Maya?

[Efalunt]

Well, the Award Criteria says the animation cannot be made in Maya and that 3ds Max must be used.. However, Technical Execution is defined as how well 3ds Max and other Autodesk products are used... Am I wrong in thinking this means we can use a bit of Maya since it's now an Autodesk product, as long as the bulk of it is done in 3ds Max?

[Morgan Gillespie]

It states "Even though Maya is an Autodesk product for creating animation, we will not be able to accept entries created in it for this competition. In order to give all submission's an equal opportunity, the donated product; Autodesk 3ds Max must be used."

That means exactly what it says.

[Efalunt]

well what I'm unsure about is that it says "we will not be able to accept entries created in it"

To me this means they won't allow entries that are entirely/mostly created in Maya... but it doesn't strike me as forbidding the use of Maya for a model or two (which isn't all that much different than using downloaded models since those might've been made in 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino, etc).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to exploit a loop hole or anything here. It's just that there's a student on our team who knows Maya better than he knows Max, and I feel it would be a shame to force him to start from scratch and limit his contribution to the animation.

Anyway, I just wanted to get the community's opinion on this before we start modeling so that tasks can be allocated appropriately. I'm also contacting Autodesk to get a definitive answer, and I'll post their response here in case other teams have the same question.

[65_Xero_Huskie]

I was also wondering about this, and have been for a while now.

If you create something in another program but import it into 3ds max for the render is that considered legal?

[WindTech]

Heh, I faced this dilema 3 years in a row. I'm a Lightwave guru at this point and much prefer working LW than any autodesk product...ever including CAD purposes. However, after talking with the judges in person, they made it quite clear to me that 3DSMAX is the only product really allowed to be used for the Animation competition. The Inventor Visualization stuff is different; I don't think it'd be possible to determine the difference between one IGES file and another, at least not easily.

Anyway, from my experiences they want purely 3DSMAX. Its literally just a way of leveling the competitive playing field in my opinion. As much as I prefer working in LW, Modo, Maya (Alias), and Rhino; the animation competition is really defined as a "3DSMAX Animation" project.

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by Efalunt

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to exploit a loop hole or anything here. It's just that there's a student on our team who knows Maya better than he knows Max, and I feel it would be a shame to force him to start from scratch and limit his contribution to the animation.

Having that student start from scratch and learn Max would put him in exactly the same place as all the other students that are new to animation teams every year. They all have to learn Max from the ground up, and are able to do it successfully every year. Because he knows Maya, he will still have an advantage - the basic knowledge he has about how models are constructed, and the fundamentals of things like the theory of surfacing and lighting will still apply when he learns Max. So he should be OK.

Like WindTech, I am a Lightwave user. I think LW is great, and it is the package that I am willing to sink a lot of time into to really learn (all the kick-off animations for the past five years have been done with Lightwave). I would love it if the competition would let me use Lightwave to contribute to the team animation entry. But the rules don't permit it, so I suck it up and move on. That is just the way things go sometimes.

-dave

[BuddyB309]

what about textures? Lets say you have an organic creature and you make the textures for it in Photoshop. Is that considerd legal? I dont know any other way for making really good textures for characters. I know some teams use the defalt textures and materials that come with max, but what about teams that try to go far beond that? Why should the judges look down on something that is much harder to do?

[Drew]

well obviously use textures from photoshop because First of all, how will they know ? and anyways your using a program to make textures for your 3d object. There is nothing against that because if there was you would have to use standard colors and arch materials. as for the whole issue on Maya, They dont want you to use anything else because they fund FIRST with 3ds max and always have so they cant ask to change. If you know maya or Lightwave, or SOFTIMAGE XSI or anything else, Great! Learn 3DS max to compete. I know that Maya joined up with Autodesk but they GUI and tools are all diffrent and Im sure that they just want to give everyone the same and equal chance at the animation this year just like every other year. Now granted, If you made an animation in Maya, how would they know? If it were autodesk products only does that mean that you cant use plugins like Afterburn, and Dreamscape? because those are made from Siti Sinati. I would just say, Do what you can and use 3ds max as much as possible. you will have less problems with equality as an issue.

[RoboJedi75]

The way I interpreted it, the main animation/modeling software must be 3ds max.

I'm assuming you can still use Photoshop to create textures and something like Premiere or iMovie to compile all your renders. I wouldn't want to compile the scenes using 3ds max *shudders*

[WindTech]

Hey if you were using lightwave you could use DFusion

Anyway; no, there should be nothing against using Premiere or iMovie or ...WMM to compile your movie as long as it comes through in the right format heh. Which I believe this year is .mov??? I don't even know heh.

And yea, textures = whatever application ya have handy. If you don't have a high end app like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro or Aura(for us lightwave folk ) then pick up a copy of The GiMP which in my opinion is overall better than photoshop heh. http://www.gimp.org/

[Armaman87]

I have a question. They were not very specific on exactly what assets could be used in the animation. If we wanted to use models from a game, would that be okay? If the game was open-source, and therefore legal if we gave credit, could we use modified models from it in our animation? Eg. Elder Scrolls III : Morrowind. Could we, say, record a sequence in a mod of our own making and use it? Also, it mentioned that we could use live action in our animation. How could we use that if we had to export our animation directly from max?

[Mike200]

For years, autodesk has been asking what other software you used for the animation on the application that you must submit along with the entry. They encourage different software use, especially if you would like to include your personal textures, live action, and sounds. However, they have sprecifically said that Maya is not allowed.

[Efalunt]

I just heard back from Autodesk and they confirmed that they aren't going to allow Maya for anything. Oh well, I guess that shouldn't be too big a setback for us since the rest of our animators know/are learning 3ds Max...