Industry News – Alias/Wavefront Announces Maya 4
Enhanced Ease of Use
Managing the workspace is now accomplished in one click using the customizable panel layouts and toolbar controls. Object placement is faster using the new lasso select, and incremental rotate, snapping and alignment tool. Quick access to the expanded Paint Effects brushes and the new shader library gives users a quick, efficient method of launching into production. Beyond UI, enhanced context sensitive help and Instant Maya books with easy-to-follow examples will prove invaluable to new and intermediate users.
Improvements in Rendering
Optimizations include selective use of the Intel Optimizing Compiler which has resulted in an average performance gain of between 5% and 10% on Pentium(R) 3 platforms. For ray tracing, subdivision surfaces and particles in heavier scenes, improvements average 15%. On the Pentium 4, the average performance gain for rendering increases to 15-20%. Workflow enhancements include an improved hypershade, pre-render optimization and automatic alpha for transparency on file and layered textures. Enhancements to bump mapping, texture filtering, and tessellation provide notable advances in image quality. Render passes have also been expanded for improved compositing integration.
Advances in Animation
New enhancements to the Trax non-linear motion editing technology include time warping, character merging, drag and drop and character set editing. New character animation features include easy FK/IK switching, quaternion-based IK, motion trails and ghosting along with a powerful new Jiggle Deformer which automatically creates secondary “character fat/muscle wobble” animation without dynamics.
Enhanced Brush-based Technologies
The Maya Paint Effects technology has been streamlined and enhanced with multi-processor support for painting and rendering, new auto-paint functionality for filling large areas with ease, and 35 new preset brushes to compliment the existing 400. Alias|Wavefront’s true 3D paint technology has now been incorporated into Maya and integrated with Maya Paint Effects so that any Paint Effects brush can be used for 3D Paint. Enhancements have also been made to Maya’s pioneer brush-based interface, Artisan. Maya 4 introduces a completely new architecture — one no longer dependent on hardware overlays, thereby allowing users to choose from a broader selection of graphics cards. This new architecture also allows for attribute and 3D painting of subdivision surfaces, world-space reflection and image-based brush profiles.
Games Related Features
Advances in the area of polygon texture mapping and editing such as independently animatable color per vertex, Straighten UV Border, and UV Snapshot, along with overall UV texture editor improvements.
Pricing and Availability
Maya Complete 4 will be priced at $7,500 (US) and include modeling, rendering, animation, dynamics, Artisan, Paint Effects and MEL, an open interface for programming and scripting. Maya Unlimited 4 will be $16,000 (US) and includes Maya Fur, Maya Cloth and Advanced Modeling features. Maya Builder 4 will be priced at $2,995 and include polygon modeling, texturing and animation capabilities for level editors, games tool programmers, and web applications. (Prices are indicated in US funds and will vary outside the US.)
