The latest Maya release brings several new improvements and features, helping you to push the boundaries of your artistry. Riggers now have a more artist-friendly experience with updates including improved GPU and cached playback support for the Jiggle Deformer as well as adding re-targeting and tangential constraints to the Morph Deformer. Maya’s modeling toolset has been expanded to include Make Live support for sculpting and improvements to the Multi-Cut tool, allowing for more modeling precision. Maya continues to build on its USD integration with added Channel Box support. This release also includes exciting new updates for the Bifrost and Substance plug-ins, as well as new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes in MtoA.
What’s New in Maya
Better control of your models
Make Live support has been added to the Relax, Smear, Pinch, Grab, and Smooth sculptingbrushes. Artists can you now use a separate surface as a constraint while sculpting.The Multi-Cut tool now displays a visual percentage when creating full edge loop cuts, allowing users to make more accurate custom cuts on meshes.
Improved USD
Maya continues to build on its USD integration with added features and support. Channel Boxsupport is added, allowing customers to edit the attributes of USD prims. Point instance selection, point snapping performance, support for import and export of lights, and many evaluation updates and bug fixes have also been included, giving artists an overall smoother experience when working with USD in Maya.
Rigging Enhancements
This release includes two new improvements to Maya’s already robust rigging toolset. The Jiggle deformer has been added to the list of GPU-supported deformers and now also works with CachedPlayback, resulting in better deformation performance. The Morph deformer has been extended with new options and modes for retargeting and mirroring. Deformer Weight Visualization has been upgraded to make it easier to see if geometry or components are selected.
A more comprehensive Bifrost
This release adds the latest version of Bifrost for Maya , adding support for recent MtoA updates and several new features, including:
• A new set of node icons that help demonstrate what nodes do visually
• An added value display that shows parameters that can be read directly on nodes
• Enhancements to geometry nodes
• Performance improvements
Amplified rendering performance in Arnold
This update also adds support for the latest Arnold release, improving rendering performance and interactivity. Several new enhancements to imagers such as Intel's Open Image Denoiser, a new LUT mode to the imager_tonemap, and a new imager to control brightness and color curves have been added. Artists can now execute multiple parallel render sessions on CPU, have multiple outputs for shader nodes, and write AOVs to multiple formats and to multi-part EXR files.
Added support for Substance
The Substance plugin for Substance 2.2.1 has been updated. Substance 2.2.1 includes the newest Substance Engine 8.3.0, with support for assets from Substance 3D Designer, Substance 3D Assets, and Substance 3D Sampler. Artists now have the ability to render scenes directly with multiple versions of Arnold, including the latest version version of MtoA, and an improved user interface that provides the ability to manage and edit renderer workflows.
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