Autodesk Mudbox 2012 by Autodesk

Autodesk Mudbox 2012 software delivers significant enhancements to the painting toolset; innovative new UV and topology-independent workflows; practical posing tools; and improved performance and large dataset handling that together address common production challenges. Now available for the Linux operating system, Mudbox 2012 offers single-step interoperability with products in the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, enhanced compatibility with Adobe Photoshop software, and flexible new feature sets that enable it to integrate more seamlessly into studio pipelines. Moreover, expanded creative toolsets that now feature paintable layer masks, editable stencils, and new brushes and brush options yield increased productivity without compromising artistic freedom.

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Key Features and Benefits

UV-Less Painting

Enjoy the freedom of not having to create UVs before you paint! Texture artists can now eliminate or reduce the time-consuming and often difficult task of creating UVs; even complex assets comprised of multiple meshes can simply be loaded, and painted right away. The resulting high-quality textures can be exported as Ptex files for an entirely UV-less process, or, for a pipeline requiring UVs, baked into UV space once UVs have been created, and exported as image files. The Ptex library is released as open source software and is included with Pixar Animation Studio's RenderMan software; support for displaying Ptex files is now also included in Autodesk Maya 2012 software.

Large Texture Datasets

Now it's possible to paint and manage large texture datasets, in order to create the very detailed, high-quality assets required by today's demanding productions. Thanks to a new texture and tile management system, artists can display and paint hero assets with hundreds of texture maps consisting of billions of texels.

Paint Layer Masks and Blend Modes

Combine and edit paint in powerful nondestructive ways, with new paintable layer masks for paint layers that enable artists to selectively reveal or hide portions of layers. Furthermore, 22 new layer blend modes help extend artistic possibilities and offer significantly enhanced compatibility with Adobe Photoshop software.

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Editable Stencils

Easily make use of available images to rub or project detail onto models, with the new ability to deform stencils to align their texture data to underlying model features. In addition, artists can leverage the full painting toolset to modify existing stencil images or paint new stencils, while a new option enables tileable stencils to be painted with ease.

Single-Step Suites Interoperability

Work more efficiently with other products in the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, with the new ability to round-trip data with Maya 2012, Autodesk 3ds Max 2012, and Autodesk Softimage 2012 software. The new workflow supports iterative round-tripping: beginning with a scene in the content creation application, data can be exported to Mudbox where paint or sculpting detail is added, then merged back into the original scene, and then refined again in Mudbox, and so on; each transfer only requires a single step to execute. Moreover, topology changes can be incorporated midstream in the sculpting or painting process: the active object in Mudbox can be updated when topology is modified in the content creation application.

Performance Improvements

A number of performance improvements in Mudbox 2012 help artists to paint and sculpt at higher resolutions more smoothly; save scenes with texture data in less time; create, select, and duplicate paint layers more interactively; and load dense OBJ meshes more quickly.

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New Brushes and Brush Options

Mudbox 2012 offers a more robust painting and sculpting toolset including: the new ability to apply a single brushstroke across multiple objects; new grab tool options that offer enhanced control over shaping a model's silhouette; and lasso and rectangle marquee modes for selection, freeze, and weights tools.

Multiple Joints

Create, manage, and weight multiple joints to quickly and easily deform and pose full-figure models. Artists can now create symmetrical pairs of joints, while joint hierarchies can be created automatically based on influenced vertices.

Pose Presets

Work with multiple poses nondestructively, with the new ability to store joint transforms as presets. Artists can sculpt at different poses and have these sculptural changes carry across from one pose to the next, deforming correctly in the space of each pose–great for accessing difficult areas for painting or sculpting, or for testing designs in different positions.

Other New Features

Autodesk Mudbox software also includes the following key features:

Marking Menus

Work more efficiently, with tablet-friendly marking menus. These gesture-based menus, familiar to Maya users, enhance productivity by enabling the artist to use muscle memory to select frequently used options much faster than using traditional menus, and without the need to switch from pen to keyboard.

Paintable Opacity

Simulate transparent or semi-transparent real-world materials like glass and ice with the ability to paint opacity. Painting the opacity channel can also be used to “cut out” complex profiles, creating the illusion of modeled detail such as leaves and branches while employing only a simple planar card as geometry.

Transfer Properties

Eliminate costly re-work, and retain production flexibility, with the new ability to transfer properties such as upper level detail, joint weighting, paint layers, and sculpt layers, from one mesh to another arbitrary mesh, even with a different UV layout.

Linux Executable

Mudbox 2012 is now available as a 64-bit executable for the Linux operating system, enabling studios whose main content creation applications run on Linux to rationalize their pipelines.