One of the things that was lacking in Maya for so long, color Management, has just come to the forefront with the Maya 2015 Extension 1 release slated for September 10, 2014. Using a new and unified color management system across all of the Autodesk products that also incorporates the flexibility for customization and support for OpenColorIO will be a welcome addition.
sophisticated new color management system that offers a color-safe workflow throughout the lighting, rendering and compositing process
Maya 2015 Extension 1 New Color Management
Maya 2015 Extension 1 offers a completely new color management stem that is incorporated throughout Maya, from preferences, to viewport 2.0 to rendering, and even right through within the Maya Shader Swatches and color pickers – all respecting the set color workflow.
The new color management tools in Maya will allow studios to customize the system to match their color workflow while allowing users to work across other applications allowing for color compatibility from start to end.
Other Features in Maya 2015 Extension 1
Performance Profiler
The 2015 Extension release also includes some other great features across Maya’s workflows including a new performance profiler. Technical artists can now monitor, measure and debug the performance of individual nodes, rigs and scenes in Maya. Offering an easy to read graphical interface, the performance profiler will allow you to measure and graph a whole host of things. These could include dirty propagation, evaluation, deformations, rendering, QT events Xgen instancing and even Bifrost simulations. Developers can now use Performance Profiler in other custom tools and plug-ins using a robust API (Application Programming Interface).
XGen Performance
XGen has been made generally faster, by making speed improvements to the XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator. You can now use Xgen’s tools for creating hair, foliage, trees or debris, more faster and more efficiently.
New Python API for Viewport 2.0
Maya 2015 Extension 1 offers a new Python API for the viewport 2.0 display allowing for flexibility ad viewport customization using python scripting.
Modeling and Workflow Improvements
Maya 2015 Extension 1 has new expanded wireframe color choices, per-menu keyboard shortcuts to repeat the last command, and new object visibility toggling. The channel box now has color coding to reflect the various key states. There are also improvements made to Multi UV Tiling with support for OpenSubdiv.
Modeling sees even further integration with the modeling toolkit, some key enhancements to the Multi-Cut tool, and some great new pivot workflows that will really save a ton of time.
