 Greetings, welcome back to Game Dev Academy, I am Shane and in this quick video I just wanted to jump on the bandwagon to make sure everybody knew that Maya 2023 has now been released. So I've just got it installed, this is the new splash screen and you can see we've got a What's New section which makes my job of telling you what's newer. Heck of a lot easier doesn't it? So we'll just go through some of these things and then we'll take a look at them. So if we start up with some of the stuff that I don't use, so the USD plugins not something I really use and I haven't used a lot of bifrost but we've got updates to those. The blue pencil tool looks really cool which allows you to do things like it's good for blocking in animation, you can also annotate your scenes. One thing that I do think looks really cool is the improved boolean operations and we will take a look at that in this video. The mesh wireframe opacity, we can look at that as well, I don't know how much use I would get out of it but it can make your scenes a little easier on the eyes. They've continued to further improve the animation performance with things like further improving the cache playback stuff like that. The retopology tools have got better as well which I think are really important. If you're going to be using booleans I think retopology especially for inexperienced users retopology after you've used booleans is a really good idea. They've continued to improve on the deformers, they've improved modeling performance, we've got some sweet mesh operations not something that I really use but they're there for those of you that do. VR for my is something that I would like to play with I haven't had time or chance yet and there are even more features that I'm not going to go into right now let's just get stuck in. Oh and in fact it might seem like a small thing but one of the things that I like about this update the most is this little icon they've got going on. I prefer this to the previous one by quite a lot I think that looks much better and they've also added things like this so you've got some tabs down the side so getting started learning I think is quite a useful tab and you can see they've got their own videos in there. I personally would recommend putting in some game dev academy ones because they are pretty good but you know they won't be told. Anyways let's create a new scene here we go you can see that the layout is very familiar they haven't changed much and I suppose as the year goes on as I learn about these new changes I'll probably share them with you as we go along but for now I want to share with you we'll take a look at the new booleans the wireframe opacity and the retopology as well so let's start with just creating something kind of cool so let's make a cube scale that bad boy up a little bit should we turn it into a die should we do that let's hit it with a bevel let's have some fun with it if we're doing it anyway we might as well we'll go five segments there we'll go 0.2 there 0.15 and then what we want to do is put in some of these numbers if you get a die and I'm going to do that with a sphere like so and we're just going to do that with it now if we place this into the mesh about there that's going to be one on the die for us and back in the old day you'd have to select um the mesh that you want to keep shift select the mesh that you want to get rid of and use booleans but if we now go to mesh booleans you can see there are a lot more options oh and I've lost it mesh booleans there are a lot more options than they used to be and now it doesn't matter which order you select them in because you can do a minus b or b minus a and that'll be to do with the order that you selected them in so if we do that we'll do a minus b and straight away we've got our boolean so now we've got um our shape cut in but what's different now is that that original mesh hasn't gone and what I really like about this is that it's still live so if I decide that the position is not right and I want to move it over here well I can and it's still being cut in so if I just do so that you can see that that's now being cut in I will undo that because I did want it in the center and we can do some other cool things as well so it's this piece sphere that's being cut out so we can change it and go the other way around and actually we can have the cube being cut out of the sphere not that I want to do that but it's an option and we'll go back to where we were and there are some other operations as well such as hole punch which cuts it in but leaves the mesh open cut out does the opposite of that slice just kind of creates a hole in the mesh that you can mess with not that I want to do that uh intersection behaves pretty much as it always did and just kind of keeps um the mesh that would have been left behind if we just did the difference and union obviously puts them together uh but this can be really powerful because it means that we've always got access to this and we can make some really cool changes to it if we want to like that so that's really cool so if we do that there are some things as well so we can also change the visibility so let's say we just want to hide that mesh we can totally do that uh and just see the result that we're getting from it and now that I've hidden that mesh or just bring it back back onto wireframe it tells me that I wanted that to be a little bit smaller cool right so now uh I'm just going to cut the video whilst I put the rest of these Booleans in and then we'll have a look at the retopology tool okay so I have now completed my die I can see I've used Booleans in the same method to cut out all the faces I could hide them and it would look as it will eventually and what we'll do is we'll just make a copy of this duplicate it over and then we can kind of see how it looks and those of you that are in the know will know that the topology of this is not acceptable really because we've got endgones everywhere um the topology is really it's really inconsistent and it's not the way we want to go so we'll look at the retopology tool to deal with that so first what I'm just going to do on this shape is delete the history on it and then we'll go to mesh retopologize and there are some settings for it so if we just look at what the triangle count is that is required for this at the moment so let's go to display heads up display and poly count that's currently taking 9 000 triangles we're going to need about the same because um we need to get the topology we might even need more to be fair so what we'll do is we'll put in 5000 here it's 5000 because this is quads not triangles and we'll try and preserve the hard edges because there are some hard edges that we need and then what we'll do is just click on apply and you can see there it's just finished up I think the result is actually quite good um because it sort of creates brand new geometry for this there's no material applied so I just need to delete my history before I apply material to it so let's just go to Lambert and then we can see if I take this one here and we'll duplicate this one so we can see them side by side visually there's very little difference between them but this one has even topology this one needs to go in the bin but this is still an important building stage on getting to this and then there are things that you can do with this one to reduce the um polygon count down not that I'm going to cover that in this particular video though once you've got a denser mesh like this you might choose to see your wireframe on shaded so if we just turn that on wireframe on shaded that might be a little bit busy for you and now in Maya we can reduce the impact of that a little bit so if we go to the shape node and go to object display and we can find the drawing override section and enable overrides like so we need to change the color from index to RGB but what that means we can do now is we can actually lower the opacity so if we drop that down to let's say 0.2 and so now we can still see our wireframe but it's almost just like a hint just a little hint of a wireframe maybe there was a wireframe there once in the past but it's faded over time but I find that easier on the eyes so that's another feature I'm not going to go over any more in this video then it was just to show you some of the new tools and features that are available and to let you know that Maya 2023 is now out and available to download should you wish to do that if there are any other features that you want me to cover then let me know in the comments below and I might even knock out a video for it otherwise all that is left for me to do is to thank you for watching I've been Shane for GameDev Academy and I'll see you in the next class