What's New in General
 
 
 

Updated Interface

Maya’s interface has now been enhanced with a new color scheme and functionality.

Watch: Qt Interface

These enhancements include:

New File Browser

Maya now has a new File Browser window, which provides you with option box options in line with the file browser itself.

Other options include a streamlined display of your file system, more navigation options relative to your current folder, and a list of recently opened folder.

New Shelf Editor

Maya now has a new Shelf Editor window. This window features a more streamlined layout that allows you to modify shelves and shelf items without navigating between tabs. The editor now supports double-click commands, and editable icon label colors and backgrounds.

Tabbed browsing for Attribute Editor and Channel Box

You can now open the Channel Box/Layer Editor and Attribute Editor simultaneously as tabs which reside on the side of the panel.

Drag and Drop interactivity

You can dock and undock menus and UI elements around different parts of the UI by dragging and dropping their dotted edges.

You can also manually resize UI elements by dragging them along their dotted edges.

New Color Chooser

Maya now has a new Color Chooser window. This window features enhanced color history tracking, multiple color selection methods, the ability to sample colors directly from images, and customizable 256 color palettes that can be saved and loaded. The Attribute Editor also features a condensed version of the Color Chooser window to make color selection quicker and easier than before.

For more information, see Interface overview.

Namespace Editor

You can now create and edit namespaces from the Namespace Editor (Window > General Editors > Namespace Editor).

Export Maya to Mudbox

You can now export directly from Maya to Autodesk Mudbox with a single click. This makes cross-application interaction faster and easier.

Relative namespaces

You can now refer to namespaces relative to a specific namespace. This allows you to streamline the Outliner and simplify MEL commands.

Asset and Container nomenclature

For Maya 2011, the term container has been simplified to assets for any and all instances.

Assets with Transforms

You can now create two types of assets in Maya. Assets with Transforms are asset nodes with associated transforms, meaning you can transform them in the scene and manipulate them in the DAG hierarchy like you would a group node. Advanced Assets do not have an associated group transforms and so you must publish nodes manually for them to interact with the DAG hierarchy.

Watch: Asset Enhancements

Publish, unpublish, bind, and unbind published nodes from the Attribute Editor

You can now publish, unpublish, bind, and unbind published nodes directly from the Attribute Editor by clicking the appropriate icon for each published node in the Published Nodes section.

Publish nodes

You can now publish nodes to a container that are not a Root Node, Parent Anchor, or Child Anchor.

Remove Reference Edits on a Loaded Reference

You can now use the Reference Editor to remove reference edits without having to unload the reference first.

Export to and Assign Offline Files

You can now import and export reference edits from a scene in Maya to and from an offline file. This allows you to store edits of a source file in their own external files or apply them to another file. For example, you can edit a basic walk cycle into a strut, export the strut, and apply that strut to a different character’s walk cycle.

Watch: Offline Edits

Additional formats for custom icons

Maya now has expanded support for file formats when creating custom icons for the shelf, assets, the hypergraph, etc. The supported formats now include BMP, GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, PBM, PGM, PPM, XBM, SVG, or XPM. Additionally, images that are not the correct size are scaled now rather than cropped.

Maya 64-bit now supported on Mac OS X

Mac OS X users can access considerably more memory to handle larger and more complex scenes with the 64-bit version of Maya.

Maya uses IPv6 on Windows Vista

Maya now uses IPv6 on Windows Vista by default. To revert back to IPv4, set the environment variable MAYA_IP_TYPE = ipv4.

Script Editor auto-completion

The script editor now auto-completes recognized commands and object path names when you enable the Command Completion and Object Path Completion options.

New user interface commands

There are a number of new UI related commands available. These include:

In addition, there are also a number of new flags for existing commands including:

A number of compatiblity changes have also been made, including: