After months of practically unusable, heavily buggy maya 8.0, this month sees the release of maya 8.5, featuring an extensive bug fix. And, the more loudly touted debut of the Maya nucleus system.Maya 8.5 hails the advent of a new era of dynamic simulation. The Maya Nucleus. Although nucleus is a full set of simulation system from fluids to rigid body to, well, everything dynamic, Maya 8.5 shipped only with one module, the nCloth. The first of a series of modules to be released for nucleus system, nCloth is intended as a replacement to the old maya cloth system. (they call it Maya Cloth Classic) If you have older maya unlimited licensed, the classic cloth system can be loaded into maya 8.5. And it will be the latest/last build available for the old cloth system. But for new licenses of maya 8.5, the old cloth will not be loadable. (and it also depends on whether you have older maya installed on your system) But with the new nCloth, why would you want to use old cloth? (other than loading old scene files).
The picture is a rendering of the new nCloth (about 100 face square) draped over a primitive cone. If you load the full size, you can really see how detailed that simulation is. Even the cloth shows the edges on the cone polygons. That's how detailed this simulation is. And this is not even close to the limit of how heavy the cloth can be. It simulates in REAL TIME on my system.
ALSO, on a less touted note, the mental ray renderer gets a revamp. It's also got a sun system, which can simulate the position of the sun and basic lighting of the heavens at a given time and position. This has appeared on other rendering systems, so this is just a long delayed update. Also, the mia_material shader for architectural renderings. (still needs setting up though)
PS. SSS is still a pain in the butt to setup repeatedly.
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