Power your creative vision with Maya

Maya brings new features and capabilities so you can power your creative visions. Animation performance enhancements to the Evaluation Manager allow you to animate character rigs more easily, while new options in the Evaluation Toolkit make it simpler to diagnose deformer evaluation for complex graphs. Maya also offers you more artistic control with updates to Blue Pencil, Tangent Controls, and a new Joint Draw Style.

Capabilities in Maya

Animation Performance Improvements

Maya brings significant animation performance improvements, especially when animating complex character rigs. This includes enhancements to the Evaluation Manager to help minimize graph rebuilds resulting in reduced lag times. This is most impactful when making frequent visibility changes on your rig. Additional improvements such as GPU Readback will help to better harness GPU evaluation for improved playback performance.

Evaluation Toolkit Updates

Several new features have been added to the Evaluation Toolkit that allow you to diagnose deformer evaluation more easily for complex graphs. This includes new options for improved visual graph output, a new GPU Outliner for more visibility and control over deformer evaluation, and enhancements to the Evaluation HUD for better insight into GPU Override status.

New Graph Editor Tangent Controls

New tangent angle and weight input fields have been added to the Graph Editor toolbar. These fields give you precise control over tangents, letting you change angles and weights on multiple selected keys at the same time.

Blue Pencil Improvements

Blue Pencil now supports touch sensitivity on tablets. Additionally, with new opacity, size, and hardness falloff ramps, you now have more precise control over Blue Pencil strokes. You can also choose from a collection of useful brush ramp presets or save your own custom brush presets for each of these settings. There are also improvements to interactive performance in addition to performance when saving and opening scenes that contain Blue Pencil drawings.

New Joint Draw Style

This update includes a new draw style called Joint, which has been added to the Joint options. This is useful when working with complex rigs containing multiple child joints in a small area where joint influences can be difficult to see with traditional full bone display.

UVPin, Proximity Pin and skinCluster Improvements

A new Relative Space Mode option has been added to the UV Pin, Proximity Pin and skinCluster nodes. This prevents double deformation or transformation issues that can occur when an object’s parent is moved and can also solve jitter issues associated with floating point precision errors when animating far from the origin.

Want to know more?

Get in touch with the Team at DVT today, to find out how we can help with your Autodesk M&E needs.