Category: Maya

[Maya] Animation

Balls falling down stairs

Using the curve editor to manually animate balls falling down stairs.

This was achieved via key framing the translation and rotation of the each ball. In this way the movement is interpolated by Maya.

One ball is bouncy whilst the other is hard.

To get the realism you need to really think about the physics involved. What happened to the ball as it falls down the stairs? How does gravity effect the bounce?

Tweaked the curves to mimic the drop off in bounce.

In this render it looks good with some simple key framing and graph editor editing. There is one glaring mistake however where the ball does not seem to reach the floor!

Picking up a ball

Creating geometry, parenting and adding constraints. Changing pivot points to ensure each body part rotates in the correct position.

Parent hierarchy is important as in determines the movement.

Constrained geo behaves realistically.

IK handles are then used to bind to the geometry. This technique in animation is used when know the final positions of your object. Animated using keyframes on the IK handles.

To pick up the ball, you can use LOC’s, and then change the parent on the frame the hand reaches the floor.

I then created another LOC and key framed it so that when the ball is thrown there it flys through the air.

Rendered!

Angle 1

“Dynamic” camera

Side by side.

[Maya] NURBS and Polygons

Demonstrating different techniques of creating objects Maya.

Intersections and booleans are easier with NURBS as they use splines to generate shapes.

The spheres below have been via NURBS intersections and the “trim”tool.

You can create complicated shapes with NURBS with intersections and then convert them to polygons if needed.

Below shows spheres created in various different ways, and then converted into polygons with different tessellation methods.

To demonstrate the different wireframes I merged a wireframe node with my shader.

Cheese

Using boolean operations on a cube to create a block of cheese

I added some rigid bodies and effects to make it a bit dynamic. Not particularly realistic but interesting.

[Maya] The Room Continued – Chair

Process refined using techniques used for the table.

Cracked plank

Using multicut tool to create geometry for cracked plank
UV mapped.

It was difficult to understand what the inside of the crack would look like, and how the UV’s should behave. Particularly in terms of the concentric rings inside the wood. I researched pictures of wood cracks to ensure realism.

Sculped geo AFTER ensuring UVs correct!!!

Using the bend tool and the soft select brush to make crack a bit more realistic.

Using the bend tool to distort the back support of the chair.

Unique bolt needed for crack as the inside of the crack reveals the bolt which has “cracked” the plank. Created with reflected geometry and extrusion.

Two variations of the chair, one with crack, one without. I reused a lot of geo, but duplicated “special” with a -1 scale in the x direction to create semi unique components.

Rendered chair

Table and chairs composed and arranged.

[Maya] The Room™ Continued…

Table continued…

Learnt that reusing some geometry is useful for speed. When geometry is reused but then re-scaled, the UV’s become distorted, so it is often necessary to recreate geometry and map UV’s onto the new geometry.

Bolt

Created sphere and removed unnecessary faces.
Applying materials and textures to bolt to create a metal like effect.
Hypershade with “Metalness” and “Specular Roughness” nodes.

“Metalness” tells the shader where the material metal-like and where the material is not. I.e where it is rusted.

Placing bolts onto table
Placed bolt

Sculpted geometry on legs to make to make it look like the bolt has been “hammered” into the leg.
Table with bolts rendered.

[Maya] The Room™

Room development.

Plank

Creating plank and UV mapping. Separated UV’s for the edges and adjusted texture in photoshop.
Using sculpt tool to sculpt geometry. Making it look more organic.
Creating room and placing objects within – using materials.
Creating window and light portal

Creating sink

Improving table

UV mapping
Sculpting geo
Texture mapped with different texture for ends – including displacement and bump mapping.

Using techniques and tools such as the edge loop tool, sculpting tool, extrusion. Point snapping, changing the pivot point. Snapping pivot point to edge, rotate tool with snapping.

[Maya]

During this session we went over the basics of Maya. Learning the environment, workspace, tools and how the program worked.

We learnt that Maya is essentially a programming language with a GUI. How it provides a tool set that allows for the realisation of visuals. The fact that it’s set up in this way can mean that it is very buggy and can often crash!

We learnt the basics of manipulating the environment, hotkeys, move tool, objesct manipulation. Extruding and how to create edgeloops.

We went over the channel box and its inputs. Crucial when creating topology as it defines how the object is first realised in the scene and can save a lot of work later on.

We went over how to apply shaders to objects and how Arnolds basic materials’ work, and how to apply them to objects.

The following image show the various ways in which something as simple as the globe can be mapped onto a 2D space. UV mapping is the reverse of this skill taking a 2D image and as best as possible getting onto a 3D object.

We went over some basic UV mapping. Which the process of laying a 2D image on 3D objects. An essential tool for modelling as it is the skill of laying 2D texture on 3D space. A fundamental skill in modelling.

Applied shaders and bump mapped a Buddha, with an HDRi. Which captures many samples of light to create realistic ray tracing light refraction which when interacting with a shader creates an incredibly realistic image, especially with the Arnold renderer.

[Maya] Bread

Modelled sphere. Used sculpt tools to sculpt out grooves. Used a Boolean to create cut.

Used a duplicate and another 2 more Booleans to create a slice.

UV’s for bread outer

UV’s for bread inner. Using different texture. Moving the UV’s to match the bread slice correctly.

Bread and slices with texture. Using soft brush I added some bends to the soft bread.

Using a bump made from the breadslice texture, as well as Arnolds subdivisions. To make the surface of the bread look accurate.

Demonstating bread with bump maps and catclark subdivisions.

Full hypershade of bread and slices.

Created a breadboard. I made 1 half first and then reflected the geometry. Added grooves for realism.

UVs
Textured with bump map and displacement map

[Maya] Tap

Here is a time-lapse of me creating a tap from scratch, following Nicks tutorial.

As you can see there was a lot of trial and error at certain parts. My instinct coming from a technical background is to be precise with all movement, but I discovered that a lot of freeform adjustment and to do things by eye is necessary. I made extensive use of the multicut tool, edge loops, sliding edge loops, extrusion and extrusion manipulation. Focusing on legal topology.

The final product: