Alias, the 3D company being taken over by Autodesk, released Maya 7 some time ago. I had the chance to get to grasps with the new release and found it to be the best ever.

Maya 7 has many new features and improvements but there are a few that will immediately draw your attention. The first is of course, the capability to use toon shaders. With Maya 7 you can animate in a cartoon-like manner. You can also just model with cartoonesque shading.

The toon shader in Maya 7 is different from toon shaders like those found in Carrara Studio. The latter will create an effect at render time. The effect resembles flat colours somewhat and while Carrara’s shader does a great job at painting in a cartoon-like manner, you don’t have as much control over the result as you have with Maya 7.

In Maya 7, toon shading is just another way of shading and painting. It offers half a dozen shading methods, with some of these resulting in effects which depend on the lighting used in the scene. Maya’s toon shader has just as many controls as any other shader in the program. And this does set the program apart --just as what you would expect of this “Queen of 3D applications”.

The result is also that you need more skill to get to the end-result you want than the level of skill you need with Carrara, for example.

A great new feature in Maya 7 is the Universal Manipulator. It allows you grab and manipulate objects in freestyle mode. There’s a View Compass to help you orientate yourself when using this manipulator.

Another great novelty is the capability to import Illustrator files. If you import art containing art, you can now bevel the lot right inside Maya 7 and benefit from the controls and set of capabilities of Maya, instead of having to do with just the tools in Illustrator CS2.

Maya 7 also comes with roundtrip editing capabilities of Photoshop files for textures and 3D Paint. You can import a Photoshop file, apply it to an object, further paint it with 3D Paint in Maya, and keep all layers intact.

For animators, there’s a huge improvement in the way Maya applies Inverse Kinematics to figurines. It’s now Full Body IK inside Maya itself, based on the MotionBuilder technology.

Hair and fur are more powerful. You can “transplant” hair, and fur now uses dynamic hair curves. Fluids in turbulent motion, like billowing smoke, or ocean storms, appear much more realistic in version 7 than in previous versions.

Finally, mental ray has become a bit faster again, especially when used in a render farm setting.