What's New in Modeling

Modeling Toolkit

Maya now includes a Modeling Toolkit (Edit Mesh > Show Modeling Toolkit) that is designed to increase the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of your workflow. The Modeling Toolkit integrates selection and transformation tools within a single window and keeps tool switching to a minimum.

Features include tools for mesh editing and creation, pre-selection highlighting, vertex locking, slide components, and fully integrated ring/loop selection.

While the toolkit adds workflows on top of existing Maya modeling features, it does not diminish the capability or usability of Maya's native toolset.

Watch: Modeling Toolkit overview

Watch: Retopology using the Modeling Toolkit

Crease Set Editor

You can now create and edit crease sets using the new Crease Set Editor (Edit Mesh > Crease Set Editor).

Offering greater control over selecting creased components and editing crease values, the Crease Set Editor is an improved alternative to the existing Crease Tool and Crease Selection Set commands.

Polygon reduction improvements

Maya has adopted a faster, more efficient algorithm for reducing the number of polygons in a mesh. This improved algorithm reduces the complexity of an object by removing unneeded vertices without affecting the object's basic shape.

New options in the Reduce Options window ( Mesh > Reduce > ) give you more control over your reduction. You can now keep your existing polygonal lines, reduce your mesh by a percentage, vertex count or triangle count, and export an index vertex map.

Edit edge flow

The new Edit Edge Flow tool (Edit Mesh > Edit Edge Flow) lets you transform the surface curvature of edges to respect the curvature of the surrounding mesh. When enabled, Edit Edge Flow changes the shape of multiple edges. For best results, it is recommended that you select no more than 2 non-adjacent edge loops. Results can be tweaked using the Adjust Edge Flow slider, which is an attribute in the polyEditEdgeFlow node.

Additionally, an Insert with edge flow option has been added to the Insert Edge Loop Tool, Interactive Split Tool, Offset Edge Loop Tool, and Connect Components Tool, letting you use these tools to insert edges that automatically respect curvature continuity.

Slide brush

A new Slide brush has been added to the Sculpt Geometry Tool (Edit NURBS > Sculpt Geometry Tool > or Mesh > Sculpt Geometry Tool > ), letting you slide vertices in the direction of your stroke while following the existing shape of the surface.

Sculpt Geometry Tool

Preserve normals

When enabled, the new Preserve normals option in the Freeze Transformations Options (Modify > Freeze Transformations > ) ensures that all transforms are oriented in the proper direction and are not flipped on negatively scaled objects.

Modify Freeze > Transformations

Vertex color visibility

The Convert display option in the Modeling Preferences has been renamed to Automatic vertex color display to better reflect its functionality. When enabled, this option automatically sets a number of conditions to make polygon colors visible in your scene. Additionally, this option has been added to the Display section of the Paint Vertex Color Tool (Color > Paint Vertex Color Tool > ).

Make vertex colors visible

Displaying hard edges in customized colors

You can display hard edges, normals, tangents and binormals in any color of your choice. Use MEL scripts to set your color preference.

Displaying hard edges in customized colors

Normals Size editor improvements

The Normals Size editor (Display > Polygons > Normals Size) now has a range of 0.02 to 10000. For more information regarding the functionality of this editor, see the following topics. This feature is applicable to both the default work space and Viewport 2.0.

Align a camera to a polygon

You can now align the current camera to the selected polygon face using the new Align Polygon To Camera option (View > Align Polygon To Camera).

View > Align Polygon To Camera

Select similar polygonal components

When in component mode, the new Select Similar option (Edit > Select Similar) selects polygonal components of a similar type to the current selection. When in object mode, this option selects other objects of the same node type in the scene.

Edit > Select Similar

New Vertex Normal Method preference

You can now set the default method for weighting vertex normals using the new Default Vertex Normal Method preference.

Modeling preferences

Multi-component selection

A new Multi-Component option (Select > Multi-Component) lets you quickly select faces, vertices, and edges without having to change between selection modes.

Select > Multi-Component