Animal Logic‘s MayaMan is a professional-level plugin for Maya with many features geared towards the production of complex animation.
General MayaMan Features:
MayaMan is a fully integrated Maya plugin, which uses MEL for its interface and Maya attributes for data storage. This means MayaMan is fully scriptable and can be interfaced with other Maya tools. It is not a closed 'black box' like some other tools. MayaMan's attributes can be animated or driven by expressions just like any normal Maya attributes.
Maya materials are emulated through the Maya 'Magic Shaders' mechanism, which writes custom RenderMan shaders on-the-fly to emulate your Maya material hierarchies. Alternatively you can attach custom shaders for surfaces, displacements, volume or lights. Custom shader parameters can be driven by Maya animation or expressions.
A variety of RIB formatting styles are supported, from a single flat RIB file to the creation of well structured, efficient RIB files, taking full advantage of DelayedReadArchive. Separate 'qual' files can be generated to facilitate changing the quality parameters without needing to regenerate entire RIB file sequences.
MayaMan provides a facility for substituting scene geometry with ReadArchive RIB files or procedural primitives.
Additional MayaMan Features:
Motion Blur Depth of Field Level of Detail Automatic generation of shadow maps Light linking Texture Reference Objects for PRef data Area lights and global illumination Background image planes Maya Cloth Maya Fur Maya Unlimited subdiv geometry
Credits: Some projects utilizing AIR with MayaMan:
Film: Happy Feet, The Reaping, Perfect Stranger, Matrix Reloaded, Hellboy, The Day After Tomorrow
Commercials: Mercedes “Highway” and “Pipes”; Jeep “Bug”; Miller “Break from the Crowd”
MayaMan Users: MayaMan requires an external cpp program to compile shaders. Windows users can download one here if you don't already have one. Unzip the archive to the bin directory of your AIR installation.
