any content that I can slap into a quick self-running show) that would be great. Message me on here, follow up to this post or email me.

Right now I'm leaning more toward Maya over Lightwave because the interface is infinitely more interesting to a viewer and it seems to make better use of 3D hardware acceleration for working previews.

Bruno

Hmmm, may not help but there was a really cool maya demo/screensaver out for OS X about a year ago. If you don't have to do a full demo you could just let something like that run on the machine. Which booth are you at anyway? Maybe I will stop by to say hi.

-Mike

ATI booth. I don't have my schedule around right now so I can't remember exactly when I'm doing which pod. I'll also be demoing Xclaim TV USB and Radeon 7000 (formerly VE) at another double-station. I think I'm officially doing 5 shifts over the four days, 3 with the high-end 3D apps and 3D technology demonstration (advanced chipset features, etc..) and 2 with what I just mentioned.

Our booth is very close to the Olympus booth, so I'll be spending time running around looking at any new digicams as well. :)

I've been told by the folks at Alias|Wavefront that their demo people will have some material at the show that I can probably copy, but I want to get as much prep done before I leave as possible, just in case I can't score anything down there.

Bruno

Might find that old contest winning Bruce Lee demo from the previous Maya version. I have it around here somewhere on disc as well if you like. Done by students in HK, but pretty damn awesome.

Maya's pretty powerful.

Ed
-former SGI'er.

Our booth is very close to the Olympus booth, so I'll be spending time running around looking at any new digicams as well. :)

You'd better give us a report on any interesting new products! Some of us can't be there with all the new toys!

Bruce Lee demo? Sounds interestring. Contact me in private message or email, I'd like some more details (like what it consists of, how it runs in Maya, source file requirements, etc...)

Right now I can do stuff with basic shapes and a few spot lights - and I'm pretty sure I can add a texture. :) I just finished watching the intro DVD. :)

I also just making a space ship while watching the DVD, but as I started to make it quite detailed, the machine hung. Ugh.

Bruno

Well good and bad news. The good is I found a movie made
from the project files. The bad, I can't find the original project
the students submitted. and the movie is physically tiny
352x240 or something like that. but its like 13 megs. :(

If you still want just that, let me know.

Ed

How about some tips to any half-decne tproject files? Have any ideas for a self-running in-Maya project? Something like a flyby of some sort that I can hopefully toggle shading and lighting options on.

I'll spend some time playing with the tutorial materials tomorrow. I was hoping not to have to dedicate these last three days to Maya though. I have some other work to do as well. :)

Bruno

Oh, I'd love to see the movie though. If you can put it up some place I'll grab it while at work (http or ftp is fine).

Bruno

Yeowch. I sit in front of Maya 8 hours a day, and i can't think of any demo's that i've seen that would be that easy to show without knowing much about the product.... Have you checked AW's website? They used to have a nice library of files with tutorials for basic stuff... I'll see if i can find anything else...

Well, I've been playing around in Maya long enough to agree with you. :)

It's also got its share of bugs and bits of poor design for OS X. Number one is the fact that you lose your current tool when saving.

Any chance you'll want to pass through Macworld this year? :)

I'll probably just leave a couple of models up on the screen and move them around every now and then. If you have any half-decent project with some type of flyby, that would be better than a static model. The examples on the tutorial CD aren't that thrilling to leave running.

Bruno

Argh... actually i would like to drop by... but there's no way i can get off work. I might be able to leave early one day and stop in before the floor closes down... but that wouldn't help ya much. =]

I should have remembered that I had seen you post about your job earlier. :) Then maybe I could have asked our marketing department to budget some $$ in to pay you for hanging out at the booth for a bit. Hehe.

Bruno

You could try downloading the demo produced by the Moving Picture Co. in London (movingpicturecompany.co.uk) for Gerry Anderson's production company. It is a short (15 minutes) of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, produced as a technology demonstrator and pilot program for the new series of Captain Scarlet that may well be in production at the moment. It uses motion capture, texture mapping, 3D sculptures (faces), 3D vehicles mapped with texture maps and colour contour maps - all in all a pretty impressive demonstration of what it could do.

Although MPC use Maya regularly as their tool of choice, they did do a pretty rigorous evaluation of different packages, including lightwave. I think in the end, Maya came out with the best cross-platform support, best price/performance, best support of acceleration hardware, best software architecture for plug-ins (not 100% sure about this, so don't quote me) and the best generic feature set. They have a white paper of it on their UK website, and they made an article of both the CS pilot production and also the choice of system for the UK graphics mag, CGI. Sorry I can't quote a specific issue, but it was late 99/early 2000. You could check this out on the CGI website (cgimag.com)