Autodesk 2011

So I am sure most have looked over the new features or where all ready on alpha/beta but what do you guys think?

Pymel officaly in Maya
HIK in Maya for realtime retargeting of animation.
Softimage getting python
Motionbuilder now a true FBX native format and more fun in story and physics and animation layers
Max tons of new modeling and Ui features

etc.

http://area.autodesk.com/products

I kinda like it, then again I may be a bit biased on all fronts Brad :wink:

Shawn, biased, surely not! :wink: Nice to finally be able to talk about som eof this stuff!

I could not find any official link that says it will include pyMel. Other than that it looks really great, finally something to get excited about in new version of Maya

Yep ships with pyMel v1 which is a great addition

[QUOTE=Mark-J;5583]Shawn, biased, surely not! :wink: Nice to finally be able to talk about som eof this stuff![/QUOTE]

Talk away! Are you two at GDC this week? If so drop me an email (hit the ‘secret’ forums to get it). I’m in SF until Saturday, would be good to finally meet you two so you can give me hell for everything I broke or didn’t do for this release :slight_smile:

[QUOTE=smcclelland;5587]Talk away![/QUOTE]

Sweet!

Having played around with Maya 2011 a bit I must say it looks like the most feature full release in years and I’m excited for it.

Softimage finally supporting kinematics in ICE is HUGE. Things I can do with that program rigging/deformation wise are just mind blowing.

Definitely looks good, I’m super stoked about the Maya PyMel addition the most I think. Quaternion skinning as well.

I like the backward compatibility feature… Its long over due Max!

I guess I can mention something else we’ve been hard at work on here as well for those Unreal or UDK folks.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/FBXImporting.html

Be interesting to know what people think of this, it’s been an exciting project so far and I’m looking forward to doing more.

Hey smcclelland! As we don’t seem to get much response on the UDK forums I’d take a shot at asking you about the FBX format for UE3. As I see it, there’s just one animation sequence per FBX file correct? So if I have 5 different sequences in the same Maya scene/timeline, would there be any way to export them as 5 different FBX files or 5 different sequences in the same file? I haven’t used FBX before so I’m totally clueless about how it works. With ActorX you sample all joints in the scene that doesn’t have the _ignore suffix, at a certain timerange, and export as an animation file. Is it possible to do the same with FBX?

Do you know if the support for Blend Shape / Morph Target animation, which is supported with ActorX/Maya, is supported with the FBX format? Note that I’m not talking about exporting the mesh/morph data but the animation tracks.

The work you’re doing is highly appreciated, you’re opening up doors for more 3d packages like Blender and people over at UDK forums seem happy. Keep up the good work!

I can tell you that I am chomping at the bit to get Maya 2011 in house. Too much good stuff and FINALLY a decent UI construction methodology in the package itself.

Or in short, integrated PyMel and QT ui alone sell this one to me.

-L

[QUOTE=lanedaughtry;5608]

Or in short, integrated PyMel and QT ui alone sell this one to me.

-L[/QUOTE]

+1

now just need good .NET support in Maya and i’ll never bug autodesk for anything again…sorta.

[QUOTE=djTomServo;5609]…i’ll never bug autodesk for anything again…sorta.[/QUOTE]

Heheheh.

Honeyed words my friend. Let’s not start making promises we can’t keep :wink:

-L

[QUOTE=smcclelland;5587]Talk away! Are you two at GDC this week? If so drop me an email (hit the ‘secret’ forums to get it). I’m in SF until Saturday, would be good to finally meet you two so you can give me hell for everything I broke or didn’t do for this release :)[/QUOTE]

Where were you last year? I asked Roselle if you were being punished or something. :laugh:

I miss being on the Beta’s :frowning: I guess thats what happens when switch jobs and everything autodesk was tied to a company account and not a personal one. Can’t wait to see some demo’s from GDC.

Will QT have proper window focus, threading and frame parenting (where the newly created UI won’t fall behind the main Maya window?)

So the way FBX works for exporting animation data to UE is saving out a single animation per file. I polled a number of people on this one and the consensus was to not store multiple animations in an FBX file as people wanted Run.fbx, Walk.fbx, StrafeL.fbx etc. FBX can be exported either based on selection or as a whole… a lot of the smarts we wrote into the importer side so if you saved your entire rig, skeleton and animation into an FBX file but you just wanted the animation the importer knows based on the context (i.e. you’re importing to an animset) and only grabs the necessary data. If you use the selection method you can just select the root of your skeleton and say export, check off animation in the options and I typically bake my animation at that point as well and resample to 30fps.

Morph Target animation is not currently supported but is something I want to add as well :slight_smile:

That was the goal! I’m hoping to do some more work on it soon.

[QUOTE=JAMsession;5611]Where were you last year? I asked Roselle if you were being punished or something. :laugh:

I miss being on the Beta’s :frowning: I guess thats what happens when switch jobs and everything autodesk was tied to a company account and not a personal one. Can’t wait to see some demo’s from GDC.

Will QT have proper window focus, threading and frame parenting (where the newly created UI won’t fall behind the main Maya window?)[/QUOTE]

They locked me in some janitors closet until I finished the skinning and animation tools :laugh: They were nice enough to slide my Game Developer subscription under the door though so I had some form of outside world content. Toss me a PM here and I’ll see about getting you back on, are you over at Radical still?

QT has proper focus properties where the windows will not fall behind the UI anymore on all platforms (they remain on top). GDC’s had a lot of really good feedback from people so far, I stopped by the booth a few times today to see how the demo guys were doing and what the customers thought.

Shawn

sorry I am locked down in Austin but great work Shawn and we will just have to have to meet up at some future event.

Have fun at GDC.

No problem Brad, maybe I can try to attend GDC Austin or something this year and meet up.

smcclelland >> I just gave it a go with Maya 2009 and the FBX version that came with it. (do I need to download a newer version, if there is one?) I had a full character scene, with referenced rig and a walking animation. I selected my skeleton, choose export selected, activated animation/bake and chose range 10-40. Exporting with those settings included objects in the scene I had not selected and almost took me 1-2 minutes to complete with a 8mb file. Did I do something wrong or is this how it’s supposed to work at the moment? :?:

I understand that the FBX support for UE3 is still new, but I hope that ActorX is not dropped because honestly using FBX for animation at this point seems awkward. ActorX exports the range in less than a second and outputs a sequence of 500kb. I’m still interested in giving FBX a chance, but for animation it seems cumbersome. I hope you don’t take this feedback negatively, I just want to be honest. :p: