Welcome, I'm Daniel Faust, the inventor of the MayaSound plug-in. I'm from Stuttgart, Germany.
With MayaSound, licensees of Autodesk® Maya® can create surround sound recordings and export MIDI data in an environment optimized for audio production.
From a simple point and click audio creation process to an advanced application programming interface, this plugin covers almost the entire range of the artist's and engineer's needs.
At the bottom of the page, there's a list with most of the important features it has to offer.
This video shows the usage of the Database Browser. In this panel you can enter your query, listen to the sounds in the results viewer, and then import the best one into the scene.
Since you can't include multichannel audio in standard playblasts, and therefore would need to render audio and video separately and afterwards merge it with another application, a new Playblast has been developed, so that creating a multichannel preview - which also shows additional information for decisionmakers - becomes a quick and easy task to do.
Paint sounds onto surfaces and reposition them or change their volume directly inside the viewport.
Using the three beforementioned tools, creating an effective soundtrack for a scene becomes really easy.
In order to archieve a better labour specialization, it is possible to export MIDI data. This also increases the influence of directors and producers on the soundtrack, since they can give immediate feedback on the previews before the sound department takes over the job.
In analogy to a color palette, the visor is capable of holding ambient sounds which can be painted onto surfaces. The ease of creating new palette entries is just as important as the ease of using them, therefore much development has gone into it.
It is possible to control the entire environment via scripts. As an example, you can use expressions to trigger sounds.
You can load, position, play and unload sounds from frame to frame while recording the result.
It is also possible to arrange sounds directly on the timline and take advantage of the sounds' 3d positioning in space.
It is possible to insert VST instruments & effects and to control their parameters via scripts or connections from other nodes.
An additional interface makes it possible to embed VST's even further so that their interface can be completely integrated into Maya and also be controlled from it. This makes them fully scriptable.
This is an old recording done in 2006 which shows how flexible this system is, by allowing you to insert instruments and modify their connections in realtime.
Features
configurable speaker setups
  • any user definable setup, examples are
    • 5.1 music
    • 5.1 cinema
    • 10.2 cinema
channel count limited by CPU
paint sounds into a scene
realtime surround sound monitoring via ASIO out
realtime ASIO in
realtime and offline rendering
MIDI input
MIDI file import and export
scripting support
C++ API to build
  • controller devices, examples are
    • MIDI message generator to turn DAG node data into MIDI messages
    • VST parameter generator to turn DAG node data into VST parameter messages
    • MIDI monitor to route MIDI data into DAG nodes
  • audio generators/effects, examples are
    • Sampler to inject waveforms into the system
    • FFT engine to exctract and route FFT data into DAG nodes
  • recording devices, examples are
    • Send to ASIO out
    • Store into WAV file
    • Store into AVI file
    • Store into AC3 file
  • mixing devices
      to compute the audio mixing between speakers and microphones, ie to add distance delay, doppler effect and the like, or design custom panning algorithms
complex routings
    each cable between devices allows complex routings to be set up
playblasts
    quickly create multichannel avi files containing the viewport video, the audio and addional information
host VST instruments/effects
powerful database of all your sound files for easy access