Alias|Wavefront Ships Maya 4

(Jun. 18, 2001)-- Alias|Wavefront announced that it is shipping Maya 4, the sixth major release of its professional 3D animation and visual effects software. This major new release hosts myriad enhancements and optimizations that will improve Maya's overall ease-of-use and efficiency throughout-most particularly in the areas of rendering, character animation, brush and paint tools and games related functionality, such as per pixel shading. Maya 4 ships today for the IRIX and Windows NT platforms with early access for the Linux version in July 2001. Maya for Mac OS X is scheduled to ship by "late" summer, the company said.

"Maya 4 is a major release which contains new features and enhancements that will not only benefit existing Maya users, but will equally address the needs of those new to Maya," explains Chris Ford, Senior Maya Product Manager for Alias|Wavefront. "Leading the way are enhancements to the UI which will help new users readily get up to speed on Maya, while seasoned users benefit from the efficiency of the new workflow. Other areas we have emphasized include animation tools and rendering enhancements."

One of Alias|Wavefront's goals with Maya 4 is to continue to enhance the software's general usability. Focused improvements have been made throughout Maya to ensure that the process a user goes through in order to learn how to complete a task or learn a skill is best of class for 3D software. To that end, Maya's feature set has been expanded in a manner that substantially optimizes and streamlines production workflow. Managing the workspace is now accomplished in one click using the customizable panel layouts and toolbar controls. Object placement is faster using the new lasso select, and incremental rotate, snapping and alignment tool. Quick access to the expanded Maya Paint Effects(tm) brushes and the new shader library gives users a quick, efficient method of launching into production. Beyond UI, enhanced context sensitive help and Instant Maya books with easy-to-follow examples will prove invaluable to new and intermediate users, particularly those who are transitioning to Maya from other packages.

"The UI improvements will prove incredibly useful in the creation of our feature film project," said Jason Maurer, Sovereign Architect of Creation for Fathom Studios, an Atlanta-based computer animation studio and Maya 4 beta tester. "It means that much of the functionality is incorporated into the interface-right out of the box. This gives us instant access to tools, viewport arrangement, and allows us to toggle quickly between the main data centers of Maya, such as the channel box and attribute editor, making the workflow on our film as smooth as silk."

Maya 4 heralds an aggressive move to improve quality, ease of use and performance in rendering. Optimizations include selective use of the Intel Optimizing Compiler that has resulted in an average performance gain of between 5% and 10% on Pentium III(tm) platforms. For ray tracing, subdivision surfaces and particles in heavier scenes, improvements average 15%. On the Pentium 4(tm), the average performance gain for rendering increases to 15-20%. Workflow enhancements include an improved hypershade, pre-render optimization and automatic alpha for transparency on file and layered textures. Enhancements to bump mapping, texture filtering, and tessellation provide notable advances in image quality. Render passes have also been expanded for improved compositing integration.

With Maya 4 Alias|Wavefront continues to assert its leadership in the areas of general and character animation. New enhancements to the Trax non-linear motion editing technology include time warping, character merging, drag and drop and character set editing. New character animation features include easy FK/IK switching, quaternion-based IK, motion trails and ghosting along with a powerful new Jiggle Deformer which automatically creates secondary "character fat/muscle wobble" animation without dynamics.

The Maya Paint Effects technology has been streamlined and enhanced with multi-processor support for painting and rendering, new auto-paint functionality for filling large areas with ease, and 35 new preset brushes to complement the existing 400. Moreover, Alias|Wavefront's true 3D paint technology has now been incorporated into Maya and integrated with Maya Paint Effects so that any Paint Effects brush can be used for 3D Paint. Enhancements have also been made to Maya's pioneer brush-based interface, Maya Artisan(tm). Maya 4 introduces a completely new architecture-one no longer dependent on hardware overlays, thereby allowing users to choose from a broader selection of graphics cards. This new architecture also allows for attribute and 3D painting of subdivision surfaces, world-space reflection and image-based brush profiles.

Maya 4 features numerous advances in areas crucial to the development of next-generation games, and interactive media- including improvements in the area of polygon texture mapping and editing. Features such as independently animatable color per vertex, Straighten UV Border, and UV Snapshot, along with overall UV texture editor improvements will make the game content creation process faster and more efficient.

Web 3D developers using Maya will be able to take advantage of the recently announced Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter(tm) in addition to a number of web plugins from third party development partners.

Maya Complete 4 is priced at $7,500 (US) and includes modeling, rendering, animation, dynamics, Maya Artisan, Maya Paint Effects and MEL, an open interface for programming and scripting. Maya Unlimited(tm) 4 is $16,000 (US) and includes Maya Fur, Maya Cloth and Advanced Modeling features. Maya Builder 4 is priced at $2,995 and include polygon modeling, texturing and animation capabilities for level editors, games tool programmers, and web applications. Alias|Wavefront offers favorable upgrade pricing from current versions of Maya

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