A newly designed Project Window provides greater flexibility for accessing and editing the location of your project files. An improved default project structure makes it easier to manage project directories as well as to create custom directories for plug-in data.

See What's New in Basics.

A new Namespace Editor design gives you more control creating and managing the namespace organization of your scene objects. Feature improvements include object lists in a pop-up window, better namespace hierarchy display, and more.

See What's New in Assets and File Referencing.

The new Send to feature provides an easy, single-step method of sending objects and various forms of data from Maya to Mudbox.

The new Interactive Split tool is one of several new options available through the Edit Mesh menu. It allows you to accurately split faces on a polygon mesh. Additionally, the new Project Curve on Mesh option lets you project curves on a polygon surface, while the new Split Mesh with Projected Curve option lets you split and detach edges on a polygon surface.

There are also three new sliders associated with the Show Manipulator Tool.

See What's New in Modeling.

Editable Motion Trails provide animators with a fast workflow for editing the position and timing of keys, directly in the Maya scene. Motion trails display with your animated models, eliminating the need to leave your scene for the Graph Editor.

Updates to the Camera Sequencer include a new playlist for more efficient shot management, improved multi-track audio, and the addition of the Ubercam, which lets you quickly output all shots to a single camera.

In addition, several improvements to the Graph Editor provide a more streamlined and familiar curve editing tool, particularly for animators using multiple Autodesk applications in a pipeline. New options and preferences include the Auto tangent type, adjacent key snapping, single-click curve editing, plus the Region Tool for scaling multiple keys.

See What's New in Animation.

New HumanIK character setup tools in Maya improve both keyframing and retargeting workflows, with a focus on visual, intuitive tools, plus streamlined interoperability with Autodesk MotionBuilder. Unified tools between Maya and MotionBuilder let you easily retarget motion capture animation from MotionBuilder and apply to rigs set up in Maya.

See What's New in Rigging.

New Fluid Effects simulation methods let you create realistic liquid pouring, splashing, and boiling effects. Other additions to Fluids include new output mesh options, improved auto resizing, and a number of new attributes to enhance the look and behavior of your effects.

Further development of the Nucleus unified simulation framework includes multi-threaded nParticle collisions and nCloth self-collisions for faster performance, per-object local gravity and wind for greater control over Nucleus forces, and rigid nCloth shells for small-scale destruction effects.

The addition of Effects Assets provide a wide range of easy-to-use, customizable effects, including fire, smoke, explosion, dust trail, melt, and fireworks.

For the Autodesk Maya Entertainment Creation Suites, Dynamics and Effects provides single-step Softimage ICE interoperability which lets you take advantage of the ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) to create effects for your Maya scenes.

See What's New in Dynamics and nDynamics.

You can now easily create render pass nodes through the Hypershade and view the output of these passes directly in the Render View. Furthermore, you can create basic compositing graphs using render passes, render targets, and standard Maya shading utility nodes, and visualize the result directly in the Render View or via a batch render.

New Viewport 2.0 features include improved support for most parts of Maya, for example, manipulators, tools, shapes, and nodes. New effects such as screen-space ambient occlusion, motion blur, depth of field and multisample anti-aliasing are also included.

Two new performance options are provided for Viewport 2.0: Use Vertex Animation Cache and Thread Dependency Graph Evaluation.

You can also preview Ptex textures assigned to any standard Maya shading network texture input in Viewport 2.0.

In addition, the new Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer allows you to perform command line rendering for Viewport 2.0, or to batch render to disk or to Render View.

See What's New in Rendering and Render Setup.