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
Smooth skinning is just one of the techniques for perfecting a character’s
deformations during animation. You can use Maya’s other deformers alone
or in addition to smooth skinning to achieve the results you want.
For more information, please refer to Smooth skinning in the Maya Help.
Lesson 3: Cluster and blend shape deformers
Introduction
Facial animation is an integral component of character animation. The face
of a character can be animated to impart a range of emotions and expressions.
Maya has two deformation tools that ease character setup for facial animation:
cluster deformers and blend shape.
Cluster deformers enable you to control a set of an object's points (CVs,
vertices, or lattice points) with varying amounts of influence to create a target
shape for an animation.
A Blend Shape deformer provides an interface for blending between various
target shapes, to control the range of movement for the cluster on an object
or face.
In this lesson, you will be introduced to cluster deformers in order to shape
a characters mouth into a smile pose. You will learn to use the Blend Shape
feature so you can animate the face from a neutral pose to a smile. In this
lesson, you learn how to:
■ Select CVs in a region and create a cluster deformer.
■ Use the cluster deformer handle to adjust the position of a cluster deformer.
■ Use the Paint Cluster Weights Tool to refine the cluster weight values.
■ Create a Blend Shape deformer to control the blending between target
shapes.
Open the scene for the lesson
In this lesson, you’ll work with a scene we created for your use.
1 Make sure you’ve done the steps in
Preparing for the lessons on page 304.
330 | Chapter 7 Character Setup