What’s New in Autodesk Maya
 
 
 

Welcome to What’s New in Autodesk® Maya® 2009!

This release is full of features that respond to your needs in games, film, TV, and design. Maya 2009 delivers a host of new features and enhancements that maximize productivity, optimize workflows, and offer new creative possibilities.

General and Performance

There are many enhancements in this release that help make you more productive, including Maya Assets, Pre-Selection highlighting, Heat Map Display, Transfer Attribute Values and a host of enhancements to the Maya User Interface.

In addition, you’ll find significant performance improvements in numerous areas including more multi-threading work and algorithmic speed-ups to boost interactive draw, simulation, and rendering performance for even the heaviest scenes.

Modeling

Polygon modelers and texture artists can be much more efficient, thanks to a wide range of new features and workflow enhancements in Maya 2009, including true soft selection, a tweak mode for rapid modifications, new UV layout and unfolding options, and Merge Vertex.

Animation

In Maya 2009, you’ll find a powerful new animation layering paradigm built on technology from Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software. This feature allows artists to create multiple layers of animation non-destructively. The flexible architecture works with any attribute; animation layers can be blended, merged, grouped, and re-ordered, and can override or add to preceding layers.

Rigging

A fully updated Maya Muscle toolset provides realistic skin and muscle behavior with secondary motion, collisions, wrinkles, sliding and stickiness all built-in in Maya 2009.

Dynamics and Effects

In Maya 2009, you’ll find new Dynamics features like Volume Axis Curve and Volume Trapping.

This release you can take advantage of nCaching with Fluid Effects, and enhanced smoothing for fluid to polygon mesh conversions.

nDynamics

The Maya Nucleus unified simulation framework gains an innovative new nParticles module, featuring particle to particle collisions, bi-directional interaction with Maya nCloth, and a special method for liquid simulation.

Also, in Maya 2009, you’ll find new features for nCloth including Force Field Generation attributes and Stickiness. Find all Maya Nucleus help in the new nDynamics guide.

Rendering

In Maya 2009, we’ve added a completely updated Render Pass feature set that optimizes integration with compositing packages such as Autodesk® Toxik™ software and supports production-level pipelines.And to help studios capitalize on the trend for stereo 3D films, there is a flexible new stereoscopic camera rig complete with in-viewport stereo viewing.

In addition, you’ll find many enhancements to IPR, and new features for mental ray for Maya.

Documentation

The Maya Help is now faster and more easily searchable than ever before.

Also, many new tutorials for beginners and advanced users have been added this release.

API

The Maya API now includes new classes for Render Passes and User Defined Manipulators, improved documentation and much more.