Industry news - Maya 2018 and Nuke 11

Okay, it is oldies right now but I think it is worth to mention a couple of thing. I think Nuke and Maya now related to announce the latest release almost the same time. I can't say that huge development going on. I miss the feeling when a software release hit me and I say "waaoooo amazing! I can't wait to try the new features".


Maya 2018

It's a little bit strange that there is no official announcement video. Maya 2018 released so quietly. We can think that Autodesk knows there is no reason to do the hype. So here are what I found:

The devil lies in the details. I guess they were tired to create fancy feature videos but if we go through the user guide we can find a lot of useful stuff especially in connection with modelling. But still no breakthrough at Bifröst. There is now sing of a general procedural workflow inside Maya. The (new) render setup system seams still not working with references so it kind of a worthless.

Nuke 11

And Nuke announcement is also a bit woozy (or something like that, and the music is shitty as well).

So there is new Lens Distortion and Precomp node has a new name called LiveGroup, background rendering. What else? I guess the VFX Reference Platform is interesting for big studios for pipeline TD's but not for artist.

 I guess with Nuke is the main problem is that Nuke is a complete software. Probably the best choice for compositing for films (is there competitors? Maybe Fusion?). There is no certain direction to develop Nuke because it would overlap other Foundry related softwares like Modo and Mari. In a business point of view there is no reason to develop for example a better modelling toolkit for Nuke to do better photogrammetry and re-modelling, projecting, texturing workflow. There is Modo and Mari for that. But for an artist it is always better to use one software for related tasks saving "tons of time" to export-import, naming, versioning, convert files.