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Products: Autodesk

Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva

Maya improves with more CPUs

Over the past few years, Siggraph has turned into the place to be if you want to catch up with the latest upgrades from Autodesk.

As you might expect, Maya 2008 has been extensively reworked for better operation following today's major CPU trend—multicore processing—as well as multithreading and algorithmic speed-ups. The Poly Reduce function, for example, is now up to 30X faster for a 22,000-face poly mesh.

More basics getting tweaked include the Mesh Smooth workflow; a new Slide Edge feature; and improvements to Booleans, Bridge, and Bevel for quicker creation and manipulation of the polygons that form highly detailed characters and environments. There are improved skinning and rigging toolsets; support for DirectX HLSL shaders in the Maya viewport; a new hardware shader API; and new, non-destructive skin-editing capabilities. www.autodesk.com

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.