Studio Arts Maya 101 Class 7 9/18/2019

Hello everyone!  In the last class I talk about Shading in Maya, the Maya Hypershade, Creating Maya Lights, and Setting up your Render Setting for Batch Render.

In the Hypershade, I showed you how you can create shaders, AKA materials to apply to your geometry meshes.  These shaders have attribute with sliders that allow you to change the color, ambient, diffuse, transparancy, glossiness, bump maps etc.  Within these same channels, you can connect different texture nodes to add more complex colors and texture.  Textures can be procedural, or can be an image referenced by Maya.

Next I assembled some simple geometry in a scene to demonstrate the different properties of Maya Lights.  I demonstrated how to change their intensity, color, direction, shadow properties, and decay rate.

To check how my lights looked, I made sure to press 7 in my viewport window, so that lights are enabled.  Also it is worth reminding you that 6 will turn on textures if you have any in your scene.  Once I was satisfied with my lights, I would render my scene, which produced a higher quality image.  This is where I would use the Maya Renderview window.  If I wanted to see my texture or light changes update in real time, I could use the Maya IPR Render, which allows me to select a small section of the image and use that area to see every change update.  I can use Keep Image in the Renderview window to save a series of renders and scroll through them to help me compare.

One I am satisfied with my light set up, I went to my Render Setting window to setup my scene for Batch Render.  In the common tab, I can set Maya to render a sequence of images based on my timeline.  I can select the file format, resolution, and set the camera to render from.  I also can confirm where my render images will go once finished.  If you have your Maya project set up properly, it should go into the images folder of your project.  Next, I went to the Maya Software Tab to set attributes like image quality, motion blur, and raytracing which affect shadows and reflections.

Once my render settings are in place, I initiate the Batch Render, and watch the status of that render in the Script Editor.  Once finished, I demonstrated how you can take that image sequence and open it in fCheck or whatever compositing program you are using.

Tutorial Videos:

A nice little video about Maya node editing in general

Very basic light demo in Maya

I don't have a video tutorial for the render settings at the moment, because most of the ones that exist are for Arnold which we will cover next week.  If you want you can just search youtube for Arnold Render settings in Maya, if you want to get primed for class.

Studio Arts Maya 101 Class 6 9/11/2019

Animating a ball bounce

In class I did a demonstration for how to do a ball bounce without squash and stretch.  Here are the steps I took:

1) Grab my ball and set key frames on translate Y for the highest and lowest point of my bounce over the timeline.  I use S to set keyframes.

2) In the graph editor, I can use ctrl-C and ctrl-V to copy and paste keyframes in Translate Y to add more bounces.

3)  In the graph editor I can select the Translate Y keyframes and move them up or down (using the middle mouse button and shift on the keyboard) to change their values.  In this example, I am changing them so that the ball loses height over time, with every bounce.

4)  I use broken and linear tangents on the keyframes where the ball hits the ground, to simulate accelerationg into and out of the floor impact.

5)  Once my up and down animatione feels good, I set keys for the translate and rotation of the ball as it is bouncing.  Usually the beginning of these curves should be linear, so they ball has motion at the beginning, and flat at the end, so it slowly stops translating and rotating.

Rigging with Constraints

I demonstrated a basic concept of rigging, where we use control curves to move poly object.  We set our keyframes on these control curves.   I usually use a parent and scale constrain to connect the control to the object.  I use these constraints, so I can keep Geo and Rig groups separate.  This is good practice for rigging.

Rigging with Joints and IK

After the ball bounce, I showed off some rigging concepts.  I used a joint chain on a leg mesh to show how it deforms the shape by pulling components.  After that I demonstrated how to setup and use an IK Handle.

Rigging a Knee

Norman Character Rig

Lastly, at the end of the class, I showed an example of a character rig and how I pose and animate it.  For class I used the Norman Rig.

A Norman Walk Cycle

and here is a fun video of Norman

animation tutorial part. 1 AKA "the secret of animation" from giovanni braggio on Vimeo.

If you would like to mess with some character acting, go hang out at the 11 Second Club.  There you will find monthly animation competitions, based on the selected audio clip.

At the end of the day, I hope you get from this lesson how animating in Maya would work.  I realize rigging and skinning are very advanced concepts, so I don't expect you guys to be master riggers after this class.  I just want you to know the rigging concepts before you play with a Maya rig.  There are so many free rigs on the internet, it is very easy to grab one and just start animating.  This is what I would suggest for people who are interested in becoming maya animators.

Studio Arts Maya 101 Class 5 9/4/2019

Hello guys.  Here are some reference videos for modeling a face.  Each one of these works a little differently from what I showed you.  Check them out and see if it is something you would be interested in trying!  The great thing about Maya and CG is that there are multiple viable solutions to the same problem.  You just need to find out what works for you.

This one is a 3 part series:
Part 1 

Part 2

Part 3

Animation 

Towards the end of the class I began to show you key frame animation.  This is where I used the s key to set markers on the timeline, that represented certain property or channel values.  The change of values over time is interpolated by Maya.  Through a series of keyframes, we can create animated movement in Maya.

Maya Help on Keyframe Animation

Keyframing and the Graph Editor

BONUS

Here is the Spiderman Animation video I showed in class.  This is pretty advanced stuff, but super interesting.