Viewport 2.0 Enhancements

View Larger The high-performance viewport introduced with Maya 2011 now offers full-screen visual effects: motion blur, depth-of-field, and ambient occlusion, enabling you to evaluate your work in a higher fidelity environment and without needing to render or export to a game engine. Moreover, Viewport 2.0 now provides component and manipulator display to support modeling workflows, together with batch rendering capabilities, and a high-performance API.

Node-Based Render Passes

View Larger Create and edit node-based representations of render passes directly within Maya, and render the composited output directly through mental ray® renderer. A powerful tool for verifying and refining render passes prior to handing them to the compositor, node-based render passes also enable artists to perform certain simple compositing tasks without leaving Maya.

Editable Motion Trails

View Larger Edit animation directly in the viewport without the need to switch context to the graph editor. New editable motion trails offer a faster and easier method for fine-tuning motion animation. Intuitively edit the position and timing of keyframes in relation to the animated object while viewing the path of motion over time in 3D space, resulting in a smoother, more productive workflow.

Sequencer Enhancements

View Larger The Camera Sequencer now offers a Sequencer Playlist—enabling you to manage your sequences through a configurable spreadsheet view that gives you the ability to reorder clips, edit In and Out points, and change camera assignments—together with support for multitrack audio and the ability to output multiple shots as a single sequence.

Substance Procedural Textures

View Larger Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of 80 Substance procedural textures. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny disk space footprint and can be exported to certain game engines via the Substance Air middleware offering (available separately from Allegorithmic SAS). Alternatively, textures can be quickly converted to bitmaps for rendering.

Craft Animation Tools

View Larger Easily create believable, complex camera movements that mimic real-world setups with 4 new camera rigs from the Craft Director Studio™ plug-in. Use a joystick to record real-time input while driving the camera; stabilize turbulent or unnatural camera movements; add shakiness to an existing animated camera; or smoothly transition or instantly cut between different camera views and settings.

Enhanced, Multi-Product Animation Workflows

View Larger An enhanced Graph Editor takes some of the best features from the f-curve editors within the products of the Autodesk® Maya® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012 and combines them into a toolset that offers more consistent functionality and terminology, enabling animators to more easily switch between products. Moreover, working with characters in both Maya and Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2012 software is now easier, with an enhanced interface, unified solver, and more consistent workflows for Autodesk® HumanIK® technology (formerly implemented as FBIK in Maya). In addition, customers who use the Autodesk® HumanIK® 4.5 or 2012 middleware solution can benefit from improved animation consistency between Maya and their game engine.

New Simulation Options

View Larger Create more compelling dynamic visual effects in less time, with new simulation options that incorporate industry-leading technology into Maya. You can now leverage the multi-threaded NVIDIA® PhysX® engine* to create static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid-body simulations directly in the Maya viewport, and gain the ability to match a runtime solution. *Available with Autodesk Maya 2012 Windows® platform only.

Maya offers two methods for creating mathematically smooth surfaces that can be shaped using relatively few control vertices: NURBS and hierarchical Subdivision Surfaces.

• Subdivision Surfaces can have different levels of detail in different regions, enabling you add complexity only where needed.
• NURBS Surfaces can be attached, detached, aligned, stitched together, extended, filleted, or rebuilt with a high degree of control over parameterization and continuity.
• NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces can be converted to polygon meshes, and vice versa.
• Precise spline-based curve and surface construction tools include lofting, birail, beveling, extrusion, trim, boundary, offset, Booleans, rounding, and square

Beyond the position of vertices that define their shape, meshes can carry essential data for software, interactive, or in-game 3D rendering. To manage this, Maya offers:

• A streamlined workflow for creative texturing—including UV creation and editing, auto-projection, interactive relaxation, layout, lattice, and smudge tools
• Multiple UV sets that support separate texture coordinates for separate texture channels
• Per-instance UV sets that enable a single mesh to be used to represent multiple objects, reducing scene overhead
• Multiple sets of animatable color-per-vertex (CPV), prelighting, user-defined normals, and normal map generation suitable for game design

Sculpt highly detailed organic models with Autodesk® Mudbox™ 3D digital sculpting and texture painting software. The complementary toolset provides a more intuitive brush-based 3D modeling experience that features 2D and 3D layers to more easily manage sculpting and painting iterations on multiple meshes and maps.

• Iteratively round-trip data with Maya using a single-step workflow that supports topology modifications.
• Paint detailed textures directly onto the high-resolution 3D mesh.
• Use the modeling layers in Mudbox to create poses or facial expressions for blendshapes in Maya.
• Create vector displacement maps for complex details in Mudbox and render them on low-resolution geometry in Maya.
  
  

Maya delivers a broad range of specialized tools for keyframe, procedural, and scripted animation, including:

• A highly controllable, nondestructive animation layering system that works with any attribute
• Trax Nonlinear Animation Editor for nondestructive mixing, blending, and editing of poses and animation clips
• A comprehensive assortment of generalized constraints
• A powerful and intuitive Set Driven Key tool that enables you to keyframe complex relationships between animated parameters
• Graph and Dopesheet Editors that provide more powerful, precise function curves to control how animated attributes change over time
• A full set of deformers for static modeling or animation
  

Create, skin, rig, and pose believable characters with realistic deformations in less time. Maya 3D computer animation software includes:

• Built-in Spline IK, Spring IK, and single chain and lightweight 2-bone solvers.
• An IK system for natural articulation of biped and quadruped models.
• Nondestructive live retargeting workflow to reuse, correct, and enhance motion-capture and other animation data.
• Maya Muscle advanced deformation tools for realistic or highly stylized muscle and skin motion.
• Substitute Geometry tool to transfer skinning information between models.
• Nondestructive workflow that enables you to insert, move, delete, connect, and disconnect joints on a bound skeleton.

Add Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 3D character animation software to a Maya pipeline to help increase production efficiency and the quality of results for high-volume character animation projects.

• With its real-time 3D engine and dedicated toolsets for character rigging, nonlinear animation editing, motion-capture data manipulation, and interactive dynamics, MotionBuilder is an ideal, complementary toolset to Maya, forming a unified end-to-end animation solution.
• Quickly and easily transfer assets via Autodesk® FBX® data exchange technology to take advantage of collaborative, iterative, single-step cross-product workflows.

Engineered with the input of leading research scientists, Autodesk Maya 3D computer animation software offers innovative dynamic simulation features to help you create stunning visual effects.

Maya nParticles

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Maya Fluid Effects

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Maya nCloth

View Larger Create realistic clothing and other deformable materials using the integrated Maya nCloth toolset. Convert any polygon mesh model into an nCloth object. Paint cloth attributes like bend, stretch, shear, and dent. Make 3D objects stiff, viscous, or flowing. Use topology-independent constraints to attach buttons, tear cloth, and control movement. Simulate cloth-on-cloth, such as a shirt over pants. Use self-collisions to achieve highly realistic results without self-interpenetration errors. Blend multiple cached simulations together to achieve complex effects. Bidirectional interaction with Maya nParticles enables cloth to affect particles, and particles to affect cloth simultaneously.

Hair & Fur

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Rigid & Soft Body Dynamics

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Achieve breathtaking 3D in Maya with an extensive range of 3D rendering and imaging tools.

In addition to the native Maya software renderer, Maya provides:

• Integrated mental ray® for Maya, with advanced photorealistic features: global illumination, final gathering, caustics, ambient occlusion, blurry reflections and refractions, motion-blurred particles, and image-based lighting
• Five licenses of mental ray® for Maya Batch* and 8 licenses of mental ray® for Maya Satellite
• A vector renderer, to turn 3D content into 2D content for the web or print, with output to Macromedia® Flash® and Adobe® Illustrator® software
• A hardware renderer, to generate high-quality images faster
• The ability to override the viewport with a third-party or proprietary renderer

Among a wealth of rendering, shading, and camera features, Maya offers:

• A flexible stereo camera rig that features in-viewport stereo viewing.
• A 3D editorial toolset featuring a Camera Sequencer for accelerated previsualization and virtual moviemaking.
• A multi-threaded Interactive Photorealistic Renderer (IPR) that quickly updates final-rendered-quality imagery as edits are made to the scene
• HyperShade and Visor tools for designing and editing shading networks, with bins for sorting and organizing rendering nodes.
• The Transfer Map feature that enables you to transfer normal, displacement, diffuse, shaded, ambient occlusion, and custom mental ray® shader information between models of differing topologies.

Maya® Composite is a fully featured, high-performance, high dynamic range (HDR)-capable compositor that provides Maya users with a highly efficient, collaborative compositing environment.

• Enhance rendered passes from Maya and incorporate them into live-action footage.
• Work interactively with visual media regardless of bit-depth or image size.
• Take advantage of advanced tools for keying, color correction, camera mapping, spline-based warping, motion blur, and depth of field.
• Perform complex rotoscoping workflows with both raster and vector paint and integrated tracking.
• Work in a full 3D compositing environment that incorporates tools to support stereoscopic productions.
  
  

With Maya Paint Effects and 3D Paint tools, you can more easily create realistic natural detail and painterly effects as 3D scene geometry or as 2D textures.

• Select, edit, and blend between 500 editable, pressure-sensitive, preset brushes, including trees, grass, flowers, crystals, feathers, barbed wire, lightning, rain, star fields, fireworks, fire, sparks, airbrushes, oil paint, chalk, pastels, pencils, watercolors, wet brushes, and markers.
• Built-in animation simulates effects like plants growing, unfurling, or swaying in the wind.
• Strokes can be drawn fully rendered during interactive painting, providing immediate feedback.
• Paint color, bump, displacement, transparency, and other textures directly on surfaces.

Transform 3D scenes into compelling cartoon animations rendered with non-photorealistic styles, such as hand-drawn, traditional cartoon, comic book, and Japanese manga/anime.

• Work in 3D to create more complex transitions and camera moves, or incorporate simulated effects that would be extremely difficult in 2D.
• Use Maya Paint Effects brushes to create outlines with an extensive range of painterly effects and precise control over line style, placement, and width.
• View interactive previews in near real time.
• Render the results in mental ray® for Maya or the Maya software or hardware renderers.

Extract accurate 3D camera and motion data from live action video and film sequences and insert CG elements seamlessly into a scene using Autodesk® MatchMover™ software.

• Push-Button Matchmoving provides advanced automatic 3D tracking; this easy-to-use feature can be used with supervised tracking to handle complex shots.
• Precision manual controls enable you to create a unique 3D reference system for your camera and 3D content.
• Advanced workflows can be based on filtering and fine tuning of tracking parameters, tracking from multiple footage and stills, tracking of moving objects, and 3D tracking constrained by motion-control data.

Maya is an open, highly extensible application. You can create scripts and write plug-ins to increase efficiency, customize features, and create competitive differentiation.

• Choose from the artist-friendly Maya Embedded Language (MEL) or the highly-extensible Python® scripting language.
• Write Maya plug-ins and stand-alone applications that run from the Maya command line in C++ or Python.
• Develop new types of Maya objects, including file translators, hardware shaders, surface shapes, manipulators and locators, and scriptable commands.

Learn more in the Developer Center.

Getting Started with Programming in Maya White Paper (pdf - 157Kb)

Maya offers streamlined workflows for working with industry-leading 2D paint, vector, editorial, and certain compositing applications.

• Use Render Layers to manage multiple passes within a single scene and export to your compositor of choice, or as Adobe® Photoshop® (PSD) or Adobe® Flash® (SWFT) software output.
• Generate and update a compositing tree from within Maya based on the render layers in the scene.
• Import an EDL in Apple® Final Cut Pro® application program, XML, or AAF formats, change shot timings in the Camera Sequencer, and re-export.
• Create and edit bevels on Adobe® Illustrator® software files, while maintaining the ability to update the original.

The Autodesk® Maya® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012 deliver the power of a world leader in 3D modeling and animation technology in a choice of software suites at a cost saving of up to 42%*.

• The Standard suite includes Maya with Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2012 real-time character animation software and Autodesk® Mudbox™ 2012 digital sculpting and 3D painting software.
• With the Premium option, get additional access to the innovative creative toolsets in Autodesk® Softimage® 2012 software.
• Single-step interoperability workflows and more consistent user interfaces enable you to more easily switch between applications.

Learn more.

*International pricing may vary. Savings based upon U.S. MSRP.

Maya provides tools and workflows to efficiently manage large data sets.

• View and edit node relationships with the powerful dependency graph architecture.
• Segment scenes using assets and file referencing to manage collaborative, iterative workflows, and to improve performance by offloading scene elements until needed.
• Group nodes into containers and create custom and user-specific views.
• Extensively modify modeled data without rebuilding, using editable and animatable construction history.
• Replace scene elements with a simple, low-resolution mesh, and load pre-translated data only when required for rendering using the mental ray® Render Proxy.