Review: Autodesk Maya 2009

Two new, notable selection features in Autodesk Maya 2009 are camera-based selection and edge-loop selection. Camera-based selection lets the user select only the components facing the camera. Edge-loop selection lets the user select a full or partial edge loop by clicking on two edges or points.

Maya 2009 marks the 10th release of Maya and the third release from Autodesk. As a longtime Maya user, I am always excited to check out the new features and updates. This new version promised a lot: faster and better integration with the mental images mental ray renderer, a whole new particle dynamics system called nParticles, new animation layers, the upgrade and inclusion of cMuscles as Maya Muscles, and an all-around upgrade to the toolset.

The first thing I noticed when opening up Maya 2009 is that all the icons have gotten a little bit of a facelift—all are beveled and have self-shadows. There is the addition of a panel menu bar at the top of each camera view, and a new menu set called Animation Layers was added to the channel box.

The panel menu bars allow you to quickly access some of the more common settings for the panels, such as x-ray and x-ray joints, various field and view guides, shading modes, and the quality of the display. I particularly like having an icon to access the panel view Isolate, which shows only selected objects in that camera view. Prior to 2009, it was nested under several menus. For those of you who don't want a lot of extra menus, you can maximize your screen space by toggling the panel menu off and on using Shift+Ctrl+M.

Another camera-view improvement is that the resolution gate now has a shaded border, so it's much easier for you or your director to visualize what's in the camera's renderable frame. Along with that, you can now change your background colors to several different shades of gray using the Alt+B shortcut. There's also a new faded horizon line that makes it much easier to visualize your space, similar to the background found in Autodesk's Mudbox application.

I first used Maya 2009 on a model of a Volkswagen Thing. It's not the most complex of models, but the new selection and modeling features really came in handy. The two most notable selection features are the camera-based selection and the new edge-loop selection. The camera-based selection is similar to polygon-backface culling in that it lets you select only the components that are facing the camera so you don't end up selecting the backsides of objects or objects that are obscured behind other objects by mistake. This option comes in handy with dense models when you want to be particular about what you're selecting. For the most part, I left this option on by default. But with Maya's new "q" marking menu, this and many other selection options can be toggled on and off quickly with just one mouse movement instead of digging through the preferences. (Autodesk also reorganized the "W," "E," and "R" marking menus for changing the move, rotate, and scale options, making them a little bit more accessible.)

The new edge-loop selection method lets the user select full or partial edge loops by simply clicking on two edges or points. Maya will even select the loop if the selections are not along the same edge loop; it will just find the closest path between them. This makes it much easier to select the components you want compared to the old methods of selecting each face by hand or selecting a full loop and then deselecting all the points you didn't want.

Added to all the translation tools is the Soft Selection option, which moves points based on a fall-off curve. After toggling it on by pressing "B," you are given a visual display that shows which points will be affected and by how much. Autodesk added this tool in the 2008 extension 2, but it is faster in Maya 2009 and has the option to act globally—affecting any surrounding geometry. The company included a collection of preset curves that you can use to define how Soft Select behaves, or you can define the curve manually. For quick global changes, Soft Selection is terrific; because it works with translate, rotate, and scale as an option, you can make quick changes without a lot of overhead.

Another great option added to the transformation tools is the Preserve UV option, which maintains UV space as you edit your models so your textures won't stretch and warp. Like Soft Select, it works with all the transformation tools. I put a logo on the side of the door of the Volkswagen and was able to move the door mold up and down without affecting the texture placements, saving me from having to redo my UVs and image maps.

I also introduced a bird to the animation, and what I always dread is editing UVs on organic characters. In Maya 2009, I was pleasantly surprised with the updates to the Unfold and Relax UV-editing tools, which make them respond better. Most amazing was the speed. Both the Unfold and Relax tools now have a virtual slider that lets you choose the amount that they affect the UVs. Even on a three-year-old laptop, the speed and interactivity were excellent.

There are too many options added to the translation tools to cover in one article, but I'll mention two that I found interesting. Tweak mode is a quick way to translate points around without having to select them. Just hold down the tilde key and flick over the points or objects you want to move. It seems like it could be handy, but be careful about it getting stuck in the on position. It hides the translate manipulator and can get turned on permanently. The rotate and scale tools are still there, furthering the confusion. I restarted Maya several times until I figured out what was going on. Now that I know, I do a quick check of the "W" marking menu to make sure it's turned off.

Autodesk also added a Drag Select mode. It works like paint selection, but it's screen-based rather than object-based, and you can select components from more than one object. It's like painting across the screen to select the objects and components you want. I used this along with the camera-based selection setting, and these selection tools definitely helped. You can change the size of the Drag Select within your preferences by changing the click-box size. All the translation tools can also take advantage of Reflection mode, which eliminates the need to mirror your models to work on them symmetrically. Take a look through the docs when you get Maya and you'll see a bunch of other options they added for selection. So far, I've been very happy with them, and besides accidentally leaving Tweak on, I've found them really helpful and solid.

Introduced in 2008 and now expanded for 2009 is Maya's new asset-management system. The idea is that you can black-box all your assets into easy-to-organize units called containers. I liked using containers for shaders in 2008, so I was curious to see the improvements for 2009. Containers can now hold any object inside of Maya. The idea is that you can put your entire model and rig into it and only allow certain channels to be accessed. It's very easy to set up: Just select a bunch of objects, create a container, and publish the attributes you want. You can publish all attributes to one container or nest containers inside of each other.

I preferred nested containers—they let you save a layout in the Hypergraph window as a visual representation of your character for selecting and editing. You can even add a background image to the parent container, giving each character layout a unique and easy-to-read look. Within the container, you can specify certain nested containers as parent and child locations, allowing you to parent them under other objects and then change the objects inside the container all while maintaining the relationships. This makes it easy to swap out parts of characters and the props they are using. I wouldn't be surprised if containers show up in some of the other Autodesk software to make swapping assets between them possible.

Autodesk added Maya Muscles to Maya 2009. Any geometry can be made into a muscle, and Maya 2009 includes a muscle creator that builds complex muscle objects very easily.

I didn't have the need to create a muscle-based character, but I was eager to check out Maya Muscles, which was added to Maya 2009. I grabbed one of my company's digital doubles and started rigging him to work with muscles instead of the standard smooth or rigid skin-binding systems. There are some minor hurdles to get over in the workflow of Maya Muscles, but once you get accustomed to how they work, you can get some really amazing results. You can create muscles and deformations from scratch or convert an existing smooth-skin bind over to muscles using the existing weighting information. This conversion gives you the option to retain your skin information, allowing you to switch back and forth between muscles and smooth bind. This comes in handy because although it is fast for a muscle system, it is not quite as fast for animating as a regular bind.

Any geometry can be made into a muscle, and Maya 2009 includes a muscle creator that builds complex muscle objects very easily. The resulting deformation is excellent, and you can paint weight maps to control the percentage of sticking, sliding, and jiggling of the muscles. Instead of relying on joints, capsules that act like joints are used with the added benefit of keeping the muscle attributes. Starting from scratch can be daunting, and there seem to be a few superfluous steps that could be combined into a single initial setup. After muscles are created, they need to be added to the Muscle Deformer, and the Muscle Deformer needs to be applied to geometry. There is no default weighting of muscles or capsules when they are created, so you either need to paint on where each muscle influences the skin, or run a setup to choose default weights from the Muscle menu otherwise the muscles will not affect the geometry. If attachment of the muscles and their influence over the skin were set up automatically, this would make things a bit easier.

The rigging of the muscles is handled by the muscle-creation tools via a base-level muscle rig called a muscle spline. This rig gives you control over how much squash and stretch the muscle has and any specific shapes you want the muscle to make along the way. You can even use the muscle spline on its own for different rigging options such as tube arms, hoses, or even as a character's spine.

You can also apply the Muscle Deformer without using muscles to take advantage of muscle jiggle, relaxation, smoothing, and the muscle-caching system. The jiggle is very controllable, and I find it gives a much better result than the standard Maya jiggle deformer. Muscle relaxation helps keeps volume and creates a really nice wrinkling effect when the character bends. I'm not completely sold on the muscle-caching over Maya geometry-caching, but I do like that you can cache to an internal node so that you don't need extra files outside of a Maya scene file. With either cache, you can eliminate all the heavy deformations from the muscles and any other deformers, which can be slow, and bake everything into a fast-deforming mesh. This way you don't need to have the fastest computer in the world to take advantage of the highly detailed deformations.

Borrowing from MotionBuilder, Autodesk introduced animation layers into Maya 2009. This is another addition that I've been eager to check out. The animation layers are controlled similarly to render layers, and they're found at the bottom of the channel box. You add objects to each layer and animate them, which can add to, multiply, or override the base-level animation. The layers effect can be blended into the others layers, so you can animate the change on and off. It seems to be meant for making global changes to motion-capture ani-mation, but I started using it to make completely different takes and minor tweaks to give our director options. Afterward, I collapsed the layers and baked the animation into one.

Layers can be muted, soloed, and ghosted to make it easier to see what animation is on each layer. Ghosting is not the same as regular ghosting in Maya, which shows the objects at different times. Ghosting an animation layer in Maya will show the complete animation as a selected color at the same time as the base-level animation. This way you can easily judge the differences between the ghosted layer and the final animation. Animation layers are a definitely a worthy addition to Maya, and I have really enjoyed taking advantage of them.

The new nParticle dynamics system adds to nCloth, the Nucleus dynamics system that Autodesk unveiled in Maya 2008. NParticles has the same ease-of-use and speed as nCloth, and it allows the creation of some pretty amazing particle dynamics without a whole lot of effort.

The new nParticle dynamics system adds to nCloth, the Nucleus dynamics system that Autodesk unveiled in Maya 2008. nParticles has the same ease-of-use and speed as nCloth, and it allows you to create some pretty amazing particle dynamics without a whole lot of effort. I was mostly impressed with the speed of it; nCloth seemed faster as well. The best aspect of nParticles? They retain their own volume and self-collide, so you can fill objects and bump the particles into each other realistically. For fluid dynamics, nParticles can be rendered as a blobby surface resulting in somewhat realistic fluids. I haven't used the system enough to get totally convincing water, but goo, foam, and mixing fluids are pretty straightforward.

You can also collide your nParticles with nCloth to create some really nice effects. As a test, I made an umbrella and opened it in the rain. Normally I would have had to do a lot of work to make even a rough attempt at this, but with the Nucleus combo of nParticles and nCloth, Maya 2009 made it possible if not easy. You can cache the nParticles with the same nCache feature, although I don't think you can paint the cache weights the same way. The nice thing is that nParticles are similar in use as normal Maya particles, but they enjoy the addition of the Nucleus tools and they're faster. I didn't test it, but fluids now can use the Nucleus cache. You can also build some volumetric shaders into fluids.

The integration of mental images mental ray into Maya 2009 provides more than 40 different render-pass options that can be included in a scene. The various passes are built-in to the render settings so there is no need to build extra shaders or render layers for different outputs. Settings can almost be tweaked in realtime.

The most anticipated update to Maya 2009 is its integration with mental images render engine mental ray 3.7. In Maya 2009, the organization of the render settings has been completely updated, separating the different options of mental ray. They include mental ray render passes, which add more than 40 different pass options that can be loaded into your Maya scene. Once in the scene file, the passes can be applied to render layers as you see fit. Instead of having Maya split itself into several different render cycles, the program can take advantage of mental ray's pass buffers and optimize the render accordingly.

With the Volkswagen model, I decided to use almost all mental ray Mi materials including "Mi_car_paint_phen" and "Mi_material_x," which have been updated for 2009. I used the presets to begin. I then used Ambient Occlusion, Reflection, Diffuse Material, and a couple of other passes to set up my composite for the car. The passes are built into the render settings, so there was no need to create extra shaders or render layers to handle the different outputs that I wanted. There is the option to output the entire render into a single EXR image file, but in this case, I rendered it out as individual image files.

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This is the most successful application of render passes in any version of Maya. It is much easier than in previous versions, and the new organization of the render settings makes it much easier to work with the many options. Maya's interactive rendering system, IPR, is now fully integrated with mental ray, allowing you to tweak render settings and shader settings almost in realtime. In Maya 2009, you can now move objects, lights, and cameras without having to start new IPR sessions and toggle the mental ray options for lights. Another added bonus is that any time you render with mental ray, polygon objects will use the Preview Smooth level that they are set to in the Panel views. You no longer need to apply a Poly Smooth or a mental ray Approximation node to get smooth polygon renders. My only issue with this is that you have to set your Smooth Preview to 3 to get a smooth polygon render. You can override the amount of smooth, but Smooth Display needs to be turned on for it to render out smoothly. So for really dense models, you need to be sure you can smooth them in your view. I would prefer it if Smooth Render could override the Smooth Preview and render regardless of the Preview Smooth level in Maya, but for model tests and quick previews, the Smooth Render preview is great.

Considering all the small improvements—along with the addition of nParticles, muscles, and the integration with mental ray—Maya 2009 is definitely worth the upgrade. The selection and modeling updates, though small, have made the biggest difference in my day-to-day work with Maya. A few new features could stand some improvement such as animation layers and the asset-management system. But they both represent a step in the right direction. You need to buy Maya Unlimited to get Nucleus, Fluid Effects, Hair, and Fur, but at $4,995, it's well worth it. I would definitely recommend getting a support package so that you get the automatic updates and access to all the tutorials and help at the Autodesk sites. Autodesk offered two extension upgrades for Maya 2008, and both were worth acquiring when they came out. I would expect the same for Maya 2009.

With this latest release, Maya 2009 feels more solid and easier to navigate, and mental ray is finally beginning to feel like a part of Maya rather than a plug-in.

Maya is available in two versions: Complete and Unlimited. Unlimited includes Maya Fur, Nucleus dynamics, Maya Hair, and Maya Fluids. Autodesk Gold Support is available for $1,295 for Complete and $1,495 for Unlimited. It gives you access to technical support, all software updates, and a host of online tutorials and downloads. You can demo Maya 2009 using the Personal Learning Edition by visiting www.autodesk.com.

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