BUILD | TOOLS // AUTODESK
A return to Maya
As the charge to support indies continues, Autodesk has unveiled Maya LT, conceived specifically for small teams. Senior marketing manager Greg Castle tells Will Freeman why the new tool matters, and what it consists of
When did Autodesk decide to target the indie audience with Maya LT? Like most people in the games industry, we’ve always been really excited about what’s going on in indie, where they’re pushing the boundaries not just of gameplay design, but also production and the way they do things. We’re also really enthusiastic about all the support for the indies from the big guys that’s going on; things like what Sony and Microsoft are doing. And indie is something we’re very keen to support in any way possible. So we took a good look at our product line, and it was clear that with some work it was really well positioned to serve indie developers.
So how did you begin to work out how to change the product to better suit indies? Well, we asked ourselves about what they really care about in terms of tools, and what they care about is having a strong userbase behind a tool, accessing production-proven tools, and they need flexible pricing. A strong userbase and production-proven tools is something we have got at Autodesk, and looking at our tools, Maya is probably the strongest for gaming in that regard. But flexible pricing is something we didn’t have. So we looked at Maya closely – because its functioning on Mac and PC, making it the obvious choice in terms of indies – and we thought about Maya’s appeal to indies.
And you’ve changed what Maya offers significantly for the LT edition? Maya is a big and very powerful product with loads of different features. When you look at games development, and especially smaller
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studios, they are really only using a small subset of what Maya offers. We figured that there was a bunch of things that weren’t really applicable in Maya that we could pull out to enable us to decrease the price significantly.
How will that pricing work? Well, the full version of Maya is priced at around $3500, and we’re offering LT at $795, with a rental pricing option, to make it easier
What indies care about is having a
strong userbase behind a tool, accessing production proven tools, and flexible pricing.
Greg Castle, Autodesk
for smaller developers who find themselves scaling up and scaling down, or freelance developers who want to easily charge back the costs of tools to whoever they are doing a piece of work for. The rental price is $50 a month, and if you go up and purchase more time, it could go as low as $30 a month. We did a tonne of research and a tonne of
focus groups, working with indie developers to what price point they would feel is acceptable, and to work out what we could legitimately charge, and we’ve arrived at a cost price we feel is fair.
Let’s move onto the feature set. How is Maya LT different from the full Maya? In terms of the feature set, some of the surplus stuff includes some of the rendering, which is used in Maya by those in the film, television and animation industries, for example, but for games developers they are using the renderer of the game engine. With Viewport 2.0, which is available in Maya, and the DirectX 11 suport, it’s a lot more of a ‘what you see is what you get’ situation. What you see in Viewport is an accurate depiction of what you’ll get in the game engine, so the need for the renderer just wasn’t there. So we pulled out the renderer, so the hardware and software renderer, Mental Ray and Render Map, isn’t in there. We did keep in Turtle Renderer to give indies access to more realistic light-baking into scenes. There’s also the ability to do playblasts, because we saw an increasing number of indies are developing 2D games using 3D models, just because it’s easier in terms of the animating process. That’s one of the main differences. Another,
that we did to maintain the difference between the larger Maya customers and the indie games developers using LT, is that you can import and modify models of any size, but when you export there’s a limit on the polys you can export in LT. So when you export in FBX there’s a 25,000 per-seat poly limit on assets that you create in Maya LT. That limit has jumped around quite a bit, with devices continuing to improve their fidelity and resolutions and stuff like that, and its something we can adjust quite easily in the future, but the models and the things we’ve
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