Maya 6 Complete and Unlimited offer goodies such as a new intuitive Bin organizer, mirroring function and a revamped Trax Editor. All images © Alias Systems Corp.

Alias has released their new version of the Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited packages for the OS X, Windows, IRIX and Linux platforms. As usual, I will be skewing my review a bit toward game development, but I will be exposing as many new features as possible. Let’s touch on some game dev-centric tools and move on to other new features later.

Bin Organization in Hypershade
I will begin with the new Bins in Hypershade. Maya can now organize complex scene shaders with a new, intuitive Bin organizer. An artist can now create a bin from the selected shaders, or create bins from scratch and add or subtract from them as they see fit. This really makes Hypershade a more powerful tool in that tons of shaders will not make for an overwhelming library anymore. Shader bins can then be named by the user for greater organization. One subtle but great function is that you can have shaders exist inside multiple bins. This means that you can create really powerful sets of shaders based on model, location, color, etc. Unfortunately, the scroll wheel still does not zoom in/out while viewing the Hypershade window and, additionally, I would like the ability to use a context sensitive right-click to select shaders directly and append them to existing bins. Currently, all bin-work needs to be done on the left-anchored bin panel.

Soft Modification Tool
While the Soft Modification tool is pretty interesting and very fun, I am having a hard time finding a real-world application for it. The basic deal with the Soft Modifier is that you can quickly select a portion of your model and then by adjusting the sphere of influence, pull or push the mesh in a very similar (though less powerful) way as the traditional Sculpt Deformer. This is similar to some of the new tools in Luxology’s modo, where the power is cool and clear, but when do I use it? I can see that if I have made a head or other organic shape, and am feeling blasé about it, I could quickly apply the Soft Modification tool and radically change the structure of the face to possibly come up with something fresh and fun. This tool is a lot more powerful on a highly tessellated mesh rather than a lower poly game-type mesh.

Hypershade using Bin Arrangements. All screen captures courtesy of Ryan Lesser.

Smooth Proxy Mirror
The Smooth Proxy tool now contains a mirroring function that allows the modeler to mirror the form on the X, Y or Z axis. This is good, but the especially cool thing here is that you can choose Full Mirror or Half Mirror. The full mirror creates a standard smooth proxy on the flip side with your main mesh in x-ray mode. You can then edit the main mesh and the smooth proxy follows suit. The Half Mirror mode is the one that I really like, where one side of the mesh stays at the original tessellation, but the flip side gets the smoothing. This just has a certain clarity that the standard Smooth Proxy does not have.

On the other hand, the Smooth Proxy tool reminds me of my continuing dissatisfaction with the Maya interface, which overall I find unattractive and too text/number heavy. Plus, there is a general lack of preview function along with a waste of dialog box real estate space. It really should be more artist-friendly.