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

Rigging in Maya November 11, 2009

On Friday we started learning about rigging in Maya. To begin with we drew a shape and inserted some IK Chains to allow the shape to move as if it was an arm or a leg. Adding spans to the original shape will help it to bend better when it comes to inserting the IK Chains. The 3D view is useful here as it helps you to check whether or not the chains are actually in the shape and in the right place.

After this we then went on to creating IK Handles which makes the whole chain move together. Select the IK Handle tool from the animation shelf ➝ panel ➝ hypograph hierarchy ➝ select tool ➝ select bottom joint and then the top joint ➝ creates an ‘effector’, which is the IK Handle.

Making a simple skeleton (just the legs):
- Make one leg and use the mirror geometry tool to create a matching leg on the other side. To join them together ➝ right click ➝ faces ➝ delete necessary faces ➝ right click ➝ edge ➝ bridge tool ➝ select edges that need to be joined.
- Make the polygon into a template so that it does not get selected by accident when making the IK Chains; right click ➝ actions ➝ template
- To mirror the joints choose the animation shelf ➝ skeleton ➝ mirror joint ➝ outline box ➝ select the axis that the joint is to be mirrored on
- To join the joints together ➝ shift click to select all of the relevant joints ➝ parent
- Create NURBs circles to attach the feet to the floor ➝ select the nurb ➝ select the handle ➝ constrain ➝ point constrain: this ties the joint to a fixed position
- Select all joints and the polygon ➝ skin ➝ bind ➝ smooth bind

ABC Maya Session Two October 22, 2009

In this weeks ABC session we started off by learning how to parent objects. Once a number of polygons have been created you can then use the middle mouse button to click and drag them on top of one another and this creates a parent object with a number of children. The lowest child can be moved individually but as you move up the chain everything below it gets moved together. SHORTCUT: Select one object, select another object by pressing/holding shift and then pressing “P”

To unparent objects you can drag and drop the child objects into an empty space and then they will become ‘free’ again and can be moved on their own. SHORTCUT: cmd + “P”

To group objects: cmd + “G”

To duplicate objects: cmd +”D”

We also learnt how to pivot objects by moving the arrowheads. The insert button (left diagonal arrow) removes the arrow heads and then by pressing and holding “V” when it is moved it will snap to a vertex but by pressing and holding “B” it can move freely. To put it back in it’s original position; modify ➝ center pivot.

Mauricio also explained to us the different files types in ‘Maya’:
‘.mb’ = mayaBinary file
‘.ma’ = mayaAscii
‘.ma’ files are larger than ‘.mb’ files as they contain more information.

In the second half of the session we continued to build the robot that we started last week. This time we were taught how to split polygons:
(polygon toolbar) Edit Mesh ➝ Insert Edge Loop Tool

and how to extrude faces of polygons:
(polygon toolbar) Edit Mesh ➝ Extrude (with a face selected from the right click menu of a polygon)

Importing Audio To Maya October 22, 2009

We had a brief explanation of how to insert audio files into ‘Maya’:

File ➝ Import ➝ Audio Files

On the animation timeline, right click ➝ sound ➝ select sound file

I tried to insert a song, it didn’t like that. I put it something smaller, it liked that.

Creating Text In Maya October 22, 2009

After learning how to create gravity in ‘Maya’ we then learnt how to make text and we could make the text fall from the sky. We inserted the text from the ‘create’ menu and then beveled it to make it 3D.

We then applied gravity to it and made it fall onto a plane.

As you can see, the letters fall apart as they fall from the ‘sky’, I can’t really remember why this was but I think it was something to do with the grouping of the letters?

We then made a second attempt and beveled the letters as we made them as opposed to afterwards and made a bowl for them to fall into. On this one I have also applied a leopard print texture to the letters by adding material attributes.

Creating Gravity in Maya October 22, 2009

Last Friday we learnt how to create gravity in ‘Maya’ and make objects fall from the sky. To begin with we made a plane and a sphere and changed them individually to active and passive surfaces from the ‘dynamics’ tools. After this we changed the fields on the sphere so that it would be affected by gravity. The purple wire frame shows that gravity has been applied to it and as it is an active surface this will take effect when the images are rendered.

This is my first attempt of getting the ball to roll down the plane:

After this I then played around with different sizes and colours to see how all the balls would interact with one another when gravity was applied.

As you can see, the large blue ball gets stuck behind the smaller orange one so I moved them around and eventually they all started rolling off of the plane.

Lighting In Maya October 18, 2009

Today we learnt about how to put lights in Maya. Below is a screen shot of the ‘Maya’ screen and the rendered image of how it would look once it had been fully rendered.

Once we learnt how to put them in we learnt how to change all of the different aspects, such as the angle, the intensity and the colour. YouTube hates me so there are no videos. But there are videos. So you’ll just have to imagine them I’m afraid.

ABC Maya Course October 14, 2009

This evening we started the ABC Maya Course, to begin with we went over the basics that we learnt last week as a bit of a refresher and then we were taught some useful keyboard shortcuts for using the programme along with how to organise all of our files properly into a project folder and how to make layers.

I’m going to write up the list of shortcuts here just in case I lose them:
- alt + left click = rotate the screen
- alt + centre click = pan the screen
- alt + right click = zoom in and out
- 4 = wire frame
- 5 = shading
- 6 = lights
- 7 = textures
- W = move tool
- E = rotate tool
- R = scale tool

We’ve been given a little project for our own time to make a robot out of paper from some templates that we have been given just to see how the shapes fit together and how things move.

Our main project for the 20-week course is to animate a robot on a desk. We started doing this at the end of the session and will be continuing next week.