CEDEC in 3D

CEDEC day two and I only managed to pick up one seminar; the demonstration of the sexy new aspects of Maya 8.0. The first half must have been a bore for the programmers as they only showed off the new poly tools and transfer options, but they got their own back in the second half, which was a boring slog through the programming side of the new package.

And it only crashed twice in the one and a hall hour lecture, though the first time was deftly deflected with a quick explanation of the help files and the live debug crash reporting functions. Either way, it looked a pretty decent upgrade and　I’ll be pestering my company like a spoiled child to get it as soon as the Japanese version is released in December.
But they had me at "proper, working alpha Z sorting in the viewport", praise the Lord!

To make this post slightly relevant, any aspiring expat artists should do themselves a favour and make sure they familiarise themselves with Maya. Though there are still a few companies that use 3DSMax or even XSI, it would seem Maya is the norm. Luckily Maya's interface is still in English; the "Japanese" version just includes a Japanese manual. That said, the Japanese version of 3DSMax does indeed have Japanese menus but comes packaged with the English version as well. So neither package should give anyone new to the local language any problems.