MAYA 2009 Announced at SIGGRAPH

Maya 2009 NEW FEATURES:

New Selection Paradigm
New selection features: true soft selection and pre-selection highlighting.

Improved Modeling Workflow
Symmetrical modeling with soft seams, a tweak mode for rapid modifications, and a new Merge Vertex feature that enables you to combine parts of a mesh.

Maya Assets
With Maya Assets, complex data can be effectively organized, shared, referenced, and presented. Maya Assets enables you to encapsulate a set of nodes into a container so that they can be treated as if they were a single node from a user’s perspective (selected attributes of interest from the contained nodes can be published to the container). This new feature also supports customized and user-specific views, flexible referencing, and the creation of customized libraries.

Animation Layering
A powerful new animation layering paradigm, built on technology from MotionBuilder, gives you more flexibility as you nondestructively create and edit animation. This toolset works with any attribute: animation layers can be blended, merged, grouped, and reordered, and can override or add to preceding layers.

Maya nParticles
The second module built on the Maya Nucleus unified simulation framework: Maya nParticles. This newest toolset gives you an intuitive, efficient workflow for simulating a wide range of complex effects, including liquids, clouds, smoke, spray, and dust. It features particle-to-particle collisions, particle and nCloth bidirectional interaction, powerful constraints, cloud and "blobby" hardware display, preset rendering, and dynamic behaviors.

Maya Muscle
Maya Muscle helps you create life-like muscle and skin motion. This toolset allows you to direct muscle and skin behavior precisely, with secondary motion, collisions, wrinkles, sliding, and stickiness.

UV Layout Enhancements
The ability to preserve UVs (when making modeling edits after the fact) as well as new UV unfolding and layout option, including an interactive mode, can increase your productivity by streamlining the otherwise time-consuming task of creating optimal texture coordinates.

Render Proxy
A new Render Proxy feature in mental ray enables you to replace scene elements with a simple low-resolution mesh, and only load the pre-translated data when required for rendering.

Render Pass Enhancements
A completely updated Render Pass feature set provides precise control over render output, making it easier to optimize integration with compositing packages such as Toxik.