Viewport 2.0 Enhancements
The high-performance viewport introduced with Maya 2011 now offers full-screen visual effects: motion blur, depth-of-field, and ambient occlusion, enabling you to evaluate your work in a higher fidelity environment and without needing to render or export to a game engine. Moreover, Viewport 2.0 now provides component and manipulator display to support modeling workflows, together with batch rendering capabilities, and a high-performance API
Node-Based Render Passes
Create and edit node-based representations of render passes directly within Maya, and render the composited output directly through mental ray® renderer. A powerful tool for verifying and refining render passes prior to handing them to the compositor, node-based render passes also enable artists to perform certain simple compositing tasks without leaving Maya
Editable Motion Trails
Edit animation directly in the viewport without the need to switch context to the graph editor. New editable motion trails offer a faster and easier method for fine-tuning motion animation. Intuitively edit the position and timing of keyframes in relation to the animated object while viewing the path of motion over time in 3D space, resulting in a smoother, more productive workflow
Sequencer Enhancements
The Camera Sequencer now offers a Sequencer Playlist—enabling you to manage your sequences through a configurable spreadsheet view that gives you the ability to reorder clips, edit In and Out points, and change camera assignments—together with support for multitrack audio and the ability to output multiple shots as a single sequence
Substance Procedural Textures
Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of 80 Substance procedural textures. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny disk space footprint and can be exported to certain game engines via the Substance Air middleware offering (available separately from Allegorithmic SAS). Alternatively, textures can be quickly converted to bitmaps for rendering
Craft Animation Tools
Easily create believable, complex camera movements that mimic real-world setups with 4 new camera rigs from the Craft Director Studio™ plug-in. Use a joystick to record real-time input while driving the camera; stabilize turbulent or unnatural camera movements; add shakiness to an existing animated camera; or smoothly transition or instantly cut between different camera views and settings
Enhanced, Multi-Product Animation Workflows
An enhanced Graph Editor takes some of the best features from the f-curve editors within the products of the Autodesk® Maya® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012 and combines them into a toolset that offers more consistent functionality and terminology, enabling animators to more easily switch between products. Moreover, working with characters in both Maya and Autodesk® MotionBuilder® 2012 software is now easier, with an enhanced interface, unified solver, and more consistent workflows for Autodesk® HumanIK® technology (formerly implemented as FBIK in Maya). In addition, customers who use the Autodesk® HumanIK® 4.5 or 2012 middleware solution can benefit from improved animation consistency between Maya and their game engine
