Maya Final

Maya

I havent posted anything about the maya project yet so i will run through now from the beginning. I started by thinking about what I could do that would be quite simple to add music to yet not too hard to animate as i’m not overly confident with maya. I thought about trying to possibly do a human face and maybe just have a voiceover of him saying something, but i felt modeling and animating this would be quite tricky. I then thought about possibly animating  something like a car which would of been quite simple to get the sound and stuff. In the end i landed on modelling a hand, I wanted to have it crawl around adams family style.

I modeled it fine and it turned out looking much better than i expected it would but when it came to putting the bones in a struggled abit with getting the placement of the bones right so the hand moved in a way that looked natural, I finally managed it and it worked well enough to animated with, although for some reason it was quite limited with the movement it was capable of, this was either due to my model or my rigging im not sure. The limitations of my model meant i had to abandon the idea of it crawling around and instead decided to make it clench into a fist then slap a flat object, this made the animation alot easier but in turn made the sound element harder as it meant the was alot less sound. I recorded the sound of myself clenching my fist and slamming different surfaces to get a range of sounds. Im not sure if it will be enough and i may add some quite music in the background overall i think the model turned out really well and i feel i have improved my maya capabilities an awful lot.

Also when animating a put in a simple ambient light and a camera, but these are pretty simple things to do and i am already quite good at using these tools so i didnt feel as if i needed to overdo it in these areas.

Maya model animation

 

Maya Class 2

Session 2 Notes | Parenting | to parent items you need to get the outliner up by clicking on one of the view menus to the left of the screen (it is the one with the white box to the left with text in it) you can then ‘Middle Mouse Grab’ elements and drop them on top of others, this will make them children of the element you drop them on to.. changes now made to the parent effect the others. This can also be done by selecting an object hold ‘SHIFT’ select the objects you wish to be linked by parenting and then press ‘P’. Grouping | In the same outliner menu as parenting you need to hold ‘SHIFT’ and select the items you want to be in the group and then hit ‘cmd+G’. Basic Object Elements | hold ‘Right Click’ on an object in the focused window, you will see a menu with many options such as ‘vertex’ you can use Vertex’s to edit more specific points of polygons. Material Attributes | by holding ‘Right Click’ and clicking ‘Material Attributes’ a menu bar pops up on the right and you can select the colour of your object and also change the textures. Pivoting | By pressing insert whilst in using the move tool on an object you can move the pivot to another location, on the mac keyboards it is the key just below ‘F14′ an arrow pointing up and to the left if you want to reset the pivot to centre then go Modify > Centre Pivot. Plug-ins | Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager | plug-ins are external plug-ins (software) that enable Maya to do things that it dose not do by default. Preferences | Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences (in this menu you can change every aspect in Maya that is visible to use, professionals just open Maya and have the viewer with not icons at all) Hotkey Editor | Window > Settings/Preferences > Hotkey Editor (This is an easy way to create simpler ways to carry out common tasks, you can set your own custom keys that will then be active whilst designing in Maya) Hiding and Showing Tools and Menus | Display > UI Elements (you can select the things you want to show, and or show all and this also goes for hiding things simply by ticking or un-ticking them) Saving As | mayaBinary and mayaAscii (Binary has been compressed to 001100 very small file but Ascii is uncompressed and is in text form so can be edited outside of maya) Splitting Polygons | make sure you are in Polygons Menu (top right) then go Edit Mesh > Insert Edge Loop Tool this will enable you to click anywhere along an edge and create a new set of vertexes along that shape. Extruding | To extrude a shape we must first select the Face we want to extrude, to do this we hold ‘right click’ on the object and select ‘Face’, choose the face we want to extrude and then go Edit Mesh > Extrude, we can then manipulate that face and the edges attached we follow it out to the point that we move it. Mirroring Geometry | (using the example of making a robot) We simply make half of our robot and to make the robot even on both sides we center the robot around 0 and then highlight the object and whilst still in the polygon menu we select Mesh > Mirror Geometry (this will mirror our half robot and give us one complete shape and model)

Lighting/Texture/Physics – Maya

This is my first test using the lighting and texture functions Maya has. We started by creating simple shapes like a sphere or a cube, I chose to use spheres, we then added a texture, lighting and shadows to the shape. We were then asked to animate these shapes and lights using keyframes and the time line. Below is what I created.

After creating these short animations we decided to start using physics and applying gravity to objects in our animations. Here i created my name and a plane for them to drop onto, once i had done this i applied gravity to each letter. After gravity had been applied I made the plane below the letters a passive rigid body and  the letters active rigid bodies. This allows the letters to randomly fall and gives the effect shown below.

Maya Class

Naming Files | Be consistent when naming files so that maya knows where things are, for example [Scene1_V9.0000.Tif] Only two separators, important to keep track of files and stay organized.

Maya Project Setup | File > Project > New *Name Project e.g. robot_1* Use Defaults > Accept

*Also helps to have third button on your mouse enabled.

Basic Navigation |

Press ‘Space’ to enable different perspectives, hovering and clicking changes your focus on that view and hovering and pressing 5 enables the surface shade. At the bottom left of every panel it tells you the coordinates that you can see in that 3D space.

Select multiple items by holding shift and selecting the items.

Press ‘W’ and it show you the local coordinate system for that object.
Press ‘+ and -’ keys to increase the size of the coordinate handles.
Press ‘E’ for rotation, it is colour coded so the ring colours refer to the same coloured axes.
Press ‘R’ to scale the object on the colour coded axes.

Press ‘4′ gives you wire frame view
Press ‘5′ gives you the shaded view

Layers | Display > layers > Create Empty Layer *You can name your layer and give it a colour e.g. Cube*

To add things to layer select the object(s) then right click your layer and hold and then click ‘Add Selected Objects’

Shading > Wire Frame On Shading (this gives your objects a wire frame with the same colour as set in your layer settings.)

Each view has its own submenu *By holding space you can find these menu items without having to go to the top of the frame.

Polygons Include, Vertex’s (corners) , Edges and Faces

Views and Cameras |

hold space and go to View > Image Plane > Image Plane Attributes * this enables you to project the front view on to the other views and move the projection around using placement

Taken from Luke Wakefords blog.