February 2005 marks release of Maya 6.5. Yes, Alias’ award-winning Maya software, which prides itself for being at forefront of technological innovation has gone a step further. Maya 6.5 is hailed by Alias to be a “performance-driven release packed with new features and feature enhancements motivated by next generation production requirements for massive dataset handling.”

Maya artists will definitely love significant improvements made with regard to interactivity in such areas as modeling, UV manipulation, deformations and 3D painting. It also provides high-performance Computer-Aided Design or CAD data import through new STEP translator, allowing artists to quickly import large data sets from major CAD packages for creation of high-quality images and animations directly from CAD data. Maya 6.5 also has such new features like scene segmentation tools for reference locking, reference editing, proxies and enhancement to nested references, which gives artists more control to focus on specific sections of massive data sets, managing scene load times, parallel and collaborative workflows, scene sharing and overall scene performance, as well as mental ray for Maya network rendering – a functionality that supports interactive, batch and command-line rendering and pre-lighting.

To achieve this effect, we will need to colorize using Paint Shop Pro. According to Bill Brewer, “colorizing is a feature built into PSP that keeps luminance values (the bright and dark parts that make up recognizable image) and colors image with one color. The image to be colorized needs to have a color depth of 16.7 million colors, and it can be in full color to start with (reduction to grayscale is not required before colorizing). Using that command brings up a dialog box where you have control over hue and saturation, with a preview. I suggest you DON'T use that menu item to colorize images. Instead use more powerful HSL adjustments accessed with Colors>Adjust>Hue/Saturation/Lightness... command. That way, you have complete control over hue/saturation/lightness, and color preview is much better than what you get with Colorize.”