Maya 6 personal learning edition?

[Anonymous]

for christams this year, my dad bought me a book called "Introducing Maya 6, 3d for beginners" by Dariush Derakhshani. included with the book is a cd that includes Maya personal learning edition, plus all the project files used in the book. i put the CD into my computer to install it and went through the installation process up to where i was supposed to enter a "software key". i tried entering the 2 numbers (the product ID and CD ID) neither of which worked. there is no mention of a registration code in the book. it also says that you can register online and it will send you an email with the activation key, but every link takes me to this website, which is to download the 30 day trial of maya 2010, which i don't need (because i have the personal learning edition, plus my internet is very slow, so the download would probably take several days.)

I suspect that Alias, the company they say to contact, went out of business, or was bought out, since I can find no mention of the company, or the site it says to go to. so my question is, is there any way i can get a registration key for Maya 6, or is there a newer version of the personal learning edition I can get? this product wasn't cheap, and I would hate for my dads purchase to go to waste.

thank you for your consideration.

[MichielDuvekot3232]

I hope Santa didn't pay list price ($34.99) This book is from 2004. For most of us, that means it's really, really old. Maya 6 was released in 2004 as well. Maya is now Maya 2010, the equivalent of version 11. Autodesk no longer creates a PLE version of Maya. The PLE versions would only run for a limited time, and that time has now long passed. Of course, no publisher mentions that the PLE can only be activated for a limited time, so now we sometimes still have books on the market that you cannot use because the software you need to work through them no longer exists.

It should be mentioned that Autodesk offers time-limited trials of Maya 2010 which you can download or order on DVD.

And lastly I should mention (so as to avoid further disappointment) that Maya is quite demanding when it comes to the hardware you run it on. Check http://www.autodesk.com/maya-hardware

[Anonymous]

I have a very similar problem. I bought Maya 6 PLE back in 2004. Just recently it just stopped launching. I cannot use it anymore. It just wont turn on, it will automatically unexpectedly quit every time I try to open it. This started happening around the time I updated to 10.5 OS. Is there any known way to fix it? Or have all Maya 6 PLE users been abandoned with a useless product? It seems like Alias just ripped off everyone that bought 6 PLE by not telling them it wouldn't work afterward.

[n8skow]

PLE was a free download. If you paid money for it, then yes, you got ripped off.
Licensing for PLE was discontinued at the end of 2008 in favor of an unrestricted 30-day trial. The last version of PLE available to the public was 8.5.

Having said that, Maya 6 is going on 6 years old, and is not tested/qualified to run on OSX 10.5.

You can obtain the 30-day trial of Maya 2010 here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13578047 though you will need to be running OSX 10.5.7 or higher.

[Anonymous]

Alias didn't go out of business; they merged with Wavefront (becoming Alias/Wavefront), which was bought by Silicon Graphics, which subsequently sold them to Autodesk.

I find it quite annoying that when Autodesk bought A/W their stated position was that they'd continue to support Maya PLE. They changed their minds and the PLE webpage disappeared from their site without a word of explanation. The "30 day free trial" is useless. Even if you spent 10 hours a day for the entire 30 days you'd still be only a millimeter up the learning curve of this back-breakingly difficult software package.

You could conceivably get your PLE 6 registration key to work if you set your computer's date waaaaaay back to 2004. Or you could try sending a flaming email to Autodesk support asking for a key that would still work all these years later. I seem to recall that when PLE 4 expired you had the option to extend it by that method. I could be wrong about that though, it was like 10 years ago... 😛