Maya 2008

Maya has a solid track record among games designers and video and film effects people, and although there are obvious overlaps between Maya and 3D Studio Max, Autodesk’s consolidation of both products is beginning to highlight differences in their possible futures. At first sight, Maya has been put through a very similar upgrade process. Renders and previews are faster – sometimes much faster, with changes to the Mental Ray 3.6 core – and modelling has also been improved. This used to be a weak point in Maya, because multiple steps were required to edit a mesh into a desired shape. In this release, you can preview a smoothed mesh while editing it directly, without switching modes – very useful, and a significant improvement. A grab-bag of other modelling improvements includes better object positioning, more sophisticated Booleans and positive changes to operations such as bevelling and bridging. You can also replace objects within a scene now, which was another much-missed option before.

A feature that will please animators is non-destructive skin editing. Skeleton bindings are preserved automatically, which means that it’s possible to modify the skeleton of a bound character without having to rebind it again afterwards. This can be impressively speedy in practice, because you can add, move and delete joints and also manage connections and disconnections without having to reskin and rebind.

Previews have been moved in a 3D Studio-like direction, although this depends to an extent on hardware support. With the right set-up, previews can include a wider range of texture and lighting effects. Hardware can also be used to cut down on render times. Faster renders are always useful, but to get the most from this feature you’ll need an out of the ordinary graphics card, adding an extra £1,000 or so to the price of the software. Maya’s API (programming interface) has also been opened up to make it possible for plug-ins to offer hardware rendering support. There’s also API support for constraints – which in simple English means that plug-ins have the potential to become more useful and more clever.

Hardware support also features in the new Direct X HLSL shaders that are included. CgFX support was a games industry staple and this next generation of shaders means that Maya is ready for the newest games designs. In theory this means that a viewport preview will match the finished console view. In practice, the match may not be perfect and a console preview is essential – so this isn’t quite the time-saver it could be.

So overall, this is a faster and more productive Maya, although not necessarily a simpler one. If there are criticisms, it’s that Maya is even more top-heavy than 3D Studio Max. While PLE 8.5 continues to be available for beginners, Maya’s approach to 3D remains fearsomely complicated. A more modular design that enables users to pick and choose the features that are most useful to them, both in the interface and in the feature sets, might make Maya less intimidating to new users.