“We’re not trying to replace ZBrush,” says Vienneau, commenting that the new tools should provide good performance on models up to the low millions of polygons. The toolset is primarily intended for modifying existing geometry – for example, when finalling a model, or for sculpting blendshapes – rather than for creating complex organic models from scratch. The other headline feature in Maya 2016 is the new Mudbox-derived brush-based sculpting toolset. New brush-based sculpting tools for animation workflows “As long as you can understand the constraints system, you can decide necessary to do your work,” says Vienneau. To make it easier to identify bottlenecks, the Performance Profiler introduced in the Maya 2015 Extension 1 release, and shown in the video above, has been updated to make it more accessible to generalist artists. Vienneau comments that this performance increase is “not automagical” and that some traditional workflows, like onion-peeling characters, will have to be redesigned to make the most of GPU acceleration. In addition, intensive tasks like deformations and skinning can now be handled by the GPU, providing a further 2x improvement in performance when working with complex characters. The new architecture gives “good performance” with rigs of up to “TV quality”, with Vienneau citing a typical 3x improvement in playback frame rate, rising to 12x on certain scenes. The changes should cut background loading times for geometry and textures, but the most significant benefits lie in the improvments to animation playback brought about by faster evaluation of character rigs. Vienneau says that during development of the new evaluation mode, “80 to 90 per cent” of customer-submitted production scenes could be multithreaded. Maya 2016 harnesses that unused processing capacity properly, with the new Parallel evaluation mode attempting to multithread by default when parsing the Maya scene graph. “It’s no secret that Maya didn’t use a lot of the cores and that you didn’t really need a multicore machine to run the software,” says Vienneau. In terms of user experience, one of the most significant changes in Maya 2016 is the improvement in viewport performance brought about by more efficient use of CPU cores and of the GPU. Improved viewport performance for complex character rigs
HOW TO INSTALL MENTAL RAY FOR MAYA 2016 UPDATE
The update improves viewport performance, particularly for animation playback adds a new brush-based sculpting toolset, a new Delta Mush deformer and a PBR shader and extends the XGen and Bifrost toolsets.ĬG Channel spoke exclusively to Autodesk director of media and entertainment Chris Vienneau about the new features, and about ‘Project H’ – Autodesk’s ongoing R&D program to “humanise” Maya’s UI and workflows. Autodesk has unveiled Maya 2016, the latest update to its industry-standard modelling, animation and rendering software, at NAB 2015, alongside new versions of 3ds Max, Mudbox, MotionBuilder and Flame.
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