Insomniac Games relies on Maya as a modeling and animation tool for several titles including Resistance: Fall of Man. Chad Dezern, art director at the facility said: "When a problem comes up, artists can usually work it out using the Maya toolset. When we need to build on the software, Maya offers an extremely flexible API, which makes it a great hub for our proprietary modeling tools."

Highlights of Maya 2008

Increased polygon modeling efficiency:

• Maya 2008 enables artists to quickly create, manipulate and place polygons that form highly detailed characters and environments, through a streamlined Mesh Smooth workflow, a new Slide Edge feature and improvements to Booleans, Bridge, Bevel and other tools.

Overall performance improvements for greater efficiency:

• With Maya 2008, Autodesk continues the task of optimizing the software’s toolsets to provide greater performance through both multi-threading and algorithmic speed-ups. For example:
  • The Poly Reduce function is now up to 30 times faster for a 22k face poly mesh, and Poly Smooth is now up to 4 times faster
  • The Maya nCloth cache performance up to 3 times faster on a cache of 10k vertices
  • mental ray translation for a 20k mesh instanced 2,000 times is over 20 times faster

Tools for creating better looking games:

• Maya 2008 is better equipped to create and display content destined for the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles. It offers support for DirectX HLSL shaders in the Maya viewport, a new hardware shader API, enhancements to the high-quality render view, accelerated mental ray texture baking performance, and more.

Increased flexibility for character setup and animation:

• Building upon the Maya software’s advanced, customizable animation system, Maya 2008 delivers improved skinning and rigging toolsets, including new, non-destructive skin editing capabilities. These enhancements allow animators and Technical Directors to efficiently explore ideas, manage iterations and get superior results, faster.

For a complete list of new features and enhancements in Autodesk Maya 2008, visit: www.autodesk.com/maya.