Autodesk Maya 2011 [MAC]

One Maya. More Value.

Create innovative digital entertainment with Autodesk Maya 2011, an end-to-end solution for CG production at an exceptional value.

Modernize your pipeline and compete more effectively with Autodesk Maya 2011 modeling, animation visual effects, rendering, and compositing software. Whether you work in film, games, television, or web and multimedia production, Maya 2011 offers stateof - the-art toolsets, in an end-to-end solution designed to meet today’s demanding production requirements.

Create Better Animation in Less Time
Maya 2011 enables you to create more content, faster, especially when it comes to believable character animation. An extensive array of new skinning tools and workflows help you rig characters more easily and apply deformations that behave more naturally
when animating joints; new retargeting tools make repurposing existing animation data easier and more practical; and enhancements to the Graph Editor helps make it easier to view, select, and edit animation curves and keyframes, accelerating everyday animation tasks. Moreover, new support for timeline scrubbing with simultaneous playback of multiple audio tracks helps make it easier to synchronize your animation against a soundtrack.

Add Production Capability and Increase Efficiency
With shrinking budgets and tighter deadlines, you need to squeeze every drop of efficiency from your production pipeline. Maya 2011 has been designed to help you do just that. Powerful, new 3D editorial capabilities help synchronize pre-visualization and
animation blocking and layout with the editorial process. You can import timelines from popular nonlinear editing applications—complete with movie files, audio, and time code information—and use them to guide animation timing and flow. Other production efficiencies in Maya 2011 include scene segmentation for faster, parallel workflows; improved file referencing and asset management; integrated color management for more accurate viewing and greater color fidelity; enhanced compositing with new rotoscoping capabilities; and 3D model and animation export to popular game engines
(Epic Unreal® Engine, Unity and Microsoft® XNA® tools) with Autodesk® FBX® 2011 data exchange technology.

Work with Ease and Speed
The new Maya 2011 user interface (UI) not only looks great, but also helps reduce eye strain, improve workflow, and increase productivity. Completely updated using the Nokia™ Qt UI framework, Maya 2011 delivers an enhanced, consistent user experience across all supported platforms that benefits both artists and technical users—with more flexible editors, a new color chooser and file browser, and an updated script editor and easier creation of custom UI elements. With a much-requested 64-bit executable for the Mac OS® X (Snow Leopard) operating system joining the lineup, the choice of whether to run Maya on the Windows®, Linux®, or Mac OS X operating system is down to your personal preference.

Key Features:

Enhanced User Interface
Enjoy a consistent, enhanced user experience on all supported platforms with an updated user interface that offers a fresh new look, dockable UI elements, more flexible editors, and a new color chooser and file browser.

Accelerated Skinning Workflow
Create better skinned characters with more realistic deformations in less time, with new skinning tools and workflows: a dual quaternion option for smooth skinning, interactive volume binding, multiple enhancements to the Paint Skin Weights tool, deformer weight mirroring, and a surface falloff mode for the Wrap deformer.

Nondestructive Live Retargeting
More quickly and easily reuse, correct, and enhance motion capture and certain other animation data with a new nondestructive retargeting workflow that uses the Autodesk® HumanIK® (HIK) middleware libraries. Transfer animation from one character to another and adjust retargeting parameters live.

3D Editorial
Accelerate pre-visualization and virtual moviemaking production with new 3D editorial capabilities in Maya. Lay out multiple camera shots directly in Maya, or import an edit decision list in Apple® Final Cut Pro® XML or AAF formats. Then change the timings of shots, create alternate versions, and use Playblast to playback and review.

Enhancements to Assets and File Referencing
More easily segment, reuse, and exchange data with or without file referencing. A new option to create assets with transforms (DAG assets) helps streamline the most common workflows with assets. Moreover, data can be exported and imported as offline files to flexibly partition scenes, while reference edits can be imported, exported, and removed without unloading.

Color Management
Make better decisions and preserve creative intent throughout the rendering pipeline by working within the context of the final color space in which images will be viewed. Initial support is through the mental ray® for Maya renderer.

Qt User Interface Toolkit
Maya now uses the Qt UI. As a result, you can create interface components for proprietary tools with Qt Designer and load them directly into Maya, while the Script Editor offers syntax coloring, automatic indentation, and auto-completion.

Large Scene Performance
Achieve significantly faster frame rates with a new interactive viewport display option—especially useful for level editors and others working with large scenes and many textures. Texture loading for interactive display is also significantly faster for BMP, JPEG, PNG, and Targa formats.

Vector Paint in Maya Composite
Perform complex rotoscoping operations such as removing or replacing elements from live-action plates using the new vector paint option in the Maya Composite functionality. Fully integrated with tracking, paint strokes are animatable and can be used to clone data from another source.

64-Bit Support for Mac OS X
Access considerably more memory to handle larger and more complex scenes with the new 64-bit executable on Mac OS X.

Autodesk Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2011
Production today requires integrating techniques from sculpting to motion capture effectively and efficiently. Get the Autodesk® Maya® Entertainment Creation Suite 2011 and access the power of the industry’s top 3D modeling and animation technology in one software suite. The suite includes Maya together with Autodesk®
MotionBuilder® real-time character animation software, and Autodesk® Mudbox™ digital sculpting and 3D painting software at a reduced price*.

Top Reasons to Buy Autodesk Maya

Buy Autodesk Maya software today, and gain access to an end-to-end creative workflow. Maya is an integrated 3D modeling, animation, visual effects, rendering, and compositing software that has been used in the making of numerous top games, television projects, and movies.

Cutting-Edge CG, Unbeatable Value
Help modernize your pipeline from end-to-end, with Autodesk Maya: a state-of-the-art creative solution for 3D modeling, animation, simulation, effects, rendering, matchmoving, and compositing in a single affordable offering. Incorporating innovative dynamic toolsets for cloth, hair, fur, fluids, and particles; the powerful Maya Composite high dynamic range (HDR) compositing system; the Autodesk® MatchMover™ camera tracker; five mental ray® for Maya batch* rendering nodes; and the Autodesk® Backburner™ network render queue manager, Maya offers tremendous value. Maya software’s award-winning technology helps artists, designers, and 3D enthusiasts around the world create more engaging and compelling digital imagery, stylistic designs, believable animated characters, and extraordinary visual effects.

Proven Solution
Maya has been a 3D tool of choice for companies producing the top film, games, and television content throughout the world for the last decade. Itself an Academy Award® winner for Scientific and Technical Achievement in 2003, Maya has been extensively used by the vast majority of nominees and winners for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects since 1999, and by many top-selling games publishers. Meanwhile,
award-winning commercials facilities and leading broadcasters on several continents count Maya among their toolset. From Hollywood to Helsinki, from Soho to Singapore, from New York to New Delhi, many of the world’s top production companies rely on Maya.

Features
At the cutting edge of innovative feature development for over 12 years, Maya is packed with tried and tested features that help speed your project from initial concept to finished renderings: polygon and NURBS modeling, UV mapping and texturing, animation and rigging, a wide range of dynamic simulation tools, toon shading, tools for generating plants and other natural detail, and a choice of four built-in renderers including mental ray.

Productivity
Increased competition and tighter deadlines, combined with higher audience expectations for quality, mean that many productions require artists to produce more creative output in less time than ever before. Maya helps maximize productivity with optimized workflows for everyday tasks, opportunities for collaborative, parallel workflows and re-use of assets, and automation through scripting for repetitive tasks.

Performance
Through a combination of multi-threading, algorithmic tuning, sophisticated memory management, and tools for segmenting scenes, together with 64-bit offerings for Windows®, Linux®, and Mac OS® X operating systems, Maya is engineered to more elegantly handle today’s increasingly complex data sets without slowing down the creative process.

Interoperability
From complex, proprietary pipelines, to the single user working from home, Maya is rarely used in isolation to create the finished job. Whether the artist is painting textures in Adobe® Photoshop® software, compositing shots in Autodesk® Flame® software, bringing in cleaned motion capture data from Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software, or meshes and normal maps from Autodesk® Mudbox™ software, Maya helps make the task as seamless as possible, helping to minimize errors and reduce iterations. Included with Maya, the Autodesk® FBX® technology supports the exchange of 3D data with numerous professional applications—enabling assets created outside of Maya to be re-used—and offers a software development kit (SDK) to assist studios with pipeline integration.

Extensibility
Maya is an out-of-the-box solution, but for companies wishing to tightly integrate it with their existing pipelines, or to add differentiated new feature development on top, Maya offers several avenues for customization. Built from the ground-up with its own embedded scripting language: Maya Embedded Language (MEL), Maya also offers Python® scripting, and an extensive, welldocumented C++ application programming interface (API). Meanwhile, with a Qt user interface (UI), developers can more easily create interface components for proprietary tools with Qt Designer and load them directly into Maya.

Platform Choice
Maya runs on these platforms: Windows®, Mac OS® X, and Linux® operating system. And it’s ready to handle the large amounts of memory that today’s large scenes require, with 64-bit executables for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Talent Pool
With thousands of artists graduating from Maya education programs each year in numerous countries worldwide, customers using Maya are able to find the talent they need to staff their projects. On the other side of the coin, individuals buying a license of Maya are making an investment in their future careers by gaining skills and experience that are highly marketable to an installed base that has seen continued healthy growth.

Subscription and Support
For an affordable annual fee that helps customers plan their budget ahead, Autodesk® Subscription for Maya entitles them to all new releases and extensions offered during the subscription period. In addition, Subscription members have access to an online technical knowledge-base and learning resources, and can manage their licenses through the Subscription Center. Adding Gold support to Subscription provides artists with access to knowledgeable support experts via telephone or web, and a mechanism to track and report issues.

Services
When a production requires more than an out-of-the-box solution, Autodesk’s custom development center is standing by with a range of offerings, including custom code development, on-demand bug-fixing (even on prior versions) and a Production Assurance menu of services that will allow customers to get precisely the help they need, when they need it most.

System Requirements:

• Mac® computer: Intel-based processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 4 GB free hard drive space
• Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
• Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD-ROM drive
• Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
  
  1. 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
  2.  HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
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