What's New in Modeling
 
 
 

Bezier curves

You can now create Bezier curves in Maya using the Bezier tool. Bezier curves are a subset of NURBS curves that allow you to modify the curvature using a series of tangents attached to each anchor point on the curve.

Watch: Bezier Curves

Connect arbitrary components

You can now connect vertices and edges in one operation with the Connect Components option. This allows you to quickly create edge paths from vertices to edge mid-points.

Spin Edge tool

You can now use the Spin Edge tool to spin an edge or series of edges around their respective centers, which changes the vertices they are connected to. Edge spinning allows you to quickly change the topology of your mesh.

Pinch Brush

You can now use the Pinch Brush in the Sculpt Geometry Tool to pull vertices toward each other. This is useful for making creases more sharply defined.

Object level Soft Selection

You can now set the Falloff Mode in the Soft Selection settings to Object. This allows you to select multiple objects in a scene and transform them with falloff, without warping the objects themselves. This is useful for densely packed objects that you want to space out, such as trees in a forest.

Assign Invisible Faces

You can now assign invisible faces to a polygon mesh. Faces assigned as invisible do not appear in the scene, yet still exist and can be manipulated. This is particularly useful when you need a face for smoothing or other polygon operations, but would otherwise like for it to appear empty in the scene view or render.

UV space tiles

UV Tiles allow you to divide the UV texture space into a series of 1x1 texture spaces, each divided by a bold border. This is useful to extend your texture space without losing sight of your border limitations.

Arbitrary Scale

The Scale Settings in the Scale Tool now allow you to scale along arbitrary axes (such as Object, Local, World, Normal, etc) similar to the Move Tool.

Transfer Attributes by topology

You can now transfer attribute values from one mesh to another by matching the mesh’s topology. This allows you to transfer attribute data even when the arrangement of component IDs of two identical looking meshes are not the same.

UV Edge Loop selection

You can now convert a selection from a Vertex, UV, or Edge selection to a UV Edge Loop selection. A UV edge loop is similar to an edge loop, but treats UV boundaries as the end of the loop selection.