What’s New in Modeling
 
 
 

Soft Selection

Soft Selection lets you include a weighted falloff area in your component selections. It’s useful for sculpting a smooth object or making smoothly integrated slopes or contours to your model without having to transform each vertex manually.

You can turn on Soft Selection in the Tool Settings editor for any of the transformation tools.

Merge Vertex Tool

You can now merge vertices quickly with the Merge Vertex Tool by dragging from one vertex to another.

You can access the Merge Vertex Tool by selecting Edit Mesh > Merge Vertex Tool.

Smooth UV Tool

You can now interactively relax or unfold a selection of UVs in the UV Texture Editor with the Smooth UV tool. This allows you to perform these operations by dragging the mouse and offer instant visual feedback so you can judge exactly how much you want to relax or unfold.

Poly Count Options window

You can now choose to display a polygon count of either the objects in your scene or their cages.

Tweak mode

Tweak mode lets you quickly move components under the mouse cursor regardless of whether you are currently using the Select Tool, Move Tool, Rotate Tool or Scale Tool.

You can activate Tweak mode by holding ‘ on the keyboard and simultaneously dragging a component with .

Enhanced loop selection

You can now select edge loops by double-clicking a single edge or select face and vertex loops by selecting a face or vertex and double-clicking a face or vertex next to it.

Convert polygon edges to curve

You can now convert a path of polygon edges to a NURBS curve by selecting Modify > Convert > Polygon Edges to Curve.

Normal Average component movement

This option lets you select multiple components or objects and move them all along the average of their combined normals.

UV Texture Editor snapping improvements

You can now use snapping in the UV Texture Editor to lock your transformations to existing objects in the scene. You can also access a number of options related to pixel snapping by selecting Image > Pixel Snap > in the UV Texture Editor.

You can also use Discrete Rotate and Discrete Scale to rotate and scale UVs in specific increments.

UV Layout enhanced options

A number of new options have been added to the UV Layout Options window, which allow you to adjust multiple UV shells in a single UV space more easily. These options also allow you to offset your UV shells and scale them in the UV space.

Preserve textures during transformation

You can now transform components of a mesh without warping its texture. By turning on the Preserve UVs option in the Tool Settings editor for any of the transformation tools, Maya will automatically perform the appropriate transformations to the UV shell to maintain the overall look of the texture.

Bevel inside curves

You can now bevel within the bounds of a curve by turning on the Bevel inside curves option in the Bevel Plus Options window. Beveling inside a curve gives you more precise control over the overall size of a bevelled surface.