Trax editor shows both animation and audio data.

Trax Editor
The revamped Trax editor is a really nice interface to Maya’s non-linear animation editing. Trax has been “re-architected to become the focal point for animation within Maya,” allowing easy manipulation and re-purposing of audio and animation data, motion capture, expressions, etc.

Scaling, moving, re-directing, re-targeting, grouping and trimming in Trax is a breeze and the interface is ultra simple. Now, multiple audio clips can be imported to Trax and played together or one at a time. Unfortunately, only .wav and aif are supported on the PC, while .mp3 is accepted on the Mac.

Retargeting and Redirecting Character Animation
Maya 6 has new character animation tools that in many ways mimic some of the functionality of 3ds max’s Character Studio. Retargeting is very simple in both use and concept, but very powerful upon execution. You can quickly and easily transfer animation data from one skeleton to another and it will adjust in proportions based on the new target skeleton. It is important to note that the skeletons must have the same naming conventions and skeletal structures.

Redirection is a fun tool in that it makes moving already complex animation sets in new directions extremely simple. For example, you can animate a car drive-cycle or biped walk-cycle and let it rip. Then just choose redirect and plot the pivot and amount to turn and the object flawlessly redirects itself without impacting the animation. Now, there is an issue with a little slidy-ness and moonwalk, since it does not adjust weight placement and center of gravity, but there are workarounds for that.

New Image Formats and Integration
Maya 6 is finally catching up to and in some cases surpassing 3ds max in its image handling capabilities. Maya now supports layered Photoshop files and allows the user to utilize either the merged layers as an image or have access to any of the individual embedded layers. Maya also allows the export of a material to PSD, including a Texporter style uvw map wireframe as one of the Photoshop layers. On top of this, Maya now supports both .png and .dds formats.

Web Integration
Like 3ds max, Maya 6 now has the ability to render a Web page within one of the panels. In general, my team uses this feature (in 3ds max) to generate Web pages filled with texture source for quick texture use; however, Maya one-ups 3ds max in that you can incorporate MEL commands into your Web pages as hyperlinks… allowing users all sorts of flexibility. In fact, if you are dissatisfied with Maya’s interface, or just want to create a panel for your team that has graphical support unavailable in Maya, just make a Website using your HTML graphics and the MEL commands and you are ready to go. These panels can be opened alongside the 3D windows or “torn off” to become floating panels.

Selective Pre-Loading for References
In game development, one issue that level artists are consistently faced with is the overwhelming 3D files that they have to work within and maintain. This gets compounded if you have multiple artists on the same file, or, additionally, level designers plotting out their objects as well. Maya’s new pre-loading setup for references works well to ameliorate the problem by allowing artists to set up references to objects in other Maya files, and upon load, choose what they want or do not want to load into the scene. In the case of large files, this allows you to quickly load what you need and ignore the rest. For multiple users, objects can be organized under contributor’s names and they can load just their segments.