I will respond by saying that I have loved mac and its OS for decades, BUT and I mean BUT. when it comes to 3D don’t use macs EVER. EVER. think outside the box and use all OS’s if you can. For audio/video go mac but for 3D go PC why I say, is because in my experience with all 3, windows/mac os/linux.  windows is the standard for all media. Mac is good but too dam retarded for custom and very proprietary were animation houses go to windows for there 3D needs. Sad but true. Also with Jobs out the loop who’s to say Apple will just crumble under new direction. I hope not but I’m very open minded about all company’s and feel they are only driven not for quality but profits in this cold world.

@relacon : yes its true that windows tends to support higher quality graphics cards, this is because in comparison apple tends to build a machine for the best card available at the time of building the machine. In most cases its not possible to upgrade to a new graphics card like you can on windows/linux due to firmware and drivers issues with OSX. To be more percise, apple burns its on ROM onto graphics cards that prevent you from just simply getting some random PNY / ATI / NVIDIA graphics card. Apple does however, usually at the request of users, provide upgrades to certain cards periodically. This is no excuse, I do believe apple needs to step up a notch when it comes to graphics card upgrades. But this will never happen since they already have your money and its in there best interested to make you buy the next best thing they make.

However, I must point out you are wrong in stating that 3D houses use only windows. This is true at a very small scale companies. However, medium to large studios use linux. The reason is windows is NOT scallable to large production environments. Also linux is less likely to get wiped out by a virus than windows is. I have worked at several of these big studios and if you want proof simply call one of your favorite studios (disney, pixar, dreamworks, sony, dd, r&h, weta) and you will find all of them films are worked on in linux environments. Some even list what software and working environment they use on there website.

In addition, most studios stay on a version of maya for 1-2 or even 3 years because it is very difficult to integrate a new piece of software every year. Especially maya. So studios tend to pay Autodesk to provide them with “patches” to older versions of there software.

I’m using Lion with QuadroFX 4600.

Incidentally I haven’t encountered installation issues with Maya 2012
but dumped it straight away after a quick test drive and ran back to 2011 with open arms.

BTW on Lion, Maya 2011 dynamics do seem to be faster.
I’d estimate around 20% faster or so.
I usually test with an nCloth 20x20 division plane falling on to a cube colliding object.

Still not half as fast as the Windows 7 version.

My advice would be to upgrade to Lion. I know 2012 is a bit of a disappointment but there’s not much in it to really really make you want to upgrade anyway.

Well wouldn’t you know it, seems like the fix is fairly easy.  I’m guessing it’s a permissions issue for the installer so I got around the lockup by calling the installer from the Terminal and running the installer as with super-admin privileges.  I’m running Maya 2010, but I assume this will also work for 2012.

Simply:

Open Terminal
use cd to navigate to your Maya installer
type:
sudo open “Install Maya 2010.app” [enter]

You’ll be prompted for your admin password before the installer pops up and again during the install process.

Under these conditions all went well with the install, and I haven’t noticed any other issues while running Maya itself.  Hope it helps!

Hey Ted, what if i already have Maya 2010 installed will i have any issues when updating to Lion?

Hi Ted, folks,
just wanted to thank you for your tip. Although the installation of Maya 2012 with MacOSX Lion failed at the end, in fact the software did install with you suggestion. In my case, I just wrote in the Terminal:
sudo open Install\ Maya\ 2012.app/ [enter]

However I cannot activate the software, so I’m using the trial version (hope within 30 days Maya will bring a hot fix to this).

Thanks.

I’ve been running it under Lion (although I’m still on 2010) and have noticed no lag, but do run into crashes or stalls during significant IPR renders.  Pretty frustrating when I forget get to save my work prior to starting my IPR passes.

I’m also not pushing my scenes too heavy but in general its been pretty stable for me so far (save for my note above) :)

I think that may just be a warning - if the install works (the terminal approach gave me an error once but not the second time) I’d say go with it.

I’m hoping Autodesk releases an update soon for Lion users!