I wanted to come in and clarify a couple of things with regards to the Maya LT release and hopefully answer any questions you all might have or listed to your input/feedback.Īs far as the 25k poly limit goes this is purely on export so the FBX file will not store anything larger than 25k. I’ll pause in case people would like to throw any objects at me upfront. My name is Shawn McClelland and I am a product designer over on the games solutions group. Shawn McClelland from Autodesk’s games solution group made the following post, with a great deal of clarification over on the Polycount forums: I have found no other source to verify the story, nor have I heard back from Autodesk.
The Tom’s Hardware link is now down and as it was the primary source of this information there may be something fishy with this story.
I will update more information as it becomes available. Oddly enough, Tom’s Hardware is the only source of information right now. At 800$, that is getting incredibly close in price to Modo, Lightwave and Maxon in price. If Blender didn’t exist and wasn’t getting better with every release, this might be more appealing. In the end, it is certainly a step in the right direction but falls flat for me. Perhaps the biggest downside is, this limit pretty much precludes you using Maya LT as your level editor. On a desktop title though, you certainly would. Granted, you generally wouldn’t use this many polygons on a standard mesh in a mobile title, yet. This is probably the biggest problem as higher polygon count meshes are becoming more and more common as devices improve in power. The inability to support plugins makes Maya LT completely useless for game engines that require plugin support such as the indie friendly Project Anarchy.įBX export limited to 25,000 polygons. No plugin support is the same story with a bigger downside. No MEL support that either sucks or is a non-issue depending on your workflow. So if you were thinking about rendering your title screen using Maya LT, you are out of luck. Perhaps worse, you also can’t even create a composited still, or any graphic more complicated than a rendered sprite. The first item, the inability to render scenes means you cannot use Maya LT to create pre-rendered animations, such as cut scenes. mlt format allows denser meshes within Maya LT) Export to FBX format of up to 25,000 polygons per scene (but the.No MEL support, and currently no plugin support or SDK.Does not support external renderers cannot render ‘scenes’ or animations.What exactly do you give up for that savings? Well, here is where things get a bit tricky. The monthly and quarterly licenses are certainly a great option for short term game development and complement the Adobe Creative Cloud offerings nicely.
So, 800$ is certainly a better price than 3,675$ for a license of the full version. Term licenses are available as part of a monthly, quarterly or annual rental plan in the near future, starting at $50, $125 and $400, respectively.
Maya LT is available immediately for both OSX and Windows at a price of $795 for a perpetual license. This release certainly lowers the price, but does it lower it enough? I have been advocating for an indie friendly version of Autodesk products for a long time, as they are easily the most expensive aspect of the game development tool chain. Through support for FBX export, Maya LT also can be used for game engines like Unity Engine and Unreal Engine. It brings the established tools of Maya into the affordability range of indie game developers and also allows them to import assets that were created in Maya proper (as well as OBJ and FBX), giving them access to thousands of available models from sites like Turbosquid. Autodesk has developed Maya LT as a new product whose focus is on the needs of indie game developers.
Indie developers, whether working for mobile, PC, or web-based games, need a professional 3D animation software that can be used to create 3D and 2D assets to be used in game engines. This new product also brings with it a subscription pricing model that they hope will make it more affordable to indie developers. Autodesk has introduced Maya LT, a new 3D animation product based on their award-winning Maya software.