What's New in Autodesk® Maya® 2011

What's New in Autodesk® Maya® 2011 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and visual effects software offers artists an end-to-end creative workflow.

Detailed Maya Features

Autodesk® Maya® 2011 software features a powerful new set of tools for helping create and repurpose character animation. And with an invigorated user interface (UI) to make artists more efficient, along with a new 64-bit offering for Mac OS® X operating system, Maya 2011 is more accessible. Meanwhile, Maya 2011 helps address real-world production pipeline challenges, with an accelerated viewport display for large scenes; a completely new UI toolkit; and new solutions for 3D editorial, color management, scene segmentation, and rotoscoping.

Enhanced User Interface 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.

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.

Non-Destructive Live Retargeting More quickly and easily reuse, correct, and enhance motion-capture and certain other animation data with a new non-destructive retargeting workflow which uses the Autodesk® HumanIK® (HIK) libraries. Transfer animation from one character to another and adjust retargeting parameters live to see and edit results without the need to re-bake.

64-bit Support for Mac OS X Mac OS X users can access considerably more memory to handle larger and more complex scenes with the new 64-bit executable.

3D Editorial Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual movie-making production with new 3D Editorial capabilities in Maya. The new Camera Sequencer enables artists to layout and manage multiple camera shots in a single animation sequence. Start laying out shots in Maya, or import an EDL from editorial with associated movie, audio, and time code information. Then change the timings of shots, create alternate versions, and use Playblast to playback and review the sequence before optionally re-exporting an EDL to editorial for further refinement.

Enhancements to Assets and File Referencing More easily segment, re-use, and exchange data with or without file referencing. Data can be exported and imported as offline files to flexibly partition scenes, while reference edits can be imported, exported, and removed without unloading. A new option to create assets with transforms (DAG assets) enables them to be directly positioned, parented, instanced, and light-linked, streamlining the most common assets workflows.

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 can be viewed. A working color profile can be set globally and overridden on individual textures and render passes. With new 32-bit support in the Render View, display images through LUTs, and control Contrast, Exposure, Tone Mapping, and Gamma. Initial support is through mental ray® for Maya renderer, with a robust API to enable other renderers to take advantage of the system.

Vector Paint in Maya Composite Perform complex rotoscoping operations such as removing or replacing elements from live action plates using the new vector paint option in Maya Composite.

More Info: http://area.autodesk.com/maya2011/features

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