3D News: Autodesk Announces All New Maya 2019

Autodesk has released its latest version of one of its flagship creative applications—Autodesk Maya 2019. The new release offers dozens of new features including new performance tools and higher quality visuals.

Maya 2019—What’s New

Maya 2019 offers significant updates to this popular 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software, updates that help 3D artists achieve their visions faster and with a more engaging workflow.

Key Takeaways

The new Maya 2019 is dramatically faster at creating animations thanks to a new cached playback mechanism. This reduces the need for time-consuming playblasts to evaluate animation work, helping animators work faster. 

A big new feature of version 2019 is the dramatic speedup in animation playback. This reduces the need for playblasts, creates higher quality 3D previews with Autodesk Arnold render updates in viewport 2.0 and more. There is also improved pipeline integration with more flexible development environment support.

01 – Autodesk Maya 2019i with Arnold rendering updates in the Viewport 2.0.

“The more you can make the technology behave and get out of the artists’ way, the more they can keep their thought process fluid, says Christopher Moore, Technical Program Manager, Blue Sky Studios. “With Cached Playback, animators can iterate more, and they totally love that.””

Key New Features of Maya 2019 include:

• Faster Animation: New cached playback increases animation playback speeds in viewport 2.0, giving animators a more interactive and responsive animating environment to produce better quality animations. It helps reduce the need to produce time-consuming playblasts to evaluate animation work, so animators can work faster.
• Higher Quality Previews Closer to Final Renders: Arnold upgrades improve real-time previews in viewport 2.0, allowing artists to preview higher quality results that are closer to the final Arnold render for better creativity and less wasted time.
• Faster Maya: New performance and stability upgrades help improve daily productivity in a range of areas that most artists will notice in their daily work.
• Refining Animation Data: New filters within the graph editor make it easier to work with motion capture data, including the Butterworth filter and the key reducer to help refine animation curves.
• Rigging Improvements: New updates help make the work of riggers and character TDs easier, including the ability to hide sets from the outliner to streamline scenes, improvements to the bake deformer tool and new methods for saving deformer weights to more easily script rig creation.
• Pipeline Integration Improvements: Development environment updates make it easier for pipeline and tool developers to create, customize and integrate into production pipelines.
• Help for Animators in Training: Sample rigged and animated characters, as well as motion capture samples, make it easier for students to learn and quickly get started animating.

“The new features in Maya 2019 give artists a more responsive working environment so they feel more creatively engaged and can iterate faster to produce better quality,” said – Chris Vienneau, sr. director, Media & Entertainment Products, Autodesk. “Cached Playback is going to reduce the need for playblasts by animators, and Arnold updates take the guesswork out of the equation, by making viewport previews closer to the final Arnold render.”

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