Autodesk® Maya® software delivers practical toolsets to help facilities working in 3D animation, visual effects, game design and post production create and maintain the modern, open pipelines needed to address today’s challenging projects. Powerful new toolsets for dynamic simulation, animation, and rendering offer new levels of creativity, while everyday productivity enhancements help artists finish faster and stay on budget. In addition, the Open Data initiative introduced in Maya offers tools to help facilitate parallel workflows and better complexity handling. Artists will also enjoy the interoperability between Maya and other Autodesk 3D software, such as Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® Softimage® – this experience is also greatly enhanced within the Autodesk® Maya® Entertainment Creation Suite environment, as well as the comprehensive Autodesk® Entertainment Creation Suite Ultimate.

Developed from the industry-renowned Naiad and fully integrated into Maya, Bifrost enables photorealistic simulation and rendering of liquids. Choose whether to mesh liquids with a new particle surface or render vorxels directly; particles, vorxels and meshes can be to native or industry-standard file formats.

Used by Walt Disney animation Studios and Pixar animation Studios, now artists can access the XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator technology in Maya. Generate curves, spheres and custom geometry on the surface of polygon meshes to facilitate the creation of hair, fur and feathers on characters and to quickly fill large landscapes with grass, trees or other foliage, rocks and debris trails.

This is a new skinning method for binding geometry to joint skeletons giving artists the ability to generate production-ready results in far less time than before. Created by Autodesk software engineers, this tool is unlike any other skinning method, can handle complex geometry, is compatible with existing skinning methods in Maya and is suitable for use in game engines.

Create advanced HLSL, GLSL, and CgFX viewport shaders with the ShaderFX real-time shader editor; connect different nodes together using an intuitive click-drag workflow. Materials can be visualised in real-time in the Viewport 2.0 and more technical artists can dig deeper into the workings of each basic node in advanced mode.

XTFX have a solid track record of implementing Maya, configuring enterprise host platforms and supporting animation pipelines for customers large and small.  To find out more about Maya, contact the XTFX team