Maya

What it is

Maya is Autodesk's 3D software for modelling, rigging, animation, simulation and rendering. It is a standard tool in film visual effects, television and game studios, where it is used to build characters and props, rig them with skeletons and controls, and animate them for film or for export into a game engine.

It was first released by Alias|Wavefront and later acquired by Autodesk. It can be scripted in MEL and Python, which lets studios automate repetitive work and build their own pipeline tools. It works alongside MotionBuilder, another Autodesk tool built for motion capture and character animation. Its own rendering engine, Arnold, is included.

How I use it

• Trained on it in the Game Art and Animation masters program at the Art Institute of Vancouver, 2003 to 2005, with MotionBuilder, Photoshop, Flash and Unreal Editor.
• The full game pipeline: character design, storyboarding and traditional animation through to Maya.
• 3D turnarounds among the hundreds of one-off multimedia pieces from my independent contracts.
• The animation training is the reason my screens tend to be legible: knowing what an operator is looking at is a design problem first.

Maya is the right tool for character work, animation and models that will end up in a film or a game engine. I learned it as part of the full game production pipeline, and that training is a large part of why I think about what an operator sees on screen, and in what order, before I write the code.

Questions