Productivity-Enhancing Workflows
Get unmatched productivity through a combination of performance and workflow features, including marking menus, 3D manipulators, selective display, brush-based tools, selection management tools, and unlimited levels of undo. Advanced data and scene management functionality give you the flexibility to work the way you want.
Comprehensive 3D Modeling and Texturing Toolsets
Access a full suite of production-proven polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surface modeling and texturing tools. The polygon workflow tools, including advanced selection functionality, attribute transfer tools, an interactive UV layout and unfolding mode, and optimization tools have also been designed to promote efficiency.
Powerful Animation Functionality
Animate characters and other scene elements with a comprehensive range of specialized keyframe, nonlinear, and advanced character animation editing toolsets, including animation layers, graph and dope sheet editors, constraints, expressions, a nonlinear animation data editor, full-body inverse kinematics (IK) system, skinning functionality, and Maya Muscle.
Advanced Visual Effects Tools
Produce any visual effect you can imagine, from highly realistic natural phenomena to stylized, 2D “painterly” effects. Maya software delivers dynamic interaction of hard and soft bodies determined by physical rules, along with the state-of-the-art visual-effects technology of Maya nCloth, Maya nParticles, Maya Fluid Effects, Maya Fur, Maya Hair, and more.
Flexible Rendering
With Maya, you get the freedom to choose the right renderer and rendering pipeline for your project. A unified user interface and workflow provide easy and consistent access to the Maya hardware and vector renderers as well as the powerful mental ray for Maya and mental ray for Maya network rendering (Satellite) options. You can also use the Render Layers and the Render Pass tools to create an efficient workflow from Maya to Autodesk Toxik software and other compositing packages.
Tools for Extending and Customizing Maya
Customize, extend, and manipulate Maya. The fully integrated Maya Embedded Language (MEL) and Python scripting languages give you high-level access to every aspect of the software so you can create custom windows, reconfigure the user interface, and issue commands from an HTML page. Moreover, the OpenMaya API/SDK completely unlocks the power of Maya for C++ and Python developers, providing direct, low-level access to all scene data required to make effective plug-ins and new types of nodes, shaders, manipulators, file importers and exporters, and more.
Here are some key features of "Autodesk Maya":
Maya User Interface - Maximize your productivity:
- Get unmatched productivity through a combination of performance and workflow features, including marking menus, 3D manipulators, selective display, stereo display, selection management tools, and unlimited levels of undo.
Data and Scene Management Tools:
Dependency graph architecture and scene segmentation tools boost productivity and workflow flexibility:
- Fully editable and animatable construction history allows for extensive modification of modeled data—no need to rebuild models.
- File referencing, scene segmentation, and shader organization features enable efficient management of complex scenes with interchangeable levels of detail.
- Scene workflow tools include the ability to position objects along a curve, replace objects within a scene, and convert instances to objects.
- Maya Assets provides highly intelligent grouping of nodes into containers, with support for custom and user-specific views, a flexible referencing system, and support for Asset libraries.
Polygon Modeling:
- Maya provides a full complement of sophisticated polygon modeling tools and UV editing tools.
General Polygon Architecture:
- Nonmanifold architecture, focused on the details of creating, editing, and texturing polygonal models, includes multiple sets of animatable color-per-vertex (CPV), prelighting, user-defined normals, and normal map generation suitable for games/interactive users.
- A complete set of editing tools, including bridge, poke, cut, wedge, bevel, extrude, chamfer vertex, extrude along a curve, mirror cut, edge loop, edge ring, slide edge, and pick-walk tools.
- Intuitive polygon workflow through a host of intelligent selection features, such as true soft selection, preselection highlighting, and camera-based selection culling.
Polygon Texture Assignment/Editing:
- Streamlined workflow for creative texturing—including UV creation and editing, auto-projection and relaxation, interactive lattice and smudge tools, along with quick access to commonly used tools via the UV Texture Editor toolbar.
- Multiple UV sets allow separate texture coordinates for separate texture channels.
- Per-instance UV sets allow a single mesh to be used to represent multiple objects, reducing scene overhead.
- An interactive mode is available for UV unfolding and layout.
Transfer Polygon Attributes:
- Enables modelers to transfer UV, color-per-vertex, and vertex position information between polygon meshes of differing topologies, even if they are separated in space or of different proportion/scale.
- Artists can use the paint tool to blend between source and target deformations.
Optimization Tools:
- Polygon reduction, data cleanup, blind data tagging, and level-of-detail tools enable artists to optimize scenes for interactive display.
NURBS Modeling:
- Maya delivers unparalleled, precision surface-modeling tools.
Precise Spline-Based Curve and Surface Construction Tools:
- Includes lofting, birail, beveling, extrusion, trim, boundary, offset, Booleans, rounding, square, and many other tools.
Surface Editing and Stitching:
- Surfaces can be attached, detached, aligned, stitched together, extended, filleted, or rebuilt with a high degree of control over parameterization and continuity.
- Multiple NURBS patches can be merged into a single polygon mesh.
Subdivision Surface and Polygon Proxy Modeling:
- Get access to a wide range of versatile subdivision surface tools.
Subdiv Proxy:
- Rapid construction of high-resolution polygon meshes allows artists to preview smoothed mesh while editing the mesh cage.
- Choice of smoothing techniques provides fine control over the polygon count of the final mesh for rendering or level-of-detail.
- Variable creasing is supported on vertices as well as edges for both the Subdiv Proxy and Smooth Mesh preview.
Hierarchical Subdivision Surfaces:
- A distinctive hierarchical approach for local refinement allows artists to begin modeling with a simple object and selectively generate increasing levels of detail only where needed.
- Partial and full creasing tools make it easier to construct both rounded, organic forms and hard-edged objects.
- Streamlined workflow for creative texturing, including UV auto-projection tools and UV Snapshot.
- Easy conversion to polygons or NURBS.
General Animation:
- Maya delivers a broad range of specialized tools for keyframe and procedural animation. Playback speed can be clamped to implement accurate frame rate.
General Keyframing:
- Fast and intuitive controls for keyframing—including cut, copy, and paste—allow animations to be created with ease.
Path Animation:
- Animation of an object along a curve or surface with automatic bank, roll, and yaw.
- Editing of motion path or other animation parameters during playback.
Animation Curve Representation:
- A choice of Euler and quaternion math options provide accurate results in all situations.
- Animation curves can be templated to prevent accidental modification.
Graph and Dope Sheet Editors:
- Powerful, precise function curves to control how animated attributes change over time.
- Rapid and intuitive global editing of keyframe timing.
- Lattice and falloff tools aid the manipulation of dense keyframe data, such as data from motion capture devices.
Generalized Constraints:
- A comprehensive assortment of constraints, including parent, point, aim, orient (with animatable offsets), as well as scale, geometry, normal, tangent, and pole vector.
Blend Channels:
- Multiple animation channels can be mixed with each other, or with constraints, into a single result.
Procedural Animation:
- Maya Embedded Language (MEL) procedures and expressions can be used to create complex animation as an alternative to traditional keyframing.
Animation Layering:
- Nondestructive, highly controllable animation layering feature set works with any attribute. Animation layers can be blended, merged, grouped, and reordered, and can override or add to preceding layers.
Set Driven Key:
- Complex relationships between animated parameters can be keyframed with this powerful and intuitive tool. Multiple attributes can be controlled with a single slider.
Trax Nonlinear Animation:
- Nondestructive mixing and editing of poses and animation clips (including constraints and expressions) with total control over all aspects of motion blending.
- Libraries of performances can be stored and edited.
- Muting and soloing capabilities provide control over each animation sequence in isolation or in the context of other animations.
- Multiple sound tracks can be matched up visually with animation and played back to facilitate character lip-synching, as well as other audio-matching requirements.
Animation and Dynamics Muting:
- Animation on selected channels or keyframes may be temporarily disabled to focus on a specific motion.
Ghosting:
- Animation can be viewed prior to, and after, the current frame, so you can evaluate motion.
Geometry Caching:
- Deformations on polygon, NURBS (including curves), and subdivision surface geometry can be cached for faster playback and rendering of scenes, as well as for transfer to other 3D packages such as Autodesk 3ds Max software.
- Caches can be edited and blended together in Trax.
Character Animation:
- Maya gives you the tools you need to animate sophisticated digital characters
Skeletons and Inverse Kinematics (IK):
- Seven built-in IK solvers reduce the time it takes to create high-quality character animation; attributes include joint limits, preferred angles, and joint mirroring.
- Spline IK solver allows for the easy animation of skeletal chains, like a character’s spine or tail, and includes easy-to-use twist and roll controls.
- Single chain and lightweight 2-bone solvers are optimized for real-time interactivity.
- Spring IK solver allows for precise control over multijointed appendages such as insect legs.
Full Body IK System:
- Fast and easy rigging and posing of characters.
- Delivers natural articulation of biped and quadruped models.
Blendable IK/FK System:
- Smooth blending between IK and FK animation.
Skinning:
- Precise control of skin behavior, even in the most challenging areas such as shoulders.
- Smooth Bind Skinning allows geometry to be connected to skeletons so that the character deforms smoothly as joints are moved.
- Substitute Geometry tool allows for easy editing and transferring of skinning information between models.
- Rigid Bind Skinning provides direct manipulation of geometry by individual joints.
- Nondestructive workflow for skin editing capabilities, including the ability to insert, move, delete, connect, and disconnect joints on a bound skeleton (no need to rebind after changes have been made).
- Support for multiple bind poses.
Motion Capture with Dense Data Editing and Resampling:
- Motion capture data can be easily incorporated into and manipulated inside Maya.
Motion Retargeting:
- Motion capture, or other animation data, applied to one character can be reapplied to an entirely different character, even one with a different skeletal hierarchy.
Motion Redirection:
- Original direction of existing motion capture, or other animation data, can be changed at any point in time.
Muscle and Skin System:
- Maya Muscle - Maya delivers advanced muscle and skin deformation tools that allow you to quickly and easily create realistic or highly stylized muscle and skin motion.
Choice of Muscle Types:
- Simple and parametric NURBS muscles available.
- NURBS muscles offer advanced sculpting and posing possibilities, and can be mirrored after initial setup.
Jiggle:
- Highly controllable, built-in Jiggle deformation.
- Separate values available along the muscle, directional damping settings, and the ability to specify thresholds control how sudden movements affect jiggling.
Wrinkles:
- The behavior of the skin when relaxed can be precisely defined, enabling the creation of life-like wrinkling in specific areas.
Sliding and Stickiness:
- Precise control over the behavior of the skin on top of the muscle can be achieved by painting weight maps for both Sliding and Stickiness.
- Up to three different Sticky maps can be created and blended between, allowing multiple weights to be stored in a single rig for maximum flexibility.
- A Displacement function allows texture maps to be used to simulate sliding, optionally at render time only, for optimum performance.
Collisions:
- A choice of different collision methods makes it possible to create the effect of skin colliding with skin and of one mesh colliding with another.
- Collisions are deformer based, rather than simulation based, and therefore require no runup or preprocessing.
Performance:
- Muscle calculations can be cached for faster playback.
Deformers:
- Manipulate geometry or particles into any desired shape
Deformation Tools:
- Can be used statically for modeling and sculpting.
- Animated deformers can add life to creatures and other objects.
- Includes Lattices, Sculpt Objects, Skin Clusters, Point on Curve Constraints, Blend Shapes, Wires, Wrinkle Tool, Bind/Detach Skin, Flow, Jiggle, and Wrap deformers.
- Soft Modification tool allows for controllable falloff around vertices or points.
- Most deformations work on all supported geometry types, including particles.
- Paintable weights on Clusters, Sculpt Objects, Blend Shapes, Jiggle, and Wires allow you to control the region and extent of the deformation.
Rigid and Soft Body Dynamics:
- Create effects through the dynamic interaction of geometry, including collisions between rigid and soft bodies.
Rigid-Body Dynamics:
- Realistic, high-speed simulation of multiple rigid objects.
- Includes dynamic constraints such as nails, hinges, barriers, pins, and springs.
Soft-Body Dynamics:
- Accurate, fast simulation of flexible objects allows for the rapid creation of secondary motion effects, such as muscle jiggle and floppy hats.
- Powerful spring architecture offers precise control of any flexible surface down to the individual spring.
Particles and Fields:
- Fully integrated particle effects can be controlled by forces based on real-world physics or by deformers.
Extensible Integrated Particle System:
- Fully integrated, with expression-based control over particle attributes, motion, and dynamics.
- Wizard enables easy particle sprite setup.
- Direct manipulators provide interactive control of particles, fields, and emitters.
- Particles can be controlled by texture values.
- Geometry instancing allows for the placement of individual objects, a sequence of objects, or an array of different objects onto any particle system.
- Collision events can trigger multiple procedural animation effects.
Volume Controls and Emitters:
- Intuitive control of particles via geometric shapes makes it easier to place particles where and when you want them.
- Standard Maya deformers can be applied and layered—including lattices, clusters, soft modifications, and nonlinears—for nonphysically realistic effects.
Field Controls:
- Field forces—such as gravity, vortex, air, and turbulence—can be applied to rigid bodies, soft bodies, or particle objects.
- Custom fields may be added via the extensive dynamics API (application programming interface).
- Clip Effects
- Library of ready-made effects, such as fire, curve and surface flow, shatter, fireworks, and lightning.
Maya Paint Effects:
- Maya provides groundbreaking paint technology for creating amazing natural detail on 2D images (including textures) or 3D objects attached to polygonal and NURBS surfaces.
Powerful Painting Techniques:
- Can be used to create animatable effects, such as plants growing, unfurling, or swaying in the wind.
- Artists can define a logotype in oil paint and watch it draw on the screen.
- Game-content artists can paint repeating textures for levels that update right on the model.
Maya Paint Effects Brushes:
- More than 500 editable, pressure-sensitive, preset brushes completely integrated within the Maya application.
- Extensive range of traditional painterly brushes, including airbrushes, oil paint, chalk, pastels, pencils, watercolors, wet brushes, and markers.
- Options for a vast range of realistic effects, including trees, grass and flowers, realistic hair, eyebrows, and beards.
- Special effects, such as lightning, clouds, rain, star fields, fireworks, fire, and sparks.
- Mesh brush type creates organic or hard-edged geometry that is convincing even close up. Used with environment reflections, it can create looks such as chrome, glass, and shiny paint or displacement/bump mapping.
- Thin Line brush can be used to quickly paint on high-quality hair that can be efficiently rendered.
Brush Attributes:
- All brushes can be used in true 3D space (to paint on or between 3D objects in a scene), on a 2D canvas (to create images and textures), or within the 3D Paint tool (to create textures by painting directly on the model).
- Brushes can be blended together to make an infinite range of new, user-customized presets.
- Brushes are fully animatable and have built-in preset dynamics such as turbulence and gravity.
- Brush growth attributes include bend, curl, and twirl.
Convert Maya Paint Effects to Polygons and NURBS:
- Data can be edited using traditional modeling tools for output to any renderer.
Paint Effects Rendering:
- Strokes can be drawn fully rendered during interactive painting, providing immediate feedback.
- Features fast, resolution-independent final rendering that can include 3D cast shadows, depth-of-field, fog effects, and motion blur.
Toon Shader:
- Supports a wide range of nonphotorealistic rendering styles for traditional 2D cartoons, comic book-style imagery, Japanese manga/anime, and others.
- Maya Paint Effects brushes can be used on an outline with access to an extensive range of painterly effects, as well as line style, placement, and width.
- Near real-time interactive previews.
- Can be rendered in mental ray for Maya, or the Maya software or hardware renderers.
Maya Artisan:
- Maya gives you a suite of integrated, pressure-sensitive brush tools with built-in mirroring.
Sculpting:
- Natural brush interface can be used to interactively sculpt polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surfaces.
Paint Selection:
- Complex selections of components, such as vertices, faces, and edges, can be made without selecting through to the back of the model.
Attribute and Script Painting:
- Editing smooth skin or soft-body goal weights, painting per vertex color or blind data, adding geometry to the scene, and other complex tasks can be quickly performed.
3D Paint:
- Paint color, bump, displacement, transparency, and other textures directly on surfaces.
- Integrated texture painting of color, bump, transparency, displacement, and other effects directly onto polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surfaces.
- Can be used with either image-based brush profiles or any Maya Paint Effects brush.
- Brush modes include paint, smear, blur, clone, and erase.
- Automatic conversion of procedural textures and PSD files.
Multiple Rendering Options:
- Multiple renderers, tightly integrated through a consistent rendering interface, let you create any look from photo-realistic imagery to a simple vector graphic.
Maya Software Renderer:
- Hybrid design uses fast, selective raytracing for maximum efficiency.
- Multithreaded, multiprocessor support with built-in memory handling maximizes productivity and provides large scene rendering capabilities.
- Full range of effects, including depth of field, motion blur, soft shadows, and lens flares.
- Advanced attributes, such as light absorbance and chromatic aberration, provide sophisticated, creative options.
- Volumetric materials, such as noise and fog, aid in the creation of environmental effects.
- Ramp Shader effects include glass, stone, cartoon-like shading, and X-ray.
- Anisotropic and diffraction shaders are also available.
- Provides high-quality software particle rendering with a comprehensive assortment of effects—including blob, tube, and cloud rendering—for gas clouds, fire, liquids, etc.
mental ray (3.7 core) for Maya:
- User-friendly UI and workflow.
- Advanced photorealistic lighting features, such as global illumination, caustics, ambient occlusion, blurry reflections and refractions, and motion-blurred particles.
- Custom mental ray shaders can be used.
- Ships with a number of useful shader presets, including physically accurate sun and sky shaders, a set of architectural shaders for hard-to-realize materials, and a round corner shader (softens geometrically precise corners).
- Light baking of shadows and lights, including global illumination and final gather, can be converted to file textures or to color-per-vertex data.
- Image-based lighting allows for the emission of photons, caustics, or direct illumination lights from spherical image maps.
- High dynamic range (HDR) images can be baked from the mental ray batch bake option.
- Photometric lighting support allows for the use of real-world lighting profiles.
- Photon visualization supports previews of the placement of photons and final gather points in the 3D scene.
- Render Proxy allows for the replacement of scene elements with a simple, low-resolution mesh. Pre-translated data is loaded only when required for rendering.
mental ray for Maya Satellite:
- Contains the same functionality as mental ray for Maya.
- Assists in distributing render jobs over processors located across a network.
- Two free licenses with Autodesk Maya Complete, eight with Autodesk Maya Unlimited software.
Hardware Renderer:
- Takes advantage of the ever-increasing power of next-generation graphics cards.
- Generates near-software-quality images at significantly faster render times for broadcast or pre-visualization needs.
- High-quality rendering in the viewport enables you to immediately see the results to changes, with no need for a separate rendering calculation.
- Support for color-per-vertex in both offline rendering and the interactive viewport.
- Support for DirectX HLSL, CgFX, and Advanced Shading Language Interface (ASHLI) shaders—includes a user-friendly UI and workflow. Hardware shader API accessible through the OpenMaya API.
- Viewport can be overridden with a third-party or proprietary renderer, such as a game engine.
Vector Renderer:
- Can be used to turn 3D content into 2D content for the web or print.
- Output to Macromedia Flash (SWF or SWFT), Adobe Illustrator (.ai), SVG, EPS, or bitmap formats.
- Provides a range of nonphotorealistic looks, including hidden-line rendering.
Rendering Controls and Effects:
- These efficient tools help you set up and evaluate your scene or create popular stylized effects.
Stereo 3D Support:
- A flexible stereo camera rig comes complete with in-viewport stereo viewing.
IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering):
- Instantaneous editing of color, texture, lights, shadows, glows, motion blur, and many other effects in final-rendered-quality imagery.
- Multi-threaded to maximize productivity and creativity.
- Supported by mental ray for Maya and the Maya software renderer.
HyperShade and Visor:
- Can be used to design and edit simple to complex shading networks.
- Visual outliner (Visor) displays libraries of textures and images, or image swatches for easy management and selection.
- Bins allow for sorting and organization of rendering nodes, such as materials, textures, and lights.
Universal Rendering:
- Includes the ability to render on an unlimited number of networked machines of the same operating system (mental ray excepted).
Transfer Maps:
- Artists can transfer normal, displacement, diffuse, shaded, ambient occlusion, and custom mental ray shader information between models of differing topologies.
- An HDR image can be baked from the Transfer Map feature.
Integrated Scripting:
- Two fully integrated scripting languages let script writers and programmers customize, extend, or manipulate Maya.
MEL:
- Offers full scripting of any Maya feature. Everything can be accessed.
- Artists and technical directors can easily create custom windows and scripts, or reconfigure the Maya user interface, to make a completely custom application.
- Commands can be issued from an HTML page. Scripts can be recognized by an external web browser via the Maya web browser plug-in.
- A Python command allows MEL scripts to call Python code. This gives MEL users the option to mix Python scripts with their MEL scripts—a good way to transition into using Python.
Python :
- Integrated into Maya at the same level as MEL.
- Higher-level language constructs allow for increased developer productivity and easier maintenance of code.
- Readily available scripting resources and knowledgeable community of users.
- Highly extensible, with a collection of third-party tools and modules available.
- Bindings to the OpenMaya API give programmers an alternate language for plug-in development.
- The Maya Python modules can be imported into an external stand-alone Python interpreter for batch processing.
The OpenMaya API/SDK:
- OpenMaya API/SDK unlocks the power of the Maya architecture for programmers and technical directors.
Direct Access to Maya Software Functionality:
- Maya plug-ins and stand-alone applications that run from the Maya command line can be written using C++.
- Maya scene hierarchy can be traversed with iterators.
- Maya plug-ins can be registered to receive a comprehensive range of Maya messages.
- Maya manipulators and locators can be created.
- New types of Maya objects can be developed, including file translators, hardware shaders, surface shapes, and MEL commands.
- Existing Maya objects, such as geometry, lights, shaders, transforms, scene hierarchy, and dependency graph nodes can be queried and modified.
- MEL scripts can be executed from C++.
- The OpenMaya API is available from Python scripting as well as C++.
Development Resources:
- OpenMaya API guide.
- Maya Motion Capture API guide.
- MEL Command reference guide.
- OpenMaya API Class reference documentation: names each OpenMaya API/SDK class and is fully searchable and indexed.
- Source code, project Makefiles, and a Wizard on Windows for building examples and generating plug-in templates.
Japanese Localization:
- Artists have the option to navigate Maya, or customize their tools and user interface, using a Japanese UI.
- UI includes Japanese-language menus, labels, error messages, annotations, heads-up displays, notes, and string attributes.
- Users can switch between the English and Japanese UI by adjusting their language setting between sessions.
- Data compatibility between English and Japanese Maya files promotes collaboration in facilities on projects where both languages are in use.
- Artists can create 3D text using resident Japanese fonts (also functions with Korean and Chinese fonts).
Connectivity and Integration:
- Maya delivers tools for integrating Maya content into the production pipeline.
Adobe Photoshop Integration:
- Artists can create shading networks with connections to layers sets in a PSD file and include procedural or 3D painted textures as starting points and UV layouts for reference.
- Render layers can now be rendered to layered PSD files.
- Any PSD file can be used as a texture map and rendered directly in the Maya software and hardware renderers and in mental ray for Maya.
- PSD files containing layer sets can be converted into a layered texture within Maya.
- A multilayered PSD file can be automatically connected to multiple material attributes.
Compositing Integration:
Render Layers:
- Allows multiple passes from any of the four Maya renderers, as well as post processes, such as Maya Fur and Maya Paint Effects, to be managed in a single scene.
- A system of per-layer and per-object overrides means that objects can have different shading and rendering attributes on different layers.
- Workflow streamlines rendering by preparing renders for optimal output to the compositor of choice—or Photoshop (PSD) or Flash (SWFT) output—with objects and elements isolated in individual layers.
- Presets allow for easy setup of commonly used user-defined passes, such as specularity, shadows, and normal maps.
- Depth and motion vector data can be stored separately and used in post processes.
- Artists can generate an Autodesk Toxik software composition from within Maya based on the render layers in the scene, streamlining the workflow and allowing for multiple iterations.
Render Pass:
- Render Pass toolset offers precise control over render output and can optimize integration with compositing packages, such as Autodesk Toxik.
Adobe Illustrator Object Nodes:
- Supports both beveling and curves.
- Maintain Construction History enables Illustrator files to be substituted or edited while maintaining the bevel history.
Web Integration:
- Support for communication between Maya and Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla-based web browsers allows technical users to create web pages, which may be used to drive Maya.
Supported Geometry/Scene Formats:
- mayaAscii, mayaBinary, MEL, Autodesk FBX, aliasWire (Autodesk AliasStudio), IGES, DXF, OBJ, VRML2, MOV (ascii motion), GE2, RTG, OpenFlight, VRML2, mental ray, RIB, Open Inventor 2.
Supported Image Formats:
- Maya IFF, Maya IFF 16, AVI, Apple QuickTime, GIF, Softimage PIC, Wavefront RLA, BMP, TIFF, TIFF16, SGI, SGI16, Alias PIX, JPEG, EPS, Cineon, Quantel, Targa, DDS, PSD, PNG, QuickDraw, MacPaint, HDR, OpenEXR, MAP, Sony PlayStation TIM, Dassault Picture, PPM, mental ray formats (CT, ST, NT, MT, ZT, TT, BIT, CTH)
Supported Vector Formats:
- Adobe PostScript, EPS, Macromedia SWF, Swfit3D, Adobe Illustrator, SVG.
CAD Data Transfer:
- Learn how you can share your design files between Maya software and the most popular solid modelers.
Plug-ins:
- See the extensive list of ADN Sparks third-party plug-ins for Maya.
WHAT’S NEW Version 2016 (Service Pack 6):
Animation General
- Soft modification deformer red area should refresh properly in Evaluation Manager modes
- Game Exporter - Various fixes for UI organization and default settings
- Crash occurs when editing motion path CV curve while camera is attached when Evaluation Manager is enabled in Parallel mode
- HIK Panel: HumanIK Examples and Mocap Example buttons are not working, and need to be adjusted to work with online files
- Dopesheet: First frame not updating
- Graph Editor: Pivot point is incorrect when scaling normalized curves
- HIK: Extreme performance lag regression when Auto keyframe is on and creating skeleton or adjusting its settings or creating a control rig
- Crash selecting NURBS curve rig controller in Viewport 2.0 when Evaluation Manager is enabled in Parallel mode
- Graph Editor: Tangent handle disappears when key is hidden by Graph Editor Outliner
- Crash on playback after editing nurbsSurface or nurbsCurve control points when Evaluation Manager is enabled in Parallel mode
- Opening scenes with Autokey enabled is much slower than previous versions of Maya, and causes Maya to hang when scrubbing keys
- Skinning: Setting values in weight lists is slower when Autokey is enabled
- Graph Editor : incorrect values with drivenKeys and clipTime enabled
- Visor link to website with Mocap and HIK content does not work
Animation Nonlinear
- Trax: Animation not updating with ghosting
- Trax: Crash when creating a blend between two animation clips
Color Management
- Eyedropper values affected by Exposure and Gamma in UV Editor
- Color management is turned off after deleting custom transform and clicking cancel to close Preference window
- Launching several Maya sessions simultaneously causes hangs/crashes due to SynColor
Foundation
- Profiler now produces a warning dialog when the Start button is pressed while the Profiler buffer is not empty
File Referencing
- historySwitch attribute with incoming connection is incorrectly saving mesh data as a reference edit
- mental ray
- Error when rendering a filtered EXR texture via mib_illum_lambert with miLocal attribute (missing tiles error)
- Fixed undo crash after modifying mila parameters or duplicating mila materials
- mental ray Satellite fails to render file that contains passes
- mental ray Satellite hangs when used in batch render with multiple satellite machines
- Creating a second IBL will overwrite the original IBL and its settings
Rendering
- Substance "Export images to disk" doesn't work for a scene with references that contain substance materials
- Hypershade Material Viewer not working in Hardware mode if meters or yards units are used
ShaderFX
- Closing Hypershade with ShaderFX window open causes crash
- Using an environment variable in a texture path crashes Maya
Viewport
- Mac OS X: Glitches with shadow display (area light with shadows causes Viewport 2.0 artifacts on Mac OS X/ATI hardware)
- Viewport 2.0: Pause and stutter on every start of playback
- Viewport 2.0: Performance issue on scenes with large hierarchies of hidden objects
- Motion Trail: several display issues in Viewport 2.0
- Deleting holdout object breaks the image plane
- Cubemap sampling broken
- OpenGL: Imageplane texture not working in Legacy Default Viewport
- Maya crashes when performing zoom using Ctrl+Alt+left mouse drag next to an object
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