Autodesk Inc., a world leader in 3D design software for entertainment, natural resources, manufacturing, engineering, construction, and civil infrastructure, announced the release of Maya 2018, is an industry leading 3D animation software application that enables video professionals who work with animated film, television programs, visual effects, and video games to create highly professional three-dimensional (3D) cinematic animations.

Prior to two-dimensional (2D) and 3D animation software, manual hand animation tools such as drawing paper and pencils, erasers, paints and brushes, light tables, and transparencies only offered a subset of what can now be done with programs such as Maya. Maya 1.0 was originally developed and released in 1998 by Alias Wavefront and seven years later in 2005, Autodesk, Inc. acquired Maya and renamed it to "Autodesk Maya". Since its original release, Maya has become widely used in the film industry to create graphics for Academy Award winning films such as Rango and Hugo. Maya is also becoming more widely used in the video game industry to create visual effects for games such as Call of Duty and Halo. Maya includes MEL, short for Maya Embedded Language, and Python scripting, which both allow you to take advantage of its open architecture by programming complicated or repetitive commands. These programmed commands help to save valuable time and also offer a method of sharing them with others who might find them useful. In the film and television industry, Maya is the de facto standard for 3D visual effects, computer graphics, and character animation.

Individuals who work in or are currently pursuing careers in the 3D animation, character modeling, visual effects, and other animation fields will discover many benefits of using Maya. The scene assembly and accelerated modeling workflows built into Maya not only maximize productivity but also help to streamline your design experience, putting creativity back at your fingertips while increasing efficiency. Complex animation tasks that are nearly impossible to construct by hand are easily created using Maya's robust tools. The grease pencil, automatic joint centering, camera sequencer, and weight distribution tools are just a few of the features that Maya offers to help animators focus more on the workflow and express more creatively. With Maya's enhanced Viewport 2.0 and DX11Shader (DirectX 11) rendering engine, blurred reflections and shader effects, as well as translucency, substance textures, and many other features can be worked with directly within the Maya viewport. 3D models and visual effects are rendered in real-time, allowing artists to work in an environment that nearly matches final output. Large and complex worlds are easily created and managed with Maya's Open Data platform, which handles production assets as discrete smart data elements and enables artists to quickly test different representations for the best result. Maya offers many other tools and features that can enhance productivity such as Volume Attributes, Paint Effects Surface, Clip Matching, URI Support, File Path Handling, PySide Pythod Qt Binding, Inline Help, and much more.