Autodesk hits a double with new versions of Maya, max.(Maya 8.0 and 3ds Max 9.0)

Autodesk has unveiled new versions of its modeling, animation, and rendering software--Maya 8 and 3ds Max 9--both designed to help digital content creators in the games, film and television, and design visualization industries achieve their creative goals.

The releases offer big improvements in core performance, productivity, and pipeline efficiency. Moreover, the upgrades mark the first major releases of the products since Autodesk's acquisition of Alias early this year, and represent the first steps in the company's three-year roadmap to more tightly integrate the applications while maintaining the separate product lines.

Autodesk's Maya 8 for the Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms features improvements that enable the software to handle larger datasets, in addition to myriad performance and productivity enhancements. The product offers a combination of 64-bit support and multi-threading and algorithmic optimizations to let artists load massive datasets and interact with them more efficiently. Key areas of the software, including skinning, draw tessellation, and subdivided polygon proxy meshes, have been multi-threaded to scale with the number of processors or cores available, thereby accelerating formerly time-consuming tasks on today's workstations.

Other key features include: the ability to override viewports with a user-defined renderer, an optimized Mental Ray 3.5 core, support for HDR and floating-point images, ...