This is my final piece for the ABC Maya course that I have been partaking in:
This has been a very enjoyable course and I have learnt a lot that I can use the help me in future projects.
ABC Maya Session Sixteen March 13, 2010
This week we did our final render layer, the shadow layer and then we were free to start rendering once we were happy with our layers to then import it into after effects and put it all together.
Setting mine up to render tonight so I’ve got the loss of my laptop for a while, have to make old fashioned entertainment.
ABC Maya Session Fifteen March 5, 2010
Playing with rendering layers.
We practiced on a NURBs sphere first so that Mauricio could illustrate the differences between rendering in the different layers and then we did the beauty and occlusion layers for our robot, to finish off with the shadow layer next week.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I like occlusion layers.
ABC Maya Session Thirteen/Fourteen February 27, 2010
Robots are animated, background scene is all sorted, lighting’s done. We need to render now and evaluate everything, I’ve got a little to do list of everything that I need to do for the end of the project.
Maya Session Twelve? February 10, 2010
It’s been a while since I’ve done an ABC blog. We’re getting on with putting Jetfire into the scene and animating him slowly but surely and annoyingly. Today we made screwdrivers, for mental ray and depth of field purposes.
ABC Maya Session Ten December 26, 2009
We’re about halfway through the project now, we’ve got our model, he’s got joints and is partially textured. Fun stuff. This week we lernt about the different IK Handles that you can use.
The IKSC Solver is the default handle, and this is the one used to move the legs up and down, or arms in and out, that sort of thing. We also learnt about IKRP Solvers, these allow you to rotate the joint once it has been bent, that sort of thing. This can be changed amongst the material attribute sections (if I remember rightly, which I probably don’t).
We also learnt about how to create locators. Create ➝ Locator. Shift click to position them with the IK Handles and then this will create a pole vector (animation ➝ constrain) then middle click the IK Handle over the Locator so that the Locator becomes the parent (then every time the locator is moved, the IK Handle will move with it).
ABC Maya Session Nine December 26, 2009
Texturing is very stressful, very stressful indeed. Lesson has been learnt, will be more organised with it next week/over the holidays when I finish it.
ABC Maya Session Eight December 4, 2009
This week we took a break from texturing to make the skeleton for Jetfire and attach it to the body.
We attached the skeleton to the body by parenting the corresponding body parts to the joints so that when they are moved they will move together. After this we began instering the IK Handles, so far I have only done them on the legs but I will go on to add them to the arms as well before returning to texturing. Before setting the IK Handles, we also had to remember to set the preferred angle as this would ensure that the hinge joints such as the knee wouldn’t bend the wrong way.
ABC Maya Session Seven December 2, 2009
Texturing = most stressful thing ever. It’s hard not to do it wrong really. But hopefully we’ll all get there in the end, here’s what’s done so far, however I think I’m going to tweak it eventually and make it neater.
ABC Maya Session Six November 19, 2009
In last night’s Maya session we started texturing. We began this with a simple exercise of making a box of ‘Duckies’, a product made up by Jason to illustrate how to use automatic mapping and planar mapping. We were told that the easiest way to handle this is to have two panels side by side and then turning one of the panels into a ‘UV Texture Editor’ from the Panel menu.
From the ‘Polygon’ drop down menu: Create UV ➝ Automatic Mapping ➝ Options and then select the number of planes you wish to project, 6 being the default, we chose 3.
From this you then put the object into ‘edge’ mode and select one of the edges on the object and in the UV texture editor you can see the different edges that you have clicked on. Now they need to be joined. Select edge ➝ Sew edges together (tool in the UV Editor window), from here work around the face that you have started on and leave the back separate.
To select all of the UV point on the shape click one ➝ CTRL & right click ➝ To Shell
Then scale the parts of the template to match what is in the UV window and move so that it has all been accurately projected onto the model.
To texture manually:
Select a face ➝ Create UVs ➝ Planar Mapping ➝ Options
Here you need to make sure that they are being projected along the right axis or they will come up as red because they’re wrong, like some of the ones below
You also need to make sure that this time, all of the projections are scaled to the same size before they are joined together or else it all messes up and gets frustrating. There are also tools in the UV Editor window that allow you to flip the projections horizontally and vertically, which I found quite useful instead of deleting the wrong projections and starting again.
The finished product:
After this we then went back to Jetfire and started to make pictures from that to use in Photoshop and make the textures to finish off modelling him. To take a photo for Photoshop: Polygon ➝ UV Snapshot (in the UV Texture Editor window) ➝ 1024 x 1024 ➝ Keep aspect ratio ➝ save as .TIFF
