Maya 6: Version 6 is flush with customer-requested features.(Product/Service Evaluation)

A longtime professional user of Alias's Maya, I couldn't wait to get my hands on Version 6. Soon after I began using the upgrade, it was evident that Alias packed 6.0 with a wealth of user-requested features.

The Hair system (Maya Unlimited only) is a nice addition to Alias's animation package. Drawing on the company's strength in dynamics, the hair module can be used to create curves for rendering hair or essentially any other use you'd have for a curve, including surfaces. The upgrade's dynamic curves respond to regular dynamic fields and have a fairly adequate dynamic system of their own, similar to that of Paint Effects. It offers the user new options in making dynamic surfaces, as well as the option to make hair, of course. Animators previously had to resort to soft-body dynamics, which always left something to be desired, namely controlling the length of the curve or surface.

Effects artists will like the ability to add deformers to particle objects, helping control unruly particles. Given its performance improvements to cloth dynamics and fur, including the ability to add fur to polygons and render through Mental Ray, Version 6 is a strong upgrade for effects work all around. Effects houses or boutiques should strongly consider making the leap from Version 5 for these improvements alone.

It's not as if the other faces of Maya have been left out of the upgrades--far from it. One upgrade of particular interest is the ability to read and write Photoshop PSD files and layer sets directly. Texture artists will love being able to write UVsnapshots directly to a Photoshop layer, and assign different layer sets within a single PSD file to different shader attributes. Now many shader attributes may be contained in one easy-to-manage map file. It is an enormous work flow leap for texture artists as well as generalists.

The Hypershade window has been streamlined to load faster than before. I still prefer the Multilister for quick shader work, considering it still loads in roughly one-third the time of the Hypershade.

Alias also improved Maya's rendering pipeline. Mental Ray is more tightly integrated in Version 6, which is nice to see. For example, you can now create Mental Ray shaders easily through the Hypershade, and you can render Maya Fur in Mental Ray.

The new Soft Modification Tool, a deformer that works like a cluster, allows for a soft selection around the deformer. You can adjust the deformer at any time and animate it as you would any cluster, which I immediately ...