(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "It would be great to be able to duplicate a reference with existing reference edits.   Currently I need to duplicate the reference then export the reference edits to an offline file, then import those edits back onto the duplicate. Could be a check box somewhere." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "Could you please change Maya's start-up options so that Maya will try to import files, if it cannot simply open them?   So that if you double-click on something like an FBX file in the (Windows) explorer (and if Maya is set as the default program for FBX files and the relevant plug-in is installed). Maya will just open the file?   I mean, currently if I do this with Maya, I get a "filetype unrecognized" message and I have to click it away, and either drag and drop the file into Maya or go through the import menu.   I really see no advantage to the current behaviour, while my suggested behaviour is very intuitive and fast." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "... maybe i want to import only 2 objects on a file... so, like in 3ds Max, you can select the objects before click import file.  Now you have to import ALL the objects inside the file and then you have to delete unused objects" Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "As someone who often has to switch between workstations when working on a project, the file path of the textures is very important. No matter how many times I save the files to relative, Maya always, ALWAYS, sets them to global. This is particularly annoying in the lighting/rendering stage, when I often have to link the files again to the project folder. The path SHOULD be relative if it's saved as relative.   There is a script to quickly rename all the files in a scene called "Clean Texture Paths" from Lightcraft, but this is only a temp solution to a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place.   Please, please, make file paths relative to the project folder, not the entire drive." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "Large image files can quickly bring Maya to it's knees by filling up main system Ram and GPU resources. But more often than not, we have no immediate need to see the full resolution of these image files inside Maya itself. Instead they are merely there to be fed to our final Render engine of choice. Be it Mental Ray, V-Ray, Arnold, etc.  In the meantime, a much lower resolution placeholder would do just as well. In Nuke this is handled by their read nodes having a separate file path entry for a low-res Proxy version of the image(s) you are loading in. Then there are global switches which enable you to tell Nuke to either use the full-resolution files for high quality results or the low-resolution versions for speed and interactivity. Best of both worlds at the flick of a switch." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "3ds Max and Mudbox, have this feature.   It is very time consuming when you have a big project and you have to find a specific geometry or prototype for your level.   This would make it so much easier to browse through my collection assets to find something to reuse."   "Other platforms have this incredibly handy feature that allows the user to see a snapshot preview image (automatically created on save) of their project file (scene file in Maya) in the OS browser AND within the application file browser. This is incredibly helpful when browsing through dozens of versions of a file so that a desired "state" of development can be easily selected as opposed to having to open each and every file to see its contents. Let's add this to Maya as a super time saver! Thank you!" Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "Those of us in the VR/AR industry are rapidly embracing the glTF 2.0 file format. Sites like Sketchfab are embracing this format and it is gaining momentum. However, right now, creating glTF assets is very difficult-- there are a few ways of converting existing formats but most of them are extremely cumbersome, require other software (Blender, for example), and are generally not very robust yet.   I will speak on behalf of us in the VR/AR industry in saying that we really need the support of companies like Autodesk to help us.   Seeing as Autodesk is listed as one of the companies supporting glTF, I would love to know what kind of timeline we're dealing with for getting native export support from Maya and other 3d packages"   Some links: https://www.khronos.org/gltf/ https://github.com/matiascodesal/maya-glTF Show More

Offer a limit for the amount of nodes allowed in an object's construction history (to auto-collapse up to the last [X] number of recent history nodes).  This should improve performance, and remove the need to delete history every few minutes. Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)    "... Right now, modeling with history on becomes very slow after a period of time and constantly requires deleting history to remain responsive. Furthermore, your history becomes a giant mess after a while, as every little modeling operation is added to the history. Modeling with construction history off doesn't work very well because you can not use the interactive modeling tools - you have to know which numbers to plug in beforehand.   My suggestion for modeling tools is to have the option to have modeling tools add a generic "edit mesh" node in the history that consolidates any mesh operations such as bevels, tweaks, extrudes, ect- but only has the last mesh operation as something that can be edited- the rest is collapsed.   Essentially, what I am asking for is making modeling properly supported with construction history off." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)    "We haven't had any new deformers for a long time, and some very basic ones are noticeably absent: Noise (world/local/normal) Displace (vector/UV) - based on an image  Smooth/Relax I'd also like to see the Maya Muscle system broken out into their individual deformers so they can be leveraged independently, especially: Sliding Self Collision/Rigidity Wrinkle Force Also the Muscle Jiggle deformer is better than Maya's Jiggle deformer because of the additional cycle and rest weights.   Atomizing the cMuscle plugin and bringing it into the fold of Maya's deformer suite would be a great way to finally bless this useful but convoluted tool, as well as expanding its functionality and hopefully adressing speed issues as well.   Finally, a way to drive any deformer weight by the stretching or compressing of a mesh. This would encapsulate cMuscle's smoothCompress and smoothExpand, but would also enable stretching and compressing to drive blendshape weights, jiggle weights, or any other deformer.   Any other suggestions for new deformers?"   "Ninja Dojo has a deform along a path deformer and i know this can be done with more work using motion path and a flow object but i would be nice to have a quicker and intuitive option like how Insert Meshes are in Zbrush along a path."   Some links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heYNKqhX9Is  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4gQRK7tsQA  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEU2nMF6ARs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doazrHltwa0 Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)    "...working with real world units is still a pain in maya, if you want to do things real scale something like a big architectural scene maya got issues with the clipping planes, even if you make them larger on the camera settings still the manipulators get messed up, it becomes really uncomfortable to work with, all the tools should use real world units as well, for example if you do a bevel you should specify the width of the bevel in cm or whatever units you are working with, same with displacement heigths, 3dsmax does this and is really usefull and a adaptive grid option would be nice as well, if you get too far from the grid it will turn all gray and useless."   "Agreed 100%!  And PLEASE show the unit besides the numbers, sometimes the users just don´t know if they are entering samples, centimeters, an angle or just an arbitrary value. This is really lacking in Maya now.  Lightwave and Modo are the best applications in this regard, even making automatic translations in the input box, if you enter the unit besides the magnitude. Really handy!"   "Most definitely. Renderers work in world scale units. And what's really annoying is that some features in Maya work in metres instead of cm so you have to remember which feature uses what scale and multiply/divide to suit. Really annoying, unintuitive and just adds more time to workflow when not necessary."   "This is my #1 disappointment about Maya. For most VFX needs, working in Meters is just the most logical and natural. It should "just work"."   "Custom scale for fbx export: Maya has problems working with large objects in real world scale. It already has options to export into different units, but these always make the model smaller. We need to be able to set the scale manually so that our models are the proper size in other programs."   "An object (like the distancetool) or a parameter that give the real life reference size. This could be used by maya, mentalray, plugins. Think for example of an automating sizing of the leather wood ocean textures, paint effects. Also usefull for physics engines and all mentalray physical simulations, and more."   "Working meters instead of cm is a nightmare, especialy when doing an architectural project with large scales : ortho views are bugging, the clipping plane is crasy, values become ridiculous (a value of 0.001 become 0.00001), bevel doesn't work etc. It's a classic bug in maya, and working in cm as meters is a really ugly thing to do, especially when it comes to rendering because you must translate all the values to get physically correct result." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   Maya needs to be more procedural, like Houdini, XSI (ICE), etc.   "Integrate and improve the SOuP toolset into Maya. There is so much in there for all categories, I didn't even know which one to put it in. Include all these workflows at soup-dev.com, consult and compensate the included parties, to learn from their r&d, and further improve upon the the goal of a procedural modeling/dynamics and opendata conversion of paintfx/fluids/nparticles/nCloth/nHair/meshes and all other data within Maya."   "Having interactive bevels on selection like this video shows it's possible with the addition of some Soup nodes, would be a major improvement to Maya modeling workflow. Being able to add and subtract bevels on selected edges on the fly , would make for a 10 stars addition to Maya's modeling toolset. Please consider this!"   Some links: https://vimeo.com/146695098 Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)    "Maya Transfer maps is super slow, so plz update it with below feature. Generate a Normal, Derivative, Displacement/Height, Ambient Occlusion, Concavity and Convexity maps of selected object Ultra High Resolution Support" Some links: www.knaldtech.com  www.knaldtech.com/docs/doku.php?id=welcome_to_knald  www.xnormal.net/ http://quixel.se/usermanual/quixelsuite/doku.php?id=gettingstarted Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)    "Key features/changes:  Layer stack one on top of the other (bottom --> top direction). Blend Modes like in Photoshop!  Drag and drop layers to change order.  Separate Alpha (mask) and Opacity channels.  Ability to paint Alpha(mask) and Opacity using 3D Paint Tool directly on object in viewport. Not exactly a feature but also important. More attention and care for design." Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)    "....have a simple blur node that allow us to blur every 2D/3D Textures node in Maya (Mental Core has one like this !)" Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "Better 3d Paint tool, faster, with layers, a projection mode, a good example is Bodypaint (Cinema 4d)." "...like Mudbox paint tools"   Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "I would like to see a bigger, more robust collection of 2D and 3D procedurals in the Maya / mental ray base libraries.   My top ten list: inverse occlusion (edge detection -- think Vray's dirtmap shader) directional occlusion 3D "primitives" (Uses the 3D placement node to create a 3d textural sphere, cube, cylinder, etc inside of its bounds) cavity (think Zbrush's default red-clay) cellular voronoi UV-shell ramp (ramps whose "position" is driven by UV shell borders) Plaid (multiple layers of grids, checkers, and color variations in one node) Swatch (single constant color) Panels (randomly divided rectangles)" Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   "Add "select hard edges" command so we can bind it to a shortcut or marking menu. That Use Constraints window in the Select menu sucks. It takes forever to dig trough it to do what you need. We need a command called simply" select hard edges" . With one shortcut we select hard edges and then we bevel them. That easy! All of us have to use all kind of obscure plugins to do such simple things.Look in ZhCG_PolyTools! There are some neat things you need to add in native Maya. Look at how NDM Phoenix plugin does it when it come to hard edges>>bevel. Thanks."   Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUR9rLEiPsA&t=66s Show More

(Copied from original User Voice forum)   " After years of doing this on my own I realize there must be a more efficient way of doing this. Anyone who has done any hard surface SubD poly modeling spends a majority of their time dealing with adding, adjusting, and terminating supporting edges for hard/sharp edges of objects.   The current Bevel tool doesn't really allow this without altering the roundness of the edge directly, making iteration and adjustment later on much more difficult, as it is no longer a simple matter of adjusting supporting edges to control it's sharpness.   On a simple 6 poly cube as an example. Say I want to just insert simple supporting edges so when it is subdivided in Smooth Mesh Preview or at render time I get a nice simple hard edged cube. If I use the current Bevel tool no matter what settings I use there is still a small degree of roundness added with the supporting edges. If I insert all of the supporting edges manually it is a time consuming process.   I would love to have an angle tolerance based Insert Supporting Edges Tool that allows me to simply select edges, and with whatever edges are selected it inserts support edges on the appropriate adjacent faces, with an offset control. The actual surface contour of the low poly cage would not change, but supporting edge loops would be inserted and I could easily offset them to an appropriate amount.   If I simply selected an entire object I could still run the tool and use an angle based tolerance to insert supporting edges, so with the cube example, a default angle of 90 degrees would insert edge loops on every edge of the cube. Nothing funky would happen to the corners of the object, it would simply add the edge loops wile retaining the exact contour of the standard low poly cube.   Hopefully that makes sense. I would be happy to clarify if necessary. This is such a common task for me with any modeling that I do, and the excellent Multi-Cut tool makes this job easier, but a dedicated tool would be phenomenal. Even if it was just functionality added to the current Bevel tool." Show More