With all the recent focus on the SIGGRAPH conference, it’s easy to overlook industry news and announcements that weren’t part of the big show in Vancouver. Fortunately, Nodal has you covered.
Autodesk has released its latest update of Maya, version 2018.4. New features and improvements include:
UV Editor settings will now persist through a restart.
Real Time Refresh option added to the Time Editor file menu. This suspends the scene update that occurs when repositioning clips, eliminating performance slowdown and inaccuracies when making precision edits to large scenes.
Improvements to Render Setup that allow the user to list only the selected render layers. This allows users to ensure that complex objects are not in the current render layer. Additional improvements allow these render settings to be exported via a .json file to be used in other scenes.
Arnold region renders can now be performed directly in the Viewport.
Improvement to the File Node by allowing the option to switch to another file rather than having to wait for large images to load during swatch generation.
.tx images generated from HDR and EXR source images will now appear with color accuracy in Viewport 2.0 and UV Editor.
Added function to allow skeleton colorization during Bake Deformer operations if desired (as opposed to being the default behavior).
For more details on the above features, check out ToolFarm’s announcement of the new Maya version. The full release notes can be found on the Autodesk website.
Have questions on deploying Maya at your facility? Contact Nodal!