2009
Table Of Contents
- Contents
- Overview
- Maya Basics
- Polygonal Modeling
- Introduction
- Preparing for the lesson
- Lesson 1: Modeling a polygonal mesh
- Introduction
- Setting modeling preferences
- Using 2D reference images
- Creating a polygon primitive
- Modeling in shaded mode
- Model symmetry
- Selecting components by painting
- Selecting edge loops
- Editing components in the orthographic views
- Editing components in the perspective view
- Drawing a polygon
- Extruding polygon components
- Bridging between edges
- Adding polygons to a mesh
- Splitting polygon faces
- Terminating edge loops
- Deleting construction history
- Mirror copying a mesh
- Working with a smoothed mesh
- Creasing and hardening edges on a mesh
- Beyond the lesson
- NURBS Modeling
- Subdivision Surfaces
- Animation
- Introduction
- Preparing for the lessons
- Lesson 1: Keyframes and the Graph Editor
- Lesson 2: Set Driven Key
- Lesson 3: Path animation
- Lesson 4: Nonlinear animation with Trax
- Introduction
- Open the first scene for the lesson
- Creating clips with Trax
- Changing the position of clips with Trax
- Editing the animation of clips
- Reusing clips within Trax
- Soloing and muting tracks
- Scaling clips within Trax
- Open the second scene for the lesson
- Creating clips from motion capture data
- Extending the length of motion capture data
- Redirecting the motion within a clip
- Beyond the lesson
- Lesson 5: Inverse kinematics
- Introduction
- Open the scene for the lesson
- Understanding hierarchies
- Viewing hierarchies using the Hypergraph
- Creating a skeleton hierarchy
- Parenting a model into a skeleton hierarchy
- Applying IK to a skeleton hierarchy
- Creating a control object for an IK system
- Constraining an IK system
- Limiting the range of motion of an IK system
- Simplifying the display of a hierarchy
- Applying parent constraints on an IK system
- Planning an animation for an IK system
- Animating an IK system
- Beyond the lesson
- Character Setup
- Polygon Texturing
- Rendering
- Introduction
- Preparing for the lessons
- Lesson 1: Rendering a scene
- Introduction
- Open the scene for the lesson
- Creating shading materials for objects
- Refining shading materials for objects
- Maya renderers
- Rendering a single frame using IPR
- Rendering using the Maya software renderer
- Batch rendering a sequence of animation frames
- Viewing a sequence of rendered frames
- Beyond the lesson
- Lesson 2: Shading surfaces
- Lesson 3: Lights, shadows, and cameras
- Lesson 4: Global Illumination
- Lesson 5: Caustics
- Dynamics
- Painting
- Introduction
- Preparing for the lessons
- Lesson 1: Painting in 2D using Paint Effects
- Lesson 2: Painting in 3D using Paint Effects
- Introduction
- Preparing for the lessons
- Brushes and strokes
- Rendering Paint Effects strokes
- Paint Effects on 3D objects
- Creating a surface to paint on
- Painting on objects
- Using turbulence with brush stroke tubes
- Using additional preset brushes
- Mesh brushes
- Converting mesh strokes to polygons
- Modifying a converted polygonal mesh
- Beyond the lesson
- Lesson 3: Painting textures on surfaces
- Expressions
- Scripting in Maya
- Index
Using expressions to control multiple attributes . . . . . . . . . 571
Linking multiple attributes on the same object . . . . . . . . . . 571
Controlling attributes in two objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572
Beyond the lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
Lesson 2: Conditional expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574
Creating a conditional expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574
Other conditional statement options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577
Fixing a problem in an expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579
Using else statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 580
Simplifying expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581
Editing expressions to refine an animation . . . . . . . . . . . . 582
Beyond the lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
Lesson 3: Controlling particle attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
Creating particle objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
Using creation expressions to set a constant color . . . . . . . . 586
Using runtime expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587
Modifying runtime expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588
Beyond the lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589
Chapter 13
Scripting in Maya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591
Some basic concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592
Preparing for the lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 595
Lesson 1: Commands in MEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596
Entering MEL commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597
Observing script history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 598
Modifying object attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
Editing Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 604
Beyond the lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605
Lesson 2: Saving scripts to the Shelf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
Setting up the scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
Recording the script history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608
Compare the rendered images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610
Saving the history as a button . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611
Beyond the Lesson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613
Lesson 3: Using Variables in MEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 614
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 614
Setting up the scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615
Storing scene information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615
Create a row of barrels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617
Stacking the row of barrels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 618
Using MEL built-in functions to calculate the Y offset . . . . . . 619
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