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
When you create a light, the scene view does not display its effect, by
default. The scene view instead uses default lighting.
3 Select Lighting > Use All Lights (Hotkey: 7). This lights up the scene view
only with lights you’ve created, not with default lighting. If you later
want to see the scene view with default lighting again, select Lighting >
Use Default Lighting (Hotkey: 6).
When you render the scene, by default, Maya uses all lights you’ve created.
If you don’t create any lights, Maya creates a temporary default directional
light for you and then deletes it when the render is complete.
Next, you aim the directional light and edit its attributes.
To edit the directional light
1 With the directional light selected, rotate the light in various directions.
The shading of surfaces changes as you rotate the light. The more directly
the light points at a surface, the brighter the shading. A directional light
is affected by its rotation, not its position. As you’ll see later, the position
of other lights affects the lighting.
2 Rotate the light as follows:
■ Rotate X: -40
■ Rotate Y: 25
■ Rotate Z: -20
With this orientation, all object surfaces in the scene show the effect of
the light in the current camera view.
3 With the light still selected, open the Attribute Editor (under the Window
menu). Drag the Intensity slider to various values to see the effects of
intensity.
Higher values brighten the surfaces. For example, an Intensity of 1.6
brightens the lighting so much that the gray default shading of some
surfaces are bleached to white.
NOTE Several of the following illustrations in this lesson are snapshots of the
scene after rendering. To render the scene, select Render > Render Current
Frame. Do not use IPR rendering for this lesson because it doesn’t
automatically update the image for some of the changes you make to the
scene.
426 | Chapter 9 Rendering