If this is in the wrong place please move to ' Everything Else' but it is Games Related, and certainly valuable if you are a budding 3d designer wishing to get into industry.

The AMD courses here are generally very good, but dont normally cross over. This one does, so here it is...

UWE' s Bristol School of Animation has joined forces with Aardman Animations and MEDIA on the Storyboarding Competition 2007, an annual contest giving potential animators a chance to win professional training with a free place to study either 2D Drawn, 3D Puppet or 3D CGI (Maya) animation on UWE' s, Bristol School of Animation' s prestigious ' Three Month Animation Course' . This prize also includes the payment of accommodation costs for the duration of the eleven-week course.

The 2007 competition judges will include a Director from Aardman Animations and Animation staff from UWE. The judges will be looking for skills in the development and communication of a strong concept likely to influence international business. The storyboard will need to visually convey the plot and action of a scene, whole film or a commercial.

Entrants must produce an original and creative storyboard for a TV or film advertisement which could be used to promote the European animation industry to a worldwide market at international film fairs and business conferences. The animated advertisement will need to convince judges that it will successfully increase international circulation of European animation, for film, television and new media industries, emphasising the cultural diversity that Europe has to offer.

Closing date for entries to the Storyboard Competition is Friday 9 March 2007. For more information or to book up on the short course please contact us on:

Tel: +44 (0)117 32 84810
E-Mail: amd.shortcourses@uwe.ac.uk
Website: www.uwe.ac.uk/amd

Why Maya? Max is what the gming industry uses. Maya is more for movies and such.

I' d disagree slightly, certainly studio' s such as Sony when i was there saw Maya comming and adopted as a technology from the outset. Max has the Havok engine in it again from 9, so it ties well into games, but they are both focused on slightly different areas of 3d work.

Maya as a character tool, max as a level / environment. Max and Maya are both industry standard, Maya is the current standard for the film/visual fx industry as you state, but max is more popular in games as much as anything as it has been around for a lot longer.

They are both owned by Autodesk now anyways, so already have inter-operatability. Tools like Virtools allow importing of both formats as standard these days.

Maya sucks and is being used waaaaaaaaaaay less than it was 5 years ago. Most 3D modelling is done in Max, LightWave and Softimage XSI whereas Maya is more commonly used in conjunction with Corel for animation work.

Maya is awful to work with!

Maya does NOT suck! I use to use 3dsmax until I did a course in maya. Now to me max does not exist only maya. The UI is so much better in maya too.

3DS Max baby!!

Well, I only know 3DS max, not really familiar with Maya.

I go to a game design school, as does a friend of mine though in a different college, and in both places we are taught Maya.

Minus points to myself for not reading the damn thing again!!

It' s a drawing/ 3-D competition???

Count me in!! We have until the PS3 release date too??

So everyone is taking advantage of Sony delaying the PS3? Yes!

We use Maya but the focus a Teesside is on Softimage XSI and 3D Studio Max (we have 3 graphics labs). Our school also hosts Animex which is the ' International Festival of Animation' which is always pretty cool. Luckily i don' t have to do too much 3D modelling but even the small aspects we do cover are enough, if not too much for me...[:' (]

Maya rocks but we dont use it at my uni

I had to use it outside uni.................MY BRO GET GET FREE COPIES OF THE FULL VERSION IF ANY1 WANTS ONE.

What uni are you at?

University of East London

Thanks for the info Musashi.

It´s just a shame i don´t any time left to participate in that contest

ORIGINAL: Gaiden BLACK

Maya rocks but we dont use it at my uni

I had to use it outside uni.................MY BRO GET GET FREE COPIES OF THE FULL VERSION IF ANY1 WANTS ONE.

Legit copies?

Yup the 5k copies................. Actually you cant even buy maya in stores can you?

Maya is uber expensive!

As for the gaming industry, from what I' ve read in the *past* I came away with the impression that a lot of Western game developers use 3D Studio Max, giving Max the edge in the U.S. game development scene whereas Japanese developers tend to utilize different 3D packages making it incredibly difficult to tell which is the favorite 3D package over in the Land of the Rising Sun..

All I know is that Sega of Japan always had a boner for Softimage

Max definitely owns the west. Softimage, XSI, Maya, and several others make up the rest of the industry but none of them come close to the dominance that Max has.

Max is very popular but it doesn' t dominate as much as some people think it does.
I' ve only used max a little bit and I' ve used maya and lightwave a bunch. I like maya the best. And I used it to do the majority of my game stuff for unreal. I' ve also used max and lightwave for game stuff.

FFS, do we have to have a fanboy war about 3D apps now?!