What's New in General in Maya 2017 Update 3

Viewport 2.0 enhancements

Maya 2017 Update 3 introduces a number of Viewport 2.0 feature enhancements for modelers and animators as well as for shading and lighting. Some highlights include:

• Native support for OSD 3.1 now allows modelers and animators to preview the actual shape and surface of adaptive openSubdiv geometry. For example, see the realtime results when sculpting an adaptive openSubdiv mesh or view creases in the mesh while animating.
• Simplified displacement preview workflow, which includes an Alt + 3 hotkey to toggle displacement preview on and off to minimize workflow interruptions.
• Support for complex shading networks on displaced surfaces. This includes realtime preview of ramps, adjustments to texture file attributes, and multi-tiled UV textures.
• Addition of previously unsupported viewport effects including point light shadows, and ambient occlusions.
• Improved transparency with the addition of a new Alpha Cut transparency algorithm. Alpha Cut provides high quality transparency and accurate object sorting without performance trade-offs.

  For a complete list of Viewport 2.0 enhancements, see What's New in Rendering in Maya 2017 Update 3.

Horizontal or Vertically dock shelf

You can now dock the shelf with a horizontal or vertical orientation to better fit the UI layout you've set up. For more information, see Orient a shelf.

Better docking highlights

The UI now highlights more clearly when dragging windows to better indicate where that window will be docked.

Automatically save workspaces

You can now choose whether or not to automatically save workspace layout changes in the Workspace layout options.

Dash scripting

A new form of fully customizable scripting has been added to the Channel Box. To use it, select one or more attributes and then Alt + right-click them to display an in-line editor, then input a command. For more information, see Dash scripting.

Content Browser performance improvement

The Content Browser now opens much faster than before.

Content Browser Python support

The Content Browser now sources .py files. Dragging and dropping one into the scene automatically executes its onMayaDroppedPythonFile method. For more information, see Find and import files from the Content Browser.

Various icon refreshes

Various icons around the interface have been modernized so that they scale better.