SIG: Autodesk upgrades VR and 3D animation tools at SIGGRAPH 2016

SIGGRAPH 2016 is underway this week in Anaheim, California, and today Autodesk announced upgrades to its VR capabilities and 3D animation tools for Indie Game Developers at the show.

Always a popular vendor on the show floor at SIGGRAPH, Autodesk today had important update information on key products in Maya LT 2017 and Stingray, it’s new game engine technology that ultimately plays out beyond just the gaming market. (see, Architosh, “Autodesk intros new LIVE visualization environment—viewer for iOS platform,” 25 July 2016)

Maya LT and Stingray

Autodesk has unveiled the latest version of its 3D animation and modeling software for indie game developers (Autodesk Maya LT 2017), as well as Autodesk Stingray 1.4, the newest version of its powerful 3D game engine and real-tim rendering solution.

01 – A screenshot from the latest version of Autodesk Stingray, the new game engine.

One of the most significant updates for Maya LT is the time editor, a new tool which helps indie game developers streamline animation of complex characters. Additional updates include improvements to existing animation tools and a new way to organize the tools and user interface (UI) into customized workspaces.

Autodesk Maya LT 2017 Feature Highlights Include:

• An updated graph editor has many new features including a UI/UX refresh that simplifies day-to-day tasks.
• Shape authoring tool improvements in Maya LT provide artists with more control to create, tweak, and correct animations in a very detailed way.
• Viewport 2.0 improvements facilitate faster selection performance for scenes with large numbers of nodes and scenes containing hidden objects.
• Vertex order transfers and corrections make it easier to work between different game creation tools, without losing data as an asset moves through the pipeline.

Autodesk Stingray 1.4 Additional Features:

• The Stingray 1.4 release offers improved VR capabilities and enhanced connectivity with Maya LT, facilitating a powerful art-to-engine workflow for game developers.
• Improved support for VR platforms includes compatibility with the Oculus Rift SDK v1.3 and the SteamVR SDK v0.9.19.
• Flow scripting for HTC Vive controllers offers a faster and more efficient way to add interactivity to VR experiences, while simplifying the process for designers to create and test their prototypes.
• Unique to Stingray, support for WebGL2 enables developers to test their projects on WebGL2 supported browsers.
• Level sync, with Maya LT, enables artists to link and export entire scenes directly to Stingray. This creates an easier way to build, iterate, review and change game levels and design scenes, without having to manually reproduce layouts in two tools.
• Easier asset share between different Stingray projects further benefits collaborative work environments.
• NavMesh improvements for better AI behavior.
• Edit UV scale and offset values in materials exported from Maya LT allows users to continue edit UV tiling in Stingray.

Maya LT 2017 is available globally via subscription. Subscribers of Maya LT receive access to Stingray 1.4 as part of their subscription. For more information, visit Maya LT or Stingray on Autodesk.com .