Improved transparency with the addition of a new Alpha Cut transparency algorithm. Addition of previously unsupported viewport effects including point light shadows, and ambient occlusions. This includes realtime preview of ramps, adjustments to texture file attributes, and multi-tiled UV textures. Support for complex shading networks on displaced surfaces. Simplified displacement preview workflow, which includes an Alt + 3 hotkey to toggle displacement preview on and off to minimize workflow interruptions. You can also take advantage of adaptive tessellation and have your model participate in lighting and viewport effects. For example, see the realtime results of smoothed subdivision and displacement when sculpting an adaptive openSubdiv mesh or view creases in the mesh while animating. Native support for OSD 3.1 now allows modelers and animators to preview the final subdivided shape and surface of adaptive openSubdiv geometry. Maya 2018 introduces a number of Viewport 2.0 feature enhancements for modelers and animators as well as for shading and lighting. To ensure that Viewport 2.0 supports your requirements, Maya 2018 includes a number of viewport workflow enhancements, feature additions, as well as performance and stability improvements. The legacy default and high quality viewports are no longer available in the Maya user interface. Viewport 2.0 is now the primary viewport and hardware renderer in Maya. Maya now fully transitioned to Viewport 2.0.See the topic How Maya counts time for more details on how timing is handled in Maya. If you have files that need to be opened in previous versions of Maya, save them as ASCII (*.ma) files. Recent updates to Maya's time precision capacity has created a limitation where binary (*.mb) files saved in this version of Maya (2018) are not backward-compatible. Autodesk Maya 2018 includes major workflow improvements and new features aimed at making content creation easier than ever before. Autodesk has released Maya 2018, the latest update to its 3D modelling, animation and rendering software.

Maya 2018 software