Welcome!

Welcome to our community forums, full of great people, ideas and excitement. Please register if you would like to take part.

This is extra text with a test link..

Register Now

Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

3D on a Mac

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • 3D on a Mac

    OK...been working for the last 3 weeks in an intensive Mac only environment for 3D (Maya and C4D). Since we have some hard core mac fans in our 3D group, I wanted to report in on how things have been going and what's been going well and what hasn't.

    a) C4D runs really well on a Mac. No complaints. Flawless. On the 20" iMacs we've been using in class here, things worked great (although remember that these iMacs are fairly robust with 2 GB of RAM and the 256MB video card).'
    b) Maya for mac sucks. 25 students in the class. All on Macs using Maya with the latest updates of OS and Maya. 10-12 times a day, I talk with a frustrated student who can't figure out why the extrude tool (or any of a number of other tools) isn't working for them. They want to know what they are doing wrong. Turns out, they aren't doing anything wrong, Maya has just decided to not work in that tool any more. Restart Maya and all works. Very frustrating for student though as they think that they are doing something wrong - not Maya thumbing it's nose at them. No excuse really for tools to just stop working for no reason that often. BTW, it crashes about as often on the mac as it does on PC - although since OSX is a nicer OS, you don't have many hard crashes where the only option is to restart your machine and loose all you work.
    c) Mac has probably the best game authoring system I've ever seen. I'm doing some freelance this summer creating some interactive 3D in a game engine. The Unity Engine (unity3d.com) is AWESOME. I had started working with the Torque Engine and OGRE, but was very happy to find Unity. Beautiful, easy to use, very compatible with Maya and C4D - and currently, Mac only.
    d) Boot camp still has problems. Maya in Windows XP via bootcamp runs more stable, but other strange things keep popping up. Safari (for windows), Firefox, IE, and Opera all end up with rendering errors. Pages either say they are loaded but don't show anything, or stop loading at random times. It only happens when I'm running boot camp.
    e) Parallels doesn't cut it when running Maya. Running Parallels and Windows XP with Maya within it crashes often, and the refresh rate bites.

    So anyway after three weeks of running 20 macs (with Maya) for 8 hours a day, and then 4 hours of personal work a night, I've got a bit more than antecdotal evidence. Moral of the story, if you're running C4D, Mac is a great 3D app. If you are doing Maya, I'd still unreservedly recommend a PC. Autodesk still just hasn't solved enough problems with it. Because of the strange Bootcamp problems, I can't recommend buying a Mac laptop and running it as a PC - stuff still isn't right. So, 3D - buy a PC. Maybe the next versions will fix things, but I'm not sure I'd want to take the chance.

    On the other hand. If you want to create games, buy a PC and a Mac. Unity is a beautiful, beautiful thing (especially when you compare it to the other engines available.
Working...
X