• Viewport 2.0 enhancements – include the addition of high-quality depth sorting, together with support for image planes and animation ghosting. It also offers a more functionally complete high-performance, high-quality viewport that allows artists to evaluate their work in a higher fidelity interactive environment in order to make better creative decisions. In addition, the same hardware rendering technology can be used to batch render larger-than-screen-size frames, producing high-quality animatics and pre-visualizations in less time.
• New Node Editor –contains three different levels of detail to help artists and technical directors to more easily create, edit, and debug node networks. The Drag-and-drop connection editing reduces dependence on the Connection Editor, enabling nodes to be rewired in a more intuitive environment, while color coding for different data types provides helpful information at a glance.
• Bullet Physics – will give you the ability to use the high-performance open source AMD Bullet Physics engine to simulate both soft and rigid bodies in a single system. This features discrete and continuous 3D collision detection, Bullet also enables artists working in both game development and visual effects to create highly realistic simulations of cloth, rope, deformable objects, and ragdoll skeletons. Bullet is available on Microsoft Windows (64-bit only), Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems. The OpenCL acceleration on Windows and Linux offers additional performance benefits on those platforms as well.
• Heat Map Skinning – provides the ability for the initial binding of geometry to skeletons to more accurate, requiring less manual refinement from the artist. This is due to a new Heat Map Skinning method that is better able to assign skin to the intended bone as opposed to an adjacent but unrelated one.
• Trax Clip matching – lets you more easily visualize how motions within two or more Trax clips match in order to adjust how they blend together. Clip Ghosts enable animators to view the start and end frames of clips as skeletal wireframes in the 3D view; clips can be manually matched with the help of these visual cues, or automatically matched using a choice of options for translation and rotation.
• Alembic Caching – is supported in Maya 2013 so now Maya artists can now read and write the Alembic open computer graphics interchange framework format. This was co-developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd. Alembic distills complex animated and simulated data into application-independent baked geometry. This gives you the ability to support massive datasets when you pass between disciplines - as an example, animation and lighting—helping reduce the overhead and loss of interactivity associated with transferring fully editable scene data.
Article comments
1 - Evans
I'm actually learning about Maya and my cousins are crazy about it. Although I'm just a beginner, I'm quite excited about the changes and improvements in the latest release. Thanks for sharing!