Maya 2022.3 released with improved USD, Rigging, modifiers and more

Autodesk has announced the release of Maya 2022.3. New features include:

• Make Live support is now available for the Relax, Smear, Pinch, Grab, and Smooth sculpting brushes. Users can now use a separate surface as a constraint while sculpting. The Multi-Cut tool now displays a visual percentage when creating full edge loop cuts, allowing users to make more accurate custom cuts on meshes.
• USD support is improved with the addition of Channel Box support, allowing you to edit the attributes of USD prims. Point instance selection, point snapping performance, support for import and export of lights, and many evaluation updates and bug fixes have also been included.
• The Jiggle deformer has been added to the list of GPU-supported deformers and now also works with Cached Playback, resulting in better deformation performance.
• The Morph deformer has been extended with new options and modes for retargeting and mirroring. Deformer Weight Visualization has been upgraded to make it easier to see if geometry or components are selected.
• Bifrost has been updated to the most recent version with a new set of node icons that help demonstrate what nodes do visually, an added value display that shows parameters that can be read directly on nodes, enhancements to geometry nodes, and performance improvements.
• Arnold updated to the most recent release adding several enhancements to imagers such as Intel’s Open Image Denoiser, a new LUT mode to the imager_tonemap, and a new imager to control brightness and colour curves. Users can now execute multiple parallel render sessions on the CPU, have multiple outputs for shader nodes, and write AOVs to multiple formats and to multi-part EXR files.
• The Substance plugin has been updated. Substance 2.2.1 includes the newest Substance Engine 8.3.0, with support for assets from Substance 3D Designer, Substance 3D Assets, and Substance 3D Sampler. 

Find out more about this release on the Maya blog.