Autodesk Maya description

A powerful, integrated 3D modeling, animation, visual effects, and rendering solution

Award-winning Autodesk Maya software is a tool of choice for those in the film, television, game development, and design industries who desire a high-level of control over their 3D content workflows and pipelines.

Artists and designers select Maya because of its intuitive user interface, which facilitates customization and fine-tuning of effective workflows, and technicians (technical directors and programmers) choose Maya for its reliability, open architecture, wide range of supported platforms, and the ease with which it can be incorporated into any existing or new production pipeline.

With Maya you'll be able to create unique, breathtaking animations and effects.

Productivity-Enhancing Workflows
Get unmatched productivity through a combination of performance and workflow features, including marking menus, 3D manipulators, selective display, brush-based tools, selection management tools, and unlimited levels of undo. Advanced data and scene management functionality give you the flexibility to work the way you want.

Comprehensive 3D Modeling and Texturing Toolsets
Access a full suite of production-proven polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surface modeling and texturing tools. The polygon workflow tools, including advanced selection functionality, attribute transfer tools, an interactive UV layout and unfolding mode, and optimization tools—have also been designed to promote efficiency.

Powerful Animation Functionality
Animate characters and other scene elements with a comprehensive range of specialized keyframe, nonlinear, and advanced character animation editing toolsets, including animation layers, graph and dope sheet editors, constraints, expressions, a nonlinear animation data editor, full-body inverse kinematics (IK) system, skinning functionality, and Maya Muscle.

Advanced Visual Effects Tools
Produce any visual effect you can imagine, from highly realistic natural phenomena to stylized, 2D “painterly” effects. Maya software delivers dynamic interaction of hard and soft bodies determined by physical rules, along with the state-of-the-art visual-effects technology of Maya nCloth, Maya nParticles, Maya Fluid Effects, Maya Fur, Maya Hair, and more.

Flexible Rendering
With Maya, you get the freedom to choose the right renderer and rendering pipeline for your project. A unified user interface and workflow provide easy and consistent access to the Maya hardware and vector renderers as well as the powerful mental ray for Maya and mental ray for Maya network rendering (Satellite) options. You can also use the Render Layers and the Render Pass tools to create an efficient workflow from Maya to Autodesk Toxik software and other compositing packages.

Tools for Extending and Customizing Maya
Customize, extend, and manipulate Maya. The fully integrated Maya Embedded Language (MEL) and Python scripting languages give you high-level access to every aspect of the software so you can create custom windows, reconfigure the user interface, and issue commands from an HTML page. Moreover, the OpenMaya API/SDK completely unlocks the power of Maya for C++ and Python developers, providing direct, low-level access to all scene data required to make effective plug-ins and new types of nodes, shaders, manipulators, file importers and exporters, and more.

Here are some key features of "Autodesk Maya":

> Polygon Modeling
> General Polygon Architecture
> Polygon Texture Assignment/Editing
> Transfer Polygon Attributes
> Optimization Tools
> And Much More.

Requirements:

· Intel Pentium 4 or higher, AMD Athlon 64, or AMD Opteron processor
· 2 GB RAM
· 2 GB free hard drive space
· Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
· Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
· DVD-ROM drive
· Supported browsers:
· Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 internet browser or higher
· Netscape 7 web browser or higher
· Apple Safari web browser
· Mozilla Firefox web browser