Maya 2020 released

Press release 2019-12-12 13:25 article > All

Maya 2020 adds new tools that empower artists throughout the production pipeline.

New features and improvements

Cached Playback - First introduced with Maya 2019, Cached Playback is a background process which drastically increases the speed of animation playback, enabling you to evaluate iterations of animation right in the viewport. Maya 2020 further refines Cached Playback with support for dynamics, image planes, smooth mesh previews, and custom plugins, as well as a new Ghosting preview.

Animation Bookmarks - Using new Animation bookmarks, you can now mark, navigate through, and organize specific events in time as well as easily zoom into playback ranges in the Time Slider. You can select start and end frames and assign different colors to bookmarks to identify them.
Arnold 6 is included with Maya 2020 and can now be used for production rendering on both the CPU and GPU. From look development to final frame rendering, Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU simplifies the process of creating and iterating on content, giving you the speed and flexibility to adapt to the ebbs and flows of production. Arnold’s intuitive interface makes it easy to toggle between CPU and GPU rendering, maintaining the same settings with a single click. Arnold GPU is based on NVIDIA’s OptiX framework and optimized to take advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology.
Bifrost for Maya - the latest update adds more power to the new visual programming environment, including significant performance and stability improvements, support for Cached Playback, improved Arnold support, new MPM cloth constraints, more pre-built graphs to help artists get started, and over 100 bug fixes driven by user feedback.
Viewport Improvements - It is now faster to interact with or select dense geometry or work with large numbers of smaller meshes in the viewport and UV editors.
Modeling - A new Remesh tool allows you to specify exactly where you need extra detail on a model by redefining the topology of any area on the mesh. With this update, you are also able to evenly re-triangulate the mesh at different densities, ensuring uniform distribution of faces.
Another tool, Retopologize makes it quick and easy to clean up meshes. Retopologize generates clean, new topology that preserves the original mesh shape while reconstructing the surface topology into evenly-distributed quads. The result is a deformable, production-friendly mesh that can continue moving down the pipeline.

More resources

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