Maya Complete 2008

Maya User Interface

Maximize your productivity.

Get unmatched productivity through a combination of performance and workflow features, including marking menus, 3D manipulators, selective display, selection management tools, and unlimited levels of undo.

• Fully editable and animatable construction history allows for extensive modification of modeled data—no need to rebuild models.
• File referencing, scene segmentation and shader organization features enable efficient management of complex scenes with interchangeable levels of detail.
• Scene workflow tools include the ability to position objects along a curve, replace objects within a scene, and convert instances to objects.

Polygon Modeling

Maya® software provides a full complement of sophisticated polygon modeling tools and UV editing tools.

General Polygon Architecture

• Nonmanifold architecture, focused on the details of creating, editing, and texturing polygonal models, includes multiple sets of animatable color-per-vertex (CPV), prelighting, user-defined normals, and normal map generation suitable for games/interactive users.
• A complete set of editing tools, 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.

Polygon Texture Assignment/Editing

• Streamlined workflow for creative texturing—including UV creation and editing, auto-projection and relaxation, interactive lattice and smudge tools, along with quick access to commonly used tools via the UV Texture Editor toolbar.
• Multiple UV sets allow separate texture coordinates for separate texture channels.
• Per-instance UV sets allow a single mesh to be used to represent multiple objects, reducing scene overhead.

Transfer Polygon Attributes

• Enables modelers to transfer UV, color-per-vertex, and vertex position information between polygon meshes of differing topologies, even if they are separated in space or of different proportion/scale.
• Artists can use the paint tool to blend between source and target deformations.

Optimization Tools
Polygon reduction, data cleanup, blind data tagging, and level-of-detail tools enable artists to optimize scenes for interactive display.

NURBS Modeling

Maya® software delivers unparalleled, precision surface-modeling tools.

Precise Spline-Based Curve and Surface Construction Tools
Includes lofting, birail, beveling, extrusion, trim, boundary, offset, Booleans, rounding, square, and many other tools.

Surface Editing and Stitching

• Surfaces can be attached, detached, aligned, stitched together, extended, filleted, or rebuilt with a high degree of control over parameterization and continuity.
• Multiple NURBS patches can be merged into a single polygon mesh.

Subdivision Surface and Polygon Proxy Modeling

Get access to a wide range of versatile subdivision surface tools.

Subdiv Proxy

• Rapid construction of high-resolution polygon meshes: Artists can now preview a smoothed mesh while editing the mesh cage.
• Choice of smoothing techniques provides fine control over the polygon count of the final mesh for rendering or level-of-detail.
• Variable creasing supported on vertices as well as edges for both the Subdiv Proxy and Smooth Mesh preview.

Hierarchical Subdivision Surfaces

• A distinctive hierarchical approach for local refinement allows artists to begin modeling with a simple object and selectively generate increasing levels of detail only where needed.
• Partial and full creasing tools make it easier to construct both rounded, organic forms and hard-edged objects.
• Streamlined workflow for creative texturing, including UV auto-projection tools and UV Snapshot.
• Easy conversion to polygons or NURBS.

General Animation

Maya® software delivers a broad range of specialized tools for keyframe and procedural animation. Playback speed can be clamped to implement accurate frame rate.

General Keyframing
Fast and intuitive controls for keyframing, including cut, copy, and paste, allow animations to be created with ease.

Path Animation

• Animation of an object along a curve or surface with automatic bank, roll, and yaw.
• Editing of motion path or other animation parameters during playback.

Animation Curve Representation

• A choice of Euler and quaternion math options provide accurate results in all situations.
• Animation curves can be templated—to prevent accidental modification.

Graph and Dope Sheet Editors

• Powerful, precise function curves to control how animated attributes change over time.
• Rapid and intuitive global editing of keyframe timing.
• Lattice and fall-off tools aid the manipulation of dense keyframe data such as data from motion capture devices.

Generalized Constraints
A comprehensive assortment of constraints, including parent, point, aim, orient (with animatable offsets), as well as scale, geometry, normal, tangent, and pole vector.

Blend Channels
Multiple animation channels can be mixed with each other or with constraints into a single result.

Procedural Animation
MEL procedures and expressions can be used to create complex animation as an alternative to traditional keyframing.

Set Driven Key

• Complex relationships between animated parameters can be keyframed with this powerful and intuitive tool. Multiple attributes can be controlled with a single slider.

Trax Nonlinear Animation

• Nondestructive mixing and editing of poses and animation clips (including constraints and expressions) with total control over all aspects of motion blending.
• Libraries of performances can be stored and edited.
• Muting and soloing capabilities provide control over each animation sequence in isolation or in the context of other animation.
• Multiple sound tracks can be matched up visually with animation and played back to facilitate character lip-synching and other audio matching requirements.

Animation and Dynamics Muting
Animation on selected channels or key frames may be temporarily disabled to focus on a specific motion.

Ghosting
Animation can be viewed prior to and after the current frame so you can evaluate motion.

Geometry Caching

• Deformations on polygon, NURBS (including curves), and subdivision surface geometry can be cached for faster playback and rendering of scenes, as well as for transfer to other 3D packages such as Autodesk® 3ds Max® software.
• Caches can be edited and blended together in Trax.

Character Animation

Maya® software gives you the tools you need to animate sophisticated digital characters.

Skeletons and Inverse Kinematics (IK)

• Seven built-in IK solvers reduce the time it takes to create high-quality character animation; attributes include joint limits, preferred angles, joint mirroring, etc.
• Spline IK solver allows for the easy animation of skeletal chains, like a character’s spine or tail, and includes easy-to-use twist and roll controls.
• Single chain and lightweight 2-bone solvers are optimized for real-time interactivity.
• Spring IK solver allows for precise control over multi-jointed appendages such as insect legs.

Full Body IK System

• Fast and easy rigging and posing of characters.
• Delivers natural articulation of biped and quadruped models.

Blendable IK/FK System
Smooth blending between IK and FK animation.

Skinning

• Precise control of skin behavior, even in the most challenging areas such as shoulders.
• Smooth Bind Skinning allows geometry to be connected to skeletons so that the character deforms smoothly as joints are moved.
• Substitute Geometry tool allows for easy editing and transferring of skinning information between models.
• Rigid Bind Skinning provides direct manipulation of geometry by individual joints.
• Nondestructive workflow for skin editing capabilities include the ability to insert, move, delete, connect, and disconnect joints on a bound skeleton (no need to rebind after changes have been made).
• Support for multiple bind poses.

Motion Capture with Dense Data Editing and Resampling
Motion capture data can be easily incorporated into and manipulated inside Maya.

Motion Retargeting
Motion capture, or other animation data, applied to one character can be reapplied to an entirely different character, even one with a different skeletal hierarchy.

Motion Redirection
Original direction of existing motion capture, or other animation data, can be changed at any point in time.

Deformers

Manipulate geometry or particles into any desired shape.

Deformation Tools

• Can be used statically for modeling and sculpting.
• Animated deformers can add life to creatures and other objects.
• Includes Lattices, Sculpt Objects, Skin Clusters, Point on Curve Constraints, Blend Shapes, Wires, Wrinkle Tool, Bind/Detach Skin, Flow, Jiggle, and Wrap deformers.
• Soft Modification tool allows for controllable falloff around vertices or points.
• Most deformations work on all supported geometry types, including particles.
• Paintable weights on Clusters, Sculpt Objects, Blend Shapes, Jiggle, and Wires allow you to control the region and extent of the deformation.

Rigid and Soft Body Dynamics

Create effects through the dynamic interaction of geometry, including collisions between rigid and soft bodies.

Rigid-Body Dynamics

• Realistic, high-speed simulation of multiple rigid objects.
• Includes dynamic constraints such as nails, hinges, barriers, pins, and springs.

Soft-Body Dynamics

• Accurate and rapid simulation of flexible objects allows for the rapid creation of secondary motion effects such as muscle jiggle, floppy hats, etc.
• Powerful spring architecture offers precise control of any flexible surface down to the individual spring.

Particles and Fields

Fully integrated particle effects can be controlled by forces based on real-world physics or by deformers.

Extensible Integrated Particle System

• Fully integrated, with expression-based control over particle attributes, motion, and dynamics.
• Wizard enables easy particle sprite setup.
• Direct manipulators provide interactive control of particles, fields, and emitters.
• Particles can be controlled by texture values.
• Geometry instancing allows for the placement of individual objects, a sequence of objects, or an array of different objects onto any particle system.
• Collision events can trigger multiple procedural animation effects.

Volume Controls and Emitters

• Intuitive control of particles via geometric shapes makes it easier to place particles where and when you want them.
• Standard Maya® deformers can be applied and layered—including lattices, clusters, soft modification, and nonlinears—for non-physically realistic effects.

Field Controls

• Field forces—such as gravity, vortex, air, and turbulence—can be applied to rigid bodies, soft bodies, or particle objects.
• Custom fields may be added via the extensive dynamics API.

Clip Effects
Library of ready-made effects such as fire, curve and surface flow, shatter, fireworks, and lightning.

Maya Paint Effects

Ground breaking paint technology for creating amazing natural detail on 2D images (including textures) or 3D objects attached to polygonal and NURBS surfaces.

Powerful Painting Techniques

• Can be used to create animatable effects, such as plants growing, unfurling, or swaying in the wind.
• Artists can define a logotype in oil paint and watch it draw on the screen.
• Game-content artists can paint repeating textures for levels that update right on the model.

Maya Paint Effects Brushes

• More than 500 editable, pressure-sensitive, preset brushes completely integrated within the Maya application.
• Extensive range of traditional painterly brushes, including airbrushes, oil paint, chalk, pastels, pencils, watercolors, wet brushes, and markers.
• Options for a vast range of realistic effects including trees, grass and flowers, realistic hair, eyebrows, and beards.
• Special effects like lightning, clouds, rain, star fields, fireworks, fire, and sparks.
• Mesh brush type creates organic or hard-edged geometry that is convincing even close up. Used with environment reflections it can create looks such as chrome, glass and shiny paint or displacement/ bump mapping.
• Thin Line brush can be used to quickly paint on high-quality hair that can be efficiently rendered.

Brush Attributes

• All brushes can be used in true 3D space (to paint on or between 3D objects in a scene), on a 2D canvas (to create images and textures), or within the 3D Paint tool (to create textures by painting directly on the model).
• Brushes can be blended together to make an infinite range of new, user-customized presets.
• Brushes are fully animatable and have built-in preset dynamics such as turbulence and gravity.
• Brush growth attributes include bend, curl, and twirl.

Convert Maya Paint Effects to Polygons and NURBS
Data can be edited using traditional modeling tools for output to any renderer.

Paint Effects Rendering

• Strokes can be drawn fully rendered during interactive painting, providing immediate feedback.
• Features fast, resolution-independent final rendering that can include 3D cast shadows, depth-of-field, fog effects, and motion blur.

Toon Shader

• Supports a wide range of non-photo-realistic rendering styles for traditional 2D cartoons, comic book-style imagery, Japanese manga / anime, and more.
• Maya Paint Effects brushes can be used on an outline with access to an extensive range of painterly effects as well as line style, placement, and width.
• Near real-time interactive previews.
• Can be rendered in mental ray® for Maya, or the Maya software or hardware renderers.

Maya Artisan

Maya® software gives you a suite of integrated, pressure-sensitive brush tools with built-in mirroring.

Sculpting
Natural brush interface can be used to interactively sculpt polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surfaces.

Paint Selection
Complex selections of components, such as vertices, faces, and edges, can be made without selecting through to the back of the model.

Attribute and Script Painting
Editing smooth skin or soft-body goal weights, painting per vertex color or blind data, adding geometry to the scene, and other complex tasks can be quickly performed.

3D Paint

Paint color, bump, displacement, transparency, and other textures directly on surfaces.

• Integrated texture painting of color, bump, transparency, displacement, and other effects directly onto polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surfaces.
• Can be used with either image-based brush profiles or any Maya Paint Effects brush.
• Brush modes include paint, smear, blur, clone, and erase.
• Automatic conversion of procedural textures and PSD files.

Multiple Rendering Options

Multiple renderers, tightly integrated through a consistent rendering interface, let you create any look from photo-realistic imagery to a simple vector graphic.

Maya Software Renderer

• Hybrid design uses fast, selective ray-tracing for maximum efficiency.
• Multi-threaded, multiprocessor support with built-in memory handling maximizes productivity and provides large scene rendering capabilities.
• Full range of effects, including depth of field, motion blur, soft shadows, and lens flares.
• Advanced attributes, such as light absorbance and chromatic aberration, provide sophisticated, creative options.
• Volumetric materials, such as noise and fog, aid in the creation of environmental effects.
• Ramp Shader effects include glass, stone, cartoon-like shading, X-ray, etc.
• Anisotropic and diffraction shaders available.
• High-quality software particle rendering with a comprehensive assortment of effects—including blob, tube, and cloud rendering—for gas clouds, fire, liquids, etc.

mental ray (3.6 core) for Maya

• User-friendly UI and workflow.
• Advanced photo-realistic lighting features, such as global illumination, caustics, ambient occlusion, blurry reflections and refractions, and motion-blurred particles.
• Custom mental ray® shaders can be used.
• Ships with a number of useful shader presets, including physically accurate sun and sky shaders, a set of architectural shaders for hard-to-realize materials, a round corner shader (softens geometrically precise corners), and more.
• Light baking of shadows and lights, including global illumination and final gather, can be converted to file textures or to color-per-vertex data.
• Image-based lighting allows for the emission of photons, caustics, or direct illumination lights from spherical image maps.
• HDR images can be baked from the mental ray batch bake option.
• Photometric lighting support allows for the use of real-world lighting profiles.
• Ability to directly render Maya Fur, Maya Hair, Maya Fluid Effects and shader glow.
• Photon visualization lets you preview the placement of photons and final gather points in the 3D scene.

mental ray for Maya Satellite

• Contains the same functionality as mental ray® for Maya® software.
• Assists in distributing render jobs over processors located across a network.
• Two licenses free with Maya® Complete, eight with Maya® Unlimited.

Hardware Renderer

• Takes advantage of the ever-increasing power of next-generation graphics cards.
• Generates near-software-quality images at significantly faster render times for broadcast or pre-visualization needs.
• High-quality rendering in the viewport lets you immediately see the results to changes—no need for a separate rendering calculation.
• Support for color-per-vertex in both offline rendering and the interactive viewport.
• Support for DirectX HLSL, CgFX, and ASHLI shaders—includes a user-friendly UI and workflow. Hardware shader API accessible through the OpenMaya API.
• Viewport can be overridden with a third-party or proprietary renderer, such as a game engine.

Vector Renderer

Windows® 32-bit and Mac OS® X on PowerPC® systems only.

• Can be used to turn 3D content into 2D content for the web or print.
• Output to Macromedia Flash® (SWF or SWFT), Adobe® Illustrator® (.ai), SVG, EPS, or bitmap formats.
• Provides a range of non-photo-realistic looks, including hidden-line rendering.

Rendering Controls and Effects

These efficient tools help you set up and evaluate your scene or create popular stylized effects.

IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering)

• Instantaneous editing of color, texture, lights, shadows, glows, motion blur, and many other effects in final-rendered-quality imagery.
• Multi-threaded to maximize productivity and creativity.
• Supported by mental ray for Maya and the Maya software renderer.

HyperShade and Visor

• Can be used to design and edit simple to complex shading networks.
• Visual outliner (Visor) displays libraries of textures and images, or image swatches for easy management and selection.
• Bins allow for sorting and organization of rendering nodes such as materials, textures, and lights.

Universal Rendering

Includes the ability to render on an unlimited number of networked machines of the same operating system (mental ray excepted).

Transfer Maps

• Artists can transfer normal, displacement, diffuse, shaded, ambient occlusion, and custom mental ray shader information between models of differing topologies.
• An HDR image can be baked from the Transfer Map feature.

Integrated Scripting

Two fully integrated scripting languages let script writers and programmers customize, extend, or manipulate Maya® software.

MEL

• Offers full scripting of any Maya software feature—everything can be accessed.
• Artists and technical directors can easily create custom windows and scripts or reconfigure the Maya user interface to make a completely 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.
• A Python® command allows MEL scripts to call Python code. This gives MEL users the option to mix Python scripts with their MEL scripts—a good way to transition into using Python.

Python

• Integrated into Maya at the same level as MEL.
• Higher-level language constructs allow for increased developer productivity and easier maintenance of code.
• Readily available scripting resources and knowledgeable community of users.
• Highly extensible, with a collection of third-party tools and modules available.
• Bindings to the OpenMaya API give programmers an alternative language for plug-in development.
• The Maya Python modules can be imported into an external stand-alone Python interpreter for batch processing.

The OpenMaya API/SDK

This key unlocks the power of the Maya® software architecture for programmers and technical directors.

Direct Access to Maya Software Functionality

• Maya plug-ins and standalone applications that run from the Maya command line can be written using C++.
• Maya scene hierarchy can be traversed with iterators.
• Maya plug-ins can be registered to receive a comprehensive range of Maya messages.
• Maya manipulators and locators can be created.
• New types of Maya objects can be developed, including file translators, hardware shaders, surface shapes and MEL commands.
• Existing Maya objects, such as geometry, lights, shaders, transforms, scene hierarchy, and dependency graph nodes can be queried and modified.
• MEL scripts can be executed from C++.
• The OpenMaya API is available from Python® scripting as well as C++.

Development Resources

• OpenMaya API guide.
• Maya Motion Capture API guide.
• MEL Command reference guide.
• OpenMaya API Class reference documentation: names each OpenMaya API / SDK class and is fully searchable and indexed.
• Source code, project Makefiles and a Wizard on Windows for building examples and generating plug-in templates.

Japanese Localization

Artists have the option to navigate Maya® software, or customize their tools and user interface, using a Japanese UI*.

• UI includes Japanese-language menus, labels, error messages, annotations, heads-up displays, notes, and string attributes.
• Users can switch between the English and Japanese UI by adjusting their language setting between sessions.
• Data compatibility between English and Japanese Maya files promotes collaboration in facilities/on projects where both languages are in use.
• Artists can create 3D text using resident Japanese fonts (also functions with Korean and Chinese fonts).

* Available for Maya® on Windows® and Mac OS® X.

Connectivity and Integration

Maya® software delivers tools for integrating Maya content into the production pipeline.

Adobe Photoshop Integration

• Artists can create shading networks with connections to layers sets in a PSD file and include procedural or 3D painted textures as starting points and UV layouts for reference.
• Render layers can now be rendered to layered PSD files.
• Any PSD file can be used as a texture map and rendered directly in the Maya software and hardware renderers and in mental ray® for Maya®.
• PSD files containing layer sets can be converted into a layered texture within Maya.
• A multi-layered PSD file can be automatically connected to multiple material attributes.

Compositing Integration via Render Layers Functionality

• Allows 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 streamlines 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 setup 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 an Autodesk® Toxik™ software composition from within Maya based on the render layers in the scene, streamlining the workflow and allowing for multiple iterations.

Adobe Illustrator Object Nodes

• Supports both beveling and curves.
• Maintain Construction History enables Illustrator files to be substituted or edited while maintaining the bevel history.

Web Integration
Support for communication between Maya and both Mozilla-based and Internet Explorer® web browsers lets artists create and view interactive web pages, which is an easy way to extend the Maya user interface or manage assets and scene data.

Supported Geometry/Scene Formats*
mayaAscii, mayaBinary, MEL, Autodesk® FBX®, aliasWire (Autodesk® AliasStudio™), IGES, DXF, OBJ, VRML2, MOV (ascii motion), GE2, RTG, OpenFlight, VRML2, mental ray, RIB, Open Inventor2.

Supported Image Formats*
Maya IFF, Maya IFF 16, AVI, Apple® QuickTime®, GIF, Softimage® PIC, Wavefront RLA, BMP, TIFF, TIFF16, SGI®, SGI16, Alias PIX, JPEG, EPS, Cineon^™, Quantel®, Targa®, DDS, PSD, PNG, QuickDraw™, MacPaint®, HDR, OpenEXR, MAP, Sony® PlayStation® TIM, Dassault® Picture, PPM, mental ray® formats (CT, ST, NT, MT, ZT, TT, BIT, CTH)

Supported Vector Formats*
PostScript, EPS, Macromedia® SWF, Swfit3D, Adobe® Illustrator®, SVG.

* Not all formats supported on all platforms. Not all formats supported for both import and export. Some formats applicable to certain renderers only.
 

CAD Data Transfer