Autodesk have announced a LT version of Maya aimed at independent and mobile game developers, offering some of the features of Maya at a more affordable price – perhaps kicking at the PLE / Gmax can once more.
Introducing Autodesk® Maya LT 2014™, a 3D modeling and animation software tool designed for indie game developers seeking a professional solution at an affordable price
Maya LT is certainly not a new idea, recently The foundry have pushed out a version of Nuke to that is meant to fill out the stations on a team of rotoscope and tracking artists, and this seems to be along that line.
It was some time ago that Autodesk killed of the PLE version aimed at education which watermarked renders and had a special file format exclusive to the PLE version, and Maya LT 2014 seems to have a different position than that, being not unlike the G-Max offering of 3Ds Max tools in a slimmed down version (which was axed long ago).
Maya LT has quite a few things missing, such as rendering, scripting and plugin support, which received a bit of backlash from some user base. Still, you are able to use a lot of the Maya workflow tools, and if you are just starting out this might be a good alternative running at around $795.00. In actuality, if you have a reaction to all the features that Maya 2014 is missing, chances are you are not Autodesk’s target market for this.
Check the tailored feature set of Maya LT compared to other versions of Maya, in this handy chart here.
