Introduction to Autodesk Maya LT

What's the difference between Maya and Maya LT?

Autodesk® Maya LT™ is a cost-effective content creation solution for indie game developers.

Autodesk® Maya® includes additional capabilities, including more advanced character animation, dynamics & effects, texturing, rendering, and custom pipeline support through .Net and Python. Maya is required for complex pipelines that require additional scripting support and full FBX export capabilities.

What features are available in Maya LT?

Maya LT includes all the tools necessary for independent game developers creating assets for PC, web, and mobile games, including:

• Full modeling parity with Maya (support for NURBS, polygons, UVs), including the Modeling Toolkit.
• Full texture baking with Turtle, plus low resolution Texture Baking preview. See Bake textures with Turtle and Visualizing textures baked with Turtle in ShaderFX.
• Basic keyframe animation, with some HumanIK, spline IK (but no Muscle deformer).

  Basic rigging is supported (joints, smooth skinning, blendshapes, basic constraints and utility nodes, and retargeting), but more advanced deformers and constraints are not available.

• Basic lighting.
• MEL scripting support and the Script Editor.

What type of assets can you create in Maya LT?

Maya LT is designed to create game assets such as props (weapons), environments (lighting, foliage, buildings), and even simple animated objects or humanoid characters.

While you can save native Maya LT (.mlt) files with as many polygons as you like, exported FBX and OBJ files are limited to 250,000 polygons per mesh. You can also export an unlimited number of polygons directly to a Stingray project, an Unreal project, a Unity project, or Mudbox using the File menu. See Export objects to a new file.

Note: You can load Maya files (.ma and .mb) in Maya LT, however any unsupported nodes are removed. If you load scenes that include file references, the referenced objects are automatically loaded in the scene. For more information, see Create, open, or save a scene file and Supported file formats.

The Content Browser window (Window > Content Browser) includes a set of sample assets you can use to start playing with Maya LT. Middle-drag to load the game character, basic animation clips, environment assets, and props into your scene.

You can also browse, purchase, and download 3D assets using the Creative Market panel (Marketplace > Creative Market).