Maya 7 announced...

Jeff Parrott

http://www.alias.com/eng/products-servic...WSSM44AJMK0IJVC

Like a new version of any software some of tools sound really great. Hope they work as well as they sound. UV tools are interesting and animators got a load of fun stuff. They redid the built in normal mapping tool and you can render to psd now.

Joshua Stubbles

Sounds good.
Hey, maybe they actually included 'target weld' this time!....

bearkub

related, but not the same announcement. =]

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=60163&an=0&page=0#60163

Thermidor

hope its got a nice new cut poly tool...

and no bugs ..

ooh , and some sorta joint driven volume morphing thing for rigging would be lovely...

Jeff Parrott

no bugs, I wish. target weld integrated, I wish. Porn in the docs, I wish. I'm really interested in the new normal mapper tool they replaced transfer surface info with.

Delaney King

yamn. Nah, I'll stick to Max. I like my tools to work.

Raven

Some of the new tools sound good, and yeah I hope they've fixed a number of issues from 6.x
I'm not going to hold my breath though.

I don't have any issues with the Polygon tools, although I would like them to add a way to access the options of a tool without activating that tools script.

Right now it's a minor inconvenience. Still I'm sticking by my previous statement in the XSI 5 accouncement.

They're releasing far to many new versions far too quickly. Getting far to costly to even hope to keep up. Given most of the tools they're providing would be able to go into previous versions, feels a little like they're just trying to bleed artists and keep escalating the crippling costs that are causing a huge number of company consolidations and closures of late.

Not entirely thier fault, but when you think most teams have what... 5-15 artists, each needing a license for that particular product. You looking at easily $2,000 each artist. This is getting to be a yearly event too.

I've not even decided if I was going to pay the £900 to upgrade to 6.5 yet. That was only released what, March? Just takes the biscuit.

Daz

Looks to be some good new stuff in there. Fingers crossed. Not that I *need* to upgrade really. It does everything I need it to. Still, curious about some of the new stuff, especially smooth proxy creasing.

Whargoul

It's good, I've been playing it since the very first pre-beta release (although still on 6.0.1 for the project I'm on). The new surface transfer thing (I forgot the name) is great, so far in my testing anyways. Grabs colour, normals, displacement, etc.

And previewing normal maps finally works, ie drop a normal map into the standard bump2d node, flip a switch saying it's a tangent space map and you're done!

I haven't tried the new shader preview thingy yet (ASHLI) but it looks very promising.