Autodesk® Maya® 2011 Announced!

Newly available for the Mac OS® X 64-bit operating system, Autodesk® Maya® 2011 software offers artists an invigorated user interface, new 3D editorial capabilities, and improved character animation. Contact Motion Media to attach or renew subscription today!

Maya 2011 (English) is expected to ship simultaneously on all supported platforms on or after April 7, 2010. Upgrade downloads for Autodesk® Subscription customers are expected to be available on or after April 7, 2010. C

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1. Enhanced UI:

Enjoy a consistent, enhanced user experience on all supported platforms with an updated user interface that offers a fresh new look, dockable UI elements, more flexible editors, and a new color chooser and file browser.

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2. Accelerated Skinning Workflow:

Create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations in less time, with new skinning tools and workflows: a dual quaternion option for smooth skinning, interactive volume binding, multiple enhancements to the Paint Skin Weights tool, deformer weight mirroring, and a surface falloff mode for the Wrap deformer.

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3. Non-Destructive Live Retargeting:

More quickly and easily reuse, correct, and enhance motion capture and certain other animation data with a new nondestructive retargeting workflow that uses the Autodesk® HumanIK® (HIK) middleware libraries. Transfer animation from one character to another and adjust retargeting parameters live.

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4. 3D Editorial:

Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual moviemaking production with new 3D editorial capabilities in Maya.

Lay out multiple camera shots directly in Maya, or import an edit decision list in Apple® Final Cut Pro®XML or AAF formats. Then change the timings of shots, create alternate versions, and use Playblast to playback and review.

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5. Enhancements to Assets and File Referencing:

More easily segment, reuse, and exchange data with or without file referencing. A new option to create assets with transforms (DAG assets) helps streamline the most common workflows with assets. Moreover, data can be exported and imported as offline files to flexibly partition scenes, while reference edits can be imported, exported, and removed without unloading.

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6. Color Management:

Make better decisions and preserve creative intent throughout the rendering pipeline by working within the context of the final color space in which images will be viewed. Initial support is through the mental ray® for Maya renderer.

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7. Vector Paint added to Composite:

Perform complex rotoscoping operations such as removing or replacing elements from live-action plates using the new vector paint option in the Maya Composite functionality. Fully integrated with tracking, paint strokes are animatable and can be used to clone data from another source.

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8. Additional New Features and Enhancements:

64-bit Mac OS^® X operating system: Mac OS X users can address considerably more memory to handle larger and more complex scenes with the new 64-bit executable. Performance will also be improved in cases where swapping would previously have occurred
Large scene performance: A new interactive viewport helps significantly improves display frame rates. Level editors and other users working with large scenes and many textures can achieve frame rates several times faster than previously possible by enabling this display method. Additionally, texture loading is now significantly faster for BMP, JPEG, PNG, and Targa formats within all interactive renderers.

Enhancements to Maya nParticles: Create more realistic particle simulations with enhancements to nParticles: Surface Tension, per-particle ramps for collision and liquid simulation attributes, motion blur rendering, instancing with rotation, and improved output mesh quality and performance.

Enhancements to Maya Fluid Effects: Create more efficient and  near realistic fluid simulations with enhancements to Fluid Effects: auto-resizing, new internal lighting attributes, motion blur rendering, and output mesh per-vertex shading attributes.

Graph editor enhancements: Animators are more productive when editing animation curves and keyframes in the Graph Editor, with a large number of enhancements that make it easier to view, select and edit animation data.
2D pan and zoom: Pan and zoom to view details in specific areas when doing precise tracking, placement or rotoscoping work, without moving the current camera
Paint Effects phototropism: Simulate the natural phenomenon of phototropism with Paint Effects plants that automatically grow towards or away from a light representing the sun.

Enhanced audio support: Animate against an existing soundtrack more easily with new support for simultaneous playback of multiple audio tracks and timeline scrubbing across all platforms.

Enhanced Material Library: Select from up to 700 material presets in a new Material Library to help simulate a wide range of real-world surface qualities and treatments.