Industry Standards: Approaching Maya, Blender, and 3D max in private practice

Given the public’s increasing exposure to avenues for mastering digital media that were once limited, the realm of 3D modeling still maintains an aura of mystery and inaccessibility because of the complexity of it’s interface and it’s almost exclusive domination by the entertainment industry. A new version of Maya has been introduced every year since the beginning of the century, and in a way the program embodies it’s own obsolescence which is based on the essential fallacy that whatever a computer can make look realistic is never real enough. The levels of programming that go into generating the software alone are immense, making the potential for exploiting it’s idiosynchrasies equally if not excessively vast. The technical and artistic possibilities that this program holds yield aesthetic explorations that were not even possible even this time last year, and given the current trend in the software’s development, the possibilities that is holds for the future are limitless as computers become faster and more powerful and as the software becomes increasingly complex. Exploiting its full potential in it’s current state is nearly impossible since it has become a tool that is on the verge of becoming beyond human understanding, something that is truly post-human. Mastering this medium, therefore, becomes a metaphor for grabbing the reigns of our technology and keeping it within the control of those who are willing to understand it, rather than letting it become the representation of an abstract dominating force.