Animation Layers allows artists to create multiple layers of animation non-destructively.

Animators will also appreciate Maya's new Animation Layering feature, which has a very simple Animation Layer Editor located in Maya's Channel Box. This interface gives you all of the tools and options you need to create and manipulate animation layers. Animation layers let you create and blend multiple levels of animation in a scene. You can create layers to organize new keyframe animation, or to keyframe on top of existing animation without overwriting the original curves. It makes tweaking animation much easier. You could take a standard walk cycle, for example, and add in the hand and facial motions needed for dialogue over the top, making it much easier to edit.

For final output, Maya now has the ability to render stereoscopic images and create stereo cameras. With the new trend in 3-D movies, this will be very important for the feature film world. Another important feature is a new multi-render pass rendering method. This gives artists the ability to render an unlimited number of render passes, and then group them into render pass sets. Using the multi-render pass feature, you can reduce the need to use individual render layer passes, thus reducing render times. If you work with complex multi-layered compositions, rendering may also be several times faster. Multi-render passes also allow you perform scene segmentation at render time.

Render passes enable scenes to be finely decomposed into their contributing shading elements, allowing precise control and virtually limitless iterations on the final look using a compositing package.

Finally, Maya 2009 also has some new workflow tools, most important of which is a new feature called Assets. These allow you to take the complex series of nodes that make up complex objects such as characters and vfx, and combine them into simpler objects called containers. You can flag containers as a certain type and then use those types to limit what assets a specific artist can see using Views.

Overall, the changes in Maya 2009 are very much worth the upgrade. The new muscle feature makes character rigging a lot more robust, and the new nParticles are going to give special effects artists a lot more flexibility and power. These updates certainly keep Maya at the forefront of digital animation and vfx.

George Maestri is an animation director and producer. He is currently the president of Rubber Bug, a Los Angeles-based animation studio. He also teaches animation at Otis College of Art and Lynda.com.