Types of Nonlinear Deformers
The following list provides brief descriptions of each nonlinear deformer and how its specific attributes affect the object s being deformed. Figure 8-1 shows the effect that each deformer has on an object. Bend deformer Bends an object. By default, the deformer bends from the center of the object along the Y axis. You can change this default behavior by selecting the deformer and using the Rotate tool to rotate it so that it is deforming in the proper direction. The amount of bend is...
Create a Hierarchy
Now that the objects are placed and scaled, we need to group them together in a hierarchy. The Sun will be the root object, Earth will be the child of the Sun, and the Moon will be a child of Earth. To monitor this hierarchical relationship, we will view the hierarchy in the Hypergraph, but instead of opening the Hypergraph as a floating window from the Window menu, we will change the Side view in the Four View layout to display the Hypergraph. Each of the four views displayed in the current...
Www.datasynthi.com Maya-complete-reference
If you've gone to the movies lately or played a video game on an Xbox system or Wii, you are familiar with the types of animation that Maya can produce. Maya is currently the industry-standard application for producing animation and effects for film, television, video games, and the Internet. This book was written to demonstrate how the program works and how it is used to produce content for these industries. Not so many years ago, access to Maya by someone outside of the animation industry was...
Create UVs
This tutorial takes you through the steps of creating UVs to a polygonal model of a human head. However, you can use this same procedure to map any object. Open the mcr8_ch18_charGeo_start.ma file on the DVD. This model does not have any UVs assigned to it. If you were to create a material with a texture map, it could not be mapped on the surface and therefore would not show up when the surface is rendered. Analyze the model and try to determine how it might be divided up into separate...
Advantages of Polygon Modeling
Polygon modeling has several advantages over NURBS modeling. Modeling Detailed or Branched Models Is Easy Because polygon models are based on the connection of independent faces, it is possible to have polygons with any number of sides and meeting any number of adjacent faces at the corners vertices . While abusing this advantage can lead to a very sloppy model, being able to break a gridlike structure more on surface structure in Chapter 4 to create branching structures, which occur in areas...
InBetween and Interpolation
In 2D animation, humans must painstakingly create pictures to fit between keyframes to suggest motion. These frames are called in-between frames, and the process of creating them is called tweening. The in-between frames of a bouncing ball are shown in Figure 14-2. FIGURE 14-2 Keyframe and in-between frames of a bouncing ball animation FIGURE 14-2 Keyframe and in-between frames of a bouncing ball animation One of the many great advantages that 3D brings to animation production is that the...
Smoke Sprite Animation
The Smoke effect uses a sequence of animated particle sprites to give the effect of smoke. Sprites are image planes that always face the camera. Textures are applied to these image planes and can be cycled through during the animation. Maya includes a 50-frame smoke sequence in the Gifts directory in the same directory as the Maya application. When you create smoke, you first need to go into the Smoke Options window Effects Smoke and specify the path to the image sequence in the Sprite Image...
Viewing and Editing Keyframes
Once keys have been set on various attributes, you can view and edit them in a number of ways. As soon as you keyframe, three things will happen immediately to let you see that an object has been animated. First, when an object is selected, red lines, or tick marks, appear in the Time Slider. These indicate that keys are set at those frames. When attributes are viewed in the Channel Box, the fields containing the values will be highlighted in orange to signify that these channels have been...
Add Fields
Now the particles shoot out upward from the emitter and continue along their paths. Although this might be fine for an explosion that takes place in outer space, the explosion in this example takes place on or near the ground on a planet with a gravitational force. For this reason, we'll apply a Gravity field to the particle_debris node to pull the particles down after they are emitted. For the smoke trails, we'll use an Air field to make the smoke rise up into the air as it dissipates. 1....
Disadvantages of Polygon Modeling
The following are some disadvantages of polygonal modeling. Data Size of a Smooth Polygon Object Is Comparably Large To represent a smooth, curvy object, without noticing any faceting in the silhouette of the model, it could take many faces. This will result in slower interaction compared to that of NURBS models. The tail of a dinosaur may need several hundred or thousands of faces to define its shape and render smoothly. A similar structure in NURBS may only require a small fraction of that...
Maya Szb
8. Play the animation in the Perspective view. The character's lower body now has much more realistic motion. 9. Let's finish up the lower body motion by adding some roll to the foot. Select the RT_footCTRL object and go to frame 15. Set the footRoll attribute to 3 and key it by pressing the s key. In frame 25, change the footRoll attribute to -3 and key it again. In frame 30, change the value to 0, and this time key the footRoll attribute individually. You can do this by highlighting the...
Tutorial Using Final Gather
Setting up lighting in Maya to simulate the way light behaves in the real world is difficult, to say the least. To achieve even lighting across a scene, you will almost always use multiple lights. As we have seen so far with Global Illumination, we can set up fewer lights since Global Illumination gives us much of the even diffusion that we get when using multiple lights. It is from these lights that Global Illumination emits photons, which bounce off objects in the scene and record their color...
Common Material Attributes
The common material attributes for all of Maya's materials are as follows Color The color of the material. Assigning an RGB or HSV Hue, Saturation, Value value using the Color Chooser sets this attribute. Its brightness value can be controlled with the slider. Transparency Controls the transparency opacity of the surface. A value of 0 black renders the image 100 percent opaque. A value of 1 white renders the object totally transparent. A color value can also be used it will act as a color...
Material Nodes
Material nodes are responsible for controlling the characteristics of a surface. The main material nodes in Maya are Anisotropic, Blinn, Lambert, Phong, Phong E, and Ramp Shader. While the texture nodes might display a pattern hinting at the material that a surface could be made of, the material node is primarily responsible for communicating this effect. Even without a texture containing pictorial details, the type of material node and the settings of its attributes will largely tell you the...
Highlight Border Edges
Within a single polygonal shape, there can exist multiple polygonal shells. A polygonal shell is a series of faces who share common components edges and vertices along their borders. All of the objects we have been working with have contained a single shell. However, when you combine two shapes together with the Combine tool, you end up with many shells within a single shape. Since the edge components may overlap, it can be difficult to see where these border edges are. It is really helpful to...
Tutorial Build an Explosion
With some of the basics of working with particles, emitters, and fields now covered, we are ready to put them to work and create something. This tutorial takes you through the process of building an explosion. To accomplish this task, we will use some of the basics covered so far in this chapter and introduce some additional tools and concepts that show Maya's power in creating effects of this type. For this shot, we want to create a cannon shooting a laser blast at a group of objects. When the...
Animate the Brushes
Another powerful feature of Paint Effects is its ability to add animation to the tubes. You can, of course, set keys on any of the attributes available in the Attribute Editor and animate them over Branches Twigs Leaves k Flowers time. On the kelp, for example, you can also keyframe Azimuth Min and Azimuth Max attributes found in the Width Scale section of the brush's Attribute Editor. This adjusts the tilting of the tubes and simulates them drifting in water. However, Paint Effects brushes...
Create Finger Controls
Animating the finger movements on a hand would be a painstaking task if the animator had to rotate each individual joint in each finger of the hand every time the character had to move its fingers. Unless the shot is heavily focused on the hand and finger movement, we can get away with some pretty simple controls in this area. For this exercise, we'll create a control object that has attributes to curl and spread each finger. Set Driven Keys provide the perfect solution for connecting the...
Focus and Shade in the View Window
You'll often work with dozens, or even hundreds, of objects in a scene. Every time you want to adjust the view to move closer to, or focus on, one or more objects, you may find it cumbersome to use the Tumble, Track, or Dolly tool. Instead, you can use hot keys from the keyboard that let you focus on a selected object or group of objects. Focusing on objects will frame or fit them to the bounds of your view window. It also sets the camera's center of interest at the center of the selected...
Maya Cloth
dynamically simulate the realistic movement of fabric cloth, such as a T-shirt following a character's animation or a flag waving in the wind. Maya Cloth can also be used as a modeling tool to extract a realistic cloth model, and then animate it with deformers instead of dynamic simulation. Figure 26-1 shows a cloth object that has been used to dress a character. This chapter explores the basics of Maya Cloth, demonstrating how to drape and simulate clothing on this animated character. Maya...
Apply the Material to the Geometry
Now that the material has been created, we will apply it to the geometry. This involves making some adjustments to the nodes' attributes and connections. 1. In the view window, select the three main objects in the church model main_base, RT_tower, and LT_tower. 2. In the Hypershade, RMB-click the mStone material and choose Apply Material to Selection from the resulting marking menu. 3. In the view window, press the 6 key to see the texture maps. You should notice that while the appearance has...
Fillet the Curves
Most intersecting curves or surfaces have some kind of transition or continuity between them so that we get that nice round edge that will catch the specular highlights when the generated surfaces are rendered. Here, we'll create a simple transition between two of these curves. Using Blend for the Blend Attachment Method attribute in the Attach Curves tool may not give us the amount of fine control we need. It is in these situations that the Fillet Curve tool comes in handy 1. Choose two of the...
Where Do Scripts Go
Okay, so you've just been to Highend3d.com, found the MEL script you were looking for, and downloaded it. So now what The most common way to use MEL scripts is to place them in one of the scripts directories on your hard drive. Three scripts directories are created when you install Maya. One of the directories is located in the same directory as the Maya application. Inside this scripts directory, you'll find several subfolders that contain hundreds of scripts. Remember that the entire Maya UI...
Create a File Texture
Neither the geometry nor the material is capable of storing texture information. As you should know by now, texture information is stored in a texture node, such as a file texture. If we were to try to use the 3D Paint tool on the model at this time, an error would result, telling us that no file texture has been assigned to the current attribute on the selected model. Remember that when you paint on a model, you are actually just painting onto a texture map that is connected to the material...
Crowd Simulation Using Particle Goals
The visual effects and games industries always need to be able to produce a mass of animated characters quickly be it soldiers, birds, bees, bugs, rats, or even orcs. These masses of animated characters are often referred to as crowd simulations. While some companies spend millions of dollars developing crowd simulators where each agent, or individual character, is almost capable of thinking or responding to its environment, you can actually set up a simple crowd simulation in Maya using...
Modeling with NURBS Patches
Patch modeling involves creating a network of separate, four-sided surfaces, or patches, and organizing them so that they flow along and define the form and details of a model. Due to the rectangular, grid-like nature of NURBS surfaces, when a radial detail needs to be introduced as the Extrude Face command would do on a polygonal surface , the surface has to be split up into multiple patches to allow for the changing structure. The resulting model may possibly be made up of hundreds of...
Impulse Impulse Position and Spin Impulse
These attributes apply a constant acceleration to the rigid body for every frame in which they are active. For this reason, these values are usually keyframed to a value for a short period and then keyframed to 0. If the values were left constant or not keyframed to be 0, the object would continue to accelerate at the set value for every frame in the entire animation, which is usually not the desired effect. In fact, in most cases, it is suggested that you try to use fields to introduce motion...
Model the Back of the Head
It's time to model the rest of the head. We could do this by continuing to extrude the edges around the border of the face, but this would mean shifting a lot of vertices around. Instead, we revert to the original blocking model and work that into the detailed face 1. Make the layer containing the blocking model visible. 2. Select the faces on the front of the model and delete them. 3. Select the model and choose Mesh Smooth. Our blocking model rounds itself out. 4. Sculpt the smoothed version...
Orienting Joints
Joint orientation is one of the most important aspects of setting up a skeleton that behaves predictably. In the last section, we talked about the Orientation and Second Axis World Orientation attributes in the Joint tool's settings. This option sets the axis on which the joint will be pointing down the bone. The default setting, XYZ, points the X axis of the joint down the bone. The Orient Joint command can be used to change the orientation of any selected joint or joint hierarchy. Which axis...
The Script Editor
Perhaps the easiest way to find a MEL command is to execute a command from one of the menus in the main Maya user interface and then look at the Script Editor Window General Editors Script Editor to see what is journaled. Every time you select an object, open a window, or execute a command from the menus or shelf buttons, these actions fire off a MEL command, which is then journaled, or listed, in the Script Editor. If you have been working in Maya for a few hours, it may surprise you to see...
Writing MEL Scripts
Earlier in this chapter, we discussed MEL commands and introduced the idea of stringing several commands together. While this may save you some time in some cases, as you become more proficient with Maya, you will undoubtedly need to take things a bit further. Specific problems or workflow issues will arise and can usually be solved through using MEL. The tmBuildFKIKarm.mel script, for example, was written to automate the process to create those additional skeletons and make the connections...
Executing MEL Scripts
Once you have downloaded a script, it is always a good idea to open it in a text editor and read any instructions that might be included. These instructions will often tell you what the script does, how to use it such as what things need to be selected before executing , and how to execute it. Sometimes, scripts are written modularly. In other words, several scripts may be needed to run a procedure. In the case of the tmBuildFKIKarm.mel script, a separate script called tmFKIKsetup.mel is called...
Surface Direction
Just as polygonal surfaces have a front and back side, so do NURBS surfaces. You can display the surface normal direction of a NURBS surface by choosing Display NURBS Normals. You'll see a perpendicular line extending from the center of each surface patch. Choose Display NURBS Surface Origins to display the surface normal as a blue line that extends from the surface origin. This display is a more manageable option to work with, since fewer normal lines appear that might obstruct your view of...
Disadvantages of NURBS
While you can easily model just about anything using NURBS, most of the disadvantages with NURBS stem from the fact that more complex NURBS models are often made from multiple individual surfaces. As a result, you have to deal with the problems described next. Seams Probably the biggest problem with models built from NURBS has to do with the seams that can show between surfaces. When using trimmed surfaces, which are discussed in Chapter 6, the solution is to try to match the tessellation...
Create the Particle Trails
As the debris breaks away from the center of the explosion, we want to create trails of fire and smoke. To do this, we will use the existing particle node, particle_debris, as an emitter by using the Emit from Object command. By selecting an object and choosing Particles Emit from Object, an emitter will be attached to the object and particles will be emitted from it. 1. Select the particle_debris node. Choose Particles Emit from Object . An emitter will be grouped underneath the...
Using Polygonal Marking Menu
The Polygon Marking menu, shown in Figure 4-3, provides you with quick access to a number of useful tools and commands for selecting and editing polygonal components. The menu is accessed by first selecting a component on a polygonal surface and then holding down the ctrl key while also holding down the right mouse button. This marking menu contains some submenus that open another marking menu when the mouse cursor is dragged over. For instance, selecting an edge, accessing the Polygonal...
Sculpt Geometry Tool
The Sculpt Geometry tool allows you to modify a model using a brush-based interface. As you will see, most of the toolsets in Maya offer this interface for performing various tasks. When it comes to modeling, the Sculpt Geometry tool provides a great way to smooth, push, or pull the positions of multiple vertices on a surface at a time without constantly having to make selections and use the transform tools. 1. Select your model surface in the view window and choose Mesh Sculpt Geometry Tool...
Prune Small Weights
No matter how hard you try, it seems that some weight will spill and some of the joints might p5W get only a minuscule amount of the weight. This may lead to a poor deformation or maybe just an unnecessary one. To counter this, you can delete small influences from skin weights 1. Select the body surface and choose Skin Edit Smooth Skin Prune Small Weights . The Prune Weights Options window is shown here. Any influences' skin weight values with the Prune Below value will be automatically...
Round the Edge
We mentioned the importance of beveling or rounding edges back in Chapter 3 when we modeled the church. A round edge adds a high degree of realism to your models. It not only helps in creating a gradation between two surfaces or faces but also catches specular highlights and helps define the form of the model when rendered. The NURBS toolset contains some amazing tools for creating round edges. The two that we will use here are the Round tool and the Circular Fillet command. Both of these tools...
Procedural Textures
Procedural textures are completely computer generated from mathematical equations. Checker, bulge, fractal noise, and cloth are all examples of procedural textures. Each has its own specific parameters to achieve its unique results. One of the biggest advantages of using procedural texture maps is that they are resolution-independent. Whereas bitmapped file textures start to soften and break apart as you zoom closer, procedural textures remain infinitely sharp no matter how close you get. A...
Create the Arm Control
The arm control will be the most complex of the entire rig. This has mostly to do with the fact that we have to build a rig that will control not only the rotations of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, but also the twisting of the bicep and forearm joints. To make it even more complex, most animators prefer that the arm is capable of switching between IK and FK. There are many ways that riggers can handle this. Maya even has a system of its own. Let's look at some of the different options.
Center of Mass
The Center of Mass attribute controls an object's center of gravity. By default, the center of mass is at the center of the rigid body object's bounding box. This simulates where the heaviest spot on the object is located, so that any forces or interactions will occur around this point. For example, imagine two rigid body cylinders that are being affected by gravity and are colliding with a plane. One cylinder has its Center of Mass attribute set at the default and the other has its Center of...
Subdivision Surfaces
We are going to take a break from modeling our head and talk about subdivision surfaces. Recently, subdivision surface modeling techniques have become the standard modeling methods for modeling organic forms in both the game and film industries. In terms of workflow, subdivision surface modeling closely resembles polygonal modeling techniques. With subdivision surfaces, a modeler can work on a coarse, low-resolution version of a model, called a proxy, while viewing a higher-resolution...
D Textures and D Placement Nodes
As mentioned, the 3D placement node is used mainly to position a texture or projection node in 3D space. While you have already seen how it is used to position a projection node that is projecting a 2D texture, you've not yet seen it used for a 3D texture. A 3D texture is a special kind of procedural texture map. Instead of being a flat surface, the 3D texture has depth to it. This means that you could map a 3D texture to a sphere and not worry about it stretching anywhere. All points in the...
Render Attributes
The Render Attributes section in the Attribute Editor contains the attributes that control how particles are displayed. The default is set to Points, and this is what we have been using so far. To change this type of display, select another option from the Particle Render Type pull-down menu. You can choose from among ten different types. We are not going to go through all of them here, as they are all well-defined in Maya's documentation. Instead, we'll cover the overall process of changing...
Exploring Continuity with the Align Command
To understand exactly how continuity is managed, here's a short tutorial that uses two curves to demonstrate achieving the various levels of continuity using the Align Curve command. Keep in mind that there is an analogous command for NURBS surfaces called Align Surfaces. 1. Open a new scene in Maya, and press f4 to display the Surfaces menu set in the menu bar. 2. Choose Create EP Curve to select the EP Curve tool. 3. In the front view, draw a two-span curve click three times . Press enter...
Finalizing the Geometry
We're almost finished Before we integrate this model into the next phase of the production pipeline, we want to prepare it so that there isn't any instanced behavior. Also, it's quite possible that the model will be subdivided later on, so it isn't necessary for us to include it in this model. Luckily, Maya 8 includes a command that really speeds up this workflow. 1. In the view window, select the model. Choose Proxy Remove Subdiv Proxy Mirror . Set the Mirror Direction attribute to -X and...
Convert Model to a Subdivision Proxy
We are going to convert our existing head model into a subdivision proxy with some specific settings so that both the proxy and subdivision mesh are mirrored. This eliminates any problems with a visible seam along the axis of symmetry. 1. Select the geometry and choose Proxy Subdiv Proxy to open the Options window for this command. Figure 4-16 shows the Subdiv Proxy Options window with the settings that we'll be using here. 2. In the Subdiv Proxy Options window, set the mirror behavior to Full...
Model the Car
With our interface now properly set up, we can begin modeling the car. The approach we'll use is very similar to the subtractive approach we used for the rim start with a base surface and cut away the details. Another approach would be an additive approach where you would draw and place every curve in the underlay and build up each patch one by one. While this is good for some models, lots of effort is put into getting C2 continuity between all of the patches. With a subtractive approach, we...
Apply a Layered Texture
In many situations, you'll want to use multiple texture maps to control a single material attribute. This not only increases the detail in a texture, but can also aid in hiding any noticeable tiling artifacts caused by a repeating texture. A layered texture node is a type of rendering node that allows multiple texture files to be combined together in a singe node. This is similar to compositing an image using Photoshop layers. The textures can be arranged in any order, their opacity edited, and...