Autodesk Maya 2015 software adds significant new capabilities to its high-end character and effects toolsets with the Bifrost Procedural Effects Platform for simulating and rendering photorealistic liquids; the XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator for creating hair, fur, feathers, grass, foliage, and certain other instanced data; and an innovative new Geodesic Voxel Binding method for skinning. In addition, support for Pixar’s OpenSubdiv libraries, enhanced polygon modeling tools, and new UV options help accelerate performance and increase artist productivity, while a new node-based visual shader editor offers an artist-friendly way to create and preview complex real-time shaders directly in the viewport.

Top Features & Benefits

Bifrost Procedural Effects Platform

Fully integrated into Maya, Bifrost offers photorealistic simulation and rendering of liquids; results can be previewed interactively in the high-performance Viewport 2.0 hardware-accelerated display, and rendered in the NVIDIA mental ray renderer. Artists can choose whether to mesh liquids with a new particle surfacer, or render the voxels directly. Particles, voxels, and meshes can be exported to a native file format, as well as to selected industry-standard file formats.

XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator

With XGen, artists can generate curves, spheres, and custom geometry on the surface of polygon meshes in order to create and groom hair, fur, and feathers on characters, and quickly populate large landscapes with grass, foliage, trees, rocks, and debris trails. With geometry created procedurally at render time, XGen enables artists to handle large amounts of instanced data that would slow down a system if loaded in memory; the rendered effect can be previewed interactively in the Maya Viewport 2.0 hardware-accelerated display.

Geodesic Voxel Binding

Geodesic Voxel Binding is an innovative new skinning method for binding geometry to joint skeletons that enables artists to produce high-quality production-ready results in less time. Unlike other easy-to-use volumetric skinning methods, Geodesic Voxel Binding can handle complex geometry that is not watertight and can contain non-manifold or overlapping components—as is frequently the case with real-world production meshes.

ShaderFX

Shader networks are created by connecting different nodes together using an intuitive click-drag workflow; artists can select from a powerful array of floating-point values, mathematical operations, texture maps, normal maps, and color nodes. The resulting materials, even those with animated values, can be visualized in real time in Viewport 2.0. An advanced mode enables more technical artists to drill down deeper into the inner workings of each basic node.

OpenSubdiv

The OpenSubdiv libraries open-sourced by Pixar incorporate technology from Microsoft Research, and are designed to take advantage of both parallel CPU and GPU architectures, resulting in dramatically faster draw performance for deforming subdivs. Artists also can visualize displacement maps interactively without the need to render, offering a better WYSIWYG experience that translates to greater productivity and more accurate realization of creative intent for modelers, animators, and look developers.

Enhanced Polygon Modeling

Artists can now more easily retopologize high-resolution meshes for cleaner deformations and better performance with a streamlined workflow that features a new Relax and Tweak feature with Soft Selection in the Quad Draw tool, and a new interactive Edge Extend tool.

Enhanced UV Toolset

Artists can now get better results in less time when creating and editing complex UV meshes, thanks to a new multi-threaded unfolding algorithm; the ability to quickly toggle checkerboard and compression shaders to help visualize UV distribution; and enhanced selection workflows.

Work the Way You Want

Top Reasons to Buy/Upgrade

The Core of a Modern CG Pipeline

With powerful integrated modeling, simulation, animation, rendering, matchmoving* and compositing* capabilities; single-step data exchange with other 3D applications in the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites 2015; and extensive opportunities for customization, studios large and small can build a modern pipeline with Maya at its core.

Stunning Simulations

Maya offers extensive simulation tools for creating high-quality, realistic liquid, fluid, particle, cloth, fur, hair, rigid-body, and soft-body dynamics. Maya Fluid Effects and the Maya Nucleus Unified Simulation Framework—with its Maya nCloth, Maya nParticle, and Maya nHair modules—were engineered by leading research scientists at Autodesk to enable you to create complex effects with multidirectional interactions. In addition, you can use the high-performance open source AMD Bullet Physics engine** to help create advanced rigid-body and soft-body simulations.

Believable Characters

Maya features highly customizable rigging tools, advanced muscle deformation, innovative new Geodesic Voxel Binding, and Autodesk HumanIK full-body inverse kinematics (FBIK). Moreover, with the intuitive Grease Pencil, you can quickly and naturally block out and mark out animation directly within the 3D scene with the ease of traditional 2D animation.

*Feature only available via Autodesk Exchange.
**OpenCL acceleration on Windows and Linux offers additional performance benefits on those platforms.

3D Editorial

Maya offers 3D editorial capabilities with the Camera Sequencer, which features a Sequencer Playlist, support for multi-track audio, and interoperability with certain non-linear editing (NLE) applications. The Camera Sequencer enables you to more precisely manage framing and timing of CG shots and play them back for review.

Performance

Maya is engineered to help handle today’s increasingly complex data sets without slowing down the creative process. It does this through multithreading, algorithmic tuning, sophisticated memory management, GPU optimizations, tools for segmenting scenes, and 64-bit operating systems. In addition, the high-performance Viewport 2.0, together with support for Microsoft DirectX 11 shaders, enables you to interact with your scene in a higher fidelity environment, helping you make better creative decisions in context.

The Open Data Initiative

The Open Data initiative is a targeted set of features and workflows designed to help facilitate data-centric, nonlinear workflows. The ability to read and write the Alembic cache format enables you to distill animated and simulated data into application-independent baked geometry, so that it can be more easily moved between disciplines.

Highly Customizable

Maya offers multiple avenues for customization for companies wishing to integrate 3D tools more tightly into their pipeline, or to more easily add specialized production tools. It was built from the ground up with the Maya Embedded Language (MEL), and also offers Python scripting as well as an extensive, well-documented C++ API.

Easy to Learn

There are numerous resources to address a user’s learning style. Tap into a large online community of 3D professionals and enthusiasts to share information and knowledge.

Make the Most of Your Mac

With Maya, Autodesk Mudbox 2015 and Autodesk Smoke 2015 for Mac OS X software optimized for the Apple 64-bit OS, you can get the most out of your Mac computer.

A Global Community

The extensive Maya online community, including AREA, provides an invaluable resource for students learning the application and artists looking for some advice for a challenging project.

System Requirements

Software

• Microsoft Windows 7 (SP1), Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 Professional Operating System
• Apple Mac OS X 10.8.5 and 10.9.x operating system
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 WS operating system
• Fedora 14 Linux operating system
• CentOS 6.2 Linux operating system

Hardware

• 64-bit Intel or AMD multi-core processor
• Refore to the Recommended Hardware wizard for a detailed list of recommended systems and graphics cards
• 4GB of RAM (8GB Recommended)
• 4GB of free disk space for install
• Three-button mouse

Web Browser

Autodesk recommends the latest version of the following web browsers for access to online supplemental content:

• Apple Safari
• Google Chrome
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox