Autodesk Maya a favourite in the industry
Autodesk Maya is leading the industry in 3D animation, modelling, simulation, rendering and compositing software. Maya provides users with the tools to produce extremely effective and professional 3D animations.
HALON entertainment, a full service previsualisation company, rely on software like Autodesk Maya to create spectacular visual effects for many of the various award winning, commercially successful and critically acclaimed films they have worked on such as: Spiderman 3 (2007), Avatar (2009), The Hunger Games (2012), Prometheus (2012). The small case study below will focus on HALON entertainment’s work on the blockbuster film: Life of Pi.
Life of Pi is a film based on Yann Martel’s 2011 novel, Life of Pi, a fantasy adventure, illustrating the life of Piscine “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy trying to migrate to Canada with his family but due to a sequence of ill-fated events, he finds himself drifting alone in a lifeboat with a variety of wild animals on-board including a full-grown Bengal tiger. The HALON team worked around the globe for this project, even though this can be tough, the process was efficient and simple due to their use of Autodesk Maya; a system they could always rely on to get the job done. Autodesk Maya provided the HALON team with the speed and efficiency to adapt and handle their work as the vision of the film progressed. The HALON team were able to create the right environments, characters and models needed as the particular scenes were being discussed.
Brad Alexander one of the co-founders of HALON entertainment below explains how Autodesk Maya helped his company create visual effects and transfer these ideas and visions seamlessly between his team and the director of Life of Pi: “Throughout the process, our biggest advantage was being able to do everything in Maya’s Hardware Renderer. We rely heavily on viewport playblasts. Being able to twirl around and pose in real time, and to receive instantaneous feedback is invaluable on a job like Life of Pi. It really enabled both our team and Ang himself to fully visualize what he wanted in each beat and scene, and to see what worked and what didn’t.”
It is therefore evident that software such as Maya provided by Autodesk delivers a crucial role for professionals such as Brad Alexander and the rest of his team. But it is not just an essential tool for professionals such as him but anyone who is looking to create expert animations and visual effects.
To read the full case study:
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autodesk_life_of_pi_customer_story_US_letter_r2-Web.pdf
