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
■ Frame/Animation Ext: Select name.#.ext. This specifies that the
filenames will have the format prefix.frameNumber.fileFormat. For
example, batch rendering the entire 200-frame animation will create
Apple.0001.iff, Apple.0002.iff, and so on through Apple.00200.iff.
■ Image Format: Select Maya IFF (.iff), Maya’s standard image file format.
You can use the .iff format for any further work you need to do,
including previewing and compositing the animation. If you require
a different format, you can specify it instead of .iff in the Render
Settings.
■ Start frame: Enter 1, the first frame of the animation sequence to be
batch rendered.
■ End frame: Enter 60, the last frame to be batch rendered. (Rendering
all 200 frames may be time-consuming.)
■ Frame padding: Enter 4. This causes the frameNumber part of the
filenames to be four digits prefixed with 0s. For example, the filenames
will be Apple.0001.iff through Apple.0050.iff.
■ Renderable Camera: Select apple_camera from the drop-down list to
indicate which camera view to render.
The four-digit padded filename is compatible with many image playback
programs, for example, Maya’s FCheck utility. Image playback programs
let you view rendered animation sequences on your monitor at real-time
speed.
For the remaining options in the Render Settings window, you’ll use the
default settings. Maya will render using the camera (persp), image size
(640x480), and anti-aliasing quality (Production Quality) that you
specified earlier in the lesson.
After you set the Render Settings, the top portion of the Common tab
shows the correct path and filenames for the files to be created during
batch rendering. Check that this information is correct.
Batch rendering a sequence of animation frames | 399