What's New in Simulation and Effects

XGen lets you generate curves, spheres and custom geometry on the surface of Maya polygon meshes.

Use XGen geometry instancing to create and groom hair and fur on characters. Quickly populate large landscapes and environments, such as grassy savannas, diverse forests, rocky terrains, and debris trails, using XGen archive geometry.

XGen also includes an interactive grooming brush-set that lets you create and groom all types of hair and fur as well as shape foliage and vegetation.

XGen also lets you:

• Use PTEX maps to control the placement of instanced geometry.
• Use its library of expressions to generate and randomly scale, position, and color default primitives and custom Alembic-based archive geometry.
• Export geometry from a Maya scene, then instance it as an XGen archive object.

Refer to the following for more information:

• XGen Overview
• What are XGen Descriptions?
• Create an XGen Description
• XGen Workflows

Built from the Bullet physics library, the Bullet plug-in lets you use the Bullet physics engine to create large-scale, highly-realistic dynamic and kinematic simulations. Bullet simulations can include interacting soft body and rigid body objects, as well as constrained collision objects, all contained in a single dynamic system within Maya.

Bullet Documentation is now included in the Maya Help. See MayaBullet.

• Maya Forces integration (Global and per-object forces). See Bullet and Maya Fields.
• Added a new collider shape type (Compound) that lets you create a single rigid body made of a compound of collision shapes comprised of multiple meshes in the hierarchy. See Create Compound Collision Shapes.
• Added another new collider shape type (Auto-Compound) that lets you handle convex decomposition of concave shapes using the Hierarchical Approximate Convex Decomposition (HACD) algorithm. Both of these new Compound collider shape types create more accurate collisions.
• Reduced Maya Dependency Graph footprint when you use Rigid Sets. See Rigid Set Properties.
• A new Remove Bullet from Selected Object option has been added to the Bullet menu.
• A Hide Shape attribute has been added to the Create Active Rigid Body options.
• A new Collider Shape Offset option in the Create Active Rigid Body menu.
• A new AbcBullet plug-in with an AbcBulletExport command for exporting the rigid set and regular rigid body simulations an animation-only Alembic file (source code included).
• Update to Bullet 2.8.1
• OpenCL GPU Accelerated Cloth on Linux