Maya 8 review

When Autodesk acquired Maya's developer Alias, there were fears that it would kill off Maya and roll its features into their own 3D application, the Windows-only 3D Studio MAX. But AD quickly assured customers that this will not be the case.

The first thing to note about Maya 8 is that it's not a Universal Binary - it runs under Rosetta emulation on Intel Macs. Autodesk claims that this was because no professional-level Intel Mac hardware was available during development. Certainly, you wouldn't want to run Maya on anything less than a Mac Pro, and the Intel developer boxes wouldn't have cut it. As for timing, AD say that Intel Macs will be supported in 'future releases'. Also, while the Linux and Windows version get 64-bit specific versions, allowing them to access far larger amounts of memory and bringing about rendering precision improvements, no such version is offered for the Mac.

Following problems with installation and licensing on previous versions, we took the precaution of installing Maya 8 in the root (superuser) account. The install did throw up some spurious and cryptic error dialogs with scary-looking 'Terminate' buttons on them, but after dismissing these, the installation proceeded smoothly. Running under Rosetta on a Mac Pro, the performance was a little sluggish, but this was partly compensated by Maya's ever-excellent OpenGL speed.

Nothing much appears to have changed. The modelling Menu set is now split into two: Polygons and Surfaces, presumably because Maya's Menu bar is getting a little overcrowded. There's not much difference in the toolset apart from the new Bridge tool, which creates a tube or sheet of polys to link two other meshes. The options are Linear (a straight join), Blend (for more flowing joins) and Blend & Curve. The curve is a graph profile that allows you to continuously vary the profile in real time along its length. There is also the option to create multiple offset edge loops on a poly mesh using a single command. Finally - at last - creating primitives is now a click-and-drag affair to set initial parameters like size and position.

Possibly the biggest upgrade in this release, and the one that will make the biggest difference to workflow is the Transfer Polygon Attributes function. This allows artists to move information (such as poly maps and UV co-ordinates) from one mesh to another, rather than having to re-import and re-assign attributes by hand. The big deal here is that this info can be moved between meshes that have different topologies or different numbers of polys. This makes it relatively simple to share one set of maps and UVs between meshes representing the same character, but at different levels of detail. This is useful in game design where different level-of-detail models are swapped in and out according the player's viewpoint or the power of the machine.

In the above scenario, surface attributes will still have to be tweaked and there are a few new tools to make this easier. In the UV editor, overlapping or font-to-back flipped UVs are flagged in colour, making them much easier to spot and avoiding a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between test renders and UV editor. However, a lot of the changes, not just here, but throughout the program, seem to be concerned with altering the layout of the interface. Whether this is to more closely align it with the way that 3D Studio MAX does things, we can't say. But change for change's sake could impact on the workflow of artists who are usedto things being the way they were before.