Autodesk Maya – A beast in 3D Computer Graphics Application

  Bibin       January 30, 2020

Maya is a highly advanced 3D graphics software created by Alias Systems Corporation in 1998. Now it is owned and maintained by Autodesk Inc. It is used to create 3D assets for interactive applications such as video games, animated movies and visual effects in movies. AAA title developers heavily depend on Maya to create maps, texture design and other 3D objects to create 3D assets as part of the game design and development process.

‘The advanced visualizer’ - which was a flagship 3D Graphics software from Wavefront Technologies which ruled the industry till the late ‘90s. Later, an Irix (a discontinued OS by silicon graphics) based project was started and named it Maya. During the production of the movie Dinosaur, Walt Disney worked closely with Maya’s Development.

Disney suggested that the user interface should be customizable so that they can implement a personalized workflow. This leads to the open architecture of Maya and it becomes the popular software in the animation industry.

Wavefront’s technology was merged into Maya after Silicon graphics acquired Wavefront technologies. In the early days of development, Tcl was the scripting language used in early times but soon after merging with Wavefront, Tcl has replaced by Sophia, the scripting language in Wavefront's Dynamation and fixed it as the MEL(Maya Embedded Language).

The initial build of Maya called Maya 1.0 was released in February 1998. It was a huge success and continue to evolve over the years. After a number of acquisitions and all, Autodesk bought Maya in 2005 and renamed it into ‘Autodesk Maya’.

Maya becomes an industry trend after its use in Walt Disney’s 2000 animated adventure film Dinosaur which grossed over 340 million in box office worldwide. In 2003 Maya received the Academy Award for achievement in scientific and technical advancements in CGI techniques. Maya’s widespread usage in movies like Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spider-Man (2002) and Ice Age helped Maya to become a standard for VFX in movies.

The unique feature of Maya is the ability to customize the workspace so that individual users can work in their exclusive scene and manipulate the media assets according to the project requirements. Assets are node-based with its own attributes and customizability. Scene dynamics and will be determined by the interconnected nodes which creates a network.

Features of Autodesk Maya

Fully customizable workspace

Faster assets loading using proxies

Incredible fluid, hair, and cloth dynamics

Work in a real-time environment as same as the desired final output

Support for advanced third-party plugins

Faster Animation: 

Animators can work faster by using cached playback in the viewport 2.0. Real-time effects rendering helps animators to evaluate work progress.

Higher Quality Previews Closer to Final Renders: 

New preview panel is so advanced that designers can preview output close to the final one.

Faster Maya: 

Stable and responsive elements with faster asset loading and manipulation.

Refining Animation Data: 

Graph editor comprises of new filters that make it easy to manipulate data such as motion capture with the inclusion of Butterworth filter and the key reducer.

Help for Animators in Training: 

Motion capture samples and sample animated characters with builtin tutorials to help beginners.

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