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
■ As you created the skeleton in this lesson, you ended the arm’s joint chain
at the wrist. This prevents you from animating hand motion. If you need
to animate hand motion or even finger motion, you would need to make
additional joints and IK handles. The same applies to foot and toe motion.
■ When you create a skeleton, you can animate a character bound to it to
produce natural skin deformations. Although you animated an unskinned
skeleton in this lesson, it’s more common to animate a skinned skeleton.
Binding a character is the topic of the next lesson.
■ It’s typically best to animate the entire skeleton from pose to pose at desired
frames. It’s hard to get desired results by animating one limb for a frame
range, another limb for a frame range, and so on.
There are many other ways to work with skeletons not described in this lesson:
■ You can blend or switch between IK and forward kinematics on joints
controlled by an IK handle.
■ There are other types of IK handles that provide different controls for
manipulating parts of a skeleton. Especially noteworthy is the IK spline
handle, which makes it easy to animate the twisting, wavy motion in tails,
necks, spines, snakes, and so on.
For more details on these and other features, please refer to the Maya Help.
Lesson 2: Smooth skinning
Introduction
After you create a skeleton, you bind it with the character’s surface so that the
surfaces move with the skeleton during animation. Binding is also called
skinning, and a character’s surface after binding is called a skin.
It is important that the character’s skin deforms naturally as the skeleton
moves. Near joints, the skin bulges or indents when you rotate the joints.
In Maya, the skin deforms because the surface’s vertices (or CVs) move in
response to the rotation of adjacent joints. The vertices are known as skin
points. This is useful for animating elbows, shoulders, necks, and so on.
Lesson 2: Smooth skinning | 319