When characters or objects interact in an environment, some kind of proof of being a living environment must be evident as they perform. This is where dynamics help to breath life into a scene and immerse the viewer. Over the years in Maya, dynamics have expanded and grown to encompass so many things. Particles of debris, bubbles, etc can be emitted. Gravitational constraints can be applied to objects. Fire, smoke, lightning can be created. Bodies of water, from rain to oceans, fill a scene and are held in virtual conatainers. Even the cloth and hair can be added and sculpted to best reflect the character who wears it. Maya simulates the attributes and movement of dynamics so that the animator doesn't have to scrutinize over every little bit to create the performance he needs. But at the same time, the attributes of these dynamics can be modified and even extended with MEL scripting to get more out of Maya.
Geometry constrained to a point do not deform with the mesh it is attached to.
Usually the last thing that you do, whether you've modeled, textured, or animated your scene, rendering is controlling the final output of your image or movie. Aside from just punching in settings and exporting what the camera sees, adding and tweaking the lighting helps to create moods and meld the different assets in your scene together as a whole. Maya provides several types of lighting solutions, such as ambient, directional, point, area, volume, and spot lights that can be mixed together to really enhance the look of your scene. Besides controlling the light that hits the surface, you can also choose and modify shaders that tell a surface to either absorb or reflect a light in certain ways. Lastly, choosing a particular render engine, like Maya software, hardware, or Mental Ray will also elicit particular results to create the look that best fits your criteria.
Use different lights to create moods and direct interest.
New Features
Autodesk Maya 2011's new features have updates that touch almost every facet of the program. Starting with interface, Maya 2011 leverages the power and customizability of the Qt interface engine. As discussed earlier, panels can be moved to fit the layout that works best for you, as well as having certain windows like the channel, layer editor, and tool settings collapse to tabs on the side of the working environment. The new shelf editor allows you to modify the individual shelves without having to jump to different tabs. One-click and double-click commands for each tool can be modified in separate tabs within the editor and any tool's icon color and background can be changed. The menu for opening a file has been updated to now contain option fields in conjunction with the file browser before choosing your file. The color picker has had a major facelift, giving you multiple ways to choose colors, sample colors from images, track color history, and save and load custom palettes for later use.
Some really cool features have been added for artists that primarily do modeling. First up, Bezier Tool has been added to the curve tool set to allow you to draw curves much like the pen tool that is found in programs like Adobe Illustrator. The Connect Components Tool lets you select a vertex point, edge or face and then draws an edge to connect them depending on the components orientation. The Spin Edge Tool allows you to select one or multiple edges and, depending if you choose spin right or left, the tool turns the edge to intersect with the next vertex point in that direction. Soft Selecting in objects has extended its control to influence not only the selected meshes components, but also a falloff selection field of the objects around it to change the spacing based on the translation of the selected mesh. And the Pinch Brush Tool allows you to pull in closest vertex points selected to "pinch" the surface of the mesh while sculpting.
