Terminator 3 SFX made in Maya

Canadian Business reports that Maya, 3-D animation software developed by Alias-Wavefront, is being used for SFX work on Terminator 3. The company won an Oscar in the 2002 science and technical awards.

Maya's handiwork was seen when Spider-Man was web-slinging through the streets of New York, or when Star Wars clone armies battled killer droids in Episode 2.

Maya allows design teams to manage a project's work flow -- the pipeline, as it's called --through its many stages, all in one standardized environment. While the software program came with a lot of bells and whistles (such as fluid effects for water), one of its most important innovations was that it could easily be customized.

Programmers can pop open Maya's virtual hood and soup up its inner workings. Often, that means plugging in proprietary programs -- or importing work done using one of Maya's competitors.

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), George Lucas's visual effects house, generally uses Softimage3D to animate characters. Maya is used for anything that's affected by the laws of nature. In The Perfect Storm, for instance, Maya created the towering waves that battered the Andrea Gail.

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