Maya 2019 released
Jan 16, 2019 by CGPress Staff
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Autodesk has announced the release of Maya 2019 with several new features aimed at improving the workflow for animators, increasing performance, and improving viewports. Autodesk highlights the key new features as follows:
- Faster Animation: New cached playback increases animation playback speeds in viewport 2.0, giving animators a more interactive and responsive animating environment to produce better quality animations. It helps reduce the need to produce time-consuming playblasts to evaluate animation work, so animators can work faster.
- Higher Quality Previews Closer to Final Renders: Arnold upgrades improve real-time previews in viewport 2.0, allowing artists to preview higher quality results that are closer to the final Arnold render for better creativity and less wasted time.
- Faster Maya: New performance and stability upgrades help improve daily productivity in a range of areas that most artists will notice in their daily work.
- Refining Animation Data: New filters within the graph editor make it easier to work with motion capture data, including the Butterworth filter and the key reducer to help refine animation curves.
- Rigging Improvements: New updates help make the work of riggers and character TDs easier, including the ability to hide sets from the outliner to streamline scenes, improvements to the bake deformer tool and new methods for saving deformer weights to more easily script rig creation.
- Pipeline Integration Improvements: Development environment updates make it easier for pipeline and tool developers to create, customize and integrate into production pipelines.
- Help for Animators in Training: Sample rigged and animated characters, as well as motion capture samples, make it easier for students to learn and quickly get started animating.
To see specific new features, visit the “What’s new?” section of Maya’s online documentation. In addition to new features, this release fixes a huge number of bugs which you can see listed in the online release notes.
Maya is available for rental at $190 per month or $1505 a year. Maya LT 2019 has also been released with the sample content and viewport performance improvements for $30 per month or $245 a year.
Great release ! Improve what you’re good at.
Now being in 2019 (with Houdini indie and Blender as future competitors) it would be great if they had an indie version. It’s far too expensive for a freelancer.
Stop people comparing Maya and Houdini. They just don’t have the same purpose.
Good luck modeling and animating in Houdini..
Also, Blender is getting better, but they still need, I think, a year or two of improvement before coming any close to Maya. The software cannot handle big scenes efficiently and it’s full of designs flaws here and here (but getting better !).
Not going to compare or bash, but just want to point out that that’s a common misconception. More and more people are actually using Houdini as a full blown DCC package. Modelling tools have come a long way. Not as good as Modo, but definitively on par with for example 3dsMax. And the animation side is at least as good as any other package. We got Houdini at the office last year, and it (unintended) became my main and only package to use over the year. I’ve completed a handful of scenes and animations in it since.
🙂 I was fully using Blender for Hero shots of helicopters in the movie “London has Fallen” (modeling|UVs) each presidential heli was 7.5 mil polys with udim UVs and full topo for the subdivision surfaces – 0 triangles. Could you please stop being smart about other products if you don’t use them. I am tired of people who just open mouth to be smart. Blender is very capable for the modeling and UVs. Maya today is far behind in those areas. btw. I was employee at Alias|wavefront, Alias and after when Autodesk took over. Maya was our love. Its sad reality how software dev. nad new owner degraded such a good product.
What a groundbreaking release! It’s gonna be a game changer! Good work autodesk, always on the bleeding edge!
Keep it up!
Yeah it’s truly a game changer. From Maya to other soft, for many.
you killed me XD
are you kidding? this is the worst Maya release ever
This is exactly what subscription model does. Once you became a hostage, you can not vote with your wallet.
I was sarcastic
This is it? Really? Outside playback cache (which is nice, but far from something ground breaking) what do we have?
Area lights on the viewport?
Two new (silly) curve filters?
“Better pipeline integration” without mentioning what exactly that is? Or is it bug fixes? Or they added one new button?
“Help for animators in training” that’s it for me. That’s the world record of bland talk without any meaning.
And that’s all after the LONGEST delay (and longest release cycle) in Maya history?
Well if you animate all day long, I think it’s an important release. It looks solid.
If you’re freelance with this money you can have Houdini, Substance, Zbrush etc…
But Maya is the king when it comes to character animation. They know it…
I wish competitors could improve this.
I’m not entirely sure about that. Of course, it is used on most BIG studios (old habits I guess), but on the plethora of small and medium ones? What animation “feature” Maya has that no other app has? I can’t think of a single one…
Also, if I animate all day long (I do often), I fail to see one “I must have this” feature in Maya in a long, long, long (long) time.
It’s been 7 years I animated in Maya (animation mentor), but I do remember that it is the workflow that just work, you just animate and it responds, the graph editor was the best I used.
Now with cache, pose editor, morphing, handling of large scenes it must be better.
I’m trying to animate a character in Blender 2.8 and it is far from “responsive”, they say they’re working on it and that it is the next big thing, animation 2020 if I remember. I love Blender, I hope they succeed.
3Ds Max is pretty good for character animation, C4D not so much from my experience.
What software do you enjoy for characters ?
I use whatever gets me the job done, be it Maya (mostly) a bit of Max and really digging into Blender.
I can’t help but feel Maya once got that spot (among animators) because it was indeed very good (and, of course, because of all the free press of people wanting to “make a pixar like animation”).
Fast forward 5 years and I can’t really tell if Maya is rightfully on this place because it’s the best tool for the job or because it’s just the tool people are used to use. For me, the later makes way more sense, specially with an old core, years dragging bugs, broken and unconnected workflows, no real integrated proceduralism…
This only adds if you think they had one year and a HALF in development, and this is ALL they did.
Good points,
I feel they’ll have to adapt, because competition is catching up.
Or maybe they just don’t care, we’ll see.
Maya best for animation.before blender was running for catch maya now maya see blender how great improve and will beat all ,suddenly release new version, dont afraid autodesk just follow blender and see power of opensource
I have to admit that’s a cool motorbike-riding skeleton dude though.
haha, write this please in Youtube comments 🙂
It is something like when one does one hour extensive tutorial for most complex modeling or animating stuff, and the first comment is: “Soundtrack?” 😀
Ha ha. I agree with you of course. I had more critical thoughts about Maya and Autodesk in general but decided to keep it light and breezy.
For once, I had a silly hope, thinking AD was delaying the new release to do real core updates, and was thinking quality over deadline…
Well that proves that this purely mercantile company will never change, they were just late for the annual shitty update actually…
This is interesting. I can not remember a press release about maya major release with so few comments. Not only here, but also in other top level forums and portal.
That’s because this is a dead software already, although industry pretends it isn’t. I cannot see any serious new feature for Maya in last 5 years.
perfect