Key features of Maya

Animate objects or skeletons by setting markers (keys) to indicate timing and position.

Add deformation effects to your characters and objects to tweak their appearance and enhance their animation.

Create animation in Maya using motion capture (or “mocap”) systems.

Pose and animate models with hierarchical, articulated structures known as skeletons.

Bind a modeled surface to a skeleton with smooth, rigid, and indirect skinning.

Easily retarget animation between characters of differing size, proportions, and skeletal hierarchy with HumanIK.

Create and edit animation sequences with any keyframeable object or attribute in Maya.

Assemble animation in sequences that you can rearrange and edit, like film clips in a nonlinear editor.

See a graphical representation of interpolation between animation keys that you can modify.

See changes made to your animation without needing to create a playblast.

Deliver natural looking effects like snow, particles, or waves with Aero, MPM, Particles, and BOSS systems. (video: 5 sec.)

Create large-scale complexity for world building or set dressing with expressive scattering and instancing tools.

Access a variety of pre-built compounds and graphs to use as a starting point for creating your own effects.

Work at the lowest level of mesh creation, organize with component tags, and create geometry inside the Bifrost Graph.

Assemble, organize, and edit USD assets non-destructively with the flexibility of the Bifrost Graph.

Build materials that work across multiple renderers with LookdevX, Autodesk’s agnostic material authoring plug-in for Maya, supported by OpenUSD.

View, author, and edit materials on Maya geometry in a single node-based visual programming environment.

Use native USD and MaterialX shading graphs simultaneously within the same Maya session.

Automatic MaterialX Stack and Document data structures ensure you can use MaterialX comfortably in your daily tasks.

Trust color accuracy with color management data precisely embedded in USD files, controlled by Maya's Color Management Preferences.

Dive into more advanced graphing using the integrated Arnold shading graphs.

Use Arnold Render View to view scene changes in real time, including lighting, materials, and cameras.

Create and apply a wide range of materials with Arnold shaders in Maya like the standard_surface, distance, or toon shader.

Use Arnold for production rendering on both the GPU and CPU.

Simulate the effect of exposure, focus distance, aperture size, and more with cameras including the cylindrical and fisheye camera.

Pick from multiple light settings to simulate illumination in a scene with efficient techniques like global light sampling.

Quickly reduce noise while preserving details in rendered images with denoising options like the OptiX Denoiser.

See accurate previews of final colors in the viewport and Render View with OpenColorIO v2.

Leverage Arnold within USD-based workflows in production scenarios for efficient flow of 3D data.

Load and edit massive data sets in a matter of seconds using OpenUSD in Maya.

Import USD data as native Maya data and export native Maya data as USD data.

See quick previews of USD scene structure using the Hierarchy View window.

Work with USD data directly in common Maya editors, such as the Outliner, Attribute Editor, and Channel Box.

See USD natively alongside Maya data in the viewport.

The Maya USD plug-in is available as an open-source project for studios to customize as needed.

Stream animation data from Maya to Unreal Engine in real time, which lets you work on character assets in Maya while seeing a preview inside Unreal.

Create Maya scripts and write plug-ins using Python 3.

Create large, complex worlds without slowing down your workflow.

Customize the interface, hotkeys, search, and more to tailor Maya to your preferences and workflow.

Easily identify and manage which plug-ins are loaded into Maya.

View and update scenes in Maya and Adobe After Effects simultaneously.

Access production management tools directly in Maya with a Flow Production Tracking (formerly ShotGrid) subscription.