This is a great chance for people who want to get into graphics and 3D animation, but don't want to use warez and don't want to give up their bank accounts.

Go to http://www.aliaswavefront.com . They are the people who made the award winning program, Maya. It has been used to make Gran Torismo 3 and movies like Ice Age, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and much more.

On their website, there is a link to the new Maya Learning edition, which is a free download. It has no time-outs and it is full-featured.

One problem is for people who have low bandwidth connections, the 136 MB download for PC and the Mac OS X (10.1.2) download of 149 MB is quite alot.

System requirements? Thats another story....

You need either Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP and on the Mac side, you need Mac OS X (10.1.2) . Thats right. It will not work on 95,98 or even Windows ME for PCs and it will not work on Mac OS 9.2 and lower.

Hardware? BOOM!

• Pentium processor, at least 600 MHz
• 512 Mbytes RAM (Yes 512 MB of RAM!!!)
• CD-ROM drive
• Hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
• Overlay plane capability is recommended.
• 3-button mouse with mouse driver software (Yes! You need a 3 button mouse!)

Minimum disk space requirements:
• 440 Mbytes temporary space needed for download and installation startup.
• 270 Mbytes needed for the Personal Learning Edition software installation.


What about Macs? BOOM again!

Hardware Requirements:
• G4 processor (though G3 systems are not specifically qualified to run Maya, these systems may be acceptable for general Maya use)
• 512 Mbytes RAM
• CD-ROM drive
• Hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card (ATI Radeon, Rage, rage mobility, nVidia geforce 2, 3)
• 3-button mouse with mouse driver software (Yes, you need a 3-button mouse for the mac. Go find one now. I have seen only one in my whole life-time for the Mac.

And for the Mac you also need
• Internet Explorer 5.1 or higher

To go to the download page to check it out, Click here. Yes. On this text.

Once you have the thing, you will be able to make really cool smoke effects and the like. You will have a huge studio at your hands.

Have lots of fun!