Image courtesy of Autodesk

Autodesk Maya 2020, one of the most recognizable applications for 3D animation and visual effects, is now also available with some exciting new GPU-accelerated features:

GPU caching of ncloth and nparticles enables smooth, real-time playback of animations without the need for playblasts or skipped frames.

New Proximity Wrap deformer joins a family of GPU-accelerated deformers to make it simpler to model deformations in materials such as cloth and muscle systems.

Includes Arnold GPU to enable the fastest interactive and final frame rendering possible.

To enable RTX accelerated ray tracing in Arnold GPU and Maya 2020:

From the top menu, select “Window” > “Rendering editors” > “Render Settings”

In the Render Settings window, select the “System ” tab

In the Render device field, select “GPU”

To turn on AI denoising for fast interactive rendering:

In the Render Settings window, select the AOVs tab

Expand the “OptiX Denoiser” section and check the box “Denoise beauty AOV”

To switch between beauty and a denoised render: Start the render by clicking on the red play button in the Arnold Renderview Click on the drop down menu in the Arnold RenderView and select “RGBA_denoise” ( denoise won’t appear unless you’ve started the render )



In addition, this Studio Driver supports Unreal Engine 4.24, released this week. This update adds a significant amount of data prep tools to UE4, including Datasmith, Visual Dataprep, and support for Universal Scene Description (USD) making it easier and quicker for artists to bring datasets into UE4.

Learn more about how NVIDIA GPUs accelerate content creation and our new RTX Studio laptops, then download the latest Studio Driver and provide us your feedback on the NVIDIA forums.