Pants and Legs and Shoes
The pants are built from a cylinder. It becomes one side of the pants and is sculpted using Artisan and pulling CVs. Attach and sculpt a bit more, creasing the crotch area as shown next. Another cylinder is used for the leg, is mirrored for the other leg. Note the bunching of CVs at the knee area. The shoe is created from a sphere. Several sections are bunched up at the sides to make the bottom flat, and it is perhaps too simple a shoe, but itmll deform well enough.
What Is the Hypergraph
The Hypergraph is, in its essence, a hypertext-like view of your scene thus the name . If you have worked with an HTML authoring tool, you will recognize the web-like appearance of linked objects in the Hypergraph. Every element visible in a scene is represented by a text box, and any linked objects have a line that connects them together, showing their connection in the scene. Passing your cursor over the line, younll see which elements of each object are connected. Besides displaying the...
Cutting Up the Body
Things are going to get a bit more complicated from here on. We need to make holes for the legs, which means we need to cut the body into pieces. But first, we need to put in more isoparms in select places for smoother stitching later on. To insert isoparms, you need to select existing isoparms and specify where you want to put the 1. In perspective view, select the Select tool from the Minibar. Pick-mask Isoparm and click on the first vertical isoparm going around the nose area. In the...
Mastering Maya Complete Cete
Courtesy of P0WDER, bookmarks added by crystal_fish John Kundert-Gibbs Peter Lee Associate Publisher Cheryl Applewood Contracts and Licensing Manager Kristine ODCallaghan Acquisitions amp Developmental Editor Cheryl Applewood Editors James A. Compton, Marilyn Smith, Jeff Gammon, Pat Coleman, Pete Gaughan Technical Editors Mark Smith, Mike Stivers Book Designers Patrick Dintino, Catalin Dulfu, Franz Baumhackl Graphic Illustration Publication Services Electronic Publishing Specialists Robin...
Summary Igm
In this chapter on animation, we went through a simple walk cycle step-by-step, and then we examined a few advanced-level animations such as running, somersaulting, and grabbling and throwing a ball. We also discussed a few of the more important animation principles. In the next and later chapters, wenll be switching gears in a major way. So relax and take a break wenll soon be getting physical. Books24x7.com, Inc. 2000 - Feedback Chapter 15 - Working with Rigid Body Dynamics Perry Harovas,...
Adjusting Interface Options
The first and most obvious place to start customizing Mayans interface to optimize your work is via the general interface options. Changing these options can make the interface cleanernallowing you to work with fewer distractionsnand also give over more space to the main scene view. Most interface options are, fittingly enough, under the Options gt UI Preferences menu. On selecting this choice from the menu, you will see a multi-tabbed window that allows you to adjust many of Mayans UI...
Branching
The last basic program structure wenll look at is branching, a slightly more complex type of loop that allows MEL to ask a question and decide whether to do some further action given the answer the for statement actually contains a branch in its test value statement . Letns use the same script as above, only this time letns put a conditional statement inside it What happens when you execute these commands The first three balls are stacked up on the Y axis when i is less than or equal to 3 , and...
Smoothing Layering and Rough Tweaking
Now we need to smooth and tweak the hand. We will need to do this in two stages, beginning with applying Smooth and fixing some problems. 1. Select the smooth hand and apply Edit Polygons gt Smooth to it with the default setting. Some things immediately stand out as needing improvement, such as consistency in the width and the direction of the fingers. We need to fix these problems before we can apply Smooth again. 2. Before we start to tweak, letns put the smooth hand and the rough hand on...
Making the Camera Move
In this next brief tutorial, we will set up a moving camera attached to a path that can still remain focused on an object. We will continue working with our floating chair. Open the scene youDve just finished. The surface plane is wavy, but is not moving. Letns create some animated waves on it. 1. Select the plane and choose Deform gt Nonlinear gt Wave to apply Wave deformation to it see Chapter 12 for more information about Mayans deformers . 2. Translate the waveHandle node to D100, 0, 100...
Keyframing and Tweaking Mouth Shapes
There are various methods of keyframing mouth shapes. You can use the Channel box, the Attribute Editor, or the Blend Shape Editor. It is generally not a good idea to keyframe individual shapes, because the shapes that are not keyframed may end up Dfloatingn between their keyframes. A much more efficient method is to keyframe all the shapes, then tweak them individually in the Graph Editor. Tip You can lock certain targets to exclude them from being keyframed if you know you won t be using them...
Torso and Arms
Open the file Child_head from the CD, or the one youDve built. Wenll build the torso as a sleeveless shirt, because doing that conveniently bypasses the tricky problem of creating a seamless shoulder. We start out with a torus, with Minor Sweep set to D180. Sculpt it to resemble the image below, tucking it at the top and at the bottom, with a cylinder for the arm. You should pull the neck area down so that it seems to disappear into the shirt. Cut the torso in half, and intersect it with a...
The Create Menu and Create Directory
Under the Create directory in the Visor panel, you will find the following folders The Camera folder contains the camera and image plane nodes. The Lights folder contains the four standard light types. The Materials folder contains nine material types. When you drag one of them into the layout area, a Shading Group is automatically created and linked to it. The Post Process folder holds the opticalFX, which creates light effects such as glow, halo, and lens flare. The Textures folder contains...
Light Effects
In addition to the properties weave looked at so far, Maya offers various special effects you can apply to lights. These include fog and various optical effects such as glow, halo, and lens flare. You can access these effects from the Light Effects section of a lightas Attribute Editor. Light Fog can be applied to Point and Spot lights. Point light fog is spherical, whereas the spot light fog is cone shaped. When light fog is applied, a separate fog icon appears along with the light icon, which...
Creating a GUI
While typing commands into the Command line or Input window of the Script Editor is very useful for simple tasks, it is often much more elegant not to mention user-friendly to create a graphical user interface window in your script to give users access to all the scriptns commands in a familiar point-and-click environment. While creating these windows can be somewhat challenging, nearly all high-quality scripts use them, so it is good to learn at least the basics of GUI creation using MEL....
HandsOn Modeling Creating a Living Room Scene with Primitives
In this tutorial, we will start building a living room scene with the primitives. Remember our principle, Dbuild only what the camera will seen The first thing we need to do, then, is to visualize what you want to see at the end. Picture the camera capturing a living room at an angle, with a sofa set, a table, a lamp, and a dog by the window YouDll find the rendered image in the Color Gallery on the CD. We will get to the lamp and the dog by the window in the later chapters, but for now, we can...
Dividing the Surface into Patch Regions
Now weare going to cut the puppy into pieces. Yes, this seems cruel, but it will help us a great deal in reducing the amount of work we need to do. 1. Select the V isoparms 2.5 and 7.5, then choose Edit Surfaces gt Detach Surfaces. Delete the right half. The image should look like the one shown below. 2. Select V isoparms 2.375 or it may be 3.375 depending on the way you cut your surface and 1.875 and choose Edit Surfaces gt Detach Surfaces again to detach those areas. Now there are three...
Constraints
Objects in real life are Dconstrainedn in many different ways. For example, if you are holding a baseball, when your hand moves and rotates, the ball moves and rotates with it, because the ball is constrained by your hand movements. As another example, consider a tennis player, whose eyes are always looking at the tennis ball. If you wanted to imitate these actions in Maya, it would be difficult and time-consuming to try to reproduce the motions of the baseball or the eyes by keyframing them....
Using the Keys Submenu
You can access several key-editing functions by selecting Edit gt Keys. The functions on this submenu work differently from those with the same name in the Graph Editor, and itns important not to confuse these functions. The functions in the Keys submenu edit keyframe curves at the object level. They are used mainly to transfer animation curves between objects. Cut Keys and Copy Keys have the same option settings. Select Edit gt Keys gt Copy gt to open the Copy Keys Options dialog box. The...
Speeding Up Calculations with Additional Solvers
Each additional object a rigid solver has to keep track of can geometrically increase the calculation time. To compensate for this, you can speed up calculations by isolating different parts of a simulation from one another and assigning additional solvers to each part. Letns see how this works by making some changes in the deformed sphere scene you created in the previous section. If you no longer have that scene, just create a ball and a plane, make the ball an active rigid body and the plane...
Using Polygon Primitives
As with NURBS, Maya provides several default polygon primitives you can use as starting points for creating more complex polygonal surfaces. When you select Create gt Polygon Primitives, you ll see the choices Sphere, Cube, Cylinder, Cone, Plane, and Torus. Note Notice that the polygon cube, cylinder, and cone surfaces are all one-piece solids, unlike their NuRbS counterparts, which are made up of several pieces. As an example, select Create gt Polygon Primitives gt Sphere gt . The Subdivisions...
Lighting the Scene
To light this scene, weall add four lights one ambient light to shade the whole scene, and three spotlights. This lighting setup will give the scene a night-time quality, which is a bit more fun than one big light for the sun. Additionally, weall make two of the lights trackn or aim toward the ship at all times. 1. First, letas create our ambient light. Select Rendering from the pop-up menu at the top left of the screen. Then, choose Lights gt Create Ambient Light gt . In the options box, set...
Shoulder and Leg Chains
We want the shoulder joint to primarily bend up and down, so create it in the Front view, as in a next. Create the arm chain in the top view, because you want the chain to be bending forward, as in b . Take note of the extra joint at the end of the chain. Name the second-to-last joint wrist and the last joint hand. Wenll be using the extra joint to set up a special orientation constraint. Group the arm chain under the shoulder joint, and then group the shoulder chain to the joint where the IK...
Using Expressions with MEL
Expressions are a specialized subset of the MEL scripting language which are designed to execute through time, not just when the command or script is called. While MEL is only evaluated when the script or macro is run except in special cases , expressions are evaluated at every frame, or after each interaction on screen like moving an object . Expressions deal primarily with changing an objectns attributes based on time, the current frame, or another attribute. Thus, expressions are well suited...
Polygon Faces
The most basic polygon surface is the triangular face. The front side of a triangular face has only one normal vector, because triangles are, by definition, planar. Quadrangular polygons quads are four-sided faces, which may or may not be planar. You also can create faces that have five or more sides, called n-sided faces. However, as a general rule, you should try to keep your polygon surfaces as triangles or quads. Note We could say that a triangular face is the building block of all...
Sculpting NURBS Surfaces Sculpting across Seams
We re now going to look at Mayans Sculpt NURBS Surfaces Tool, and use the head you created in Chapter 6 to see how Artisan works with complex issues like surface seams. Tip If you do not have or don t like the head from Chapter 6, use the file headStarter.ma on the CD-ROM. First things first we don t want to alter the shape of the person s ears or eyes, so hide them from view select each, and then choose Display gt Hide gt Hide Selection . Drag-select the remains of the head, and then open the...
Creating the Thumb
Building the thumb is one of the trickiest things younll do in this tutorial. Wenll use the Split 1. On the left side of the hand, draw two edges using Edit Polygons gt Split Polygon Tool. Next, at the bottom the palm of the hand , draw four more edges. Pull out the vertex at the side and the one at the bottom beside it, then pull them down. Select the face that sticks out with the vertices, and extrude it twice, turning and scaling it as you do. See the next graphic for guidance. This is going...
Copying the Animation
Now we need to copy the animation from the left leg to the right. With the cube still active, select Edit gt Keys gt Copy Keys gt , click on the Below setting, and then click Copy Keys. Select the RfootCube. Select Edit gt Keys gt Paste Keys gt , type 12 in the Time Offset field, and click the Paste Keys button. Select both cubes, open the Graph Editor, and apply View gt Infinity, then Curves Pre Infinity gt Cycle, and then Post Infinity gt Cycle. Select the Translate X curve for the RfootCube,...
Using the Rigid Body Solver
When you work with more complex shapes you may find that Mayans default settings donnt get you the speed or accuracy that you are looking for out of your rigid body simulation. For such occasions, Maya allows you to adjust how it calculates rigid body simulations through the Rigid Body Solver. With the Rigid Body Solver you can adjust how Maya calculates the simulation, giving you the ability to fine-tune your simulation for speed or accuracy. Letns look at the solver in action. Create another...
Stingray
This image was created in Maya 2 by Michael Leone at Viewpoint Studios. The stingray was generated from a primitive NURBS sphere with the help of nonlinear deformers and by manually pushing and pulling the CVs. Nonlinear deformers were also used to create the lifelike motion of the stingray as it glides through the water. Complex layers of procedural shaders were used to generate the stingrayns skin. Silicon Graphics Limited. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Editing Deformations
Deformations depend on the relationships among points and their groupings. The controls you can use for your deformations include the Relationship Editor, Edit Membership tool, Paint Set Membership tool, and the Prune Membership function. You can also edit the deformation order. Whenever you create a deformer, Maya creates a deformer set of the same name. This set shows up in the Deformer Set Editing module of the Relationship Editor. You can use this editor to edit the membership of points in...
IKs Constraints and Hierarchy Setup
Once the joints are all built, we can put IK handles on the arms and the legs. The IK handles will then be constrained to the cubes. The cubes will give us better visual feedback in selecting and transforming the arms and the legs than using just the IK end effectors. Hand Cubes Wenll use the ikRP Handles option setting, because you can get more rotational control with it. Start an IK handle at the left arm joint, and end at the wrist joint. Create a polygon cube, scale it as you see below, V...
Binding the Puppy
Now letns return to the puppy from the last chapter. We are first going to create two lattices, one for the puppyns head, another for the body. Then wenll bind the two lattices plus the tail and the legs to the skeleton as smooth skin. The skeleton will deform the lattices, which will then deform the puppyns head and body. This method of indirectly moving the puppy using lattices is easier to weight, and it produces smoother deformation. Wenll first have to solve a double-transformation...
Spine
The spine joints will be moved by the IK Spline tool, which allows us to build it more like the human spine, as shown below. The joints must have no limitations otherwise, the spline wonat work. Note the start joint is one above the root joint. The curve is four spans, which means it has seven CVs. Create three clustersnthe first one containing six CVs, the second containing four, and the third containing the top twonand display their handles. They will serve as three spline control handles....
Editing Polygons
This section focuses on the tools for working with polygons. You have many options, ranging from moving polygon components to manually softening or hardening a polygonns edges. You can find the editing tools on various menus, including the Edit Polygons menu, the Tool Options submenu, the Booleans submenu, and the Normals submenu. Note The number of Polygon tools available has expanded considerably in Maya 2. Here, we cover the option settings for the functions you are likely to use most often....
Converting Baking a Rigid Body Animation into Keyframes
Once youDve got an orbital motion you like, you can Dbaken the rigid body animation into keyframes so you can change the keyframes into other sorts of motion. Baking is the term Maya uses for creating a set of keyframes that mimic the dynamic motion of a rigid body simulation. As we will see below, baking an animation allows you to adjust motion paths and keyframes for what was once a dynamic simulation and thus did not allow this kind of adjustment . Warning If you may eventually wish to...
Using the Curve Editing Tool
Usually you can manipulate a curve by translating the CVs. But at times, you may want an edit point to stay in position while the CVs around it move to change the curve shape. The curve editor is especially useful in such a situation. Create a curve, and then select Edit Curves gt Curve Editing Tool. Grab the Parameter position handle see below and move it along the curve while keeping V pressed to snap the editor to edit points. Once itns on the edit point you want, you can modify the curve...
Using the Selection Tools
Maya also provides some tools to aid you in selecting components. Select Polygons gt Selection to see a submenu with selection tools. The Grow Selection Region function increases any selected component elements by one unit. Shrink Selection Region does the opposite. Select Selection Boundary leaves only the boundary of the selected component elements still active and deselects the rest. You can also convert any selected component elements to another by using the Convert functions on the...
Flexors
The easiest way to make joints bend smoothly is to use a flexor, a special type of deformer that works with rigid skinned joints. There are three types of flexors lattice, sculpt, and cluster. You will usually want to use the lattice. Joint Lattice Select the skeleton, and apply Go To Bind Pose. The cylinder is no longer deformed. Select the second joint and, from the Skin menu, apply Edit Rigid Skin gt Create Flexor. Leave everything at the default setting and click Create. A joint lattice or...
The Channel BoxAttribute Editor
New to version 2, the Channel box and Attribute Editor can be set to toggle back and forth, filling the right-hand portion of your screen to make the Attribute Editor and Channel box toggle, choose Options gt UI Preferences gt Open Attribute Editor in Main Maya Window . The Attribute Editor gives you access to all an objectDs attributes, while the Channel box gives a more simplified view of only the objectDs keyable or animatable attributes. As these two panels are counterparts, it makes sense...
Smoothing and Sculpting Polygons
Smoothing is a simple but indispensable function that you will use over and over again. The Smooth tool on the Edit Polygons menu subdivides a surface, or selected faces of a surface, according to the division setting in the option box the default setting is 1 to create as smooth a surface as its division setting will allow. It always produces quads, and you should generally leave the subdivision setting at the default. If you are going to apply Smooth more than once, you usually want to tweak...
Working with the Time Slider
The time slider has several key-editing functions, which you can access by RM choosing them. When you select an object that has keyframes, the time slider displays key ticksnred vertical lines showing where keyframes are in the time slider. Breakdowns are displayed as green ticks. By Shift clicking and dragging, you can select a frame, or a range of frames, which is displayed in a red block with arrows at the start, in the middle, and at the end of the block. You can then move the frame or...
Using the CV Curve Tool
Go to front view and select Create gt CV Curve Tool gt . Notice the default setting is at Cubic and Uniform. Leave everything at the default and X click near the origin. Draw the curve on the left shown below. Oops The last CV placement was a mistake. No problem. Just MM click and you can X drag the CV back to where it should be placed like the curve on the right Tip You can also edit CVs or EPs while you are creating a curve by pressing the Insert key. With this method, you can select multiple...
Rigid Skinning
Tip You can also skin selected joints in the same way you would complete skeletons, but you would do this with different geometries, such as skinning the hand, then the arm, and so forth. Trying to skin one object separately to two joints brings up some tricky partitioning problems, and fixing them is usually not worth the effort. Instead, if you have to do something like that, try creating lattices with the objectns control points instead and skin them to the selected joints.
Using One Driver Attribute
Letns try a simple tutorial to see how this works. For this example, wenll use three spheres to represent finger joints and have one of the spherens rotation drive the other two spheresn rotation whenever nurbsSpherel rotates in the X axis, nurbsSphere2 and nurbsSphere3 also will rotate in the X axis . 1. Create a torus. Set its values as follows 2. Select Move, then press Insert to get into the pivot mode. X drag the pivot to the origin. Your torus should look something like the one shown...
Using Fields to Add Effects to Rigid Bodies
After you play with the gravity settings for a while, find a value for gravity that will give the ball a good long flight time, because now wenre going to add some other fields to affect the ballns flight. First, letns add some wind. Select the sphere, then select Fields gt Create Air gt . The Options Create window opens, giving you several ways to adjust the air field. Younll see three buttons at the top Wind, Wake, and Fan that are simply preset options you can use to create the effect of...
The Graph Menu
The Graph menu has several useful functions. The Graph Materials on Selected Objects command allows you to work with a select group of render nodes according to the surfaces you select. By moving the materials, textures, and networks that have been applied to the selected objects into the layout area, this command provides an efficient way to isolate the render nodes you want to work with in complicated scenes. The Graph Materials on Selected Objects command also is available through the...
Coloring Surfaces
When you create a material and open its Attribute Editor, you can find its default Color attribute in the Common Material Attributes section. The default is set as a gray color with zero saturation and 0.5 value in HSV, or 0.5 RGB. Maya provides many ways to adjust the color of the material Use the Color Chooser. To access the Color Chooser, click the color box beside the Color attribute. Connect textures or file textures to the Color attribute, typically by dragging them to the Color attribute...
What s an Attribute
An attribute Attr is any item that lives on a Maya node a Maya node is anything you can see in the Hypergraph . This sounds a bit obscure, but itas really fairly straightforward anything like rotateX, transformZ, or scaleY is an attribute of an object more specifically, an objectas transform node . When you build, alter, or animate an object, youare changing one or more attributes on one or more nodes in the objectnand of course, all of these changes are just MEL commands, so you can make Maya...
Projection Mapping
Maya has three types of projection mapping functions available from the Texture submenu Planar, Cylindrical, and Spherical Mapping. There is also a Create UVs Based on Camera function, which creates UV values of a planar mapping projected from the camera view. 1. Start a new scene and create a polygonal cube. With the cube still selected, open the Texture View window. You should see the cube UVs laid out as shown below. The default setting for the cube normalizes UVs so that they are all...
Placeholders Circles and Trees Variables Loops and Branching
If younve done any programming at all, younve probably been waiting for this point the main reasons to program are to 1 create flexibility and to 2 do repetitive tasks. Flexibility comes through variables or placeholders , while repetition is made possible through looping and Itns actually much easier to see what a variable is than to talk about it. Type the following in the Script Editor string myVariable myVariable hi there print myVariable When you execute these commands, younll see that nhi...