Autodesk- Maya 2011
Now Available for PC or MacPreset fur descriptions like squirrel, bear, bison, and wet Labrador dog can be used to easily create realistic fur, short hair, wool, and grass. Maya Artisan can be used to paint fur attributes, such as clumping, baldness, length, and curl, directly across multiple NURBS or polygonal surfaces as well as “comb” and style fur. Download Maya product brochure here (pdf)
Download FAQ here (pdf)
One Maya. More Value Autodesk® Maya® software offers artists an end-to-end creative workflow with comprehensive tools for 3D animation, modeling, simulation, visual effects, rendering, matchmoving, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. All these capabilities are combined into a single application offering CG artists an exceptional value. Newly available for the Mac OS® X 64-bit operating system, Maya 2011 delivers a revitalized user interface, enhanced viewport interaction, new 3D editorial capabilities, integrated color management, and improved character animation.
What's New with Maya 2011
Enhanced User Interface
Autodesk Maya 2011 3D animation software provides a consistent, enhanced user experience across all supported platforms—Mac OS® X, Windows® 32- and 64-bit, and Linux® 64-bit operating systems—with a revitalized user interface that offers a fresh new look, dockable UI elements, more flexible editors, and an updated color chooser and file browser. In addition, a new node browser within Hypershade displays nodes by category in a searchable tree list and provides easier access to frequently used nodes.
Accelerated Skinning Workflow
With Autodesk Maya 2011 you can create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations in less time. New skinning tools and workflows include 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.
Nondestructive Live Retargeting
Reuse, correct, and enhance motion-capture and other animation data faster and more easily with a new nondestructive retargeting workflow that 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 rebake.
New Solutions for 3D Editorial
Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual movie-making production with new 3D Editorial capabilities in Autodesk Maya 2011. The new Camera Sequencer enables you to layout and manage multiple camera shots in a single animation sequence. Start laying out shots in Maya, or import an EDL in Apple® Final Cut Pro® XML or AAF formats from editorial with associated movie, audio, and timecode 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 & File Referencing
With Autodesk Maya 2011 you can more easily segment, reuse, 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. Other assets enhancements include creation from template, automatic template binding based on a user-defined mapping, and extended black box support.
Professional Camera Tracking
Extract accurate 3D camera and motion data from video and film sequences and insert CG elements seamlessly into a scene using Maya software’s new, advanced matchmoving camera tracking system. A critical tool for leading visual effects production work requiring integration of CG elements with live action, Autodesk® MatchMover™ software provides high-quality 3D camera tracking with easy-to-use automatic tracking capabilities and precision manual controls.
More Rendering Power
Features
Polygon & Subdivision Mesh Modeling
Autodesk Maya provides a production-proven and intuitive toolset for creating and editing polygon meshes, including:
Maya delivers a broad range of specialized tools for keyframe, procedural, and scripted animation, including:
Download FAQ here (pdf)
One Maya. More Value Autodesk® Maya® software offers artists an end-to-end creative workflow with comprehensive tools for 3D animation, modeling, simulation, visual effects, rendering, matchmoving, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. All these capabilities are combined into a single application offering CG artists an exceptional value. Newly available for the Mac OS® X 64-bit operating system, Maya 2011 delivers a revitalized user interface, enhanced viewport interaction, new 3D editorial capabilities, integrated color management, and improved character animation.
What's New with Maya 2011
Enhanced User Interface
Autodesk Maya 2011 3D animation software provides a consistent, enhanced user experience across all supported platforms—Mac OS® X, Windows® 32- and 64-bit, and Linux® 64-bit operating systems—with a revitalized user interface that offers a fresh new look, dockable UI elements, more flexible editors, and an updated color chooser and file browser. In addition, a new node browser within Hypershade displays nodes by category in a searchable tree list and provides easier access to frequently used nodes.
Accelerated Skinning Workflow
With Autodesk Maya 2011 you can create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations in less time. New skinning tools and workflows include 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.
Nondestructive Live Retargeting
Reuse, correct, and enhance motion-capture and other animation data faster and more easily with a new nondestructive retargeting workflow that 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 rebake.
New Solutions for 3D Editorial
Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual movie-making production with new 3D Editorial capabilities in Autodesk Maya 2011. The new Camera Sequencer enables you to layout and manage multiple camera shots in a single animation sequence. Start laying out shots in Maya, or import an EDL in Apple® Final Cut Pro® XML or AAF formats from editorial with associated movie, audio, and timecode 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 & File Referencing
With Autodesk Maya 2011 you can more easily segment, reuse, 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. Other assets enhancements include creation from template, automatic template binding based on a user-defined mapping, and extended black box support.
Professional Camera Tracking
Extract accurate 3D camera and motion data from video and film sequences and insert CG elements seamlessly into a scene using Maya software’s new, advanced matchmoving camera tracking system. A critical tool for leading visual effects production work requiring integration of CG elements with live action, Autodesk® MatchMover™ software provides high-quality 3D camera tracking with easy-to-use automatic tracking capabilities and precision manual controls.
More Rendering Power
Features
Polygon & Subdivision Mesh Modeling
Autodesk Maya provides a production-proven and intuitive toolset for creating and editing polygon meshes, including:
- Bridge, poke, cut, wedge, bevel, extrude, chamfer vertex, extrude along a curve, mirror cut, edge loop, edge ring, slide edge, and pick-walk tools
- The ability to preview or render smoothly subdivided meshes while editing a lower-resolution proxy or cage; subdivision meshes support variable creasing
- True soft selection, preselection highlighting, and camera-based selection culling
- Polygon reduction, data cleanup, blind data tagging, and level-of-detail tools for scene optimization
- The ability to transfer UV, color-per-vertex, and vertex position information between polygon meshes of differing topologies
Maya delivers a broad range of specialized tools for keyframe, procedural, and scripted animation, including:
- A highly controllable, nondestructive animation layering system that works with any attribute
- Trax Nonlinear Animation Editor for nondestructive mixing, blending, and editing of poses and animation clips
- A comprehensive assortment of generalized constraints
- A powerful and intuitive Set Driven Key tool that enables you to keyframe complex relationships between animated parameters
- Graph and Dope Sheet Editors that provide more powerful, precise function curves to control how animated attributes change over time
- A full set of deformers for static modeling or animation
- Realistic, high-speed simulation of multiple rigid objects. Objects can be connected with constraints such as nails, hinges, barriers, pins, and springs.
- Accurate, fast simulation of flexible objects allows for the rapid creation of secondary motion effects, such as muscle jiggle and floppy hats.
Maya nParticles and Fields
For 32-bit Autodesk Maya 2011
- Maya nParticles gives you an intuitive, efficient workflow for simulating a wide range of complex 3D effects, including liquids, clouds, smoke, spray, and dust; nParticles can be created with a choice of dynamic and rendering behaviors, such as water and cloud, making initial setup faster and easier.
- The Liquid Simulation functionality gives you an intuitive method to create effects such as pouring liquids and sloshing liquids in containers. Specify the incompressibility and viscosity of the particles, as well as how much they are permitted to overlap.
- Maya nParticles can collide with other nParticles, enabling them to accumulate within volumes, as well as filling a mesh with nParticles to do effects such as objects disintegrating.
- Bidirectional interaction with nCloth enables particles to affect cloth, and cloth to affect particles simultaneously, allowing complex effects to be easily simulated.
- nParticles can use a range of nConstraints, including Transform, Component to Component, Point to Surface, Slide on Surface, and Force Fields, providing an extra degree of control without the need to write complex expressions.
- Integrated particle effects can be controlled by forces based on real-world physics such as gravity, vortex, air, and turbulence, or by deformers and textures.
- A built-in ramp widget allows for easy and intuitive mapping of various shading attributes such as Radius, Color, Opacity, Incandescence over time (or over age, radius, speed).
- Integrated, with expression-based control over particle attributes, motion, and dynamics.
- Geometry instancing allows for the placement of individual objects, a sequence of objects, or an array of different objects onto a particle system.
- Enables you to quickly transform any polygon mesh model (open or closed meshes) into a Maya nCloth object. Other than clothing, you can create things like deformable plastics and metals as well as inflatable objects such as balloons.
- You can manipulate cloth attributes like bend, stretch, shear, dent, and tear with the easy-to-use Maya Artisan brush-based interface.
- Supports making 3D objects stiff, viscous, or flowing, and as tightly or loosely woven as you desire.
- Support for cloth-on-cloth simulations—such as a cape over a jacket or a shirt over pants—with believable influences and collisions.
- Topology-independent constraints can be used to fit a garment to the contours of a character; influence how the Maya nCloth settles on a character; control how the Maya nCloth moves during animation; or attach buttons, tear cloth, and merge different Maya nCloth objects.
- Simulations are cached in the unified caching framework, so multiple simulations can be edited in the Trax timeline and blended together to achieve results not typically possible from a single simulation.
- Support for self-collisions means highly realistic results without the self-interpenetration and implosion errors that other cloth systems frequently exhibit.
- Standard Maya dynamics forces or the integrated Maya Nucleus physics forces can be used to automatically animate Maya nCloth.
- Bidirectional interaction with nParticles enables cloth to affect particles, and particles to affect cloth simultaneously, allowing complex effects to be easily simulated.
- Realistic hair presets are available, including pigtail, bun, curls, dreadlocks, and highlights, and you can transfer hair from one character to another.
- Constraints allow for the simulation of effects, such as ponytails and hair clips.
- Built-in curl and braid attributes make intricate styles easy to achieve per follicle or over larger areas.
- Self-collision between clumps makes the realistic simulation of hair/ character interaction possible.
- The hair system can be used to make a NURBS curve dynamic, for a wide range of dynamic effects such as ropes, chains, and dynamic lofted surfaces, as well to create advanced character rigs using dynamic-spline inverse kinematics (IK).
- Multiple types of fur can be designed on each surface—for example, a head surface can have body fur, eyelashes, and whiskers.
- Base and tip colors can be mapped using procedurals or file textures to create such effects as random leopard spots, or precisely placed tiger stripes.
- Clumping controls can be used to create natural looks such as wet, matted, or dirty fur.
- Attractor system enables fur movement to be keyframed or to react to dynamic forces within Maya: dynamic curves can be used as attractors.
- Animated file texture sequences can be used on an attribute to create complex changes over time.
- Paint—Retouch images and mattes. Work with multiple layers, reveals, clones, blend modes, and custom brushes. See your painted results immediately in-context with your composition and get your effects work finished faster. Painted frames are automatically shared and usable by Maya Composite collaborators, even on remote workstations.
- 3D Control - Reaction—the 3D compositing super tool—and the animation editors help you to create your compositions with speed and precision. The unique Maya Composite gestural user interface paradigm helps streamline the process of manipulating elements within the 3D environment. Relevant information and common commands are quickly accessible in the curve and track editors, streamlining the animation process.
- Interoperability—Automatically generate and update compositions based on Render Layer and Render Pass setups provided by Autodesk Maya. Create 32-bit OpenEXR images in Maya and then easily bring them in and manipulate them within Maya Composite for realistic color and lighting details.
- Image processing—Quickly and precisely control the look of your image with a wide range of effects and workflow tools, including warping and lens distortion, dust removal, filters, grain/degrain, and slate tools.
- Data management—Effectively manage your project data. Maya Composite features efficient archiving of media and composition files for backup, offline, and near-line storage. Intelligent dependency tracking allows compositions to be restored with alternative paths, giving you flexibility in managing storage and workstation resources. Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path support enables you to access files and directories across your network. A hierarchical bookmarking system makes links to footage, projects, and compositions easy to save and access.
- Color correction—The histogram and Photo Lab interactive HDR color correctors, along with a host of color management tools, help give you better control over exposure settings as well as shadow and highlight details—so you can work with images more efficiently.
- Keying and rotoscoping—Get more precise keying results, more quickly. The intelligently designed Maya Composite keying toolset, including the Keyer Super Tool, combines sophisticated keying technology with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
- Advanced 2D tracking—High-speed, interactive tracking technology enables fast, smooth image stabilization and matching of elements to moving objects.
- High-quality renders—Create unsurpassed 2D and 3D renders using the Maya Composite renderer, with its proprietary Jinc filter. Support for network rendering and the Autodesk® Backburner™ render management system helps in efficiency when it comes time to render.
- Smart collaboration—Collaborate with confidence. The Maya Composite file-based data model, including versioning functionality, enables you to keep track of multiple iterations of a file; plus, the software can be set up to notify team members working simultaneously on linked compositions within a project when updates are made by another user.
- Extensibility—Work the way you want. Support for the OpenFX application programming interface (API) and integrated Python® scripting language enables you to customize and extend Maya Composite to fit into your pipeline.
- Autodesk® MatchMover™ delivers industry-leading 3D camera tracking, and is now available with Maya 2010.
- Push-Button Matchmoving: provides the most advanced automatic 3D tracking on the market; this easy-to-use feature can be used with supervised tracking to handle complex shots.
- Using this toolset, you can extract accurate 3D camera and motion data from video and film sequences.
- Advanced Matchmoving: delivers precision manual controls that enable you to create a unique 3D reference system for your camera and 3D content.
- Advanced workflows can be based on filtering and fine tuning of tracking parameters, tracking from multiple footage and stills, tracking of moving objects, 3D-constrained tracking, and 3D tracking constrained by motion control data.
- 3D set layout supports combined MatchMover/ Autodesk® ImageModeler™ workflows: for image-based design visualizations.
- The Maya Embedded Language and Python® scripting language offers scripting of Maya features.
- Scripting enables you to create custom windows and scripts, or reconfigure the Maya user interface, to make a custom application.
- Commands can be issued from an HTML page; scripts can be recognized by an external web browser via the Maya web browser plug-in.
- Python is highly extensible, with a collection of third-party tools and modules available.
- Python bindings to the OpenMaya API give programmers an alternate language for plug-in development.
- The Maya Python modules can be imported into an external stand-alone Python interpreter for batch processing.
- Render layers enable multiple passes from any of the four Maya renderers, as well as post processes, such as Maya Fur and Maya Paint Effects, to be managed in a single scene.
- A system of per-layer and per-object overrides means that objects can have different shading and rendering attributes on different layers.
- Workflow helps streamline rendering by preparing renders for optimal output to the compositor of choice—or Photoshop (PSD) or Flash (SWFT) output—with objects and elements isolated in individual layers.
- Presets allow for easy set up of commonly used user-defined passes, such as specularity, shadows, and normal maps.
- Depth and motion vector data can be stored separately and used in post processes.
- Artists can generate a composition from within Maya based on the render layers in the scene, helping to streamline the workflow and allow for multiple iterations.
- The Render Pass toolset offers precise control over render output.
- Adobe Illustrator Object Nodes support both beveling and curves.
- Maintain Construction History enables Adobe® Illustrator® files to be substituted or edited while maintaining the bevel history.
For 32-bit Autodesk Maya 2011
- Microsoft® Windows Vista® Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional (SP3 or higher), Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional, or Apple® Mac OS® X 10.6.2 operating system
- Windows: Intel® Pentium® 4 or higher, AMD Athlon™ 64, AMD Opteron™ processor, AMD Phenom™ processor
- Mac® computer: Intel-based processor
- 2 GB RAM
- 4 GB free hard drive space
- Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® graphics card
- Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
- DVD-ROM drive
- Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
- 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
- HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 7.0 or higher, Apple® Safari®, or Mozilla® Firefox® web browser
- Microsoft Windows Vista Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, Apple Mac OS X 10.6.2, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.4 WS, or Fedora™ 11 operating system
- Windows and Linux: Intel® EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, or AMD Phenom™ processor
- Mac® computer: Intel-based processor
- 2 GB RAM
- 4 GB free hard drive space
- Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
- Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
- DVD-ROM drive
- Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
- 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
- HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, Apple Safari, or Mozilla Firefox web browser
Information source: usa.autodesk.com
