With Macromedia just announcing Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio and the new Shockwave 3D Player (both due next month), Alias|Wavefront has announced that it’s developing an exporter plug-in that can be used to transfer content directly from its Maya 3D animation and effects package into the studio software.
Due next month, the Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter plug-in serves as a high-speed Maya scene optimizer and export solution for the soon-to-be released 3D version of the Shockwave Web platform, according to Mike Wilson, director of Maya Interactive at Alias|Wavefront. Like Director, the Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter plug-in will be available in both Mac and Windows versions.
“Alias|Wavefront is committed to the Shockwave platform as a high quality 3D web content publishing path for Maya customers,” Wilson said in a statement.
3D content delivery is an iterative process with repeated exports and modifications necessary to assure top compatibility, performance and appearance in the target player, Wilson said. The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter being developed by Alias|Wavefront is specifically designed to enable rapid iterations between Maya and Director, he added.
“The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter checks the Maya scene for compatibility with the Shockwave Player, and then suggests scene optimizations that will improve performance. Moreover, it keeps track of changes and injects only these, as opposed to the whole scene, on subsequent exports — the result being that data conversion, which normally takes a number of minutes, is reduced to seconds.”
The Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter will be available to all Maya users at no charge. You’ll be ale to download it on the Alias|Wavefront Web site.
By the way, Maya for Mac OS X is now in beta testing and due for a final release between now and summer.