Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 17, 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
With the Maya 2019 Update, Autodesk has focused primarily on the animation area of its DCC tool: Alongside Cached Playback and real-time reflection, the developers have also sought better performance with hundreds of bug fixes. Improvements to the Evaluation Toolkit also make it easier to check the resources used. We summarise the highlights of the update here:
The New Features at a Glance
Cached Playback
With the new Cached Plaback system, animations can run in the viewport without having to update the scene again. Among other things, a target frame rate can be set for playback. The new function is enabled by default with the update and, unlike the previoush Playblast, calculates playback in the background. Only the respective information affected by the latest changes is recalculated. The scene can then be viewed from any camera perspective without renewed loading times.
Faster Viewport 2.0
In the 2019 release, workflows can now be executed significantly faster in Viewport 2.0: when loading files (especially with complex geometry), selecting objects or snapping. In the attached preview, Autodesk shows a city scene with a 47-second loading time in Maya 2019 – compared with 1:21 minutes in Maya 2018. Downsampling large textures is also intended to improve performance.
Arnold & Render Setup
Updates to the Arnold Standard Surface Shader in Maya 2019 bring the Viewport 2.0 preview closer to the actual render result. Reflections from environment lights can also be displayed in real time, which should be useful especially for the previz & lookdev area.
Something has also changed in Render Setup: Alongside new colour coding, multiple layers in the Setup Editor can now be exported simultaneously as a batch render since the update. The workflows for creating and importing templates for batch rendering is also easier. How the new workflow for this works is described in detail here.
New in the Graph Editor
Two new key-reduction filters have been added to the curve-editor menu of the Graph Editor to improve the respective animation curves: the Butterworth and the key Reducer filter.
Among other things, both filters offer the possibility of selecting only part of a curve for the process, a preview function, and the option of excluding certain tangents from the filtering process. You can find more about this in the documentation.
Further New Features
- FBX Import and export with integration for the hierarchies of Blendshape Targets
- Motion Capture Samples: New skeleton examples in the Content Browser
- Render Setup: A new workflow tutorial series
- MASH Node Improvements
- Evaluation Toolkit
Feature Suggestions
Anyone who, like some Reddit users, was looking forward to major new features will unfortunately have to be patient a little longer. For desired functions, users can submit their own ideas or support existing posts with an upvote in the “Maya Ideas” forum.
For More Information: To the Update Notes
