New Workflows Unveiled for Autodesk Media and Entertainment Portfolio

As the stakes are high in the rapidly innovative VFX and animation industry, Autodesk has its eyes on streamlining post-production and games pipelines. They have upgraded their media and entertainment portfolio, including Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, Bifrost, and Arnold, further open standards and bolster artist-driven animation, modeling, and simulation workflows. They also boost performance with support for Apple Silicon. Autodesk is collaborating with Adobe to build a material standard, and with Microsoft to unveil a beta version of AI-powered Maya Assist.
“Our customers use a lot of different tools to get productions out the door. It’s a top priority for us at Autodesk to help connect their workflows, so they can work nimbly and efficiently across teams and projects,” said Diana Colella, senior vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “That’s why we’ve focused our development efforts on integrating open standards like USD, LookDevX, and OCIO across our tools.”
Open Standards Ecosystem
Across tools, they continue to integrate open standards that accelerate and streamline the flow of data between people, teams, and software at studios.
LookDevX, a new agnostic material editor in Maya, standardizes material workflows, allowing artists to create complex shading networks that can be shared freely and accurately throughout studio pipelines. A modern, node-based environment, enables artists to author a variety of materials like USDShade, Material X, and Arnold that can then be used by other artists across multiple projects.
A new Boolean modifier offers a modern and intuitive way to produce clean geometry, and updates to the Array modifier help create beautiful, nature-like scenes, procedurally.
With effective colour management tools built around the Academy Colour Encoding System (ACES) and OpenColorIO (OCIO), a must for most modern post-production pipelines. From Viewport to the final render, colours are predictable and consistent, so artists know that they match and align at every phase of production.
Elevated animation, modeling, and simulation workflows now in Maya
On top of LookDevX and Hydra for Maya, Maya gains new tools and workflows across its animation, modeling, and simulation toolsets.
Updates to Retopologize and the Boolean toolset give artists more creative control while modeling.
Streamlined animation tools, including a redesigned Time Slider, make navigating and editing animations more fluid and intuitive.
Bifrost, Maya’s visual programming environment, offers visual effects artists a complete overhaul of viewport volume rendering, using new, state-of-the-art NanoVTT technology, as well as MPM Gel, a cool new capability that simulates substances such as soft-serve ice cream.
Maya–including Bifrost and Arnold for Maya–now runs natively on Apple Silicon, enabling artists to achieve new levels of performance while rendering.
AI-Assisted Workflows Come To Maya
The AI-powered private beta of Maya Assist, provides a new way of interacting with Maya scene data using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. This allows artists to automatically manipulate scenes using natural language text prompts directly in Maya. For example, you can ask to copy an object, increase its size by 25%, or add a camera and aim it anywhere. The private beta launches on April 5.
To apply, visit: feedback.autodesk.com/key/MayaAssistFeedbackApplication
Joining Forces With Adobe On An Open-Source Material Model
With the goal of standardizing material workflows and enabling smoother interoperability across the tools artists use, we’re also working to bring Autodesk Standard Surface and Adobe Standard Material into one new material model that can be used across product portfolios and adopted by the wider industry. Having a common material model will help artists and studios work more efficiently by facilitating the seamless exchange of 3D assets. We’re actively engaging with the MaterialX governance group to ensure that the new model can be integrated and fully encoded within a MaterialX node graph.