Autodesk ships Maya 2019.1 and Maya LT 2019.1
Autodesk has released Maya 2019.1 and Maya LT 2019.1, the latest versions of the 3D animation software.
In the full edition, the update improves lighting workflow in the Render Setup system and Light Editor, and adds new options for controlling cached animation playback and scene debugging.
Both editions get performance improvements in the Outliner, and when working with Booleans.
Maya 2019.1: improvements to lighting workflow and cached animation playback
Maya 2019.1 itself gets most of the new features this time round: mainly improvements in lighting workflow.
The update introduces new ways to add scene lights selectively to a render layer, including the option to use expressions, or to set up light overrides in the Light Editor.
Performance of the Light Editor itself should be improved by a new ‘just in time’ scrolling system; and it is now possible to set properties for multiple lights simultaneously.
The new cached playback system for animation introduced in Maya 2019 also gets a few updates.
Among them, it is now possible to disable caching of Smooth Mesh Preview to improve performance, and the option to flush the cache directly from the Timeline.
The Evalution Toolkit also gets a new Scene Lint window for troubleshooting common performance issues.
Options include searching the scene for unused expressions, slow OpenCL paths, or flat animation curves that could be replaced with static parameter values.
There is also a sizeable list of bugfixes.
Maya LT 2019.1: mainly just bugfixes
Maya LT 2019.1 is a much smaller update, simply introducing a new preference setting for increasing speed when expanding objects in the Outliner; and fixing common crashes when working with Booleans.
Both changes are also included in Maya 2019.1 itself.
Pricing and availability
Maya 2019.1 and Maya LT 2019.1 are available for Windows 7+, RHEL or CentOS 7.3 or 7.5 Linux and Mac OS X 10.11+ on a rental-only basis.
Since the 2019 release, the price of a subscription to Maya has risen to $195/month or $1,545/year; Maya LT costs $30/month or $250/year.
Read a full list of new features in Maya 2019.1 in the online release notes
Read a full list of new features in Maya LT 2019.1 in the online release notes