Maya 2014 LT is out!

Really great news coming from Maya these days. Now for indie game companies who want to make great assets for their games but can't afford Maya comes Maya 2014 LT. This is pretty much a stripped down version of Maya that left all of the new and old game related tools like the Directx11 viewport and HumanIK rig. There is one bonus however that comes with this version. The new big thing from Maya is the node based DX11 shader editor (seen above). Rather than write out your code, you can set up the logic via nodes like a polished shader editor in a top engine. The great thing is that at the end, Maya will optimize and export out your node setup as a shader file so you can apply it to your respective game engine now!

This is huge to hear from Autodesk and I'm really excited to use it. The shader editor is currently the only feature that you can only get with the LT package so it's worth a shot to give it a quick look to see how it all works. Unfortunately, you loose big stuff like Maya scripting with this version of Maya which I think is a huge loss. A big draw to this program is that to get a license, you just need to pay 50 bucks a month for it like a rental. I'm assuming this also means that when a new version of Maya comes out, you can switch over.

Hit the jump for a trailer video and the feature set comparison between Maya 2014 and Maya 2014 LT.


Here's a link to the comparison chart:
http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya-lt/compare

Here's the trailer: