Autodesk Maya is a highly professional solution for 3D modeling, animation and rendering in one complete and very powerful package.
It has won several awards for professionalism and power and is one of the leading industry 3D animation packages. One of the reasons for this is that Autodesk Maya offers a huge amount of objects and effects to work on your projects and because Autodesk Maya is based on an open architecture, all your work can be scripted or programmed using a well-documented and comprehensive API (Application Programming Interface) or one of two embedded scripting languages, the Maya Embedded Language (MEL) or Python.
This combination of of openness combined with industry standard 3D visual effects, computer graphics, and character animation tools is more than enough for professional film, television, game development, and design projects.
Although beginners will be completely lost at the beginning, the Autodesk Maya interface is surprisingly well organized for such a huge application and different elements such as dynamics, animation or polygons are directly accessible via tabs. Within these are advanced editing features in fields like rendering, animation and relationships. Finally, the Timeline is at the bottom of the interface and allows you to animate and control the evolution of your modeling project.
If you are new to Autodesk Maya however, there are lots of video tutorials and tips on startups about how to use it. These will teach you a number of things like rotating, keyframe animation, component selection and preview rendering. The Help menu is also full of further tutorials and offers links to extra learning resources.
Note that to get the best out of Autodesk Maya, you do need a three buttoned mouse to complete all of the actions possible. Although Autodesk Maya 2012 isn't a huge change from 2011, it offers plenty of powerful new features and has fixed many of the bugs in the previous release.
Autodesk Maya is a solid 3D modeling application that still keeps setting the industry standards.
Recent changes- Enhanced Viewport 2.0 - high performance renderer for viewport window that allows to work in complex scenes with high FPS value. First appeared in Maya 2011, in Maya 2012 Viewport 2.0 was significantly improved. Now it supports full-screen effects, such as Antialiasing, Motion Blur, Gamma Correction, Depth of Field, Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion. And the most exciting feature: Viewport 2.0 can be used as general Renderer in Maya! Yep, that's it: along with Maya Software, Maya Hardware, mental ray ? Maya Vector now you can use new one - Maya Hardware 2.0, which uses all features of Viewport 2.0. With this renderer high-quality pre-viz pictures even in high resolutions can be rendered in few seconds, using your GPU resources. For example, in following video that demonstrates Viewport 2.0 features, 4096px wide picture was rendered in just 3 seconds!
- Node-Based Render Passes - adds to Maya base functionality of compositing software, allowing to have more controls over rendered image and render passes without need to switch into other application. In general this process is very similar to Shading Networks creation and done inside of Hypershade - it's same nodes, connections, etc. Nice to have such feature in Maya, watch next video for details.
- Editable Motion Trails - this feature allows to edit animation right in viewport window, moving keyframes, scaling tangents and more. In overall it's just a part of Graph Editor's functionality that was translated into viewport. With editable motion trails animation editing will be faster, more effective and convenient.
- Enhanced Sequencer - with this will be possible to change clip order, edit In and Out points, change Camera assignments in new Sequencer Playlist.
- Substance procedural texture - previously available only in Maya Advantage Subscription Pack, in Maya 2012 Substance procedural textures will become available to all Maya users. Substance is a library of 80 procedural textures, including wood, metal, concrete, asphalt and more, many parameters of which can be controlled and changed "on fly" by user. In other words, this textures are created programmatically, unlike the bitmap textures that can be edited only in graphics editor software such as Photoshop. Procedural textures even can be animated, allowing to create different and unique effects. Also they can be exported to classic bitmap file and used as general texture in game engine, for example.
- Craft Animation Tools - 4 new camera rigs for creation of realistic, real-world camera movements.
- Enhanced Graph Editor and HumanIK - added some very interesting new features, including updated Human IK and Characterization Tool ( better watch video below ). HumanIK was unified in MotionBuilder 2012 and Maya 2012 ( previously in Maya it was called FBIK ).
- New Dynamics simulation options - development of Nucleus dynamic simulation system led to new simulation options in Maya 2012, like liquids simulation in Maya Fluids. Also dynamics and physics plugin Digital Molecular Matter ( DMM ) will be integrated into Maya 2012. DMM allows to simulate different kind of materials and their behavior. Plugin can be used for exporting completed simulations to game engines or used inside of Maya. Maya 2012 also features PhysX plugin for acceleration of some physics simulations by GPU resources, and Nvidia's Apex Clothing technology.
- Support for Vector Displacement Map - now in mental ray it's possible to use Vector Displacement Maps, created in Mudbox or other applications, for adding geometry details to low-polygonal models with this maps.
This download is only for the Akami Download Manager which you must use to download the trial.
Pros- Industry standard 3D animation package
- Many objects and animations
- Open Python scripting language
- Lots of video tutorials
- 64 bit support
- Very lengthy installation
- Slow startup
- Hard for beginners
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire