Product Reviews

Maya 7 is an across-the-board upgrade to the most-respected piece of 3D software on the planet.

There are numerous tweaks and improvements, but probably the largest is in the Animation department. Maya's Inverse Kinematics (IK) algorithms - the routines that set up characters so they can be manipulated like traditional marionettes - has been totally overhauled. It's what Alias calls 'full-body' IK. Traditionally, IK effects would propagate up a chain and stop at a particular node. So, for example, moving a character's hand would cause the forearm and upper arm to follow, but the movement would stop at the shoulder. Now, in version 7, moving the hand far enough can cause movement to propagate through the entire skeleton, leading to far more natural movement and with less input from the animator. This new routine has been transplanted from Alias' companion product, MotionBuilder.

Another time-saver is the ability to rotate a character's joints while painting Skin Weights (these affect the sphere of influence a joint will have over its surrounding skin). This allows significantly faster feedback to the animator on how a joint/skin junction will behave.

Allied to the IK changes are the new Substitute Geometry features. These enable you to swap low-resolution 'stand-in' geometry while still maintaining the correct weighting relationship between the IK skeleton and the surrounding mesh. Previously, stand-in geometry would have to be re-weighted, which was a time-consuming and tedious affair. This is especially welcome since animators spend a lot of time with so-called 'tootsie-roll' meshes that allow quick analysis of IK skeleton motion.

From a big change to a small - but significant - one: Maya can at last import Illustrator files. Text as paths can then be extruded, bevelled and animated within Maya. The import is handled by a 'node' (as are many things in Maya). Nodes in Maya have inputs and outputs, so the input (the original .ai file) remains linked and live - that is, changes made in the original Illustrator artwork will then be automatically reflected in the Maya scene file. It's taken a while to implement, but Alias has done it right.

Maya 7 also boasts increased

Another small but important change is the late adoption of Universal Manipulator handles (although Manipulator handles were a Maya first). Late, but well implemented, as they take full advantage of the object's bounding box for the manipulator handles display, keeping the controls well spaced.

Another late arrival to Maya's modelling set is the ability to selectively weight sub-patch creases. In other words, you can continuously control the sharpness or smoothness of the edges of a subdivision-surface object without adding or subtracting any geometry, by painting on the attraction between a subdivision object at its defining poly cage. This allows much finer control of the detail on models, while keeping mesh complexity to a minimum and being a great time-saver. However, it's worth pointing out that most 3D programs have had this feature for four or five years now. Further, Maya's Artisan paint/sculpting toolset has been redesigned to work on subdivision surface objects - previously, it only did NURBS and polygon meshes.

Alias has significantly beefed up Maya's Render Layers feature, which puts elements of the final rendered scene onto different layers for tweaking in post-production compositing programs. Maya's Fur and Hair and Paint Effects can now also be output to their own Render Layers, and you can export Render Layers to sequentially numbered layered PSD files and then into After Effects.

Another tweak to the Interactive Photorealistic Renderer enables artists to tweak lights in a scene without pausing the main render. There's also a new Toon shader for cartoon and manga- and anime-style output. Also, Maya's renderer can now render Maya Hair directly.

We had a bit of a time installing Maya 7. The installer wouldn't write the correct licence file, which necessitated many calls and emails to Alias, which sent us new licence files - all to no avail. We finally twigged that although the installation guide says you need administrator access to install Maya, what it actually means is root access. Once installed under root, licence files were written and we were off. Still, you don't want to pay £6000 for a piece of software only for it to cause you to lose the best part of a day.

There's very little in Maya 7 that hasn't been tweaked, overhauled or improved, and most of the improvements will go towards saving animators their single most precious resource: time.