Autodesk Maya 2013 - Changelog

What's new in Autodesk Maya 2011:

August 20th, 2010

Enhanced User Interface:
· Enjoy a consistent, enhanced user experience on all supported platforms with an updated user interface that offers a fresh new look, dockable UI elements, more flexible editors, and a new color chooser and file browser.

Accelerated Skinning Workflow:
· Create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations in less time, with new skinning tools and workflows: a dual quaternion option for smooth skinning, interactive volume binding, multiple enhancements to the Paint Skin Weights tool, deformer weight mirroring, and a surface falloff mode for the Wrap deformer.

Nondestructive Live Retargeting:
· More quickly and easily reuse, correct, and enhance motion capture and certain other animation data with a new nondestructive retargeting workflow that uses the Autodesk HumanIK (HIK) middleware libraries. Transfer animation from one character to another and adjust retargeting parameters live.

3D Editorial:
· Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual moviemaking production with new 3D editorial capabilities in Maya. Lay out multiple camera shots directly in Maya, or import an edit decision list in Apple Final Cut Pro XML or AAF formats. Then change the timings of shots, create alternate versions, and use Playblast to playback and review.

Enhancements to Assets and File Referencing:
· More easily segment, reuse, and exchange data with or without file referencing. A new option to create assets with transforms (DAG assets) helps streamline the most common workflows with assets. Moreover, data can be exported and imported as offline files to flexibly partition scenes, while reference edits can be imported, exported, and removed without unloading.

Color Management:
· Make better decisions and preserve creative intent throughout the rendering pipeline by working within the context of the final color space in which images
· will be viewed. Initial support is through the mental ray for Maya renderer.

Qt User Interface Toolkit:
· Maya now uses the Qt UI. As a result, you can create interface components for proprietary tools with Qt Designer and load them directly into Maya, while
· the Script Editor offers syntax coloring, automatic indentation, and auto-completion.

Large Scene Performance:
· Achieve significantly faster frame rates with a new interactive viewport display option—especially useful for level editors and others working with large scenes
· and many textures. Texture loading for interactive display is also significantly faster for BMP, JPEG, PNG, and Targa formats.

Vector Paint in Maya Composite:
· Perform complex rotoscoping operations such as removing or replacing elements from live-action plates using the new vector paint option in the Maya Composite functionality. Fully integrated with tracking, paint strokes are animatable and can be used to clone data from another source.

What's new in Autodesk Maya 2009:

November 26th, 2008

General and Performance:
· There are many enhancements in this release that help make you more productive, including Maya Assets, Pre-Selection highlighting, Heat Map Display, Transfer Attribute Values and a host of enhancements to the Maya User Interface.
· In addition, you’ll find significant performance improvements in numerous areas including more multi-threading work and algorithmic speed-ups to boost interactive draw, simulation, and rendering performance for even the heaviest scenes.

Modeling:
· Polygon modelers and texture artists can be much more efficient, thanks to a wide range of new features and workflow enhancements in Maya 2009, including true soft selection, a tweak mode for rapid modifications, new UV layout and unfolding options, and Merge Vertex.

Animation:
· In Maya 2009, you’ll find a powerful new animation layering paradigm built on technology from Autodesk MotionBuilder software. This feature allows artists to create multiple layers of animation non-destructively. The flexible architecture works with any attribute; animation layers can be blended, merged, grouped, and re-ordered, and can override or add to preceding layers.

Rigging:
· A fully updated Maya Muscle toolset provides realistic skin and muscle behavior with secondary motion, collisions, wrinkles, sliding and stickiness all built-in in Maya 2009.

Dynamics and Effects:
· In Maya 2009, you’ll find new Dynamics features like Volume Axis Curve and Volume Trapping.
· In this release you can take advantage of nCaching with Fluid Effects, and enhanced smoothing for fluid to polygon mesh conversions.

nDynamics:
· The Maya Nucleus unified simulation framework gains an innovative new nParticles module, featuring particle to particle collisions, bi-directional interaction with Maya nCloth, and a special method for liquid simulation.
· Also, in Maya 2009, you’ll find new features for nCloth including Force Field Generation attributes and Stickiness. Find all Maya Nucleus help in the new nDynamics guide.

Rendering:
· In Maya 2009, we’ve added a completely updated Render Pass feature set that optimizes integration with compositing packages such as Autodesk Toxik software and supports production-level pipelines.And to help studios capitalize on the trend for stereo 3D films, there is a flexible new stereoscopic camera rig complete with in-viewport stereo viewing.
· In addition, you’ll find many enhancements to IPR, and new features for mental ray for Maya.

Documentation:
· The Maya Help is now faster and more easily searchable than ever before.
· Also, many new tutorials for beginners and advanced users have been added this release.

API:
· The Maya API now includes new classes for Render Passes and User Defined Manipulators, improved documentation and much more.