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
This creates a series of files named Emit.0001, Emit.0002, and so on,
through Emit.0075. These files are the rendered frames 1 through 75.
Maya puts the files in your current project’s images directory.
5 To play the hardware-rendered sequence, select Flipbooks > Emit.1-75.
6 Close the FCheck image viewing window when you are finished
examining the animation.
Beyond the lesson
In this lesson you were introduced to a few of the basic concepts when using
particles. You learned how to:
■ Create particles from a source object called an emitter.
When you create any type of emitter, a particle object is also automatically
created and connected to it. Emitters can be points (CVs, vertices), surfaces
(NURBS, polygons), curves (NURBS curves) or volumes (spheres, cylinders).
■ Control particles using fields, and volume objects.
With volume axis fields, you can funnel or swirl particles within the
boundaries of common volumetric shapes. Although this lesson showed
how to use a pair of volume axis fields to control the motion of particles,
Maya has several other types of fields such as Gravity and Turbulence for
simulating natural phenomena. You can use the fields to animate the
motion of curves and surfaces in addition to particles.
■ Change the color of particles using a ramp texture.
You can also change ramp colors by editing other ramp attributes, such as
Noise and Noise Frequency. To do so, right-click the attribute box for rgbPP,
then select arrayMapper1.outColorPP > Edit Ramp. See the Maya Help for
details on ramp attributes. You can also control other particle attributes
with ramps; for example, opacity. See the Maya Help for more information.
■ Render particles using the hardware renderer.
The majority of particle rendering types are visible only when using the
hardware render. Software rendering does not display them. However, if
you use a particle render type of Blobby Surface, Cloud, or Tube, you must
render the particles using the software renderer as hardware rendering does
not display those types.
If you create a scene that includes both particles and geometric surfaces,
you may need to render the scene twice, once with hardware rendering
Beyond the lesson | 493