Maya 5: Alias/Wavefront trims up the flagship.(Product/Service Evaluation)

With Maya 5, Alias|Wavefront has tried to answer the needs of artists and production studios with a more refined implementation of current work flows. This newest upgrade of the modeling and animation software doesn't try to attract a larger user base with flashy new capabilities, but instead further solidifies Maya's existing tools.

The most noticeable enhancements include a tighter integration of rendering capabilities, with added native support for mental ray for Maya, stronger hardware rendering, and vector-line rendering. With the new unified Pender Globals, users can output their animations through any of Maya's four native renderers to achieve a broad range of effects--from the subtleties of global illumination and caustic lighting to a hand-illustrated look.

This new unified rendering workflow is truly elegant. Being able to natively choose among renderers, as opposed to using plug-ins of external renderers, is a welcome edge for production work and artistic exploration.

Full mental ray integration is a boost for some photoreal rendering needs. And the vector rendering enables cartoon and line art rendering. Maya's hardware rendering has good quality and high-speed output, but needs a wider hardware support base, which will come with time. The existing Hardware Render Buffer is left intact, however, and is as functional as before.

I was impressed with the improvement of constraints in Maya 5. It now has the ability to blend between an object's own animation and its constraints, and also comes with two new attributes to better control constraint relationships among objects.

Once animation is created, Maya 5 makes it easier to evaluate and edit with improved ghosting and new muting features, which have in some form already been seen in competing animation packages. Ghosting lets you view poses from previous and future frames of an animated object to better judge the motion. The new muting function lets you choose whether particular channels of animation play back on an object through the Channel Box, without needing to disconnect from the animation. This capability makes it easier to focus on a particular aspect of an animation. In addition, different types of inputs on attributes (such as keyframes versus set keys versus expressions) are distinguished by different colors in the Attribute Editor and Channel Box. These kinds of additions seem simple, but really add up.

Effects animators will also enjoy the expanded possibilities of Paint ...