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
TIP The exact UV boundaries can be viewed more clearly when the
anti-aliasing for the texture image is temporarily turned off. To do this, select
Image > Display Unfiltered to view the texture image without anti-aliasing.
If you need to move a single UV so it precisely matches a particular
location on the texture map you can turn on Pixel Snap (Image > Pixel
Snap). When you select and move the UV using the Move Tool, it will
reposition the UV coordinate based on pixel boundaries.
Beyond the lesson
In this lesson you were introduced to a few of the basic techniques required
to assign and accurately position texture maps on polygonal models using UV
texture coordinates:
■ UV coordinates are essential for applying and accurately positioning texture
maps on polygonal and subdivision surfaces.
■ UVs can be explicitly created for a surface mesh using a variety of UV
mapping techniques. (Planar mapping, spherical mapping, cylindrical
mapping, and Automatic mapping.)
■ UVs are represented as 2D coordinates and are viewed and edited with
respect to the 2D texture map using the UV Texture Editor. The UV Texture
Editor provides many other tools for editing UVs.
■ UVs are usually positioned to fit within the 0 to 1 UV coordinate space
unless the texture map requirements are such that the map needs to repeat
across the surface mesh.
■ It is useful to display both the 3D scene view and the 2D UV Texture Editor
simultaneously when texture mapping so that a correlation between the
3D model and 2D UV coordinates can be made.
■ You can visualize texture borders using Texture Border Edges.
■ You can view the regions where UVs overlap each other in the UV Texture
Editor by selecting the UV shells and selecting Image > Shade UVs.
You can open the PSD file you used in this lesson using Adobe
®
Photoshop
®
to learn how layers were used for the texture map. You can edit one or more
of the layers to experiment with how the texture can be modified. After you
Beyond the lesson | 373