Maya for free...

For those of you who haven't seen this yet, there is now a free version of Maya 5!

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20031015005537&newsLang=en

http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/maya/maya_ple/index.shtml

Check it out.

That looks cool I d give it a try if my pc could handle it

ah, cool. for a while there they didn't have one available online. although you could still get the PLE that came with UT2k3, since it's what you use to make static meshes for that game. I'll probably stick with the version 4 I have since I can't download that on 56k anyway :sad:

I like max's polymodeling tools better.

Max is better for modeling, but texturing Maya is a lot better. Hope the plugin for UT2k3 gets updated for it soon.

is there a free version of 3DSMax?

Sort of. You can get G-Max, which is a cut-down version of 3ds max used for modeling (it won't render). Plugins still work for it, I think, so you can export your models in the HL format and such.

You can't directly export to HL models, you have to use the Q3 plugin, export as a .mdl3, then take it into Milkshape and convert it to HL.

Is there a plugin for that free maya that can at least lead to a conversion to HL .mdls?

Gmax sucks and there is no free version of max unfortunately. The educational version is not too bad to come by if you know the right people though.

Agreed. Maya good. G-Max bad. Never tried 3DSMax though - Supposed to be quite difficult to handle. It's all very well saying that MS3D will work, but that costs money and with all that activation it's a pain when you're reformatting every five minutes.

According to the HL2 SDK FAQ (acronym heaven) there will be a plugin for Maya to export to HL2 models. Don't know about HL1 .mdl files though.