Autodesk Maya 2013

Maya nHair
Create stunning, highly realistic hair and other curve-based dynamics with the new Maya® nHair module for the Maya® Nucleus unified simulation framework.

• Create complex simulations with multiple dynamic entities all working together, with the ability to interact bidirectionally with both Maya® nCloth and Maya® nParticles.
• Use a common system of fields, forces, and constraints for all Nucleus modules.

Viewport 2.0 Enhancements
Evaluate your work in a higher fidelity interactive environment in order to make better creative decisions. Viewport 2.0 now offers a more functionally complete high-performance, high-quality viewport, featuring:

• High-quality depth sorting
• Support for image planes and animation ghosting
• The ability to use the same hardware rendering technology to batch render larger-than-screen-size frames, producing high-quality animatics and previsualizations in less time

New Node Editor
Create, edit, and debug node networks more easily with the new Node Editor.

• Choose from three levels of detail.
• Rewire nodes in a more intuitive environment with drag-and-drop connection editing.
• Distinguish different data types at a glance through color coding.

Bullet Physics
Simulate both soft and rigid bodies in a single system, with the high-performance, open source AMD Bullet Physics engine.

• Create highly realistic simulations of cloth, rope, deformable objects, and ragdoll skeletons.
• Take advantage of discrete and continuous 3D collision detection.

*Available on Microsoft® Windows® (64-bit only), Linux®, and Mac OS® X operating systems; OpenCL acceleration on Windows and Linux offers additional performance benefits on those platforms.

Heat Map Skinning
Enjoy a more accurate initial binding of geometry to skeletons in Maya 2013, thanks to a new Heat Map Skinning method that:

• Is better able to assign skin to the intended bone as opposed to an adjacent but unrelated one
• Requires less manual refinement

Trax Clip Matching
Visualize how Trax clips overlap in Maya 2013 to build complete character performances from individual animations.

• Clip Ghosts enable you to view the start and end frames of clips as skeletal wireframes in the 3D view.
• Match clips with the help of these visual cues, or automatically, using a choice of options for translation and rotation.

Alembic Caching

Read and write the Alembic open source computer graphics interchange framework format, initially developed in 2010 by teams from Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd.

• Distill complex animated and simulated data into application-independent baked geometry.
• Reduce the overhead and loss of interactivity associated with transferring fully editable scene data between disciplines.

ATOM Animation Transfer
Transfer animation between characters via the new ATOM (Animation Transfer Object Model) offline file format, in order to repurpose existing animation data as new characters are created.

• ATOM natively supports keyframes, constraints, animation layers, and Set Driven Keys.

File Referencing Workflow Enhancements
More easily segment scenes to work in parallel and better manage complexity, thanks to targeted improvements to both the user interface and the underlying architecture for file referencing.

Graph Editor Enhancements
Enhancements to the Graph Editor include a new interactive Retime tool and a stepped preview mode for pose-to-pose animation.