The recently released Maya 8.5 is offered in multiple versions: the less expensive Maya Complete aimed at users with straightforward projects and the costlier Maya Unlimited, which offers tools for studios. All images © Autodesk.

Autodesk recently released Maya 8.5, the latest update to the standard anchor for many visual effects and gaming studio pipelines. As with previous releases, including those under the Alias corporate banner, this new incremental release is offered in multiple versions. Maya Complete is the less expensive option aimed at users who require the tools for straightforward projects without some of the more specific tools offered in the more expensive Maya Unlimited. The extra goodies that are unique to the Unlimited product include hair/fur, cloth, fluid effects and Maya Live, useful for studios that want tight integration of matchmoving functionality with their 3D application.

The newest of the new in this release is the Maya Nucleus Unified Simulation Framework. This addition to Maya is a likely first step into the next-generation of 3D software. Maya Nucleus allows artists to more easily create and iterate on particle based simulations, cloth simulation being only one example among many other potential future uses. Unlike previous attempts at complex simulations, Maya Nucleus is quicker and less prone to application crashing behavior. Autodesk claims that the system is robust enough for artists to work with some simulations in realtime, adjusting things on the fly to meet their needs. As to be expected from such claims, your mileage may vary, throttled mostly by how beefy your rig is.

nCloth, offered in Maya 8.5 Unlimited, is the first system to use the Maya Nucleus technology. What's new here is that the simulation can be saved as a cache file and edited and blended like other animation clips.

nCloth is one of the new features of Maya 8.5 Unlimited. Beside the usefulness of a good cloth system, nCloth is noteworthy as the first system to use the Maya Nucleus technology. Basic setup with nCloth is straightforward, enough so that experienced users will be up and running in no time. The toolset is given its own tab on the Maya toolbar with easy to read icons and tool tips. Once the user designates a cloth object and the object(s) it will collide with, the simulation can be run with a single click. What's new with this system is that the simulation can then be saved as a cache file and edited and blended like other animation clips. The simulation ran fairly fast in the simple test that I ran: a 400 face sphere as collision object dropped onto a 1,000 face plane as cloth object. System specifications for this test were 3.2 GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 256 MB GeForce 7800 GS video card. The simulation began immediately upon the button press and moved along nicely at approximately one frame-per-second. Your experience will most certainly vary depending on the usual system and scene specifics. A more complex test, on the same rig, yielded good results, although as expected some slowdown occurred. The slowest processing time between frames was approximately four seconds. For this test I created an abstract piece of soft geometry at around 8,000 polygons. This served as the collision object. The cloth in this test was again a simple plane, the difference this time was a denser mesh at 5,000 polygons. While the simulation took a bit longer, once complete I was able to play the cached animation back in realtime while zooming and rotating the scene with no hiccups. A more involved test, using similar polygon counts, this time using a rough human form as the collision object and a simplistic mesh vest as cloth, ran with similar results. It seems like polygon counts drive solving time rather than the complexity of arrangement.