New Viewport 2.0 features
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New features include improved support for most parts of Maya, for example, manipulators, tools, shapes, and nodes.
Two new performance options are provided: The option provides more interactive scrubbing of your animation, and the option provides better performance by evaluating separate characters in separate threads.
New API support for plug-in shapes, hardware shaders, and locators is provided. Approximated support in the viewport is provided
for mia_material_* shaders and other mental ray shaders. New effects include screen-space ambient occlusion, motion blur,
depth of field and multisample anti-aliasing.
In addition, the new renderer allows you to perform command line rendering for , or to batch render to disk or to . You can access the renderer from the window, the window, the , via the command line renderer, or by selecting .
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Previewing your composite in the Render View
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You can now easily create render pass nodes through the and view the output of these passes directly in the . Furthermore, you can create basic compositing graphs using render passes and standard Maya shading utility nodes, and visualize
the result directly in the or a batch render using the new render target node.
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Vector displacement maps
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Connect a vector displacement map to your shading group in Maya to create complex sculpted surfaces with displacement in arbitrary
directions; for example, to create undercuts or overhanging features. You can create vector displacement maps in Mudbox or
any comparable software.
You can use this feature with any Maya or mental ray shader; however, you cannot visualize vector displacement maps in the
scene view, and you must render using mental ray for Maya.
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Support for Ptex textures
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Maya 2012 provides you with the ability to preview Ptex textures assigned to any standard Maya shading network texture input
in Viewport 2.0.
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new mental ray Rendering book
All mental ray shading and rendering documentation has now been moved to the new mental ray Rendering book. mental ray specific
nodes and attributes descriptions have been moved to the mental ray node attributes chapter.
mental ray attributes only accessible when mental ray plug-in is loaded
Previously, all mental ray attributes were available in the nodes' regardless of whether the mental ray plug-in was loaded.
Beginning with Maya 2012, mental ray attributes are only accessible when the mental ray plug-in (Mayatomr.mll) is loaded.
mental ray for Maya users should ensure that the Mayatomr.mll plug-in is set to in the .
mental ray support for compressed .tif files
mental ray for Maya now supports input of LZW compressed .tif texture files.
EXR version 1.7 support
The EXR version 1.7 support of channel names of length 252 characters is available in Maya 2012. To utilize this option, create
and set the MAYA_EXR_LONGNAME environment variable to 1. You must ensure, however, that any other applications you are using
also support this standard.