Book description
Designed for busy Maya users like you, this guide offers dozens of how-tos, workarounds, and shortcuts culled from years of experience in a fast-paced, deadline-driven production pipeline. You’ll discover tricks and timesavers on texturing particles, customizing Paint Effects brushes, modeling polygon faces, creating facial rigs with wire deformers, and much more—and helpful full-color illustrations reinforce the concepts. From modeling, animating, and rigging to texturing and lighting, this book will help you streamline workflow and improve your skills.
Table of contents
- Copyright
- Dear Reader,
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1. Customization and MEL Scripting
- 1.1. Resetting to Factory/Swapping Prefs Files
- 1.2. Creating Custom Shelf Icons
- 1.3. Building a Simple MEL Window
- 1.4. Building an Intermediate MEL Window
- 1.5. Creating an Autosave MEL Script
- 1.6. Creating Your Own Paint Effects Brushes
- 1.7. Creating Notes for Your Fellow Animators
- 1.8. Passing Information to Files
- 1.9. Industry Tip: Creating an "Expert Mode" MEL Script
-
2. Modeling
- 2.1. Breaking Up NURBS Surfaces
- 2.2. Cleaning Up NURBS Surfaces with Attach and Detach
- 2.3. Closing Holes in NURBS Objects
- 2.4. Building a NURBS Gear
- 2.5. Building a NURBS Eye
- 2.6. Cleaning Up Imported Polygons
- 2.7. Industry Tip: Building a Polygon Head by Extruding Edges
- 2.8. Industry Tip: Adjusting the Maya Grid for Linear Units
-
3. History, Scripting, and Animation
- 3.1. Deleting Select History in the Hypergraph
- 3.2. Using Variables within Expressions or MEL Scripts
- 3.3. Choosing between Local and Global Variables
- 3.4. Driving Vehicle Wheels and Bike Pedals
- 3.5. Massaging Curves in the Graph Editor
- 3.6. Wilting a Paint Effects Flower
- 3.7. Creating Realistic Eye Movement
- 3.8. Animating Realistic Camera Moves
-
4. Dynamics, Particles, and the Ocean System
- 4.1. Driving a Boat through an Ocean
- 4.2. Creating an Ocean Wake
- 4.3. Building a Dynamic Chain
- 4.4. Filling a Water Glass with Particles
- 4.5. Animating Gelatin with a Soft Body
- 4.6. Generating Swarms with Goals
- 4.7. Industry Tip: Scattering Geometry with Instanced Particles and Expressions
- 4.8. Adding Additional Variation to Instanced Geometry
- 4.9. Offsetting Animation within an Instancer
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5. Character Rigging
- 5.1. Resetting Bind Poses with dagPose
- 5.2. Creating a Poor Man's Foot and Leg Rig
- 5.3. Setting Up an Easy Spine Controller
- 5.4. Picking Up a Prop with a Constraint
- 5.5. Using Blended Wire Deformers for Facial Rigging
- 5.6. Weighting a Head with the Component Editor
- 5.7. Preventing Cluster Drift
- 5.8. Industry Tip: Creating an Advanced Arm Rig
- 6. Texturing
-
7. Lighting
- 7.1. Mastering 1-, 2-, and 3-point Lighting
- 7.2. Mastering Naturalistic Lighting
- 7.3. Setting the Mood with Light Color and Position
- 7.4. Setting Up Believable Lamplight
- 7.5. Forcing Decay on Directional and Ambient Lights
- 7.6. Industry Tip: Unusual Lighting Techniques
- 7.7. Producing Quality Depth Map Shadows
-
8. Rendering
- 8.1. Splitting Up Renders per Object
- 8.2. Rendering Interlocking Characters in Separate Passes
- 8.3. Splitting Up Renders per Shading Component
- 8.4. Rendering Lone Shadows
- 8.5. Rendering Multiple Passes with the Render Layer Editor
- 8.6. Mastering Render Layer Editor Intricacies
- 8.7. Avoiding Raytraced "Black Pits"
- 8.8. Rendering a Wireframe for Your Reel
- 8.9. General Rendering Tips for Your Reel
-
9. Advanced Rendering Techniques
- 9.1. Rendering OpenEXR and .hdr Images with mental ray
- 9.2. Texturing with HDR Images
- 9.3. Rendering Super-White Values with mental ray
- 9.4. Choosing Between 16-Bit and HDR Formats
- 9.5. Lighting with LDR and HDR Images
- 9.6. Importing ZBrush Normal Maps
- 9.7. Normal Mapping in Maya
- 9.8. Linking and Unlinking Shadows
-
10. Demo Reels and Project Work Flow
- 10.1. Adding to Your Demo Reel
- 10.2. Calibrating Your Monitor
- 10.3. Creating 3D on Multiple Machines
- 10.4. Estimating Project Requirements
- 10.5. Industry Tip: Animation Project Management
- 10.6. Prepping Animation for Video
- 10.7. Prepping Animation for 35mm Film
- 10.8. Finding an Audience for a 3D Short Film
Product information
- Title: Maya® Professional Tips and Techniques
- Author(s):
- Release date: March 2007
- Publisher(s): Sybex
- ISBN: 9780470107409
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