What's New in Maya 2017 Update 1

About Maya Updates

Maya 2017 marks a shift in the way Maya is maintained and updated to
provide quicker access to new features, and quicker fixes to customer
issues.
Instead of the Service Packs and Extensions you may be accustomed
to, Maya Updates will be released. Updates will include defect fixes, and
new features.
Note: The Maya API binary compatibility will not be modified in any
2017 updates, however, the API may be extended to enable new
features.
Updates will be available on the Maya Downloads page as a full install
of the product on Mac and Linux operating systems. On Windows
operating systems, Maya Updates will appear in the Autodesk Desktop
App, as an incremental install. Each update will contain the fixes and
features of any update prior to it. You cannot run an Update alongside
an existing version of Maya 2017.
Similarly, the Maya Help itself will be refreshed for each update. Look for
specific What's New topics for every update. This means if you are not
upgrading your software with each update, you may see help topics
where information has been changed and it may not apply to your
version of Maya. This may include Maya technical documentation, API
Guide, Maya User Guide, and other resources as necessary.

Graph Editor updates

Lock Tangent Weight and Free Tangent Weight options are now named
Lock Tangent Length and Free Tangent Length in the Graph Editor
toolbar and Tangent menu.

Now, when the tangent length is locked, it turns black in the Graph View.
Graph Editor Tangents menu
Graph Editor Toolbar

Time Change Undo Preferences

You can now add time changes to the undo stack by turning off the
Undoable Time Changes option in the Undo preferences. (All adjacent
time-change commands are undone at once by default.)

Animation performance

OpenCL has been re-enabled for Windows NVIDIA drivers 386.68 and
later.

Color Management

Option to Enable or Disable Color Management for New Scenes

The Color Management enabled setting in the New Scene Options

determines whether or not color management is enabled by default for
new scenes.
Support for switching OCIO contexts

If you are using an OpenColorIO configuration file for color

management, you can change OCIO context environment variables and
see the effect without restarting Maya. To do this, use MEL or Python
commands to change the environment variable and then refresh the
color management preferences.
For example, suppose that your configuration file uses a context named
SHOT, which is currently set to abc123.spi1d, and you want to change
it to ijk456.spi1d. In this case, you can run the following lines of
MEL in the Script Editor:
putenv "SHOT" "ijk456.spi1d";
colorManagementPrefs -refresh;

Rendering
The Render Setup Find in ... marking menus in the Outliner have been
enhanced to allow you to more easily locate the nodes you want within
your collections. Nodes are highlighted in the Property Editor for easy
identification, and layers that are initially collapsed automatically expand
if the node exists among its collections. These menus can also be used
to locate lights in your collections.

API

PySide

Maya 2017 uses PySide2. To use PySide in your scripts, import

modules from PySide as follows. This allows your script to be
compatible with both Maya 2017 as well as versions earlier than Maya
2017.
try:

from PySide2.QtCore import *

from PySide2.QtGui import *
from PySide2.QtWidgets import *
from PySide2 import __version__
from shiboken2 import wrapInstance
except ImportError:
from PySide.QtCore import *
from PySide.QtGui import *
from PySide import __version__
from shiboken import wrapInstance

For more information, see the PySide examples in the devkit/

pythonScripts folder of the Maya Developer Kit.
Lighting

If a plug-in light uses the light classification, you must include these
light attributes: intensity, color, emitDiffuse, and
emitSpecular, in order for the light to behave like a Maya light. The
attributes can be static or dynamic.
For more information about the light classification, see the Viewport
2.0 API > > Maya Viewport 2.0 API Guide > Plug-in Entry Points >
Registration section of the Maya Developer Help.
Maya Developer Kit

Obtain the most updated Developer Kit examples online at Autodesk

Exchange at https://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/MAYA/en/Home/
Index.