Detailed Maya Entertainment Creation Suite Features

Detailed Maya 2011 Features

Enhanced User Interface
Enjoy a consistent, enhanced user experience on all supported platforms with an updated user interface that offers a fresh new look, dockable UI elements, more flexible editors, and a new color chooser and file browser.

Accelerated Skinning Workflow
Create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations in less time, with new skinning tools and workflows: 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.

Non-Destructive Live Retargeting
More quickly and easily reuse, correct, and enhance motion-capture and certain other animation data with a new non-destructive retargeting workflow which 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 re-bake.

64-bit Support for Mac OS X
Mac OS X users can access considerably more memory to handle larger and more complex scenes with the new 64-bit executable.

3D Editorial
Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual movie-making production with new 3D Editorial capabilities in Maya. The new Camera Sequencer enables artists to layout and manage multiple camera shots in a single animation sequence. Start laying out shots in Maya, or import an EDL from editorial with associated movie, audio, and time code 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 and File Referencing
More easily segment, re-use, 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.

Color Management
Make better decisions and preserve creative intent throughout the rendering pipeline by working within the context of the final color space in which images can be viewed. A working color profile can be set globally and overridden on individual textures and render passes. With new 32-bit support in the Render View, display images through LUTs, and control Contrast, Exposure, Tone Mapping, and Gamma. Initial support is through mental ray® for Maya renderer, with a robust API to enable other renderers to take advantage of the system.

Qt User Interface Toolkit
Maya now uses the Qt user interface, resulting in a number of advantages for technical users. For example, users can more easily create interface components for proprietary tools with Qt Designer and load them directly into Maya.

Large Scene Performance
A new interactive viewport significantly improves display frame rates. Level editors and other users working with large scenes and many textures can achieve frame rates several times faster than possible with previous versions of Maya by enabling this display method.

Vector Paint in Maya Composite
Perform complex rotoscoping operations such as removing or replacing elements from live action plates using the new vector paint option in Maya Composite.

Detailed MotionBuilder 2011 Features

GPU-Calculated Skin and Blendshape Deformers
Using the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) to help calculate skinning and blendshape deformations yields significantly faster performance, providing a more interactive in-viewport experience and much faster playback.

Animation Layers Updates
An expanded animation layer toolset offers new capabilities to rename, mute, solo, and merge layers, and blend them with variable weighting. In addition to providing more control and greater flexibility in MotionBuilder, the toolset now more closely matches the behavior of that in Maya, helping improve interoperability.

New Material Handling Method
A new method for handling materials that is aligned with the FBX material model provides better consistency with content creation applications and games engines, increasing ease-of-use and helping improve interoperability.

Integrated Nvidia PhysX Plug-in
Rigid-body and ragdoll simulations can now be calculated using the Nvidia^® PhysX^® plug-in, a feature of particular benefit to games customers using the PhysX middleware.

Python Batch Tool
The batch tool helps eliminate repetitive tasks by enabling a set of processes to be automatically applied to multiple files, has been rewritten in Python^™ programming language, enabling it to be more readily customized or extended.

Native FBX 2011 Support
MotionBuilder now supports the most recent version of Autodesk^® FBX^® asset exchange technology, helping improve interoperability and provide support for more features.

Story Tool Re-architecture
Artists working on pre-visualization, or laying out storyboards or multiple cameras, will appreciate improvements to the stability and performance of the Story Tool as a result of under-the-hood work to make it part of the core MotionBuilder engine.

Motion Capture on Bones
Enhancements to the MotionBuilder Open Reality^® SDK enable developers to bypass the Actor solve to directly access data on the character’s bones.

Enhanced SDK Documentation
Consolidated documentation and new examples help new users to become familiar with the MotionBuilder SDK.

Perforce Support
A new plug-in provides support for users of Perforce asset management systems.

Detailed Mudbox 2011 Features

Posing Toolset
Quickly and easily deform and pose models to change their design, access occluded regions, present them for approval, or prepare them for map extraction. With tools for quickly creating and editing joints, and the ability to import weighted skeletons from Maya 2011, Autodesk^® 3ds Max^® 2011, or Autodesk^® Softimage^® 2011 software.

Image Adjustment Brushes
Selectively edit and manipulate existing paint and photo-based layers with new image adjustment brushes: Blur, Dodge, Burn, Contrast, Sponge, Hue, Hue Shift, and Invert. These brushes enable existing image data under the brush to be altered or enhanced—for example, color-corrected, brightened, or softened.

Vector Displacements
Extract maps using a new Vector Displacement method and represent displacements that do not simply follow the normal: for example, forms with appendages, undercuts, folds, and bulges, such as a human ear. Once extracted, maps can be used to help recreate detail at render time in supported renderers, or as brush stamps or stencils in Mudbox to sculpt complex detail onto meshes in a single stroke. Artists can build up a library of commonly-used forms and reuse them on models.

Paint in UV Space in the 3D View
While painting in 3D space helps with precise placement of detail on the model, in some cases it is easier to paint textures in a 2D format. An innovative new feature in Mudbox unfolds a 3D model into a 2D representation, based on its UVs, but retains the benefits of working in a true 3D environment such as the ability to analyze lighting and material qualities. Beyond painting, sculpting on the unfolded mesh with tools such as Grab and Smooth enables basic editing of the 3D model’s UVs.

Enhanced Interoperability with Maya, 3ds Max, and Softimage
No need to navigate through multiple file browsers and remember path and filenames: now models and scene information transfer between Mudbox 2011 and Maya 2011 with a single click. In addition, Displacement and Normal maps extracted in Mudbox are now associated with models when an Autodesk^® FBX^® 2011 file is exported, helping to eliminate the need to manually reassemble the asset when brought into in another program.

Blend Modes for Paint Layers
Control how paint layers composite together to help create a final image by selecting from one of the new blend modes: Multiply, Screen, Add, or Overlay. These non-destructive settings help artists to experiment freely when constructing complex multi-layered textures by offering the flexibility to change the blend mode.

Multi-Layer PSD File Exchange with Photoshop
Import and export multiple layers in PSD files to leverage the Adobe Photoshop toolset on more demanding scenes and projects. Now artists can edit layers in the context of the final composite, helping preserve continuity in look and workflow when moving between Mudbox and Photoshop.

High-Quality Turntables
Quickly and easily create high-quality 360 degree turntable movie files directly in Mudbox.

Session Recording
Record a sculpting and painting session in Mudbox and export the recording to a movie. Recorded sessions can be used to share workflows, teach techniques, and showcase talent.

Superior Performance
Work with assets of greater complexity through significant performance increases for scenes with multiple objects.

Enhanced Color Chooser
Store and recall recently-used colors and user-defined palettes, and work in a choice of color spaces using the same new color chooser as Maya 2011.

64-bit Support for Mac OS^® X and Windows^® 7
Mudbox 2011 has new 64-bit executables on Mac^® OS^® X and Windows^® 7 operating systems providing more addressable memory to more easily handle the increasingly detailed models required by today’s challenging productions.

Mudbox In-product Community
Get more out of your Mudbox experience with online community resources accessible directly from the Mudbox application. Artists can select from hundreds of stamps, stencils, base meshes, and tutorials in the Mudbox Library, and share their work with other users for valuable peer review without ever having to leave their work environment.