Maya 7 also comes with roundtrip editing capabilities of Photoshop files for textures and 3D Paint. You can import a Photoshop file, apply it to an object, further paint it with 3D Paint in Maya, and keep all layers intact.

For animators, there’s a huge improvement in the way Maya applies Inverse Kinematics to figurines. It’s now Full Body IK inside Maya itself, based on the MotionBuilder technology.

Hair and fur are more powerful. You can “transplant” hair, and fur now uses dynamic hair curves. Fluids in turbulent motion, like billowing smoke, or ocean storms, appear much more realistic in version 7 than in previous versions