Autodesk Maya LT – Cost Effective Tools for Game Development By Steven Schain The asset creation and modeling tools in Maya LT help developers create visually rich games while maintaining their bottom line. Due to the lengthy development time of 3D models, it can often take years for a game to go from inception to completion. This makes it difficult for game creators to meet industry demand quickly while also trying to curb production costs. Now, even though software costs have come down, the number of people working on the project has gone up as games have become more complex, leading to even higher production costs. This is one reason Maya LT is such a promising tool for the game community. Maya LT provides both fantastic game development tools and a low cost per seat, making it possible to equip game production departments at a fraction of the cost of full-blown software packages. highly functional UV editing. Along with these, the standard modeling features of Maya LT give the user the ability to create anything they can imagine. Besides modeling, game developers require a wide range of other functions, like rigging and animation, and the ability to create complex materials using the latest real-time, physically- based shaders. Lighting is another feature users can work with inside of Maya LT. Users are able to set up basic lighting, and then bake the lighting into texture using the Turtle texture baking tools. Once their assets are ready, developers can use some of the integrated options to send that asset directly to a game engine, such as The design of assets for game development takes Autodesk Stingray. Maya LT is tightly integrated with Stingray, allowing users to go back and a variety of forms, from props to characters, cars forth between Maya LT and Stingray to ensure to whole environments. While a program like the full version of Maya can be used for asset creation, the quality of their asset and deploy them to the most of the functionality of the software is unused game environment. With its advanced capabilities by a majority of the development team. Most asset coupled with its cost-effective price tag, Maya LT development for games revolves around the need is quickly becoming the tool of choice for game for strong modeling, texturing, and animation tools. developers large and small. Maya LT was developed to meet the demands of even the best asset developers. The modeling tools in Maya LT are the same tools available in the full version of Maya. Maya LT offers advanced functionality for automated Level of Detail generation, intuitive sculpting, and www.cadlearning.com 25