What's New in Maya 2017 Update 1

About Maya Updates

Maya 2017 marks a shift in the way Maya is maintained and updated to provide quicker access to new features, and quicker fixes to customer issues.

Instead of the Service Packs and Extensions you may be accustomed to, Maya Updates will be released. Updates will include defect fixes, and new features.
Note: The Maya API binary compatibility will not be modified in any 2017 updates, however, the API may be extended to enable new features.

Updates will be available on the Maya Downloads page as a full install of the product on Mac and Linux operating systems. On Windows operating systems, Maya Updates will appear in the Autodesk Desktop App, as an incremental install. Each update will contain the fixes and features of any update prior to it. You cannot run an Update alongside an existing version of Maya 2017.

Similarly, the Maya Help itself will be refreshed for each update. Look for specific What's New topics for every update. This means if you are not upgrading your software with each update, you may see help topics where information has been changed and it may not apply to your version of Maya. This may include Maya technical documentation, API Guide, Maya User Guide, and other resources as necessary.

Graph Editor updates

Lock Tangent Weight and Free Tangent Weight options are now named Lock Tangent Length and Free Tangent Length in the Graph Editor toolbar and Tangent menu.

Now, when the tangent length is locked, it turns black in the Graph View.

Time Change Undo Preferences

You can now add time changes to the undo stack by turning off the Undoable Time Changes option in the Undo preferences. (All adjacent time-change commands are undone at once by default.)

Animation performance

OpenCL has been re-enabled for Windows NVIDIA drivers 386.68 and later.

Color Management

Option to Enable or Disable Color Management for New Scenes

The Color Management enabled setting in the New Scene Options determines whether or not color management is enabled by default for new scenes.

Support for switching OCIO contexts

If you are using an OpenColorIO configuration file for color management, you can change OCIO context environment variables and see the effect without restarting Maya. To do this, use MEL or Python commands to change the environment variable and then refresh the color management preferences.

For example, suppose that your configuration file uses a context named SHOT, which is currently set to abc123.spi1d, and you want to change it to ijk456.spi1d. In this case, you can run the following lines of MEL in the Script Editor: 
putenv "SHOT" "ijk456.spi1d";
colorManagementPrefs -refresh;

Rendering

The Render Setup Find in ... marking menus in the Outliner have been enhanced to allow you to more easily locate the nodes you want within your collections. Nodes are highlighted in the Property Editor for easy identification, and layers that are initially collapsed automatically expand if the node exists among its collections. These menus can also be used to locate lights in your collections.

API

PySide

Maya 2017 uses PySide2. To use PySide in your scripts, import modules from PySide as follows. This allows your script to be compatible with both Maya 2017 as well as versions earlier than Maya 2017. 

try:
    from PySide2.QtCore import * 
    from PySide2.QtGui import * 
    from PySide2.QtWidgets import *
    from PySide2 import __version__
    from shiboken2 import wrapInstance 
except ImportError:
    from PySide.QtCore import * 
    from PySide.QtGui import * 
    from PySide import __version__
    from shiboken import wrapInstance

For more information, see the PySide examples in the devkit/pythonScripts folder of the Maya Developer Kit.

Lighting

If a plug-in light uses the light classification, you must include these light attributes: intensity, color, emitDiffuse, and emitSpecular, in order for the light to behave like a Maya light. The attributes can be static or dynamic.

For more information about the light classification, see the Viewport 2.0 API > > Maya Viewport 2.0 API Guide > Plug-in Entry Points > Registration section of the Maya Developer Help.

Maya Developer Kit

Obtain the most updated Developer Kit examples online at Autodesk Exchange at https://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/MAYA/en/Home/Index.

Parent topic: What's New in Maya