Mastering Autodesk Maya 2015

Autodesk Official Press

Todd Palamar

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118862513
• eBook ISBN: 9781118862575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics
• Index: Computer Science

Expand your skills with complete Maya mastery

Mastering Autodesk Maya is the ultimate guide to the popular 3D animation software. Author Todd Palamar draws on his extensive professional animation experience to help readers take their Maya skills to the next level. Written for those who already know the basics of this enormous program, the book covers advanced topics and professional techniques for modeling, animation, texturing, and visual effects.

Fully updated to reflect Maya's latest features, the book takes a hands-on approach to instruction, providing readers with a diverse set of tutorials designed by real-world professionals to showcase 3D animation and visual techniques used in industry settings. Complete and comprehensive, the book makes an excellent desk reference for the working animator, and is an ideal resource for those seeking Maya certification. The unique combination of challenging material and practical instruction make this one-of-a-kind guide the ultimate Maya handbook. Topics include:

• Animation using inverse kinematics, keyframes, and deformers
• Hard surface and organic modeling
• Proper rigging techniques, and working with Maya Muscle
• Xgen, Paint Effects, and rendering with mental ray
• Texture mapping, compositing, nParticles, and more
• Virtual filmmaking and scene management

The most complex skills are useless if they can't be applied, so the book emphasizes the practical, day-to-day uses of each skill, and discusses which solutions best fit which scenario. For the computer animation professional seeking a more in-depth mastery of this popular animation program, Mastering Autodesk Maya is an excellent investment in the future of your career.

Chapter 1
Working in Autodesk Maya

The Autodesk^® Maya^® working environment has evolved to accommodate the individual artist as well as a team of artists working in a production pipeline. The interface presents tools, controls, and data in an organized fashion to allow you to bring your fantastic creations to life easily.

Understanding the way Maya organizes data about the objects, animations, textures, lights, dynamics, and all the other elements contained within the 3D environment of a scene is essential to understanding how the interface is organized. Maya uses what's known as the Dependency Graph to keep track of the various packets of data, called nodes, and how they affect each other. Any single element of a Maya scene consists of multiple nodes connected in a web, and each one of these nodes is dependent on another. The Maya interface consists of editing windows that allow you to connect these nodes in an intuitive way and edit the information contained within each node.

There is usually more than one way to accomplish a task in Maya. As you grow comfortable with the interface, you'll discover which editing windows best suit your working style.

This chapter is a brief overview of what professionals need to understand when working in Maya. You'll learn what types of nodes you'll be working with and how they can be created and edited in Maya. You'll also learn how to work with projects and scene data as well as the various windows, panels, and controls that make up the interface. This will help you, whether you are working alone or as part of a team of artists.

This chapter is about working with nodes, but it is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to each and every control in Maya. You will find that information in the Maya documentation. If you've never used Maya before, I strongly encourage you to read the Maya documentation as well as Introducing Autodesk Maya 2015, by Dariush Derakhshani (Sybex, 2014).

In this chapter, you will learn to:

• Understand transform and shape nodes
• Create a project

Creating and Editing Nodes

A Maya scene is a system of interconnected nodes that are packets of data. The data within a node tells the software what exists within the world of a Maya scene. The nodes are the building blocks that you, as the artist, put together to create the 3D scene and animation that will finally be rendered for the world to see. So if you can think of the objects in your scene, their motion, and their appearance as nodes, think of the Maya interface as the tools and controls you use to connect those nodes. The relationship between these nodes is organized by the Dependency Graph (DG), which describes the hierarchical relationship between connected nodes. The interface provides many ways to view the graph, and these methods are described in this chapter.

Any given workflow in Maya is much like a route on a city map. There are usually many ways to get to your destination, and some of them make more sense than others depending on where you're going. In Maya, the best workflow depends on what you're trying to achieve, and there is typically more than one possible ideal workflow.

There are many types of nodes in Maya that serve any number of different functions. All the nodes in Maya are considered DG nodes. Let's say you have a simple cube and you subdivide it once, thus quadrupling the number of faces that make up the cube. The information concerning how the cube has been subdivided is contained within a DG node that is connected to the cube node.

A special type of DG node is the directed acyclic graph (DAG) node. These nodes are made of two specific types of connected nodes: transform and shape. The arrangement of DAG nodes consists of a hierarchy in which the shape node is a child of the transform node. Most of the objects you work with in the Maya viewport, such as surface geometry (cubes, spheres, planes, and so on), are DAG nodes.

To understand the difference between the transform and shape node types, think of a transform node as describing where an object is located and a shape node as describing what an object is.

The simple polygon cube in Figure 1.1 consists of six flat squares attached at the edges to form a box. Each side of the cube is subdivided twice, creating four polygons per side. That basically describes what the object is, and the description of the object would be contained in the shape node. This simple polygon cube may be 4.174018 centimeters above the grid, rotated 35 degrees on the x-axis, and scaled four times its original size based on the cube's local x- and y-axes and six times its original size in the cube's local z-axis. That description would be in the transform node.

Figure 1.1 A shape node describes the shape of an object and how it has been constructed; a transform node describes wher...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Publisher's Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Working in Autodesk Maya
• Chapter 2: Introduction to Animation
• Chapter 3: Hard-Surface Modeling
• Chapter 4: Organic Modeling
• Chapter 5: Rigging and Muscle Systems
• Chapter 6: Animation Techniques
• Chapter 7: Lighting with mental ray
• Chapter 8: mental ray Shading Techniques
• Chapter 9: Texture Mapping
• Chapter 10: Paint Effects
• Chapter 11: Rendering for Compositing
• Chapter 12: Introducing nParticles
• Chapter 13: Dynamic Effects
• Chapter 14: Hair and Clothing
• Chapter 15: Maya Fluids
• Chapter 16: Scene Management and Virtual Filmmaking
• Appendix A: The Bottom Line
• Appendix B: Autodesk Maya 2015 Certification
• End User License Agreement