[bjames]

This photo must be from a pre-release version of Maya 1 as the top title bar shows Siggraph 96.  My question is does Maya 1.1 have the option to display the left side tool menu similar to power animator 7 and up?

Unless I’m missing it, I don’t recall seen this option.

   

[gijoe77]

This is news to me - man that would be really cool to give it the power animator look and feel!

[Nichosen]

They look familiar to me.
I think I used those when we moved over to maya from soft and lightwave.
The setting should be close to where you turn on/off the shelf.

Edit:
It could be that I just recall the icons from the shelf itself.

[bjames]

From the 1996 date, IIRC that’s like 2 years before the official release date. Since Maya was built from the PA and Wavefront packages, I’m wondering if the side menus was later scrapped before release.

[vishnu]

Apropos of nothing I just looked at the SIGGRAPH96 website, bunch of interesting stuff but not this:

https://history.siggraph.org/conference/...echniques/

[bjames]

The image was taken from a blog celebrating Mays 10 anniversary. The author said the image below was taken from Cory Mogk's Maya blog. I could not find that particular blog, however I did find out from other blogs, that Cory Mogk works at Autodesk, but was also a member of the Development team that created Maya. So the image could very well be a very early version or Frankenstein prototype of Maya.

[vishnu]

Maya is, or at least was, the largest commercial software package ever developed. The coding team seems to have very little turnover, but then if you're working on the best, why would you leave? Anything else would be a step down.

[bjames]

You make a good point there…. They can be considered as pioneers as the technology was still rather in its infant stage.

[vishnu]

It seems to be an area of technology that has a lot of longevity, a lot of the pioneers are still active, Jim Clark for example, and Ed Catmul stayed with Pixar well into his mid to late 70s.

[bjames]

Oh.. I did not know Jim Clark was with Pixar, cool..