Software And Internet Blog

Maya celebrates its tenth anniversary with the 2009 release, an event marked by enhancements across the board. Although some of these have popped up in other Autodesk tools before now.
For example, Maya’s modelling toolset gains true Soft Selection (below), a technique found in 3DS Max and Mudbox that allows you to sculpt smoothly by manipulating weighted selections of a mesh. Once the selection is created with the mouse (Select, Move, Rotate or Scale tool) and keyboard shortcuts (B), it can be moved, scaled and rotated.

Colour feedback indicates the size of the area affected and a much smoother transformation than normal is possible. The fall-off area of the effect (the strength and coverage of the selection’s influence) can be increased or decreased by holding B and the left and right mouse button, while the shape can be modified through the use of the Falloff curve.

It’s also possible to set the fall-off to affect multiple objects at the same time (setting it to have a global basis) such as deforming a row of teeth to match a jawline. By pressing ‘ on the keyboard and simultaneously dragging a component, you can also invoke a Tweak mode allowing you to quickly move components under the mouse regardless of whether you are currently using the Select tool, Move tool, Rotate tool or Scale tool. Soft selection also works well when used with symmetrical modelling – another key feature of Mudbox.

Modelling has been strengthened by the ability to merge two vertices on the same mesh together using the new Merge Vertex tool. Edge, face and vertex loop selection has been improved to let you select by double-clicking a single edge, or double-clicking an adjoining face or vertex respectively. Maya’s Move, Scale and Rotate tools now support reflection in world and object space, allowing you to work on two sides of a symmetrical model at the same time.

There are useful settings for softness, and you can preserve the seam to avoid moving components off the centre axis. When used in conjunction with Soft Selection, the model doesn’t need to be symmetrical for you to edit it reflectively. Also new is a much-needed option to preserve UVs when using the Rotate, Move or Scale tools, so you can transform components of a mesh without warping its texture. Other UV enhancements include the Smooth UV tool, which can be used to relax or unfold an entire UV shell into the UV space. You can then use the same tool to fix small imperfections in the shell.

You can now work with multiple layers of animation. This allows any attribute to be animated on a separate layer, leading to a non-destructive workflow where layers can be blended, merged, grouped, nested in hierarchies and reordered to offer complex, multi-faceted animation. This is a major strength of MotionBuilder, which makes you wonder about its future as a separate product line.
For now, though, Maya can animate in a non-linear fashion, combining imported motion-capture data or retargeted animation cycles with hand-keyframed sequences, use the mute, solo and weight functions on individual layers to vary the output and experiment with multiple ‘takes’ of animation using a single scene.

You can also bake animation from layers, just as you can with other keyframe animation. Character rigging has been improved by the enhanced muscle and skin-deformation tools of Maya Muscle. This wasn’t loaded by default, but a trip to the plug-in manager provided us with a new menu. New features include realistic skin motion and behaviours such as wrinkling, jiggle and deformer-based collisions.

Maya nParticles is the second module built on the Nucleus simulation framework, able to simulate effects ranging from liquids, clouds and smoke to spray and dust. nParticles allow you to quickly apply liquid simulations, such as realistic pouring water and sloshing fluids in containers. You can also use constraints that make particles slide down a surface and apply particle interaction effects, such as marbles stretching and then splitting the material of a cloth bag.

Commonly used nParticles – such as water, balls and thick cloud – have presets and are already loaded with dynamic and rendering settings.Another shortcut, the Fill Object with Particles command, requires a single click to perform this task. nParticles shares a new Stickiness attribute with nCloth, allowing you to adjust the tendency of a nCloth object to stick to other Nucleus objects (including passive objects) when they collide.

An example could be nParticle mud splashing on to an nCloth coat and staying there.
Render passes are commonly used in the film and television VFX pipeline: the technique outputs separate shaders for a scene, offering more customisation at the compositing stage. Support for render passes has been updated, and the new multi-render pass feature lets you render an unlimited number of render passes, grouped into render pass sets.

A sub-layer allows subsets of the objects or lights in a scene to be grouped together as render pass contribution maps, while still managing the main output process. Users with complex multi-layered compositions will probably see the greatest benefit.

Another new feature aimed at studios is Stereoscopic 3D. This technology is currently hot property in the film world, so rendering support in Maya is hardly a surprise. Viewports now offer a stereoscopic viewer, featuring anaglyph, checkerboard and freeview stereoscopic modes to show what the scene will look like when the correct hardware and 3D glasses are used. It supports a three-camera setup allowing you to control the perceived 3D depth of the objects.