Thursday, December 28th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Autodesk ships Maya 2018.2


Autodesk has released Maya 2018.2, a minor update to the 3D modelling and animation software, adding new render attributes for Bifröst simulations and updating FBX export.

(Full disclosure: it actually came out before Christmas, but we didn’t manage to cover it at the time.)

New render options provide finer control over Bifröst output
Bifröst, Maya’s fluid simulation toolset, gets a number of new render attributes in Maya 2018.2.

Simulations can now be rendered as surfaces, points or volumes, with the option to choose different render types for the liquid surface, foam and spray.

Each render type gets its own individual controls, including new smoothing options for surfaces.

It is also now possible to render only those portions of a sim that fall inside the world-space bounding box of clipping mesh; and to blend a simulated fluid surface back into a planar mesh for ocean simulations.

Data channels like velocity, vorticity and density can also be exported individually for use in shading.

The 2018.2 release also updates FBX export to avoid issues created by animation curves with long tangents. Where a tangent extends beyond the surrounding keys, the animation is now baked into the curve on export.

The previous update, Maya 2018.1, also added a new Unity neutral tonemap: a view transform that emulates Unity’s default viewing pipeline.

Pricing and availability
Maya 2018.2 is available for Windows 7 and 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and 7.2 WS and CentOS 6.5 and 7.2, and Mac OS X 10.11 and above. It is available on a rental-only basis, starting at $185/month or $1,470/year.

Read a full list of new features in Maya 2018.2 in Autodesk’s online documentation