Autodesk Maya is now more accessible than ever with a new update that overhauls the user onboarding experience. Whether artists are new to Maya, learning 3D, or getting up to speed with the latest update, Maya features an improved and personalized startup experience, interactive tutorials, and a comprehensive tool for easily navigating the UI.
“Redesigning the Maya user experience has been an ongoing pursuit to help improve onboarding, allowing artists to start creating projects faster than ever,” Trevor Adams, Experience Design Manager at Autodesk. “Our goal is to help users feel oriented in the UI quicker, while learning how to find the essential tools within the first 10 minutes of starting up the program.”
New Maya features include:
Streamlined Onboarding Experience: A personalized startup experience gets artists up and running faster, featuring a new and easily navigable welcome screen that connects artists to learning content, communities, documentation, and recent projects.
New Search Functionality: A new search feature saves artists time by making it easier to find tools, commands, and scene objects. Artists can also now add personalized keywords to tools and commands in the search engine, making it easier to customize workflows.
In-App Interactive Tutorial: A new gamified interactive experience comes pre-loaded in Maya and teaches first-time users the basics of 3D and Maya’s UI, including navigating a scene, and moving, rotating, and scaling objects. Additional tutorials on modeling, animation, lighting, and shading are available for artists to download on AREA. Advanced users can also take advantage of a reusable framework to create customized interactive tutorials to share with new team members, students, and the wider creative community.
Quick Tour Walk-Through: For more advanced users, the new Quick Tour provides a walkthrough of Maya’s most useful concepts and tools in two-minutes. Each step includes a link to detailed documentation, allowing artists to go more in-depth on features as needed.
The latest Maya update is now available as a standalone subscription or with the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection.