LogInThis release includes workflow improvements to the animation and 3D modeling tools, volume shaders support, a set of new Bifrost nodes, and more.
Image Credits: Maya
Autodesk launched Maya 2025.1, the first release since its major update in March. Although it mostly focuses on workflow and quality-of-life improvements, there are also some curious and handy new features.
Flow Retopology plug-in mimics the Retopologize tool's functionality with the option of submitting retopology jobs to run in the cloud. While Retolopogize works well for rebuilding complex geometry, it also could be a computationally expensive process and might require you to wait an indeterminate amount of time for it to complete while freezing the Maya interface and stopping you from working until the process is completed.
With this new plug-in, you can offload the computation to a remote job monitor, saving time and continuing to work in Maya. Flow Retopology also allows you to run multiple operations simultaneously, including unique meshes, and your result is then available to be imported back into Maya or saved to disk from the job monitor.
Currently, it has some limitations: you can perform 30 jobs per calendar month with the number resetting at the beginning of each month. There's also a 6-hour maximum processing time per job, if unfinished after 6 hours, the job will fail.
The completed job is stored in the Job Monitor for a month from the date of submission.
LookdevX, Maya's toolset for creating USD and MaterialX shading graphs, has also received a number of updates.
In LookdevX 1.4, you can hide input nodes with a simple right-click to keep your graph clean and quickly browse and select nodes in the new node library. In addition to surface and displacement shaders, this update also supports volume shaders, allowing to preview effects like smoke.
Along with improved performance and stability, Maya 2025.1 introduces some UI upgrades to Smart Extrude, a powerful tool originally introduced in 3ds Max. Now, you can access Smart Extrude from the poly modeling toolkit and it also displays an icon above the manipulator in the Viewport when active, making it easier to distinguish from the Move tool manipulator.
Maya's animation functionality got updates for Graph Editor and Dope Sheet. You can now zoom in both based on the cursor location, making it the default zoom behavior for the Graph Editor and the Dope Sheet Editor. The Dope Sheet Editor now also features a new baking channel option, multiple audio track support, and more.
Bifrost, Maya's visual programming environment for creating procedural effects, has received a major update with a number of workflow improvements.
The new Node Library lets you add nodes to a graph by dragging and dropping or double-clicking, and unlike the Tab menu, the Node Library can be filtered by namespace and allows you to select multiple nodes. You can drag the pane to have it float or dock it anywhere in the graph editor.
There's also a set of new nodes, providing "an early look at the possibilities for rigging workflows in Bifrost". Check new Rigging example graphs in the Bifrost Browser to get started with your own experiments.
Image Credits: Maya
The latest version of Maya's Arnold enables Intel Open Image Denoise (OIDN) renderer denoising by default and introduces some workflow and UI improvements for RenderView snapshots functionality.
Additionally, Maya's USD plug-in has also been updated, making it possible to lock layers to work confidently without worrying about editing the wrong layers.
Image Credits: Maya
Check out the full list of release notes for Maya 2025.1 here and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.