Unlimited

Maya unlimited version comes with a set of tools not available in the Maya complete version.

Maya Fluid Effects

A realistic fluid simulator (effective for smoke, fire, clouds and explosions, added in Maya 4.5)

Maya Classic Cloth

Cloth simulation to automatically simulate clothing and fabrics moving realistically over an animated character. The Maya Cloth toolset has been upgraded in every version of Maya released after Spider-Man 2. Alias worked with Sony Pictures Imageworks to get Maya Cloth up to scratch for that production, and all those changes have been implemented, although the big studios opted to use third party plugins such as Syflex instead of the (relatively) cumbersome Maya Cloth.

Maya Fur

Animal fur simulation similar to Maya Hair. It can be used to simulate other fur-like objects, such as grass.

Maya Hair

A simulator for realistic-looking human hair implemented using curves and PaintEffects. These are also known as dynamic curves.

Maya Live

A set of motion tracking tools for CG matching to clean plate footage.

Maya nCloth

Added in version 8.5, nCloth is the first implementation of Maya Nucleus, Autodesk's simulation framework. nCloth gives the artist further control of cloth and material simulations.

Scripting & Plugins

In Maya, anything can be connected to anything. E.g. a color intensity of a shader can be used to control the movement of a door opening and closing. To control the node based system of Maya, fully reconfigurable user interface can be scripted with MEL script code which can be dropped onto a shelf to create a new icon that executes that code.

With the release of Maya 8.5 support for the Python scripting language has been included.

• List of Maya plugins

The History of Maya

Maya is the culmination of three 3D software lines: Wavefront's The Advanced Visualizer (in California), Thomson Digital Image (TDI) Explore (in France) and Alias' Power Animator (in Canada). In 1993 Wavefront purchased TDI, and in 1995 Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) purchased both Alias and Wavefront (due to pressure from Microsoft's purchase of Softimage earlier that year) and combined them into one working company, producing a single package from their collective source code. In the mid-1990s, the most popular pipeline in Hollywood films was a combination of tools: Alias Studio for modeling, Softimage for animation, and PhotoRealistic RenderMan for rendering.^{[citation needed]} This combination was used for numerous films, such as Jurassic Park, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The combined company was referred to as Alias|Wavefront. It took Alias|Wavefront two more years after the merger to release Maya.

Both Alias and Wavefront were working on their next generation of software at the time of the merger. Alias had taken a Macintosh product, "Alias Sketch!", moved it to the SGI platform and added many features to it. The code name for this project was "Maya", the Sanskrit term for "illusion." Maya was developed in close collaboration with Walt Disney Feature Animation, during the production of Dinosaur, and the GUI was all customizable as a requirement from Disney so they could set up their own GUI and workflow based on decades of animation experience. This had a large impact on the openness of Maya and later also help the software become an industry standard, since many facilities implement extensive proprietary customization of the software to gain competitive advantage.

It was then decided to adopt Alias' "Maya" architecture, and merge Wavefront's code with it.

In the early days of development, Maya used Tcl as the scripting language. After the merger, there was debate amongst those who supported Tcl, Perl and Sophia. Sophia was much faster than the others and won out. However, once error checking was added, it ended up being equally slow.

Upon its release in 1998, Alias|Wavefront discontinued all previous animation-based software lines including Alias Power Animator, encouraging consumers to upgrade to Maya. It succeeded in expanding its product line to take over a great deal of market share, with leading visual effects companies such as Industrial Light and Magic and Tippett Studio switching from Softimage to Maya for the animation software.

Later Alias|Wavefront was renamed Alias. In 2003 Alias was sold by SGI to the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and the private equity investment firm Accel-KKR. In October 2005, Alias was sold again, this time to Autodesk, and on January 10, 2006, Autodesk completed the acquisition and Alias Maya is now known as Autodesk Maya.

Maya has been used to animate popular television shows. It is used in combination with CorelDRAW to animate the cartoon South Park,^[2] and has been used to make 3D segments on Futurama and games such as Xenosaga, Resident Evil, and character models in F.E.A.R. Every episode of VeggieTales after King George and the Ducky was animated using Maya. It is now used to do the 3D modeling in Channel 4's Grand Designs.

Maya has also been Crystal Dynamics' main software, creating such titles as Tomb Raider: Legend, Tomb Raider: Anniversary. The software was also used to create the best selling game The Sims.