Autodesk releases Maya and 3ds Max 2018
Autodesk revealed major upgrades to its Media & Entertainment Collection at SIGGRAPH.
Autodesk used August’s SIGGRAPH convention in Los Angeles to release significant updates to what they call their Media & Entertainment Collection, including Autodesk Maya, Shotgun, Arnold, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Autodesk Flame.
Jocelyn Moffatt, shotgun product marketing manager for Autodesk gave The Broadcast Bridge an exclusive interview about what these announcements entail.
“First off, of August 30, 2017 new subscription benefits will be added for Maya and 3ds Max customers including Cloud Rights,” Moffatt began, “which will free up their local processing and rendering resources.”
In addition, starting Sept. 7, new M&E subscribers will get an Arnold 5-Pack promotion at no additional cost. Also, Autodesk’s drawing tool, SketchBook for Enterprise, will be moving into the collection.
Autodesk also had big announcements for their new Maya 2018 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software.
The new UV Editor interface in Maya 2018's new UV Toolkit.
“We’ve been focused on three key areas for Maya: the character animation toolset, the motion graphics tools, and its rendering capabilities,” Moffatt said. “The UV Editor interface has been overhauled, and now includes a new UV Toolkit with better tools and functionality.”
The 3ds Max we saw already had a “.1” update.
As Moffatt put it, “3ds Max 2018.1 adds VR authoring tools for design visualization artists, so we are calling it ‘3ds Max Interactive’, she said. “We want to make it easy for architecture and design customers to bring their scenes into a VR workflow without having to learn a whole new tool. Now they can accomplish this with the interactive VR Viewport.”
3ds Max 2018 with the interactive VR Viewport.
The Flame family also got a “.2” update. Some of the new features include Pybox, a python scriptable software handler for processing images by way of external renderers, a contextual menu in action, smart merge for the connected conform workflow, and a new function that can now drive the batch environment through scriptable commands.
“This update is about enabling this workflow with The Foundry’s Nuke,” Moffatt finished up. “It’s part of our goal to provide our customers with a whole ecosystem of tools.
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