Autodesk® Maya® 2011 - Qt helps make the best even better
Autodesk launches new, Qt-based Maya
A milestone for Autodesk and a proud day for Qt has arrived with the release of the first ever Qt-based version of Maya.
Think of the best animated or CG-intensive movies you’ve seen and the top few games you’ve played over the last ten years. Every single one of them is very likely to have included pieces made with Autodesk’s industry-leading 3D modelling tool Maya.
Autodesk Maya is such a complete and powerful solution it is not an exaggeration to call it an undisputed industry standard in film and game production. It has held this position for nearly ten years.
Fully cross-platform between Windows, Mac and Linux, Maya is a powerhouse capable of rendering, compositing and simulating anything a movie or game studio can dream up. For some time, popular plugins for Maya have been built using Qt, but today’s release represents the first time Qt has been used to build the product itself.
According to Rob Hoffmann, Senior Product Marketing Manager 3D Media and Entertainment at Autodesk, ”Our new Maya release, which includes a powerful new set of tools for helping to create and repurpose character animation, an invigorated user interface (UI) to make artists more efficient, and a new 64-bit offering for Mac OS X."
"In addition, Maya 2011 helps address real-world production pipeline challenges, with an accelerated viewport display for large scenes; a completely new UI toolkit; and new solutions for 3D editorial, color management, scene segmentation, and rotoscoping." he said.
"Maya 2011 has taken advantage of both Qt’s advanced GUI capabilities for our stunning new user interface as well as Qt’s inherent cross-platform support. Using Qt meant we could not only create a fantastic new release of Maya with an advanced user experience, but also do it in an efficient manner by sharing code across platforms.” said Mr Hoffmann.
When asked, Autodesk listed the following three points as being key benefits to their using Qt:
· Dockable UI elements
· More flexible editors
· A new color chooser and file browser
In addition to Maya itself being built with Qt, we are working with Autodesk to deliver a Qt-based SDK for Maya plug-in development.
In conclusion, we are proud to be under the hood of this amazing tool, and we think it’s very cool that the next blockbuster you see or play will be the end piece of a long chain that started with something Qt-based.
