University of California at Berkeley
           Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
                       Instructional Support Support


/share/b/pub/maya.help

								Apr 25 2019	


CONTENTS
	Maya
	Licensing
	Maya Personal Edition
	Maya Tutorials on the Web
	Maya Plug-Ins
	Rendering: Mental Ray, Renderman, Tractor, Zync


Maya 
----
  Maya is powerful 3D animation and visual effects software.  
  Maya is from Autodesk (http://autodesk.com/).

  Maya is installed on the Macs in 200 SDH. 

  Maya can not be run remotely through an X session.  You must run Maya in 
  the lab, since it is programmed for the Mac desktop.  
  
  Maya Complete and Unlimited version 9 is installed in 330 Soda (Macs).
  Previous versions do not work with the new licenses.
  To start Maya, go to /Applications/Autodesk/ and click the maya icon.  

  There is a copy of the Maya media in \\macsww\macsww\Intel\maya.  It is
  accessible to funded EECS accounts (but not to instructional accounts).
  
Licensing
---------
  The Maya licenses typically do not support older versions. 

  Starting in October 2008, Maya is licensed via a floating license that is
  running on an EECS Instructional server.  (Previously, it was run on a 
  computer in Prof O'Brien's lab.)

  The software and licenses have mostly been donated by Autodesk (and 
  previously Alias-Wavefront) through the efforts of Profs James O'Brien 
  and Brian Barsky.  Licenses were purchased at a generous discount by EECS 
  Instruction in May 2002. 

  Instructional staff members can read licensing information in
  https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~inst/staff/SSL/?file=service.contracts

Maya Personal Edition
---------------------
  Autodesk also provides a free student edition for anyone who wants to learn 
  to use Maya at home.  You may download a copy from http://usa.autodesk.com.
  (It is not for use on computers in an instructional lab.)


Maya Tutorials on the Web
-------------------------

  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=opera&rls=en&q=related:www.blackorb.com/3dtutorials/dancing.pdf

Maya Plug-Ins
-------------

  The Renderman plug-in for Maya is installed on the MacPros in 200 SDH.

  To include in in your Maya plug-in selection (using Maya 2013 for example),
  login to a Mac and run these UNIX commands once in a terminal:

  mkdir -p ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2013-x64/modules
  cd  ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2013-x64/modules
  ln -s /Applications/Pixar/RenderManStudio-4.0-maya2013/etc/RenderMan_for_Maya.module

   Then:
   1) start Maya 2013 (use the Finders, under Applications/Autodesk)
   2) go to Window > Settings > Plug-in Manager. 
   3) Scroll to > "Renderman_for_Maya.bundle" and Load or Auto-Load it.

   In the terminal window, this command lists the available renderers;
   Renderman for Maya2013 will include 'rib' and 'rman' in the output:

   /Applications/Autodesk/maya2013/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render -listRenderers

   The Face Machine (http://www.anzovin.com/products.html) plug-in for Maya
   is installed on the MacPros in 200 SDH.

Rendering: Mental Ray, Renderman, Tractor, Zync
-----------------------------------------------

  Pixar Renderman and Nvidia Mental Ray are typically used for rendering
  from Maya.  Renderman can be run on our local render farm using Tractor, 
  or on the Google Cloud Platform using Zync (when available).   
  
  For more information, please see

	/share/b/pub/tractor.help	(Renderman farm on our Macs)
	/share/b/pub/zync.help		(Renderman farm on GCP)
	/share/b/pub/nvidia.help 	(Mental Ray on 200 SDH computers)



 					Instructional Support Group
  					384/386 Cory, 333 Soda
  					inst@eecs.berkeley.edu