Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
By GEORGE MAESTRI 3D Modeling/Animation Maya 2011 M aya is probably the most noted 3D application used in television and feature films. It has long been a staple in the animation and special effects industry, and has been used on everything from Hollywood blockbusters, to network tele- vision, to games and product design. Maya 2011 is the latest release and adds a brand-new interface, along with some terrific new char- acter animation, modeling, rendering, and special effects features. Maya is offered in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. For OS X users, Maya is now fully 64-bit compliant, adding a nice boost in speed and memory. In fact, anyone using Maya should seriously consider a 64-bit system—the speed boost is notice- able, and the ability to use memory above 4gb allows for significantly larger scenes to be loaded. Without a doubt, the most noticeable new feature is Maya’s updated interface, which gives the software a whole new look. From an organiza- tion standpoint, most everything is in the same place, but buttons have been softened and the colors changed to a darker hue, making the in- terface more attractive and putting it more in line with other Autodesk Media & Entertainment products. In addition to these cosmetic changes, Maya 2011 has a number of new interface features. One of the nicest is the new color picker, which allows you not only to select colors either using the color wheel or an eyedropper, but also to keep track of the most recent colors you’ve chosen. Menus and UI elements can be docked and undocked more easily, and the new file browser makes it much easier to find your assets. Another simple but effective new feature is a tabbed interface along the right-hand side of the screen that allows you to easily switch between the Attribute Editor and the Channel Box. For modelers, the hands-down best new feature in Maya 2011 is the simple addition of Bezier curves. Tis type of curve uses a handle on each vertex to control tangency and direction, and they would be familiar to anyone using drawing packages, such as Adobe Illustrator, as well as anyone who edits animation curves in Maya’s graph editor. Bezier curves work exactly like Maya’s venerable NURBS curves, and can be used as the basis for any sort of NURBS surface. Personally, I find Bezier curves easier to manage, and one especially handy feature is the ability to create sharp corners with a simple click. Polygonal modelers also get a Maya 2011 $3495 (stand-alone) Autodesk www.autodesk.com few new tools, such as the Spin Edge Tool, which allows you to re-orient edges in a polygonal model with a simple keystroke. Connect Arbitrary Components is quite novel; it allows modelers to draw edges between any number of components, which makes it easy to add detail into a model. My other favorite new modeling tool is Object Level Soft Selection, which is a mouthful to say but a very easy tool to use. To put it simply, the tool allows you to stretch and scale groups of objects without deforming the objects themselves. One pos- Maya 2011’s new Interactive Skin Bind allows for precise control over character skinning. sible use would be in laying out multiple objects in a scene, such as trees in a forest. Using Object Level Soft Selection, you could scale an entire forest without resizing the trees, the result being that the trees would remain the same size, and the only thing that would change would be the density of the forest. Animation Anyone involved in character animation will appreciate the new skin- ning tools in Maya, which work similarly to the Skin modifier in 3ds Max. Te new interactive Skin Bind tool places a capsule-like manipu- lator around each joint in a character’s skeleton. Manipulating the vol- ume of this capsule increases or decreases the effect of the joint on the character’s mesh. Improvements to the Paint Skin Weights tool add an- other level of control, with skin weights now appearing in technicolor rather than the boring black and white of the old versions. Paint Skin Weights also has a number of new functions to fix weights, including the aptly named Weight Hammer, which pounds down stray verti- July 2010 77