Maya 8 Release!

#161

I guess that depends on the person. I’m one of those that can see room for improvement and changes within minutes of using any program. I’ve yet to see a perfect program that I can’t imagine a single thing that could work better.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a permanent sufferer, whiner, or unhappy person. As long as I am able to do what I want with a worthy effort I’m OK:)

#162

I like and welcome the new options, features, and enhancements in Maya. Usually I read thoroughly the documentation before I post like this. But I’m kind of exited and impatient and decided to ask.

  I’m currently just playing with the interactive primitive creation.

First question - when you create 2 steps primitives by dragging, after the first step you can change things like width and depth for a cube and radius for some of the other primitives in the options, but then when you perform the second step (drag), these changes are ignored. However some changes in between steps like divisions remain. So the question is does anybody have figured out how actually this is suppose to work. At the moment I consider this as one of those semi completed “features” and weird things.

Second question - I’m trying to figure out how the snapping is supposed to work. My findings so far are that you have to have the snapping enabled only during the first click from a click and drag action – for example hold c, click on an edge to start the dragging, and release immediately the c before the dragging continue. Well that works fine but the question is how to snap again during the same drag to another edge. If I activate the snapping again while still dragging, I’m able to snap only to the nearest edge of the same object. Luckily point snapping in this way works fine to any point of any object.

     Did anybody find details of how to perform these kind of snapping in the help?
#163

I found the attaching curve to a surface follicle a great new feature in the hair system. Previously, to model hair attached to a surface, one have to start with a simulation and continue modeling curves from a certain point.
Now with this feature the shape of the hair can be started with sculpting a NURBS surface which is much better for visualizing the hair. Then the surface can be rebuilt with any density for duplicating its curves. The new feature allows those curves to be attached to a surface with a hair system which is great

#164

Ckas. Zap wrote a shader that’s called the architectural and design (i think that’s the name) shader for MR that’s gonna be in max9. From what he was saying at his masterclass it wasn’t included in maya8 because it wasn’t completed by the time maya8 came out. It’s a really really nice shader btw.

#165

Houkah …sounds pretty interesting. Is there anything on the web about it? And what does it do?

#166

Look at this screen:

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/images/viewport_override_large.jpg

How many of you have that Direct3D option? :shrug:

#167

Seems like there are a lot of bugfixes …

Mayalive is now working, dual screen monitors seems to work much better (menus are available).

For the direct3D option you need the plugin: D3DViewportRenderer

First impressions are that it seems more stable and some old bugs are fixed.

#168

So this is a third party plugin? Why it isn’t installed by default? :shrug:

#169

you must compile it yourself…

C:\Program Files\Alias\Maya8.0\devkit\plug-ins\D3DViewportRenderer_README.txt

#170

If I save a file in Maya 8 that I previously created in Maya 7, I can’t reopen it in 7. Is this a problem or am I doing something wrong? Does it work fine for everyone else?

I went to try the sculpting tool to see the new feature in it, whenever I go to make my first click on the model Maya 8 shuts down. It works on the same model in 7?

(I’m on a mac)

Sorry if this shouldn’t be posted in its own thread…

#171

hahaha, I like that there’s an angry guy who wrote a reply: “maxified maya” and put an angry face, hahahaha, excelent, I can imagine him threatening the computer screen in utmost despair “you’ve maxified MY Maya, you gdbsobsmfkz.etc.etc.etc…” :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

I absolutely understand the feeling :-))))))

Anyway, some people seem to prefer to call it Maya 7.5, or 7.02… I’d call it Maya 5.something, just to be more radical :smiley: I don’t have it, and I’m sure it’s improved as far as eficiency goes, and I’m glad to hear that… but I guess people are waiting to see some new technologies implemented, and implemented well, which takes me to the one thing I’m especially interested, please, tell me, someone who was fortunate enough to play with the new Maya “8”… did they finally integrate FBIK or not??? Is it usable now, or is it the same FBIK from Maya 7?

#172

I’m going to answer my own questions and add some feed back to my previous message.

I think that the interactive primitive creation is real advantage only if used along with snapping. A lot of scenes require plenty of cube primitives for objects like walls, tables, shelves, windows, stairs and etc.

I spent some more time testing and looking and I can conclude now that it doesn’t appear to be any mentioning in the help how to snap objects during the interactive creation. I’m guessing that they left this to the users to figure out by themselves:D. And here is my findings so far.

Snapping to live objects – Maya orients the primitives with the normals of the live objects and this works perfectly for objects like the sphere and objects with round base like the cylinder and cone but is problematic with the orientation of cubes and planes. To check the problem, create a cube, rotate it randomly, make it live, and try to create interactively other cubes snapped to it. I have no idea how Maya decides the orientation of the new objects – one would expect them to be aligned with the live cube but they are not. The workaround here is to rotate the object afterwards along its local Y.

Snapping to objects – the orientation here is always along the world axis but snapping to edge is problematic. Regardless edge or point snapping as I mention earlier you have to start with snapping enabled (or holding c) and disable it immediately after the fist click before you continue to drag. Then if you want to complete the shape by constrain snapping it to another component (this is more relevant to cube and plane). while still dragging activate the snapping again when the cursor is in the proximity of the desired point. This works good for points snapping but unfortunately doesn’t work for edge snapping. For edges it snaps the shape back to the original edge.

#173

Sorry to disappoint you but it doesn’t appear to be any new features or changes to the FBIK from the previous version. I haven’t used it a lot, however as far as I remember, in the previous version I think the problems were not due to lack of features or bad design but mostly bugs, performance, or implementation issues. So someone has to take the time and actually give it a shot in order to make a judgment if the things work the same in the new version

#174

Hehe. When a programs doesn’t have Save As older version option, you shouldn’t expect a scene saved from the newer version to be open by older versions. Nice try though:)

By the way I’ve seen a lot of threads about how to change the file using a text editor in order to achieve the Save As older version function but it must be tested with 8 to 7. Just make a search for it.

 This works fine on my system. Sounds like video card/driver compatability with v, 8 problem.
#175

Thanks, for some reason I thought I opened my files that were saved in 7 in Maya 6.5 but I guess I was wrong.

Thanks Emil3d!

#176

**NUKE-CG is so bored of everyone calling Maya 8 a 7.02 or 7.1 update, the cliche has been beaten to death

And I don’t blame the users, really, Autodesk’s press release is vague and only touches on a fraction of Maya 8’s features. Advertising it’s just a 64bit version with polygon caching, and mental Ray 3.5 is very poor marketing… do you not like money Autodesk?

Very confusing.

#177

Ckas, if i remember correctly it was created for architectural renders. It did reflections, solid and blurred, very well. There was also an option for auto-rounded corners, so you wouldn’t have to go in and chamfer/bevel every edge in your scene. (It was a render-time effect so it didn’t actually change your geometry) There was some other stuff as well, master zap is the one who wrote it, so he could probably give you the best info on it. Again that shader isn’t in maya 8, so sorry everyone for the off topic post.

#178

I see autodesk has dump all the good stuff from max to maya, like colour softmod, shaded uv, interactive creation stuff…its a sign they may go down this way to bring about everying worth a while in maya.

now you can bake occlusion from high to low res, and all the map transfers looks are very well done, there goes the advantage turtle has over maya…

#179

About the interactive creation stuff, do you mean the primitive creation or have they actually implemented more interactivity in their other tools?

#180

The shelf editor is very unstable… even deleting and item, or changing an image will make it crash :wise: