Maya 8 Features

General Enhancements
Autodesk® Maya® 8 software has been optimized to provide superior performance across many areas. Enhancements to existing tools and new features make formerly time-consuming modeling and texturing tasks easier and more streamlined. This video highlights a few examples such as a new Transfer Polygon Attributes feature that allows you to transfer UV, color per vertex (CPV), and vertex position information between polygon meshes of different topologies. Also, you now have the option of overriding Maya viewports with a propriety or third-party plug-in renderer. For example, a Microsoft® Direct3D® or game engine render can be view directly in the Maya viewport.

Polygon Tools and Workflows
Maximize productivity for the most common tasks with new and improved tools in Maya 8 software: polygon bridge, multiple edge loop insertion, enhanced add divisions, and new workflows such as the ability to interactively create, position, and scale primitives in a single operation.

Rendering
Maya 8 software delivers new rendering functionality focused on streamlining the rendering workflow and improving pipeline efficiency. You can now preview your mental ray® shaders directly on objects, in the interactive view. Render times can be reduced by recycling the images from the layers that do not need to be re-rendered. Also new in Maya 8, all Maya render layer information can be exported to Autodesk® Toxik™ collaborative software with versioning capabilities for final assembly and tweaking. The Maya image plane now supports real-time, z-depth compositing in the camera viewport.

Geometry Caching
You can now cache deformations on polygon, NURBS (including curves), and subdivision surface geometry, allowing for faster playback and rendering of scenes. Caches can be edited and blended in the Trax Editor, letting you blend the results of various vertex animations together in order to form a new animation. When used with FBX® interoperability format, geometry caching allows you to exchange final animation data between other applications such as Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® MotionBuilder™ 3D animation software products.