By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, May 17, 2004 - 6:37:00
Pros: 0

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Alias released Maya 6 just a couple of weeks ago. Maya 6 is an important upgrade with many new and improved features. Examples of these important features include the newly designed non-linear Trax editor, new scene segmentation and file referencing features and support for more file formats, including PNG and DDS.

Maya 6 comes in two flavours as usual: Maya Complete which is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, and Maya Unlimited which is available for IRIX, Linux, and Windows. The Ultimate version still not being available for Mac OS X is somewhat incomprehensible given the fact that Panther now runs on one of the fastest hardware platforms (Power Mac G5), but is a fact of life.

One of the major improvements in Maya 6 is the Trax Editor. The Trax Editor is now central to animation within Maya. It should give animators new ways to edit, combine, and repurpose various types of animation data. Trax has received a complete interface overhaul. Interaction for clip grouping, scaling, trimming, cycling and blending has improved.

Tracks can be locked, or disabled, removing its effect on the overall animation. Animating against a sound track is now simpler than before because sound clips can be matched visually with the animation clip, and played.

New in Maya 6 is a time-saving Motion Retargeting tool, a feature that helps you repurpose existing motion data. With this tool, existing animation data (motion capture and other) can be given a new destination by transferring the data between skeletons as joint rotations. The skeletons can be of like or non-like hierarchies and proportions.

Motion capture and other types of motion data can be adapted and reused on different characters, even if they differ completely. The motion library can therefore be expanded in use dramatically. Motion Redirection is another tool to reuse existing motion data. With it, you can give existing motion data a new direction. A character walking in a straight line can be easily reworked to form a character that is walking in cirlces or climbing a mountain.

Another repurposing tool is the character mapper. This tool allows you to repurpose animation clips. It lets you map animation curves from one character to another by establishing a relationship between a source character and a target character's joints or attributes.

Photoshop integration

Photoshop files (version 6.0 and higher) are now supported, facilitating simple painting workflows. You can use any existing Photoshop file as a texture in Maya, convert a PSD file with layer sets to a Layered Texture in Maya to help visualize and work with the individual layer sets, create a layered PSD file from within Maya in order to paint multiple channels (color, bump, specular, etc.) separately on an object, in Adobe Photoshop, and use Maya's 3D Paint Tool to sketch out an object to act as guidelines for the areas on the Photoshop image that should be painted.

At anytime, you can modify a PSD file in Photoshop, then refresh the image to see the modifications immediately. The PSD File node lets you use a PSD file as a texture in Maya. It is similar to Maya's File texture node, but it's for PSD files only.

By default, Maya links a PSD file to the composite image, which is included in the PSD file. Maya can only read image and vector layers, so when the PSD node is linked to Photoshop's composite image (it is by default), Maya supports anything that Photoshop supports, including layer styles, adjustment layers, text, and so on. However, you can choose to link the PSD node to a layer set instead, in which case layer styles and adjustment layers are not supported and should be rasterized before the PSD file is read in Maya.

PSD files with layer sets facilitate iterative painting. Photoshop users can add, modify, or delete any number of layers within a layer set while maintaining the connections in Maya. Maya users can convert a PSD node to a Layered Texture, and see the layer sets as multiple PSD File Textures connected to a layered texture in Hypershade.

Improved integration features

On Windows, Mac OS X and Linux only, you can now use a Web browser within a Maya panel to browse through and view Web content, or to issue MEL commands from an HTML page. The Web browser can be used simply for displaying documentation, but since it can execute MEL commands it can also be used to build user interfaces or interactive tutorials, or to manage assets and scene date. This will facilitate the integration of intranet infrastructure tools directly into Maya.

Maya now supports the use of scrolling wheels on mouse input devices. This feature allows you to dolly in perspective or orthographic views, zoom in the Hypershade, Graph Editor, Dope Sheet, Render View, Paint Effects, and other windows and editors, and scroll in the Script Editor and Console window.

In Maya 6 you can excercise control over which references, at all levels in the hierarchy, you want to load with your file upon opening. A new concept—selective load settings—refers to the state of reference loading when the top-level file of a series of referenced files is saved. This improves file opening performance in large scenes. By saving out the selective load settings with a given file, or building a set before opening the file, you can cut down on the time it takes to open the file by only loading reference files of interest.

There are two new File menu items: "View Image" and "View Sequence". These allow you to view an image or image sequence from within Maya. When you select one of these menu items, a file browser appears and you can select the image or image sequence to view. The image or image sequence is then displayed in FCheck.

There are numerous other new features in Maya 6, of which perhaps the Soft Modification Tool is among the most spectacular. it lets you push and pull geometry as a sculptor would push and pull on a piece of clay. By default, the amount of deformation is greatest at the center of the push/pull, and gradually falls off further away from the center. However, you can control the falloff of the deformation to create various types of effects.

Maya 6 is full of such new and improved features, and therefore is probably one of the most important upgrades ever. It's a shame, though, that the Unlimited version still isn't available to Mac OS X users, because there has been a lot of improvement in the areas of hair and fur as well. Still, this upgrade is an absolute must-have.