What's New in Maya 2026

Welcome to Maya 2026! You can access this release from your Autodesk Account.

Read on to learn about the new features and updated workflows you'll find in this release. For technical details including What's Fixed, see the Maya 2026 Release Notes. For changes to the 2026 Maya devkit, see What's New in the 2026 devkit.

For more on the evolution of Maya over the years, check out the Maya timeline on Autodesk AREA.

What's New in Modeling

New modeling updates in Maya include updates to the boolean node and a new dialog to set units for STL files.

Share cuts to Animate in Context

Animate in Context allows shot-based artists to view the shots surrounding their active scene directly in Maya.

What's New in Rigging and Character Animation

Various customer-requested updates and improvements for riggers and animators.

Introducing Golaem

Golaem, a crowd simulation and character layout plug-in for Maya, is now available as part of the Media & Entertainment Collection. Golaem makes it easy to populate worlds with digital characters.

Default surface shader: OpenPBR

OpenPBR is now the default surface shader in Maya.

Arnold for Maya 5.5.3

Updates in MtoA since Maya 2026 introduce major performance boosts and add initial GPU support for Toon shading, an interactive HTML-based render stats report, and enhanced USD integration.

Bifrost 2.13.0.0

Bifrost 2.13.0.0 includes the ability to simulate liquids directly in the graph, together with many other new features.

What's New in USD for Maya

USD for Maya 0.31 now supports light linking.

What's New in LookdevX for Maya

LookdevX 1.7.0 for Maya introduces improved publishing workflows, relative paths support, and a new generative textures API.

Flow Retopology for Maya 1.3

Flow Retopology is now included with Maya 2026. Use Flow Retopology to work with complex geometry and offload job processing to the cloud.

Substance 3.0.4

Substance for Maya has been updated to version 3.0.4.

Flow Wedging Tutorials

There's a new playlist of videos for those who want to try out Flow Wedging.

What else is new?

This release of Maya also includes the following changes and improvements.

Color management

OpenColorIO has been updated to OCIO v2.4.1.

In addition, the legacy SynColor color management system is no longer supported.

WebM support You can now export a playblast as a .webm file. Additionally, image planes and the Camera Sequencer now support this format.
Unit-less math nodes

Many math nodes with DoubleLinear (distance) attributes now have versions that use unitless (double) attributes instead. This improves their compatibility and range. As a result, the original DoubleLinear (distance) versions have been deprecated, but are still available in Maya 2026. These have been renamed to include a "DL" suffix (example: "absolute" has become "absoluteDL"), while node types without the"DL" suffix now refer to the new unitless math nodes (example: "createNode absolute"). Old scenes with DoubleLinear math nodes will open/import correctly in Maya 2026 but will issue warnings about any deprecated DL nodes in the scene.

In addition, three math node types have been renamed to include a "DL" suffix for consistency and will need to be updated in custom tools/scripts:
  1. addDoubleLinear is now "addDL"
  2. multiplyDoubleLinear is now "multiplyDL"
  3. pointMatrixMult is now "pointMatrixMultDL"
Note: Maya 2026 scenes with math nodes may exhibit problems when attempting to open in older releases.
  1. Lines like "createNode power" (which, in a 2026 .ma file, will create a unitless power node) will create the pre-2026, DoubleLinear version of the power node in pre-2026 releases.
  2. Lines like "createNode powerDL" will cause errors in older releases since powerDL did not exist pre-2026, but the .ma file can be edited to use the pre-2026 DoubleLinear node type: "createNode power" instead.
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