Autodesk Maya 2011

Autodesk Maya 2011 software features powerful new tools for helping create and repurpose character animation: enhanced skinning capabilities and nondestructive live motion retargeting. Its new 3D Editorial timeline helps accelerate pre-visualization and virtual movie-making workflows, while an invigorated user nterface helps improve artists’ efficiency and creativity.

Maya 2011 addresses today’s demanding production requirements with its high-performance viewport display of large scenes, integrated color management, scene segmentation, improved rotoscoping, and new UI toolkit. With support for 64-bit Mac OS® X as well as Linux® and Windows® operating systems, Maya is now more accessible han ever, offering artists an end-to-end creative workflow at exceptional value.

New Features:

• Redesigned User Interface - Maya 2011 has a fresh new look and feel. Based on Nokia Qt, the new UI is simpler to customize, featuring dockable UI elements and improved editors. As beta tester Rob van den Bragt, supervisor/director, The Mill, explained, "I am loving all the positive steps taken in Maya 2011. With the UI now based on Qt, Maya has become more flexible, powerful and modern."
• High Performance Core - Maya 2011 features a completely redesigned graphics pipeline that helps deliver new levels of performance for complex scenes while improving the quality of the viewport feedback.
• Mac OS X 64-Bit Availability - Mac OS X users can access considerably more memory to handle larger and more complex scenes with the new 64-bit executable.
• Accelerated 3D Editorial - The software's new Camera Sequencer adds powerful multicamera editorial capabilities to help facilitate pre-visualization and virtual moviemaking production using a Maya timeline. Developed on-site in production to meet the needs of large-scale CG animations, the Camera Sequencer supports import of both AAF and Final Cut Pro EDLs. "The most exciting feature in Maya 2011 is the Camera Sequencer," said beta tester Matt Wood, visual effects supervisor, Space Digital Ltd. "I found it to be an amazing solution. The ability to edit and animate at the same time is truly remarkable - not just sequencing cameras but slipping, reordering and even retiming them individually. It's so valuable."
• Enhanced Skinning Workflow - Creating believable CG characters is also made easier with a new, dual quaternion option for smooth skinning, interactive volume binding, enhancements to the Paint Skin Weights tool, deformer weight mirroring and surface falloff mode for the Wrap deformer. "The Paint Skin Weights tool overhaul has made working with large numbers of joints much easier, and the interactive skinning envelopes will be very helpful for working with multiple characters of the same size with various mesh topologies," said beta tester Ryan Trowbridge, character technical director, Naughty Dog.
• Improved Maya Composite - A new Vector Paint feature in Maya Composite dramatically improves its paint and rotoscoping capabilities. Now, animatable and trackable paint strokes can be used to paint colors and reveal or clone data across a sequence or on a per-frame basis. "We absolutely love the new Vector Paint tools, which nicely round out the robust toolset in Maya Composite," said beta tester Michael Vaglienty, visual effects supervisor, Giant Steps, VFX.

System requirements:

For 32-bit version of Autodesk Maya 2011

• Operating system Microsoft ® Windows Vista Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP Professional (SP3 or higher), Microsoft Windows 7, or Apple Mac OS X 10.6.2
• Windows: Intel Pentium 4 or faster, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron or AMD Phenom
• A Mac: The Intel
• 2 GB of RAM
• 4 GB of free hard disk space
• Graphics card with OpenGL hardware acceleration from the list of compatible
• Three-button mouse driver installed
• DVD-ROM drive
• Claims Maya Composite to the volume of cache:
• A minimum of 10 GB of free hard disk space, 200 GB recommended
• Hard disk: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
• Browsers: Microsoft ® Internet Explorer 7.0 (or higher), Apple Safari, or Mozilla Firefox.

For 64-bit version of Autodesk Maya 2011

• Operating system Microsoft Windows Vista Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition (SP3 or higher), Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, * Apple Mac OS X 10.6.2, Red Hat ® Enterprise Linux ® 5.4 WS or Fedora 11.
• Windows and Linux: Processor Intel ® EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron or AMD Phenom
• A Mac: The Intel
• 2 GB of RAM
• 4 GB of free hard disk space
• Graphics card with OpenGL hardware acceleration from the list of compatible
• Three-button mouse driver installed
• DVD-ROM drive
• Claims Maya Composite to the volume of cache:
• A minimum of 10 GB of free hard disk space, 200 GB recommended
• Hard disk: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
• Browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 (or higher), Apple Safari, or Mozilla Firefox