Maya 4.5.

Alias|Wavefront Adds Fluid Effects to its Flagship Program

Alias|Wavefront's flagship modeling and animation program, Maya, has been in transition recently. The package has seen a new surge in popularity since the company drastically cut the price of the software last year. Maya 4.5 is the first new version since the price drop, and I'm happy to report that Alias has continued to add innovative features not found in other packages.

Maya now has a few new shelves and marking menus, which add to the software's productivity. One nifty enhancement is the ability to create presets from within the Attribute Editor. Not only can an entire page of settings be recalled, but they can also be blended with existing presets. So, if you want a shader that is halfway between two other shaders, you can accomplish this with a few clicks. Another nice feature is the ability to annotate any object in a scene. This is great for larger projects, where information such as help files and version numbers are necessary for following an object through the pipeline.

The biggest addition to Maya Unlimited is the Fluid Effects module, which allows users to simulate water, fire, clouds, lava, and so forth. The module interfaces well with Maya Artisan, allowing you to literally paint how a fluid will move through a scene. Attributes such as fluid density, velocity, and temperature can be painted directly onto objects. The module is tightly integrated with the rest of Maya, which enables fluids to interact with such features as soft bodies and forces.

Modeling has seen a few enhancements. Some of the new polygonal modeling tools include poke faces, which allows you to expand a face around a vertex, and wedge faces, which allows you to extrude along an arc. Another tool lets you cut faces cleanly along a line. NURBS modelers will be happy to know that the full suite of advanced modeling tools previously available only in Unlimited is now included with Maya Complete.

One of the more interesting new tools is the smooth proxy mode for editing polygons. Much like subdivision surfaces in other packages such as Discreet's 3ds max and NewTek's LightWave, this feature allows modelers to see a smoothed version of their object beneath an editable cage. This feature should not be confused with Maya's own subdivision surface module, which is a bit more complex and allows for hierarchical subdivisions. The smooth proxy mode is a quick way ...