whats the difference?

From what I can remember Maya Unlimited comes with the Hair plugin and i think there''s a cloth plugin aswell... There''s probably loads more but I dont really know much about maya.

Fluid effect, fur, cloth, and Live Matchmoving.
And $5000.

damn, i cant believe i installed the complete version thinking for some reason that it would be more complete.

so far, maya is not very user-friendly, and neither are any of the documents i could find on it.

personally i found that i was fine and well on my way after watching the "essential movies" or whatever they''re called that explain the interface, and after doing a couple of tutorials like the poly hammer one...

there''s a ton of more advanced tutorials out there also...it''s really not difficult to get started.

Unless your planning on doing some cinematics or some pre render stuff complete is more than enough for most game development tasks.
On the question of Maya's user friendliness, having used maya, max, poweranimator, and truespace professionally and several other packages for fun, I would have to both agree and dissagree. True, there is not a lot of hand holding with Maya... really the only interface I have found more impenetrable would be houdini. On the other hand when you learn how Maya's system works, not all the ins and outs of every tool just the "system" then it couldn't be more transparent and out of your way. There wasn't one day in a 3 month project that I didn't fight Max's interface and half built set of tools. Maya on the other hand works the same way from start to end. If I open a tool I rarely if ever use, I know intuitively how it works because the "system" is consistend through every level of the package. With Maya simply don't bother trying to learn all the tools until you understand the basic workings and then everything else will seem simple.

Designer
PhrenicGames

[edited by - eturnip on October 19, 2003 12:08:08 AM]

cool.
i messed around with it some more and i now find maya 5.0 pretty intuitive and user-friendly, contrary to my post earlier.

i cannot, though, for the life of me texture-map a model.
to keep things simple i wanted to texture a box.

how can i do this?
a tutorial, a simple one, will be real nice.

GekkoCube:
1) Right click on the box
2) Select "Materials->Assign New Material" (And choose whatever; phong and blinn are what I use the most)
3) Click the button on the right side of the "color" slider (The first button that looks like black and white squares)
4) When the "Create Render Node" dialog box comes up, choose file (Looks like green mountains)
5) In the attribute editor next to "file", click the button that looks like a folder
6) Select the texture file you want
7) Push ''6'' and you should see the texture. (If you don''t see the texture, go to "Shading" in the menu thats in the viewport (editor window?) and select "Hardware Texturing"

That should do it, easiest way I found anyway.

-UltimaX-

"You wished for a white christmas... Now go shovel your wishes!"

ultimax has given you the simplest way...a few clicks and it''s textured.

if you want more control however, do a search in from the help menu system and look for "UV mapping". there''s a tutorial in there that got me fairly comfortable with the whole process.

it''s definitely not one of the more simple aspects of maya though so you may want to relax with that stuff a bit while you get fluent with the program as a whole...

if you''ve done UV mapping in anything else though you should already know what you''re doing, and you can just use the tutorial to point towards the right buttons to press.