A while back, people were worried, excited, and disapointed when Maya PLE was released. The last talk I heard on it from the blender community was that it wasn’t worth the download because of the huge watermark.
So, I’m just curious. Did anyone stick with it and learn a little bit of Maya, or did you all just ditch it?
Levi
the water mark drove me nuts!!! Sometimes it is tuff to see things such as lines when they line up with the water mark. Acutally, I wouldn’t call it a water marke, it’s more like a mark with some transparancy!!!
Oh, I’m learning it still inbetween stuff, but that’s only because I managed to pick up a Maya 4 Visual Quickstart book for £15!! I’m getting there, slowly…but XSI is SO much better. You should get the experience set instead - it comes with training videaos and everything!! And you can actually SEE through the watermark!!( (I know, this is unheard of in AW’s HQ).
The ability to save in Maya is pretty nice, tho’, even if you can’t see what you’re doing 
LethalSideParting
Actually, I think it’s pretty cool. The watermark doesn’t really bother me that much (it’s only for learning after all) and it is sure nice to have some high-end 3D software that actually works well on my Mac (though I am seriously considering Lightwave at xype’s suggestion).
maya’s nice but XSI is the shi@t. trust me if you really wanna see some mapping in action get ahold of this package and watch the tut videos. you won’t be disappointed with this package and the watermark are little hairlines along with demo version written in the corner of the viewports.
ack… all those limitations were just too much! learning it was no fun…so i resorting back to my quest… a quest in which was succesful and i now have an “ice cream” version of maya 4.0 unlimited from “a” friend… wow, i gotta tell ya how cool it is with no limitiations…this program has the most options and cool interface ive ever seen…the modeling interface is quite a bitch to learn, but thats cause im so use to maya…but ive made some nice scenes so far that im proud of, and am gonna buy the a learning boook for it so i can go big, maya style ::rap music starts to play::…ewwww rap…yuck!..::flies away in red tights::
-chris
bad renderer…bad watermark…bad amount of tutorials.
I am a maya animation student. Don’t listen to these people who rant “XSI is so much better or lightwaves renderer is so much better.” Just choose whatever you are most comfortable with. At my college we use maya because it is the industry standard for film. Every program has it’s streangths and let downs. ILM uses just about all the major 3d programs. XSI for animation, maya for particles and easy scripting, houdini, and others. Any big studio isn’t going to be using just one 3D program. If you want a bargain, hash’s animation master is a steal for 200 (300 for latest version) bucks, it is about the easiest program for animating and very powerful, i saw a developer give a demo of it at a LA computer fair and was very impressed. There dynamics were hell a lot easier to use then mayas.
They just released a kick ass hair plugin for maya, since you have unlimited go get it. http://www.joealter.com/
And don’t let the crappy native render for maya let you down, there is always mental ray, and messiah plugins.
Blender got me interested in this career, don’t use blender much anymore but I come here all the time still because it is where my roots are.
I just couldn’t get into it: I get much better results with blender, so I’ve decided to stick with blender 
The watermark didn’t bother me. and it is nice to have a top end piece of software available if you did want to get into the industry. thumbs up to alias/wavefront but Blender won in the end
ilm uses softimage 3d for animation. not xsi
I used it a bit. But never liked the water marks in the window. Somethimes it was hard to see the models.
I don’t use it anymore.
bug
Dude, my bad, I meant softimage. Don’t know why I put xsi. We’ve had a ILM animation supervisor speak at our college, ripped our work to bits. Great experiance though.
cool 
Im going to start a new school at 8/26, digital animation with maya for 2 years.
I liked Maya PLE, I can’t try The Experience CD I got the in the mail 2 days ago. I was carless and didn’t read the required resolution and low and behold I can’t run it…I can’t even get a new monitor because a bigger one wouldnt fit in my desk.
whoa whoa whoa…dittohead?? bad renderer? its the same as regular mayas renderer i belive, which rocks… bad amount of tutorials? are u kiddin? lol…did u even try to look tutorials?? haha theres thousands of really really good ones… =D maya rocks
Are you running on Windows? I’m pretty sure there is some software out there which lets you create a “virtual” desktop of however big you want. If it is bigger than the physical screen size, then it scrolls. Might be worthwhile searching for that?
brian
humm, PLE was a bit annoying.
I downloaded it and booted it up, ARRG big logos everywhere. All of the buttons were icons (I like the text buttons of Blender and LW so much more) and it was rather confusing to do much more than add a sphere at first glance.
The watermarks on the viewports were too much for me (I can understand putting them in the render, but the viewports?) I noticed that they would even jitter back and forth a bit as the viewports re-drew, which was annoying.
I dumped it, I still am going to learn LW when I get around it to.
I have windows, yes but I only found one free virtual desktop. It worked good but the software won’t work with a virtual desktop. XSI needs an actual screen resolution of 1280X1240 before it even installs.