SAN FRANCISCO — Autodesk (www.autodesk.com) is at SIGGRAPH 2014 in Vancouver with extensions for Maya 2015 and 3DS Max 2015. The update for Autodesk Maya 2015 delivers powerful new production tools designed to help studios build more efficient and productive pipelines. A new color management system offers a color-safe workflow throughout the lighting, rendering and compositing process. New tools also make it easier to share, transfer, and collaborate on data.
Studios can now customize the system to closely match their color pipeline, enabling artists to work across The Foundry's Nuke software, Adobe Photoshop software, Autodesk Creative Finishing solutions, and other applications to help allow for color compatibility throughout the studio pipeline. The new Performance Profiler allows technical directors to gauge, measure, and debug the performance of individual nodes, character rigs, and Maya scenes. Performance Profiler offers a graphical interface that enables performance measurement and graphing for dirty propagation, evaluation, deformations, rendering, Qt events, XGen instancing and Bifrost simulations.
The update includes workflow enhancements designed to make daily tasks easier and more efficient. These include expanded wireframe color choices; a per-menu keyboard shortcut to repeat the last command; object visibility toggling; color coding in the channel box to reflect various key states; performance improvements; and multi-UV tiling support for OpenSubdiv. Enhancements have also been made to the Multi-Cut tool.
Artists can also now create and groom hair, fur, and feathers on characters, and populate large landscapes with grass, foliage, trees, rocks, and debris trails faster and more efficiently, with targeted performance enhancements for the XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator.
Maya 2015 Extension 1 introduces a Python API for the high-performance Viewport 2.0 hardware-accelerated display, offering increased flexibility for viewport customization. The Extension will be available September 10th.
Autodesk 3DS Max 2015 software helps increase overall productivity for artists working with high-resolution assets. Extension 1 adds support for OpenSubdiv, allowing artists to represent subdivision surfaces and visualize their model interactively without the need to render. New Alembic support makes processing complex animated and simulated data more memory efficient and allows artists to view large datasets in the Nitrous Viewport and transfer them to other programs.
Enhancements to the ShaderFX realtime visual shader editor provides expanded shading options and better shader interoperability between 3DS Max, Maya, and Maya LT. With new node patterns — wavelines, voronoi, simplex noise, and brick — as well as a new bump utility node and a searchable node browser, game artists and programmers can create and exchange advanced shaders more easily.
Extension 1 for 3DS Max 2015 is now available.