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
By parenting the objects, you can move, rotate, or scale the cap and the
body as a single entity by selecting only the body.
Notice that the salt shaker displays horizontal curves that wrap around
the body. The curves are the original circles you used to loft the surface.
Because these curves are part of the surface’s construction history, you
can alter their shape if you decide you want to alter the shape of the body
and the body will update based on the construction history.
If you prefer not to see the curves in the scene view, select the curves and
select Hide Selection. The curves won’t appear when you render an image
of the scene. Maya displays only surfaces, not curves, in rendered images.
Beyond the lesson
In this lesson you were introduced to the basic techniques related to lofting
curves to create NURBS surfaces:
■ You made a salt shaker with two surfaces: a body made from lofted curves
and a cap made from an altered sphere. An advantage of creating a separate
surface for the cap and base is that you can easily give each a different
color or texture, for example, one chrome and the other marble. Another
advantage of creating a separate cap is that you can animate the object
separately. For example, you could choose to animate the cap unscrewing
from the shakerBody.
■ You used a Loft operation rather than a Revolve operation to create the
body. The vertical corrugations on the surface would be impossible to
create by revolving a curve.
■ You can alter the position of the profile curves and the shape of the shaker
will update because of the construction history. If you’re certain you won’t
change the body’s shape by editing the shape of the lofted curves, you can
delete the body’s construction history to quicken Maya’s processing of
your interaction with the surface. (For a surface as simple as the salt shaker,
deleting the history won’t boost processing much.)
■ There are many other useful tools for creating and editing surfaces. For a
glimpse of the possibilities, take a look at the Surfaces menu and the Edit
NURBS menu.
If you want to learn more about a particular tool or feature that has been
presented in this lesson, please refer to the Maya Help.
Beyond the lesson | 165