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Award-winning Autodesk® Maya® software is a powerful, integrated 3D modeling, animation and rendering solution that enables leaders in film and television, game development, design visualization, and education to stay ahead of the game.
Autodesk Maya 2008 software delivers faster, more efficient tools and workflows for creating the stunning, high-resolution characters, environments, and performances that will populate the games consoles, theater screens, and televisions of the future.
New and Enhanced Modeling Tools and Workflows
Maya 2008 introduces considerable performance improvements and a number of new features that will make modeling workflows significantly more efficient. The Maya Mesh Smooth workflow, for instance, has been dramatically streamlined: You can now preview a smoothed mesh while editing the mesh cage—with superb performance, particularly on multiprocessor workstations. Other much-requested workflow enhancements include the ability to position objects along a curve, replace objects within a scene, and convert instances to objects.
Additionally, a new Slide Edge feature—as well as significant enhancements to Booleans, Bevel, Bridge, Reduce, and other tools—let you model more efficiently. Maya 2008 also delivers two new selection management features: X-Ray selection highlighting and the ability to “pick walk” edge loops.
Faster, More Accurate Viewport / Hardware Rendering
Truly WYSIWYG interactive previews are several steps closer now that the Maya hardware rendering engine supports layered textures, multiple UV sets, negative lighting, and object space normal maps. Not only does this improve preview fidelity when using the High Quality renderer in the interactive viewport, it allows a greater range of effects to be rendered to final output using the Maya hardware renderer. Moreover, accelerated draw and selection performance, together with more efficient updating of UI elements, facilitates level editing and speeds overall workflows.
Nondestructive Skin Editing
Animators and animation technical directors usually find it necessary to work iteratively on their rigged characters. Maya 2008 can streamline iterative skinning workflows by enabling you to modify the skeleton of a bound character, without having to rebind it after, thus preserving any work done after the skeleton was bound. This process is supported through new tools for inserting, moving, deleting, connecting, and disconnecting joints on a bound skeleton, as well as support for multiple bind poses.
mental ray 3.6 Core
Maya 2008 uses the latest mental ray® 3.6 core, a release that boasts dramatic performance improvements in the translation of polygon meshes and instances for rendering, as well as for IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering) startup. Additionally, particle types previously supported only in the Maya Hardware renderer can now be rendered in mental ray, eliminating the need to combine outputs from multiple renderers.
go to Autodesk Homepage |
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