Late last month, Alias|Wavefront announced the immediate availability of its Maya Personal Learning Edition software. Since that announcement, the company’s Web site has been swamped with requests for the software.
Alias|Wavefront President Doug Walker, told MacCentral during an exclusive interview last night that Apple is now hosting the software for users of iDisk. The 128MB download is available today for interested users.
Maya Personal Learning Edition provides full access to the toolsets included in the US$7,500 Maya Complete package. NURBS modeling, animation, inverse kinematics, Maya Artisan, Maya Paint Effects, particles, dynamics and rendering are all supported.
Users are granted a free seat of Maya for non-commercial use, with a renewable annual registration. Maya Personal Learning Edition adds a watermark on images and uses a special non-commercial file format. Industry-standard plug-ins are not supported, either. Still, for the price, Alias|Wavefront is counting on attracting creative professionals, students and anyone else with an interest in 3D computer graphics and animation.
Maya Personal Learning Edition can be still be downloaded free of charge from Alias|Wavefront’s Web site. By the end of March CD copies will be available from the Alias|Wavefront online store at a cost of US$5 plus shipping and handling.