The Maya animation community is doubtlessly breathing a collective sigh of relief that Maya 8 has shipped at all, considering that this is the first release of the venerable animation package since Alias was taken over by its then arch-rival, Autodesk, last year. That said, this is yet another in a series of Maya releases that doesn’t offer a lot of sexy new features. While Maya 7 seemed to be as mostly about bug fixes and refinements, this release is more about real-world productivity.
Most notably in this direction, Maya 8 has been re-built to run natively in 64-bit operating systems. Currently, this includes Windows and Linux only. While 64-bit, rather than humdrum 32-bit operation may sound sexy, the vast majority of users will notice almost no difference between the two modes. Those who will are animators working with huge or very complex 3D scenes – primarily the ones involved in film and television production. (Game artists rarely build sets with tens of thousands of models or multiple millions of polygons.)
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