Autodesk Media & Entertainment
The entertainment scene never slows down, and Autodesk Media & Entertainment is committed to fuelling your creative fire, streamlining operations, and driving business growth amidst the whirlwind. Reflecting on the past year, you’ve created awesome films, shows, and games with new tools and workflows. Let’s rewind and explore the tech highlights that emerged in 2023.
Openness Grew
In 2023, we further emphasized open tech adoption, like OpenUSD, for enhanced team collaboration. You were introduced to LookdevX, an agnostic material authoring plugin that currently supports the OpenUSD data model natively in Maya. Explore the LookdevX video series to see it in action.
Maya USD and 3ds Max USD got upgrades for smoother cross-software workflows. And OpenPBR, a new open-source shading model from our collaboration with Adobe (under the governance of ASWF through MaterialX) is now available on GitHub, empowering you to create impressive materials shareable across various tools.
Additionally, Open RV is now open source, helping you standardize review and approval workflows.
Character Animation Quickened
We’ve expanded animation capabilities to speed up creation.
- Easily edit animations with Maya’s redesigned Time Slider. The Graph Editor also now offers an enhanced Curve Sculpting toolset for better key management.
- Enjoy faster, lower-memory usage in the Bake Deformer tool, a new Snap Proximity Wrap Bind option, and improved skin clusters for realistic character deformations in Maya.
- Control animations with 3ds Max’s Transform List Controller “Append” and “Assign” options.
Learn more about creating Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 character animation in Maya with Framestore.
And in Sir Wade Neistadt‘s 2023 Maya Animation Challenge, you created electric moments featuring the funky Ash and Boomy. Watch the challenge reel here.
VFX Artists Got a Whole Lot More Toys
This year, Bifrost in Maya got a whole lot bigger, empowering you to make anything from icy blizzards to icing on a cupcake.
- Simulate materials like toothpaste, melted chocolate, foam or icing with MPM Gel. Give it a go in this MPM Gel tutorial.
- Create realistic rubber and elastic materials with MPM Rubber.
- Scatter and simulate with speed by procedurally tagging and manipulating model elements with component tags.
Not a Bifroster just yet? Go from a beginner to a seasoned pro for free with Bifrost Bootcamp.
Modelers Received Powerful Tools
You were introduced to new features so you can achieve high-quality models more quickly.
- Produce complex designs in 3ds Max with the new Conform Modifier. Project objects onto other surfaces using two methods, Shrink Wrap and Volume.
- Boost your productivity with procedural modeling in 3ds Max with the Boolean Modifier. Process operations 35% faster and experience increased support for smoothing groups, specified normals, and explicit normals.
- Create better modeling results more quickly in Maya with several Retopologize updates, including a new version of ReForm and symmetry improvements.
Keelworks was a modeling machine this year too. They unveiled their world-building and character creation techniques with 3ds Max.
Rendering Capabilities Blossomed
Enhanced rendering tools in Arnold allow you to achieve more accurate results.
- Render faster than before with a redesigned GPU renderer, bringing multiple improvements in startup time and rendering speed.
- Access more powerful rendering tools with enhancements to Global Light Sampling. Global Light Sampling improves rendering performance by 2.5x in common lighting scenarios with all types of lights. Additionally, with enhancements to the GPU performance, you can achieve speedups of up to 3.7x in real-life scenes.
- Create higher quality renders with enhanced support for MaterialX Node Definitions, Shaders, Material Bindings, and State Shader nodes.
VFX Finishing Heated Up
Your hub for finishing and VFX workflows was red-hot in 2023. Important updates continued to help you centralize conform, timeline, VFX, publishing, color, and delivery in Flame and deliver more, faster.
- Create, add, and edit subtitles directly in Timeline with new subtitling workflows.
- Increase performance with the shift from OpenGL to Vulkan and Metal frameworks.
- Display clip information in the Player with Metadata Overlay to view metadata rapidly and in-context.
You Reviewed in New Places
This year, you entered Flow Capture (formerly Moxion) Rooms — a new cloud-based collaborative space with built-in live conferencing, chat, and a slew of other features. Plus, Flow Production Tracking (formerly ShotGrid) took studios like WeFX up a notch, helping them transform their creative process by accelerating their project deployment and optimizing their resources.
Boundaries Were Pushed
In November, exciting new workflows were announced for Autodesk Flow, the industry cloud for M&E. Enabled by open standards like OpenUSD and leveraging AI, Flow will connect workflows, people, and tools across the production pipeline to a single source for all assets, files, and feedback, beginning with Flow Production Tracking (formerly ShotGrid) and Flow Capture (formerly Moxion).
Workflows Got Smarter
At AU 2023, you were introduced to Autodesk AI to help you do more with less. By leveraging AI-powered workflows in Autodesk Flow, you will be able to automate repetitive tasks and transform your data into compelling insights. New capabilities like Generative Scheduling in Flow will automate scheduling for productions by managing the constantly shifting variables between teams and budgets.
And with ML-powered keyers in Autodesk Flame and natural language text prompts in private beta for Autodesk Maya, you can already leverage smart tools to iterate quickly, innovate, and deliver high-quality outcomes.
Videos. A lot More Videos.
Discover new and unique content with the new M&E YouTube channel. Series like How I Made It in Maya demonstrate powerful animation, visual effects, and games workflows. As well, previous sessions from events, like the 2023 Vision Series from SIGGRAPH, provide you with behind-the-scenes access to industry insights and workflows. Subscribe here.
And that’s a wrap on 2023. Cheers to an epic year of crafting amazing films, shows, and games together!