What s New in Maya 4.5? | Maya 4.5 Fundamentals

What's New in Maya 4.5?

A large amount of the work you do in Maya is moving, rotating, and scaling things in 3D space. New features in this area include special new tools for aligning and snapping objects that will make it much easier to accomplish relative positioning of scene objects:

Align tool You can quickly and interactively align any number of objects of any type with the Align tool. It offers min/max/center alignments, as well as an opposite edge alignment for any axis. The tool is totally graphical; you don't need to think about left and right in XYZ space.

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The Align tool will not work in Component mode, but will work on any scene element ”lights, curves, and so on.
Snap Together tool Like the Align tool, the Snap Together tool is completely visual. After activating the tool, an arrow will appear to indicate the point that will touch the second object. Next, click on the surface of the second object, and a dotted line will indicate the pending movement while you adjust this second target point.
Discrete Move, Rotate, and Scale When the move, rotate, and scale icons in the toolbox are double-clicked, the tool settings appear; here you will find a new option for discrete snapping. This allows the object to snap in increments as you adjust it. The increments may start at zero, or you can enable the relative option to cause the transform to start the increments based on the object's current transform.
Polygonal Snap Below the discrete move settings, the new polygonal snap options appear. You can select a polygonal object and make it "live" with the Make Live button, and then other objects will snap to either the vertices or face centers when moved.
New marking menus for component selections Maya has a built-in set of marking menus for editing the components of polygons, NURBS, or Sub-Ds. In all cases, using Ctrl-right click brings up the new marking menus, which offer options for expansion or contraction of the current selection, or conversion of one type of component to another. This allows you to select a set of vertices, for example, and then convert this selection to the group of faces encompassed by the vertices.
Node notes in Attribute Editor Now appearing at the bottom of the Attribute Editor is a notes area. Each node of a scene can have unique notes. This can be invaluable for group work, sharing files with friends , or just keeping track of scene development as you go.
Presets in Attribute Editor You can build a set of presets for any node and later load them or even blend them with the current settings. You can use this button to save the current settings as a preset, edit presets for this node type, or select a preset and either load or blend it at 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 90%.
New display features Maya's 3D viewports can exhibit some new features as well. If you need to call attention to a specific object by name , you can use annotated labels. This lets you have a floating text label pointing at something in all 3D views. Use Create Annotation for this feature. Wireframes may now display in a pseudo-antialiased mode. This is in the panel's Shading pull-down and is called smooth wireframe. Another new panel menu feature is Use No Lights ”something that might be helpful with the new Ramp shader materials.
New polygon-editing tools New polygon-editing tools such as poly cut, poly poke, poly wedge, and poly edit by painting allow you to make fast edits in a single step to your polygonal models. Cut allows you to make a linear slice across any selection of polygons, with the option to discard polygons from one side. Wedge allows for easy rounded extrusions from a face, where one edge of the face acts like a hinge. Poke will add a vertex to the center of a polygon, connecting all the polygon's edges to the vertex as triangles . All of these polygon-editing features will prove helpful for modeling with the smooth proxy approach, described later and employed in Chapter 7, "Modeling with Polygons."
New NURBS modeling tools Maya 4.5 sports an integrated "bevel plus" feature for beveled NURBS objects, which is particularly helpful for logo creation.
Smooth Proxy This feature allows for fast setup of polygon mesh creation via a smoothed object that is controlled by a lower-resolution but easier-to-edit mesh. This technique is explored in Chapter 7 of this book. The smoothed mesh can now use either Linear or Exponential smoothing to allow more modeling flexibility. The Exponential and Linear smoothing algorithms both smooth equally, but they offer different controls for the resulting topology. For example, Exponential has an option to maintain soft and hard edges, while Linear has options to better control the number of resulting faces.
New animation features Maya 4.5 adds new marking menus for adjusting tangents or editing keys. For dynamics, a new rigid body hinge constraint has been added that will rotate on its axis when torque is applied. This allows for superior dynamics simulation when your hinge is moving or bouncing at some point in the simulation. The old hinge constraint is now called "Directional Hinge." Maya 4.5 also adds a function called Mirror Joint for easier character construction because most jointed characters are vertically symmetrical. In addition, Maya 4.5 adds new minor features to Trax and the Graph Editor.
Lighting New volume lights. This means you can visually fill an area with a light with built-in falloff. These are scalable and offer volumetric shapes such as sphere, cone, cube, and cylinder. For most lighting work, users will prefer the ease and control of this new light type where point lights might have been used in the past.
Particles Now, particles may cast shadows in hardware shading.
New Ramp shader A type of shader where all the attributes have ramps assigned. This new shader allows for easy creation of new material types including glass, stone, x-ray, and toon-shading. The toon or "cel" shading look is the most common use for this shader, achieving a look that mimics the ink and paint appearance of traditional 2D cartoons.