Thursday, March 7th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Sneak peek: Maya’s new retopology tools

Autodesk has posted another sneak peek of R&D technologies for Maya, this time showing retopology workflow.

The video shows a cylinder being constrained to the arm of a character to create nice clean quads with the same overall form, much like Blender’s Shrinkwrap Modifier.

The artist then creates new geometry over the character’s wrist and hand by drawing vertex positions on their surface and connecting them to form quads, in the same manner as Quad Draw in digitalRaster’s NEX plugin.

Like last week’s sneak peek of the grease pencil tool, this is functionality that currently exists in add-ons to Maya, but the workflow looks clean and straightforward. We can imagine these are tools a lot of people will use.

As ever, Autodesk has posted a disclaimer that the technology is not guaranteed to form part any particular release of Maya, but given that Maya 2014 is due to launch on 27 March, you can draw your own conclusions.