Power your creative vision with Maya

3 min read

Defender of Slow loris image courtesy of Olga Dannik

Maya brings new ways for you to channel your creativity with enhanced tools and integrations. New Boolean operations increase workflow productivity, and Vertex Color enhancements give you better visual feedback for objects. Maya also continues to build on its USD integration for a more seamless experience across teams.

Solutions in the Maya 2023.2 Update

Animation Performance Improvements

Maya 2023.2 Update Animation Performance Improvement

Maya brings significant animation performance improvements, especially when animating complex character rigs. This includes enhancements to the Evaluation Manager to help minimize graph rebuilds resulting in reduced lag times. This is most impactful when making frequent visibility changes on your rig. Additional improvements such as GPU Readback will help to better harness GPU evaluation for improved playback performance.

Evaluation Toolkit Updates

Maya 2023.2 Update Evaluation Toolkit Updates showing Evaluation Graph Output
Evaluation Graph Output

Several new features have been added to the Evaluation Toolkit that allow you to diagnose deformer evaluation more easily for complex graphs. This includes new options for improved visual graph output, a new GPU Outliner for more visibility and control over deformer evaluation, and enhancements to the Evaluation HUD for better insight into GPU Override status.

Maya 2023.2 Update Evaluation Toolkit Updates showing GPU Outliner
GPU Outliner

New Graph Editor Tangent Controls

Maya 2023.2 Update New Graph Editor Tangent Controls

New tangent angle and weight input fields have been added to the Graph Editor toolbar. These fields give you precise control over tangents, letting you change angles and weights on multiple selected keys at the same time.

Blue Pencil Improvements

Maya 2023.2 Update Blue Pencil Improvements

Blue Pencil now supports touch sensitivity on tablets. Additionally, with new opacity, size, and hardness falloff ramps, you now have more precise control over Blue Pencil strokes. You can also choose from a collection of useful brush ramp presets or save your own custom brush presets for each of these settings. There are also improvements to interactive performance in addition to performance when saving and opening scenes that contain Blue Pencil drawings.

New Joint Draw Style

Maya 2023.2 Update New Joint Draw Style

This update includes a new draw style called Joint, which has been added to the Joint options. This is useful when working with complex rigs containing multiple child joints in a small area where joint influences can be difficult to see with traditional full bone display.

UVPin, Proximity Pin and skinCluster Improvements

Maya 2023.2 Update UVPin, Proximity Pin and skinCluster Improvements

A new Relative Space Mode option has been added to the UV Pin, Proximity Pin and skinCluster nodes. This prevents double deformation or transformation issues that can occur when an object’s parent is moved and can also solve jitter issues associated with floating point precision errors when animating far from the origin.

Speed up your workflow with a simplified asset and sequence selection process and other updates to maximize efficiency.

Asset Filtering : Easily find Unreal Engine assets and sequences with a new search and filter option. When performing a search, the matching text will be highlighted in the Unreal Engine asset list and sequence list and will be kept as a selection filter. You will be able to filter by asset type for lights, cameras, and static mesh actors.
Animation Sequence Filtering : Select an animation sequence for skeletons faster and more efficiently with updates that only show sequences related to the selected skeleton in the Live Link UI in the sequence list.

Link Settings Saved : Link settings in the Live Link UI now save with your Maya scene. These settings will be reloaded each time your scene is opened and will let assets and sequences be relinked quickly and easily, removing the need to re-set connections every time you reopen a scene.

Additional Camera Attributes Suported : Additional camera attributes are now supported for both Unreal Engines’ Cine Camera Actor and the Camera Actor, syncing properties such as the Aperture, Focal Length and more.

Check out the Unreal Live Link for Maya 2.1 Release Notes for more information.
 
Download the free plugin on the Autodesk App Store.
 
Ask questions, explore topics, or share your knowledge on the Unreal Live Link for Maya Forum.

Maya 2023.2 Update Unreal Live Link for Maya 2.1 showing Asset Filtering
Asset Filtering

Check out the Maya 2023.2 Release Notes for more information.

Learn how customers around the world are using Maya on AREA by Autodesk.