What’s New in Autodesk Maya 2009?
What's New Autodesk Maya 2009?
Create breathtaking 3D with Autodesk® Maya® 2009 software. Ten years since its industry-redefining launch, Autodesk Maya software continues to push the envelope, with a feature-packed release. Addressing the increasingly difficult challenges faced today by everyone from one-man shops to chief technology officers managing a complex production pipeline, Maya 2009 delivers a host of new features and enhancements intended to maximize productivity, optimize workflows, and offer new creative possibilities for users in film, television, games, and design.
New Selection Paradigm
Powerful new selection features in Maya 2009—including true soft selection, and pre-selection highlighting—mean fewer mouse clicks, and less trial and error for common tasks.
Improved Modeling Workflow
Maya 2009 delivers intuitive, productive modeling enhancements, including symmetrical modeling with soft seams, a tweak mode for rapid modifications, and a new Merge Vertex feature that enables you to combine parts of a mesh.
Maya Assets
With Maya Assets, complex data can be effectively organized, shared, referenced, and presented. Maya Assets enables you to encapsulate a set of nodes into a container so that they can be treated as if they were a single node from a user’s perspective (selected attributes of interest from the contained nodes can be published to the container). This new feature also supports customized and user-specific views, flexible referencing, and the creation of customized libraries.
Animation Layering
A powerful new animation layering paradigm, built on technology from Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software, gives you more flexibility as you nondestructively create and edit animation. This toolset works with any attribute: animation layers can be blended, merged, grouped, and reordered, and can override or add to preceding layers.
Maya nParticles
Maya 2009 introduces the second module built on the highly acclaimed Maya Nucleus unified simulation framework: Maya nParticles. This newest toolset gives you an intuitive, efficient workflow for simulating a wide range of complex effects, including liquids, clouds, smoke, spray, and dust. It features particle-to-particle collisions, particle and nCloth bidirectional interaction, powerful constraints, cloud and “blobby” hardware display, preset rendering, and dynamic behaviors.
Maya Muscle
Maya 2009 includes the comprehensive Maya Muscle software, which helps you create life-like muscle and skin motion. This toolset allows you to direct muscle and skin behavior precisely, with secondary motion, collisions, wrinkles, sliding, and stickiness.
UV Layout Enhancements
The ability to preserve UVs (when making modeling edits after the fact) as well as new UV unfolding and layout options —including an interactive mode—can increase your productivity by streamlining the otherwise time-consuming task of creating optimal texture coordinates.
Render Proxy
A new Render Proxy feature in mental ray® enables you to replace scene elements with a simple low-resolution mesh, and only load the pre-translated data when required for rendering.
Render Pass Enhancements
A completely updated Render Pass feature set provides precise control over render output, making it easier to optimize integration with compositing packages such as Autodesk® Toxik™ software.
