Post Magazine

I 've been using Maya 2009 for quite a while, and there are new features that have immediately made my work life eas- ier. Most notable are the enhancements to render passes and easy access to Mental Ray frame buffers. For example, you can output a render to a single OpenEXR file of your scene but have that file contain all the sepa- rate passes you need for composite work, from shadows to mattes to occlusion. And that's just from one render. Previously, render passes needed to ren- der separately from each other. Maya 2009's new frame buffer workflow extracts the passes during a single render of the entire scene. This is great for efficiency as well as organization and integration into composi- tors such as The Foundr y's Nuke. And al- though this functionality could have been coaxed out of Maya/Mental Ray through custom coding, it's nice to see it in the UI and functional for coding luddites like me. It does represent a depar ture from the Ren- der Layer workflow from before, but it is something fairly quick to pick up and be- come proficient in. And don't let me forget about Mental Ray archiving! This feature of the Mental Ray renderer allows you to place low resolution in- scene proxies for complicated models while you work the scene file. The more complicated model is then loaded only at render time, so you don't have to struggle with large scenes. Again, this is a functionality that has been worked around before by coax- ing the feature out of Maya through some MEL work, however UI integration like this opens the doors for many more people to enjoy working in stupid huge scenes. N I C E A S S E T S A N D M O R E And speaking of huge scenes, Maya 2009 finally incorporates an asset management system, called Maya Assets. Larger facilities typically have their own pipeline worked out that manages such assets; and some turnkey software such as OpenPipeline brought de- tailed asset management to those without the resources to code their own. Maya As- sets will not really change anything for exist- ing set-ups; however, shops or groups that don't already have their own pipeline will benefit from this feature. Scenes are not get- ting any less complicated over time, and de- livery times are evermore unreasonable and shor t. Efficiency is king, and asset manage- ment is the cornerstone to large projects. Maya continues to be a rich toolset for animators, and the effor ts in the large grinding gears of Autodesk continue to show this fact. For example, muscle systems have already been introduced with Maya 2008 Extensions, but are now integrated into Maya 2009, giving animators compre- hensive musculature options when design- ing and rigging their characters. In addition, from the MotionBuilder bag of tricks, Au- todesk has included Animation Layering. Just like Render Layers, Animation Layers allow you to create and edit animation in your scene without destroying any previous work! This is a great feature that at the very least allows animators, and the producers pushing them, to tr y more things without the hassle of new scene files ever y time. What's more, animation from layers can easily be blended or merged together so you can always "split the difference" to sat- isfy a client, if not to lose a little bit of your ar tistic soul in the process. UVs, the bane of my personal existence, have gotten a little easier to deal with in Maya 2009. And while hardcore texture and modeling folks may still turn to software such as Headus to help their UV work, the more general Maya user will find easier un- folding and layout options for their UVs right in the Maya UI, including an interactive mode. Even still, I'll continue to force interns to do my UVs. And a final notable addition to Maya 2009 will make many effects people happy: nPar ticles. Building on the Nucleus system, nPar ticles are the next step in dynamics for Maya since nCloth was introduced. I'm im- pressed by the streamlined workflow nParti- cles now affords me. What used to take sev- eral steps to create with Maya par ticles (in- cluding some expression writing) I can now do with half the steps with nPar ticles. That just makes much more sense to me.The dy- namics under Nucleus seem to run much tighter than before, and the collision abilities amongst all n-based dynamic objects are fantastic. Heck, now you can have self-collid- ing par ticles straight out of the box. This opens the door for a lot of fluid-based ef- fects, as well as an easier workflow. F I N A L T H O U G H T S All in all, Maya 2009 is the next logical step in Maya's upgrade march into the fu- ture. Nothing in par ticular will blow you away; however the doors have been opened wider to more general users and smaller shops in several key areas: rendering, anima- tion and dynamics. By opening the UI to fea- tures like render proxies, asset management, easier par ticle workflows and Mental Ray frame buffers, Autodesk is putting more power in the hands of the little guy, and this is critical in such a competitive market. But is it getting too late? Maya's foothold has been slipping in small studios, giving way to 3DS Max, in particular. It will be interesting to continue to watch how Autodesk leverages the power of XSI and 3DS Max in future Maya features. Some have said if you smack Maya's front-end onto a 3DS Max back-end, you'd have the perfect software, though others would look to XSI for a more modern UI overall. Autodesk, if you're reading this, call me… 56 Post www.postmagazine.com By DARIUSH DERAKHSHANI VFX Supervisor/ Head of CG Radium Los Angeles dariush@koosh3d.com V I T A L S T AT S R E V I E W Autodesk Maya 2009 PRODUCT: Autodesk Maya 2009 WEBSITE: www.autodesk.com PRICING: US $1,995, Maya Complete 2009 (Standalone); US $4,995, Maya Unlimited 2009 (Standalone). · Mental Ray archiving · Maya Assets · nParticles This version of the software puts more power in the hands of the little guy.

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