What's the difference between Maya and Maya LT?
Autodesk® Maya LT™ is a cost-effective content creation solution for indie game developers.
Autodesk® Maya® includes additional capabilities, including more advanced character animation, dynamics & effects, texturing, rendering, and custom pipeline support through .Net and Python. Maya is required for complex pipelines that require additional scripting support and full FBX export capabilities.
What features are available in Maya LT?
Maya LT includes all the tools necessary for independent game developers creating assets for PC, web, and mobile games, including:
- Full modeling parity with Maya (support for NURBS, polygons, UVs), including the Modeling Toolkit.
- Full texture baking with Turtle, plus low resolution Texture Baking preview. See Bake textures with Turtle and Visualizing textures baked with Turtle in ShaderFX.
- Basic keyframe animation, with some HumanIK (but no advanced solvers or Muscle).
Basic rigging is supported (joints, smooth skinning, blendshapes, basic constraints, and retargeting), but more advanced deformers, constraints, and utility nodes are not available.
- Basic lighting.
- Full import, limited export.
While you can save native .mlt files with as many polygons as you like, exported FBX and OBJ files are limited to 65,000 polygons per mesh. You can also export an unlimited number of polys directly to a Unity project using File > Send to Unity. See Export objects to a new file.
Note: You can load .ma and .mb files in Maya LT, however any unsupported nodes are removed. If you load scenes that include file references, the referenced objects are automatically loaded in the scene. - MEL scripting support and the Script Editor.
What type of assets can you create in Maya LT?
Maya LT is designed to create game assets such as props (weapons), environments (lighting, foliage, buildings), and even simple animated objects or humanoid characters.
The Samples Visor window (Window > General Editors > Samples Visor) includes a set of sample assets you can use to start playing with Maya LT. Middle-drag to load the game character, basic animation clips, environment assets, and props into your scene.