finalRender Stage-2 for MAYA (yes right for Maya)

[Long John]

http://www.finalrender.com/news/read...-35-788&NID=83

Eppelheim– July 19, 2004) - cebas Computer GmbH, one of the largest plug-in developers for 3ds max, today announced its upcoming release of finalRender Stage-2 for Alias Maya 6. Responding to increasing customer demand from the Maya community, cebas Computer GmbH has decided to offer its premiere rendering tool for Alias Maya 6.
finalRender Stage-2 for Maya 6 will be presented to a worldwide audience, for the first time, at this year’s SIGGRAPH Convention taking place August 8 – 12, 2004 in Los Angeles, California. Interested studios and Maya users are invited to come by and see it live at cebas’ booth# 2039, Los Angeles Convention Center.....

Stage-2 is meant as the platform independent rendering system, Maya will be the first of many other platforms to come. We might also offer a Stage-2 for 3ds max in the future, however on 3ds max - finalRender Stage-1 will see several incarnations before we go to Stage-2.

Bigger studios will on the other hand profit from our platform inter-operability between different applications. The output will always be the same

[yog]

I wont be holding my breath.
The article says that FR for Maya will be "presented" at this years Siggraph with an expected delivery date of Q1 2005.

I purchased FR Stage-1 when it was "presented" at a Siggraph a few years back with an "estimated" ship date of ONE month later. In fact we ended up waiting over a year for the product. The wait was made far worse by Cebas's very poor public relations, to the extent the were banning people for little more than asking for an update on delivery times.
In the first six months after the first estimated delivery date Cebas refused to communicate with users at all, then came up with a revised delivery date of (drum roll) of "sometime next month", which actually turned out to be another six months with no communication in the interviening time.
It was mainly because of this I switched to Vray, so I guess I have something to thank Cebas for after all

So by this standard I would expect FR for Maya sometime in 2007

[Long John]

i think we all know edwin and his PR.

on the other side i think even HE must learn something from the past.

when you look at the features then stage-2 for maya is not more then stage-1 for max.

i don´t know how much work it is to port a existing renderer to maya and how many guys working on it.

at least it´s nice to see that not only chaos is working on a maya version.
competition is always a good thing (for the cutomer ).

[mike_kennedy]

I wonder how Turtle is doing, being one of the first 3RD party renderers on maya?
I think the pool for maya 3rd party renderers will get very crowed over the next while....

[percydaman]

hehe...when it comes to posting a ship date and following up on that, I could count the times developers have come through, like on one hand! Even after falling into that trap time and time again.