Monday, April 2, 2012

Maya 2013 - New Node Editor

A new look for Maya's next gen Node Editor

Originally introduced as part of the Maya 2012 SAP (Subscription Advantage Pack), it appears that a new Softimage style node editor will be included with the upcoming release of Maya 2013, replacing the Hypershade/Hypergraph/Dependency Graph of previous versions. On first impression, I have to say I like the look of this new editor. Being able to quickly expand a node to get a better visual sense of input and output connections seems very useful. With this one new feature, the old secondary Connection Editor becomes redundant and everything is nicely unified within a single editor. Pretty nice.

Another welcome addition which will save time is the new TAB field - allowing for a more convenient way to quickly search for and generate nodes, ala Nuke.

Press TAB to quickly search/create nodes


Check out the video below for a quick demo of the new Node Editor in action...