Coming soon means the end of the month. Here's what we have in store for folks on Subscription:

Maya Subscription Advantage Pack for 2011 Top Features and Benefits

Substance Procedural Textures

Choose from a library of up to 75 new Substance procedural textures, and edit or animate parameters to help achieve a vast range of looks. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny memory and disk space footprint, making them ideal for exporting to games engines via the Allegorithmic Substance Air middleware offering; integration is currently provided for Unreal® Engine 3 game engine, Emergent's Gamebryo® game engine, and Unity. Alternatively, textures can be baked to bitmaps for use with certain renderers. Some examples are: BrickWall, with adjustable brick distribution, surface aging, and mortar thickness; ModernConcrete, in which artists can adjust the age of the concrete revealing to varying degrees the rebar beneath; and Eye, with parameters for pupil size, eye color, and extent of veining.

Craft Animation Tools

Now it’s significantly easier to create believable, complex camera movements that mimic real-world set-ups, with four new camera rigs from the Craft Director Studio™ animation tool. Rigs can be connected to a joystick or certain other input devices, enabling the animator to intuitively drive the camera while automatically recording a path in real time. The rigs also enable animators to more easily stabilize turbulent or unnatural camera movements; to add subtle movement to an existing animated camera in order to mimic hand-held shakiness or more violent disturbances such as an earthquake; and to smoothly transition or instantly cut between different camera views and settings. Also included are four pre-rigged models— two cars, and two airplanes—that can be used to more quickly pre-visualize scenes or to help create in-game cinematics. Used alone or in conjunction with the camera rigs, these rigs offer a faster and easier way to simulate complex vehicle motion, including terrain recognition.

FX Assets

Select from a range of easy-to-use effects and assign them to an object as easily as assigning a shader. Building on the Maya Asset framework and simulation toolsets, these FX Assets present only the relevant editable and animatable attributes to the artist, helping them more easily customize the effect to their requirements.

Motion Capture Samples

Leverage the new motion retargeting capabilities of Maya 2011 with up to 70 new motion capture samples that provide useful starting points to help more quickly create pre-visualizations and develop animations. Utilizing the Autodesk® FBX® 2011 asset exchange format, the samples can be shared between Maya 2011, 3ds Max 2011, Softimage 2011, Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2011 software and certain other applications that support FBX.

MotionBuilder Subscription Advantage Pack for 2011 Top Features and Benefits

Live Video In

Valuable reference video from a motion capture session can now be streamed directly into MotionBuilder and recorded simultaneously with the motion capture data on a per-take basis. Formerly handled as a separate process, this helps directors and their creative teams to better visualize the end results and to troubleshoot errors, helping reduce the need for downstream changes and rework.

Real-Time Curve Filtering

Even the slightest noise or jitter from an input device can be distracting for the audience of a real-time performance animation. Now a low-pass filter can be applied in real-time, helping smooth out noise before the data in the input signal is used to create the on-screen rendering—so viewers can enjoy a more compelling character performance.

Audio Per Take

Dealing with multiple animation variations that each have associated audio is now significantly easier, with the new ability to handle separate audio files per take. This enables animators to switch between multiple takes and automatically change the audio file to match—previously a time-consuming manual process.

Motion Path Up Vector

Cameras and certain other objects attached to a motion path can now be assigned an up vector. This helps prevent accidental flipping, and matches the behavior in Autodesk® Maya® 2011 software.