Maya and Mac Pro

You used Maya on a Mac Book? I had no idea they had a universal binary version yet.
I really didn't think that autodesk would even bother releasing a universal binary for the Mac, and most Maya users would be looking to other applications for their 3D needs.

As far as rendering goes that is done by the CPU so if it is universal it should fly.

867MHz G4 QuickSilver Mac OS X (10.4.7) 1.5GB RAM

I used Maya 7 on my stock Mac Pro. It's definately usable, but working on a scene I'm doing on my pc which is 2.8ghz HT/1gb ram/128mb agp workstation card gives about 35-55 frames while on the Mac Pro it's around 15-40. Hopefully the Universal version of Maya will fix that.

Hello,

I do a lot of work in Maya, which up till now has been on my G5 2 x 2.7.

I have just received my MacPro and am just now waiting for my license transfer to come through to move Maya to the MacPro.
It is my intention to run Maya under BootCamp on the windows side for several reasons:

-to take advantage of the multitude of shaders, plug-ins and extras that are available only for PC use.

-to avoid the performance hit that running a program as complex as Maya through Rosetta would involve.

-and mainly to enjoy the superior performance of Maya under XP. There is a wealth of material on CGTalk that demonstrates the vast difference in Render times etc between OSX and XP for Maya. There is one test scene there that people have tried with different hardware. One user posted his render times for the scene on a MacPro using OSX andXP.

The figures?
OSX 11'20"
XP 2' 52"

Food for thought? Kind of made my mind up for me.

I will post again when I'm set up and let you know how its going.

mic

Question: how does Maya work on a Mac Pro with XP, when the HDD´s are working only in PIO Mode ?
I tried Avid Xpress with Windows XP on my new Mac Pro and this is unusable (too slow). I can´t imagine that Maya would be worth the install as long as the PIO bug isn´t solved. Or did you find a solution to get full disk speed ?

That, Sir is a very good point.

I had not considered that. Reading the latest posts on that thread in CGTalk, it is a question that has been asked of the original poster. At present he has not replied on that. Hmmmm.

I have not set Maya up on my MacPro yet, and will try to find out some answers on this.

If anyone wishes to refer to the thread on CGTalk it is:

"How fast is your computer with Maya 7.0 and Mental Ray?"

Hi I have a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Pro, I have Maya V7 installed on both and all seems well untill you go into a few areas eg. hypershade, texture editor to work on UV's. In the UV editor I cannot see any of the geomerty but it is there as I can select the UV's! also in the hypershade window there are refresh problems with querky overlay that appears in the widow which looks like close up artifacts of shadernodes and placement node graphics. Also if render with more than 1 processor in batch mode it crashes every time!

Two thing I'm guessing the crashing problem may be fixed in the native ver 8 and the display anomalise are to do with the graphic card drivers? Any how with the ability to do UV texture Maya on the mac is no use to me what so every. Intrestingly none of these problems are occuring on the MacBookPro! If any one knows if there is a driver update or patch for the NVIDIA Geforce 7300 GT on the Mac Pro I would be very greatfull to here about it. Or as a matter of fact any workaround to the problems mentioned above

Many thanks



Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.7) Maya app graphics problems with NVDIA GeForce 7300 GT

Certainly, Here you go...

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=291650&page=1&pp=15&highlight=fast

It is a long thread, the relevant bits are on the last few pages.

mic

MacPro 2 x 3.0, PowerMac G5 2x2.7/Apple display 20,3.5gb Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Could you please explain what is PIO mode?
I am using Media Composer through Bootcamp and it runs great. We should discuss.

A|F

Hey Mic,

I'm trying to switch to a Mac Pro here, and my plan to use Boot Camp was the same as yours, as it was your intention about a month ago. Assuming you got your license transferred, how'd it go?

I did hit up Autodesk directly for clarity on their OSX Universal Binary position--did they mean they didn't support Boot Camp-->Windows-->Maya 8, and they retorted that there was no support at all. Actually, my question to them was "Did it work at all, curse the support" but whatever. Folks like us are on our own according to them.

This is the only product I care about. I plan on pretty much doing all my worky work in Windows until Adobe gets their act together, and then I'll move everything over.


Dell Windows XP Pro Also own Macs

I am running Maya 7 on a 3 gig MacPro and I can confirm the interface problems. Since I do a lot of animating and texturing in Maya the MacPro is useless to me running OSX. I have to run Windows which I hate. This has been a huge problem and to be honest I would not recommend anyone who uses Maya heavily to get a MacPro, unless you want to run Windows. In which case it is mad fast.

Rendering in Maya in OSX is painfully slow on the MacPro. Lightning fast on the MacPro running XP. I doubt that a universal version of Maya will be slow on the Mac. My Quad G5 renders 2x faster than the MacPro running OSX so I have to imagine it is a function of Maya running under Rosetta rather than a core OS issue.

For me the solution is to do all my work on my quad G5 and use the MacPro to render. If I had known that going into it, I wouldn't have bought the MacPro. I could even deal with the slower rendering and just fired up Windows on the MacPro to render but I can't really work in Maya because of the interface issues. I know they seem like a graphics card issue which I am sure that it is a driver issue but it is weird that XP is fine using the same card - and the drivers for that card come from the the boot camp disc that I created - in OSX!

There will be a UB of Maya. I am confindent.

Oh yeah, I won't even think of transferring my license (I need to ask my reseller if my dongle version lets me use both platforms--doubt it, but we certainly pay enough money on this app) until Autodesk releases a binary. Then I gotta get my external renderers/plugins updated, blah blah blah.

That's a lot of work, but I can wait...just needed to know if Maya worked at all on the Windows side of Boot Camp. The only issue is that my window for purchase (I'm in gov'mint) is basically through the end of next week. May not get the chance next fiscal year.

Hey Max,

About the dongle. I have exactly the setup you were talking of now. I got a dongle and transferred my license to that, and I can now boot to either platform on the same license. And I'm on an educational license, so I am sure you could get it done.

Maya works fantastically on XP, as has been mentioned, and like you it is the only reason I have installed XP in the first place. Dont actually relish the idea of Windows on a Mac, but for the performance in Maya I'll get into it.

It took a little hassle to get this arrangement together, but I am sitting happy now, and can wait (for however long it takes) until Autodesk gets a UB version out.

good luck to you,
mic

BTW Max - the license for Maya works on either platform - it is tied to the hardware ID of the machine which is the same no matter what OS you're using.