2024 - Maya

Modelers received some much-needed quality-of-life updates in Maya 2024:

While Maya’s animation toolset is already legendary, 2024 introduces smarter mechanics for character riggers and animators. The new Squash and Stretch deformer allows riggers to easily apply this foundational animation principle to characters without writing complex Python scripts or relying on bulky custom rigs. It preserves volume naturally, giving animators a slider to inject bounce and weight into their characters instantly. maya 2024

Animators haven't been left behind. Maya 2024 introduces several quality-of-life improvements to the Graph Editor and rigging toolset: Animators haven't been left behind

Maya has been slowly integrating USD for a few versions, but Maya 2024 feels like the turning point where it becomes fully production-ready. The integration is tighter, allowing for better data exchange and scene assembly. For studios utilizing a USD pipeline, the friction between Maya and other DCCs (like Houdini or Katana) is lower than ever. For studios utilizing a USD pipeline, the friction

Maya’s visual programming environment, Bifrost, receives another major update, blurring the line between Maya and dedicated simulation software.

The visual programming environment (Bifrost) is now deeply integrated. Key updates include:

To set expectations, Autodesk did not release a new render engine (Arnold is still the bundled standard, version 5.3.1). There is no major overhaul to the UV toolkit, and the old legacy "Render Setup" system is still present but deprecated.