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What's New in Maya LT 2019

Welcome to What's New in Autodesk® Maya LT® 2019.

This release focuses on letting you work faster than ever before through new workflows and numerous performance enhancements.

  • A myriad of improvements to Viewport 2.0 enhance its performance when doing everything from loading scenes to selecting objects, to handling dense meshes.
  • Plenty of examples and presets have been added to the Content Browser covering a variety of areas, including motion capture and characters. Use them as-is, or as a jumping-off point for your own work.

Viewport 2.0 enhancements

A number of common workflows in Viewport 2.0 are now much faster than before. These include:

  • Files now load faster in Viewport 2.0.
  • Selecting / Deselecting objects is faster.
  • Pre-select highlighting now performs faster on dense meshes.
  • Snapping performance has been improved.
  • Memory management in Viewport 2.0 has been improved by gracefully down-sampling large textures. This means that the Viewport in Maya 2019 can more easily display textures in scenes that previous versions might have had difficulty with. For more information, see Viewport 2.0 options.

Time Editor Suspend Refresh

Previously, when working with large scenes in the Time Editor, repositioning clips would trigger a redraw that resulted in a performance slowdown. This lag led to difficulty and inaccuracy when trying to make precision edits.

Now, to avoid this performance setback, activate the Real Time Refresh option located in the Time Editor File menu. When active, Real Time Refresh suspends the scene update so your fine-tuning is uninterrupted.

UV Editor changes

A few small changes have been made to the UV Editor to streamline workflows. These include:
  • The Unpack option in the Unfold UVs Options has been renamed Layout UVs to more accurately reflect what it does.
  • The Shell Pre-Scaling method in the Layout UVs Options now defaults to Preserve 3D Ratios. This will result in UV shells that better maintain the relative sizes of the geometry they belong to.
  • The UV Editor's most recent settings now persist through a Maya restart. You can reset them manually via a new Reset UV Editor UI command.

Render People, plus new motion capture samples in the Content Browser

Examples of preset human rigs have been added to the Content Browser (via Renderpeople.com). These are great if you need a quick background character or example rig.

In addition, new motion capture example skeletons are also available.

Deformer Improvements

Bake Deformer
Skeleton coloring is no longer automatic when you use the Bake Deformer tool. In previous versions of Maya, whenever you created a new skincluster, a color would automatically assigned to the skeleton.
Now, skeleton coloring is optional. If you want the skeleton to be colorized, use the following flag on the bakeDeformer command in the Script Editor:
-colorizeSkeleton = true
Other improvements have been made to the Bake Deformer concerning the smoothing and pruning of weights, such as the ability to get rid of spikes in the weight mapping, and removal of very small values below a threshold (pruning) to let you optimize your rig and clean up rigging noise.

What else is new?

FBX support for Blend Shape target hierarchies

Importing / exporting objects using the FBX file format will now automatically include the full hierarchy of blend shape targets for those objects.

FBX Export

Animation curves with long tangents are now resampled on export to FBX to avoid potential conflicts caused by overlapping. If you do not want the animation to be baked onto the curve at export, manually adjust the elongated tangents in the Graph Editor. (See Edit Tangents)

"Long tangents" are tangents that extend either before the previous key or after next key.

Hide Set nodes in the Outliner

You can now hide sets from appearing in the Outliner on a per-node basis. (See Create and Edit Sets).

Affected Highlighting location and defaults

Affected Highlighting has moved from the preferences to the Display menu and Select Tool settings. It's also now off by default.

Color Management

The new Unity neutral tone-map is useful if you are producing content for the Unity game engine. It is a view transform that emulates the default viewing pipeline in Unity. See Choose the default View Transform.

Improved experience browsing and loading textures in the File Browser

When creating File nodes using large image files such as HDR images, you can now interrupt swatch generation by selecting another image file in the File Browser, or click Open to bypass swatch generation. This eliminates the need to wait for the texture to load.

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