CGSociety :: Product Review
Sean Wagstaff
8 December, 2005 |
Maya 7 is driven through its final paces under the guise of Alias, in this ‘New Features’ review.
October’s stunning announcement that Alias would be acquired by arch-rival Autodesk (the developer of 3ds Max) rippled through the world of 3D production. As face-to-face rivals, Maya and 3ds Max have played an important game of one-upsmanship for most of the past decade. With the sale by a Canadian school teacher’s pension fund (for $180 million or so) expected to be complete in about four months, it’s likely that this Maya 7 review is the last I’ll be writing about Alias-branded products.
Maya has always been a well-designed product, but it has suffered from a slow feature-revision cycle and a feature request list that far outstrips the company’s ability to keep pace. Version 6.5 continued in this trend, with most of the changes relating to performance and fixes to long-standing problems, and few major new features to crow about. Maya 7, however, has a list of new features as long as your leg. Most significant in this release is integration of the full-body IK solver borrowed from Kaydara’s Motionbuilder (Kaydara was recently acquired by Alias); a host of workflow management improvements, including much better file referencing; a completely new and very welcome approach to render layers and render management; some significant modeling and texturing improvements; and even a new Toon Shader. Maya 7 also offers a gaggle of enhancements to the user interface, and lots and lots of nips, tucks and tweaks in almost every other aspect of the program. Because there is so much new to look at, this review primarily looks at the changes in Maya 7 from 6.5, rather than the application as a whole.
|
 |
 |
Project management and rendering are two of the biggest winners in this release. Although it’s not a sexy feature, Render Layers get my vote as the most important change in Maya 7. While previous versions allowed you to render a scene in passes, this release has moved that functionality into a new Render Layers palette. The interface is similar to Maya’s display layers, but Render Layers contain groups of objects, lights, shaders and rendering overrides. Each render layer is rendered as a separate pass and its images are stored in their own directory. In earlier versions of Maya shots would often require saving and rendering multiple versions of a file, with separate render settings, or objects textured with different shaders. For example, it was common to set up separate files for beauty passes, and holdout passes, where the same objects would have normal diffuse shading, and black matte shading, respectively. In Maya 7, you simply add the same object to two different render layers, and assign a different shader to it in each layer. At render time, each layer is rendered using the “override” shader assigned in that layer. Similarly, overrides can be created for rendering options. For example, one layer can be rendered using Mental Ray, while a particle pass might be rendered using Maya’s Hardware Renderer. Inexplicably, you can’t override the camera.
|
|
The new Render Layers are a huge productivity improver. On my first job with Maya 7, I had to render over 160,000 frames, each using three to six render layers. This new feature alone spared me from saving, managing and rendering hundreds of separate project files, a big consideration with 300Mb scene files.
I found some problems in render layers, however. It’s very easy to end up with different shaders assigned to the same object in different Render Layers and not know it, and there’s no quick way, short of writing MEL scripts, to identify objects with more than one shader assigned, or to know which shader is active on which layer.
|
|
 |
 |
On the surface, the changes to Maya are subtle. Most obvious is a navigation widget that lives in the corner of perspective windows and lets you quickly switch to standard views by clicking on its handles. (This reveals another nice change in Maya – transitions between views are animated, which helps to orient you to the new POV.) In a similar vein, a new Universal Manipulator allows you to rotate, scale and translate an object using a bounding cage marked with intuitive graphical handles at its corners. My favorite part of this tool is the capability to click on a numeric label and change a transformation value directly, without going into the Channel Box or Attribute Editor. It’s also a great time saver that you can now quickly switch between the pivot point, world space, local space, and the geometric center, as the basis for transformations.
|
 |
Other nice interface changes include mirroring in the Move tool, which lets you deform one side of a symmetrical object and have the other side deform proportionately. And snapping is now available in all tools that use the standard Manipulator. For example, when extruding a face of a polygonal object it can now be snapped incrementally. And illustrative of the many tiny, but very useful changes, is that you can now snap to the centers of polygonal faces.
|
|
