Anyone use the program MAYA by Autodesk?

[C5 Golfer]

Friend in the family is in school and Maya is one of the classes she is taking. She has asked for an external hard drive to allow her to work at home and at school. When I asked how big of a hard drive she replied with "huge, Maya takes a lot of memory." I tried to ask and discern her meaning of “memory” - did she mean hard drive space and/or memory size and she was not really sure. I am thinking her computer actually needs a little more memory so upgrading it to 2 GB of RAM should do the trick. And then getting her a 160GB external hard drive should do the job for her when transferring work to home to school and back to home. If any of you use Maya -- do you think a 160 GB external will do the job for all her various projects? And if you have suggestions on what external to buy that would be helpful. ( it is a PC – not a fruit – sorry Apple)

Thanks and happy riding this year.

[trailertrash]

Not sure about disk space but you may want to go for more RAM as well:

(from the vendor's website)

Hardware

At a minimum, the 32-bit version of Maya 2008 software requires a system with the following hardware:

Windows and Linux: Intel Pentium® 4 or higher, AMD Athlon® 64, or AMD Opteron® processor

Macintosh®: Power Mac® G5 or Intel®-based Macintosh® computers

2 GB RAM

2 GB hard disk space

Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® graphics card

Three-button mouse with mouse driver software

DVD-ROM drive

[C5 Golfer]

Thanks Trailer-- I did read the website a couple of weeks ago for System requirements. If you read my Original post you'll see I am doing the RAM. Sad part about the requirements is says 2 GB hardspace -- which is the space it takes to load the program. Portable space is not identified anywhere which is why I am asking those who possibly use it.

[trailertrash]

yeah, I was thinking you would probably want to go more than the minimum on that type of application.

maybe try a maya forum?

[C5 Golfer]

yeah, I was thinking you would probably want to go more than the minimum on that type of application.

maybe try a maya forum?

Good idea--

[kjl]

Yeah, I use Maya and other 3D modelers a lot. It all kind of depends on what kinds of projects she'll be working on, and how structured the group is with regards to keeping old versions of objects, textures and scenes around.

If she's just working on a beginner single-person project for a semester or something, 2 gigs of ram and 160 gb of hard drive space will be just fine.

But if it is a group project with like 8 people working on various pieces that have to get loaded in at once or she is going to be plastering super high-res textures all over high-poly models and doing renders on the machine, she may bump into the 2 gig ceiling. Which is not to say it won't work, but it will get painful and sluggish when it starts swapping. But depending on what OS you're using and if you're 32 or 64 bit you might not be able to add much more anyways. I believe 32 bit versions of windows only go up to 3 gigs.

If the external hard drive is really just to take stuff back and forth between home and school, 160gb is plenty. If it's the main storage device for the projects she's working on and the projects are large, she may fill it up. People generally keep old versions of models, shots, animation, textures, and even old renders around just in case, and if she's rendering out a 3 minute long animation or something... a 3 minute animation for film (24 fps) at 32 bits per pixel at, say, 1280x960, and you're looking at some 20 gigs of hard drive space just to store all the images. Of course you can save some space with fewer bits, lower resolution, compression, etc., but just so you get a ballpark idea of the sizes involved...

[C5 Golfer]

Thanks Ken, That is the info for which I was looking. That helps a lot - specially the last paragraph. My feeling on the old stuff is store it on a DVD or CD and shelf it.

[bobdea]

I'd go with a 500 gb drive to be safe or even bigger if you can afford it.

http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/usb_500gb.htm

those are all great deals.

If she wants to hold on to old projects the bigger you're willing to spend I am sure she'd use. something like this http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/usb_2tb.htm

[C5 Golfer]

I'd go with a 500 gb drive to be safe or even bigger if you can afford it.

http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/usb_500gb.htm

those are all great deals.

If she wants to hold on to old projects the bigger you're willing to spend I am sure she'd use. something like this http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/usb_2tb.htm

How portable is the 500 GB ? I wanted something physically small so it is easier for her to move back and forth.

[trailertrash]

the other thing to keep in mind about the larger usb drives is that they need external power. not that that is a deal breaker but something to keep in mind.

[C5 Golfer]

the other thing to keep in mind about the larger usb drives is that they need external power. not that that is a deal breaker but something to keep in mind.

Good point -- here is one of the guys at which I was looking.

http://www.iomega.com/direct/products/family.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=53223315&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=26890319&bmUID=1198522356465

[kjl]

If you really are just using it to move models, animation, source files, textures, etc. around (i.e. you are not using it to move 40 gigabytes of animation around) and you don't mind the cost, a small 8-16 gb USB flash drive is probably a better idea. A 16 gb flash drive probably costs the same as a 150 gb external hard drive, but is way more convenient, and it fits on your keychain.

http://www.amazon.com/USB-Flash-Drives-Storage-Add-Ons/b?ie=UTF8&node=3151491

[skategoat]

kjl:

Where did you use Maya? I used to work for Alias (Alias Wavefront in those days) and made a ton of customer visits to California.

Henry

[bobdea]

those big ones are not terible but they do need external power if you go with a cheap SATA enclosure ($10ish) and a any small hard drive they can run off USB

the drives http://www.pricewatch.com/notebook_drives/sata_200gb.htm

and the enclosures http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/external_usb.htm

[Scuff]

Ken has some great advice.

C5 G: Best of luck to your friend and aspiring 3D artist!

Just last week I picked up a 320GB Western Digital external fire wire

Hard Drive - $130 at Best Buy, for this very purpose.

Had previously been using a 1GB USB flash-drive to transfer 3D models and scene

files between home and work. The flash-drive idea works great, and

this new external drive is also working well, just with more space.

I chose the firewire external drive over USB because I'm not really concerned about drive

size or having the extra power supply, but also because

I've found that firewire is a little better for repeated read/write functions

(i.e. working directly from the drive) and handling larger files.

The USB hard drives seem to have a delay in response when reading from the disk

and even a lag when playing back .mp3's in

iTunes. It'll does the job, but I'll bet this delay will become greater

when trying to play back larger video files, or caching a sequences of images.

FWIW: Here's a fun statistic to share with your friend:

I attended a presentation a few weeks back given by a

Technical Director who worked on "Transformers" - he said

there was a total of around 64,000 3D objects in the movie,

and a total of 202TB (Two hundred and two Tera bytes)

of hard drive space used for the production

~Karl

[bobdea]

firewire, yes, it has a better sustained read/write speed than USB and then there is firewire 800 which blows the older standards out of the water.

[C5 Golfer]

Ken has some great advice.

C5 G: Best of luck to your friend and aspiring 3D artist!

I chose the firewire external drive over USB because I'm not really concerned about drive

size or having the extra power supply, but also because

I've found that firewire is a little better for repeated read/write functions

~Karl

Thanks Karl,

Firewire for some reason reminds me of reliability issues sometime back with cables easliy damaged and causing com problems -- USB you can manhandle or kink the wires and no big deal but kink a firewire and it fails sometimes... leastwise that is my recolection of a 1 year ago. I think the firewire spec even specifies a minimum bend radius of around 3 inches.