Autodesk introduced nCloth in Maya 8.5, and it's now been updated in Maya 2008 to be faster, more user-friendly and features improved realtime previews. 

In the last version, Maya 8.5, Autodesk introduced nCloth, a new system for creating cloth objects using the Nucleus Unified Framework. nCloth has been updated in Maya 2008 to be faster, more user-friendly and now has improved realtime previews.

Model builders are not the only creators who get attention in Maya 2008. Riggers and animators get their props too with new non-destructive skinning. The old way of rebinding the skin over and over again with each new iteration has been replaced with the new skin editing functionality. Users can keep the skeleton bound to geometry throughout the skinning process, including the ability to add, remove, join or disconnect joints while their previously created binding remains unaffected.

Shader support is also enhanced in the new version. Direct X HLSL shaders are now part of the Maya toolkit, useful most likely to game developers and other realtime application users. Maya 2008 still includes the previously offered CgFX shader support. Even though the shader support here is robust, there are many details that fall outside of their capabilities, especially in the complex game development world. Users will be able to view PC and console shaders in realtime right in the Maya viewports, but there is no guarantee that those previews will be identical to the their final game platform. Game artists won't be surprised that they will need to work with the Maya shaders to create the custom result they desire, especially as next-gen game development continues to evolve at breakneck speed.

Users can keep the skeleton bound to geometry throughout the skinning process, including the ability to add, remove, join or disconnect joints while their previously created binding remains unaffected. 

Some additional general category enhancements come with the Maya 2008 update, including API updates for hardware rendering. The API also has some wish list additions for animators, specifically the new constraints API that will allow technical artists to write animation helpers more easily. mental ray 3.6 core is faster now, allowing faster polygon translation and rendering instances of polygons. For example, a 20,000 polygon mesh that has been instanced 2,000 times now renders 20 times faster than before. The improved mental ray functionality also includes the ability to render particles that previously only be viewed in the hardware renderer. This removes the necessity of combing two separate render outputs after rendering is completed. The final mental ray improvement is accelerated texture baking. This is noticeably faster than previous versions, however a precise amount could not identified without comparing one to one with versions of Maya.

Increased workflow being the focus of Maya 2008 is seen with some of the other effective feature enhancements, including speed boosts for Poly Reduce, which is now as much as 30 times faster than previous versions, and a four times speed increase for Poly Smooth. Along the same lines of more speed, nCloth now caches three times faster than it did in Maya 8.5.