Maya 2015 new features
Dynamics & effects
Bifrost procedural effects platform
Create photorealistic, dynamic simulation and rendering of liquids.
- Developed from Naiad technology, fully integrated into Maya, and refined for ease-of-use.
- Preview results in the Viewport 2.0 hardware-accelerated display, and render them in the NVIDIA mental ray renderer.
- Choose whether to mesh liquids with a new particle surfacer, or render voxels directly.
- Export particles, voxels, and meshes to a native file format, as well as to selected industry-standard file formats.
XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator
Generate curves, spheres, and custom geometry on the surface of polygon meshes to create fur, feathers, foliage, and more.
- Create and groom hair, fur, and feathers on characters.
- Populate large landscapes with grass, foliage, trees, rocks, and debris trails.
- Handle large amounts of instanced data that would slow down a system if loaded in memory.
- Preview the rendered effect interactively in Viewport 2.0.
- Control the appearance and behavior of primitives by setting attributes, painting maps, creating expressions, or using the included XGroom interactive grooming toolset.
- Control long hair by creating guide hairs.
Bullet Physics
Create large-scale, highly realistic dynamic and kinematic simulations with the enhanced open-source Bullet plug-in delivered in conjunction with AMD.
- Simulate both soft and rigid bodies in a single system.
- Take advantage of continuous 3D collision detection.
- Create compound collision shapes from multiple meshes.
- Produce better collisions with concave shapes.
- Integrates with Maya Forces.
- Supports rigid sets for increased scalability.
3D animation
Geodesic Voxel Binding
Produce high-quality, production-ready bound characters in less time, with an innovative new skinning method.
- Quickly bind complex geometry to skeletons.
- Handle non-watertight geometry, and meshes with non-manifold or overlapping components.
- Resulting weights are compatible with existing skinning methods in Maya and suitable for use in game engines.
3D modeling
Streamlined retopology toolset
More easily optimize meshes for cleaner deformations and better performance.
- The Quad Draw tool integrates a Relax and Tweak feature with Soft Selection, and an interactive Edge Extend tool.
- Optimize meshes for cleaner deformations and better performance.
Polygon modeling
Enjoy more reliable and faster polygon modeling with better Booleans, enhanced beveling, and deeper integration of the Modeling Toolkit.
- Get an efficient library for faster and more reliable Boolean operations on polygon geometry.
- Produce better bevels with an extended Bevel tool.
- Streamline polygon modeling workflows with a more deeply integrated Modeling Toolkit.
OpenSubdiv support
Get faster draw performance, displacement map visualization, and RenderMan matching for subdivision surfaces with support for OpenSubdiv libraries.
- Open-sourced by Pixar and incorporating technology from Microsoft Research.
- Use both parallel CPU and GPU architectures for faster draw performance when deforming.
- Enable interactive visualization of displacement maps without the need to render.
- Closely match subdivision surfaces generated in Pixar's RenderMan renderer.
UV toolset
Quickly create and edit complex UV meshes, and get faster results when working with tiled texture sequences.
- Multithreaded unfolding algorithm for faster and easier high-quality results.
- Ability to quickly toggle checkerboard and compression shaders to help visualize UV distribution.
- New selection workflows for increased productivity.
- Support for loading, visualizing, and rendering UDIM and UV tagged texture sequences, for a more streamlined workflow with Mudbox 3D digital sculpting and texture painting software and certain other applications.
3D rendering & imaging
Color management (Extension 1)*
Preserve creative intent throughout lighting and rendering workflows with a sophisticated new color management system.
- Use the simple linear workflow provided out of the box, or customize the system to suit your color pipeline.
- Enjoy consistent color-safe handling of imagery across The Foundry's NUKE software, Photoshop, Autodesk Creative Finishing solutions, and certain other applications.
- Take advantage of support for EXR floating-point data and for the Autodesk Color Management component (SynColor), the OpenColorIO open source project, and the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES).
- Implement or access third-party support for the Maya Color Management system in certain other renderers and applications that work with Maya through the included SDK (Software Development Kit).
*This feature is exclusively available as part of the Maya 2015 Extension 1 release to customers on active Maintenance or Desktop Subscription.
ShaderFX New
Easily create advanced HLSL, GLSL, and CgFX viewport shaders with the ShaderFX real-time visual shader editor.
- Create shader networks by connecting different nodes together using a click-drag workflow.
- Select floating-point values, mathematical operations, texture maps, normal maps, and color nodes.
- Visualize materials in real time.
- Drill down into the inner workings of each basic node.
Ptex support in mental ray
Render Ptex texture files in mental ray for Maya.
Eliminate the need to create and assign UVs to meshes by creating Ptex files in Mudbox 2015 3D digital sculpting and texture painting software or certain other texture painting applications and rendering them in mental ray for Maya.
Maya 2015 System Requirements:
Operating System
- 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
- FedoraTM 14 Linux operating system
- CentOS 6.2 Linux operating system
Browser
- Apple® Safari® web browser
- Google ChromeTM web browser
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer® web browser
- Mozilla® Firefox® web browser
Hardware
- CPU 64-bit Intel® or AMD® multi-core processor
- Graphics Hardware Refer to the Recommended Hardware wizard for a detailed list of recommended systems and graphics cards
- RAM 4 GB of RAM (8GB recommended)
- Disk Space 4GB of free disk space for install
- Pointing Device Three-button mouse
Autodesk's Maya 2015 3D animationsoftware, modeling, simulation, rendering, and compositing software offers a comprehensive creative feature set on a highly extensible production platform.
Maya provides high-end character and effects toolsets along with increased productivity for modeling, texturing, and shader creation tasks.