Introducing Autodesk Maya by Dariush Derakhshani – PDF Drive – PDF Architectural Rendering with 3ds Max and V-Ray – A.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
3d animation for the raw beginner using autodesk maya 2e. KING|ROGER Mastering Autodesk Maya Pages. Expand your skills with complete Maya mastery Mastering Autodesk Maya is the ultimate guide to the popular 3D animation software. Author Todd. Start reading Introducing Autodesk Maya for free online and get access to an The online library for learning ePUB (mobile friendly) and PDF.
 
 

 

Autodesk maya 2015 tutorials for beginners pdf free

 

Download 3ds Max Supplementary F Save the files to your local machine. You will need to navigate to this folder 3ds Max Tutorials folder when you are asked to set the Project Folder in the lessons. In this textbook, the readers will also learn about arnold materials, lights, and rendering.

The size of the latest installation package available is The following version: This class will walk you through the early steps of learning 3ds Max software from the ground up.

We will explore the user interface and the workflows that best suit new users. We will address importing and file linking from external source files, cameras lighting, and rendering techniques aimed at the CAD and Rivet software users. In this second part, we will see how to adjust few parameters inside Max, specially the parameters that you see inside the Import dialog.

Login or register to post comments. Sams Teach Yourself 3ds Max in 24 Hourshas everything needed to get the successful digital artist proficient in 3ds Max in a short 24 hours.

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At the end of the tutorials , you should have a good feel for how to use the Maya Muscle skin deformer for your own characters and projects. Sign in. Maya gives users the option to customize the interface.

Using the customization features, you can create a custom set of command icons, define keyboard shortcuts, and even alter menus. Lesson 1. Click on the Create menu, and then select the Polygon Primitives submenu and click.

Python is a straightforward language, so even if this is your first time to learn any programming language, you can learn Python without experiencing any issues.. Python has multiple applications, and so. Are you looking for a Maya course which is completely made for absolute beginners. May be you are currently using other 3d software like max or blender and wa.. In this section, we’re going to be learning about 3D modeling.

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Autodesk maya 2015 tutorials for beginners pdf free.3ds max tutorials pdf free download full version

 
 

Jul 12, , AM Jul Reply to author. Report message as abuse. Show original message. Either email addresses are anonymous for this group or you need the view member email addresses permission to view the original message. Often, the key difference is one of a topdown vs. In the end, modelers are free to use their creativity to use polygon and NURBS tools to turn what they have in their imagination into a stunning 3D scene. In it we see the components of a simple polygon model, a table.

In Figure 2. Figure 2. The vertices of the polygons appear in a pinkish color and the edges of the polygons are blue. The only other thing we need to know to completely specify this component mathematically is what vertices are connected by edges.

We can generalize this to the entire glass table, with its components moved into place, as in Figure 2. In other words, the information needed to specify a polygon model is extremely simple from a mathematical perspective.

A reasonable hierarchy appears in Figure 2. We are probably not worried about animating the table, but one reason for creating the hierarchy is so that we can move the entire table by grabbing the bottom of the table. The mathematical simplicity of polygon modeling makes it easy to represent a model inside a 3D application like Maya. Further, graphics cards typically render triangle-based meshes, and quads can be turned into triangles simply by bisecting them with diagonals.

There is something else that is useful to note. Why did we break the table down into these 11 components? We could have constructed it as a single mesh. After all, we are indeed not trying to animate the table by having the legs walk it across a room, right? More importantly, when it comes time to put materials on the model, the job is a lot easier if the components of the model correspond to the separate pieces that we are likely to manufacture the table from in the real world.

And although in Figure 2. And maybe in another version of the table, the outer ring would be made out of a different material than the bottom of the table. This is why polygon modeling is generally viewed as a top-down process; we begin with a primitive and then reshape it. In the figure, we see that there are a number of polygon primitives available in Maya; the ones that are used most commonly are Sphere, Cube, Cylinder, Cone, Torus, and Plane.

Although it was added to Maya fairly recently, I find the Pipe primitive to be very useful. Once we create a Cylinder, we adjust its attributes in the Attribute Editor, as seen in Figure 2. In particular, the radius is 29, the height is 1. Now we have made the glass top.

Renaming objects makes it dramatically easier to locate components in the Outliner. Since a scene can quickly become packed with large numbers of polygon primitives, we often go the Outliner and click on a component so that it will be highlighted in the Viewport; this is how we can select an object that might be difficult to click on in a complex scene. The part of the table that encases the glass top is made out of two components, the Outer Ring and the Table Bottom.

Both of them are Pipe primitives from the Create dropdown. Assuming that the reader is following along and building each example in this book, I leave it up to the reader to set the attributes Radius, Height, Thickness, and three Subdivision attributes of the two pipes. Note that the number of subdivisions chosen for all of the components of the table is based on how smooth the components need to be.

The Radius, Section Radius, and two Subdivision attributes must be set. This means that you should grab one of the three arrows on the Move tool rather than clicking on the center of the Move tool, which will cause the affected object to be dragged through 3-space rather than along a specific axis.

If an object is moved randomly through 3-space, it will make it difficult to line it up with other components. Likewise, it is important to avoid rotating objects; if we were to rotate the glass top, say, so that it was no longer flat against the x-z plane, it would be difficult to later line it up properly with the outer ring and the table bottom.

The legs are the only components that cannot be created by simply rescaling a polygon primitive. To create a leg, we begin with a polygon Cube. We then adjust its height and subdivisions. But with the leg, we are not choosing the subdivision attributes to facilitate smoothing, at least not directly. We need to set the Subdivisions Height attribute large enough so that we can apply something called a Bend deformer. We need a number of subdivisions so that once the leg is bent, it is smooth; this is because vertices are used as the bend points of the object being deformed.

The Bend deformer will not bend the leg properly without the subdivisions being set first. Here are the steps we follow. First, we create a polygon Cube and increase its height; then we add a number of subdivisions along this height. Second, we apply a Bend deformer.

The Bend deformer is very heavily used in Maya polygon modeling. We can use it to roll up garden hoses, bend rain gutters, and create curved subway tunnels. We then use the duplicate of the leg to make three more copies; the original leg, which is attached to the Bend deformer, is not used, because if it is moved, the Bend deformer will re-bend the leg.

In general, when any of the nonlinear deformers shown in Figure 2. Each of these primitives is an object within the Maya database. These objects are then arranged into a hierarchy in the Outliner. Another approach is to craft a model out of a single primitive. We will create a T-shirt. There is an important modeling strategy to keep in mind when performing polygon modeling: add detail, in the form of new edges and vertices, only as needed.

This menu is very important; for now, we note that it is used to move between four common contexts in which we perform polygon modeling: Object, Face, Edge, and Vertex. A face is a single polygon. Once we are in Face mode, we select the top middle face and hit the Delete key.

We have made a neck hole, and we see this in Figure 2. We also delete the three faces at the bottom of the T-shirt so that eventually, someone can slip it over his or her head. We are still in Face mode.

Next, we shift-select the ends of the two arm faces at the top of the cube. Then we choose the Extrude tool, as shown in Figure 2. We pull out the two arms by moving the yellow arrow, as seen in Figure 2.

We can accomplish the same thing by setting the Divisions setting of the Smooth tool to 3 and then using the tool only once. First, we see again the principle of only adding detail as needed. Smoothing, since it creates new faces, is a form of adding detail. We have waited until now to smooth the T-shirt, which the tool does by adding vertices and edges and thus faces ; if we had done the smoothing before pulling out the sleeves, it would have been very hard to make the sleeves.

Second, the Smooth tool is very powerful, and often the result is an extremely different overall shape. In this case, a key reason why the Smooth tool does what we want can be seen in Figure 2. In particular, the Smooth tool wants to intelligently bridge any two faces that are at right angles to each other.

This is very critical to understand when using the Smooth tool. Notice in Figure 2. It almost makes a sphere! Later, in Chapter 6, we will look at a similar tool in an application called Modo, and we will gain some more insight into why smoothing an object that has very few vertices and edges can dramatically alter its geometry. What we are going to see is a powerful relationship between polygon geometry and particle dynamics—namely that one can be used to generate the other.

Next, with the shirt still selected, we create a Gravity Field that will then affect the motion of the shirt. See Figure 2. Turning the polygon shirt into a system of particles has created a clothlike effect that makes the shirt crumple as it hits the Passive Collider.

So, why is polygon modeling still the gold standard? In part, it is the ease with which it can be understood and used in a top-down i nc re me nt a l f a s h ion. And, of course, polygon modeling also naturally fits with the functioning of graphics cards, as they historically have been built to render meshes made of triangles.

We will look at graphics cards in Chapter 8 on rendering. But the real reason, perhaps, is that polygon modeling has been around a long time and has become the most developed modeling capability in many or most major 3D modeling applications.

Only polygon meshes wireframes can be turned into a connected graph of particles and thus form nCloth. We often start with lines. NURBS modeling—it stands for nonuniform rational basis spline—is a curved-line modeling technique that is similar mathematically to Bezier modeling, which is an extremely common technique and is available in many drawing and painting applications, as well as in text editing and document preparation applications that allow the user to create line drawings.

In these two techniques, NURBS and Bezier, rather than representing a model as a set of connected, straight lines, as in polygon modeling, it is defined by a set of curved lines. These CVs, as they are called, are fed into polynomials that then define the shape of the curve by creating x, y, z vertices on the curve. Interestingly, often the only CVs that lie directly on the curve are the beginning and end vertices. Thus, the CVs control the shape of the curve, rather than necessarily lying on the curve.

The one exception is a straight line which, if you think about it, is a kind of curved line , where all the CVs lie on the line. Also, we often create a continuous series of curves that mathematically are separate NURBS or Bezier curves, where the final end point of one curve is the beginning endpoint of another curve. The top-right view is a perspective view, while the other three, top, front, and side, are orthographic views, in that each of them is flattened along some axis.

In the front view, that is, in the lower left-hand part of the main window, we have started at the bottom of the grid, very close to the z axis, and we have used the CV Curve tool to lay down a series of control vertices. They are in red, with the last one in yellow. Note that we start at the bottom, work our way up, and then backtrack a bit by going back toward the z axis.

The result is a line with several sharp curves in it. Now, whenever the line makes a sharp curve, it appears that the CVs are on the line. But it only looks this way because whenever the line in Figure 2. We thus see that we can surgically control the shape of a curve by placing CVs close together, as this causes the curve to be very close to the CVs. The reason for the name of this dropdown is that when we define NURBS models, we often start with lines and then move them through 3-space to create surfaces, which then define the shell of our model.

Consider the result of the Revolve tool, as seen in Figure 2. Note that the reason we doubled back at the top of the curve is so that the cup would have a lip, instead of FIGURE 2.

In other words, tool. Importantly, when we revolved this curve, Maya created more lines to flesh out the surface of our cup. The endpoints, cv1 and cv5, are on the curve. But cv2, cv3, and cv4 are outside the curve. We can see how the control vertices dictate the shape of the curve without the line going through every CV. If we were to move cv2 in the negative direction along the x axis, we would be widening the curve. Note that, unlike the curves that make up the cup in Figures 2.

If we wanted to make a very tight curve, we would put our vertices close together, as we did on the curves in Figure 2. Given a set of CVs, along with the polynomials that define the points of the curve as a function of the location of the CVs, we are given the exact shape of a curve—not its physical length.

We will now use the Loft tool to turn two curves into a surface. This tool is shown in Figure 2. First, we select the curve we made in Figure 2. Then, with the two curves shift-selected, we choose the Loft tool, and this creates the surface at the bottom of the figure. Again, we make a surface by manipulating curves—not by beginning with a 3D primitive. We see the circle we have created in Figure 2.

It is actually two connected curves; look closely at the bottom of the line—it bends backward a bit. As with the lofting example above, we are carefully leaving our curves on specific planes so that we can work with lines that we know are either parallel or in this case at 90 degrees to each other.

We get the surface found in Figure 2. Since Bezier mathematics is used heavily in many modeling applications and it is easier to explain, and since Maya also supports Bezier curves but in a much more limited way than with NURBS curves , we will look at Bezier mathematics. Legend has it that Bezier, an engineer with the French car manufacturer Renault, in the late s, needed to design the curves in cars in a way that was precise and scalable.

Rather than drawing a curve on a piece of paper that was 15 feet long perhaps , he only had to give the builders of the car a couple of polynomials and some control vertices. It is also said that another French car engineer, Paul de Casteljau, who worked for Citroen, developed a very similar technique simultaneously.

And, in fact, it is believed that the technique we call Bezier modeling is actually the version of this technique that was developed by Casteljau.

Consider Figure 2. There are four CVs on the bottom of the figure. Those four control points, along with two polynomials of degree 3, which are at the top of the figure, define the curve at the bottom of Figure 2. In general, if there are n control points, we need two polynomials of degree n — 1 to create a curve. To generate a point along the final curve, we feed in the values for the four CVs which are in 2-space , along with a value for t, into the two polynomials, and the polynomials produce an x value and a y value for the curve.

Notice that t lies between 0 and 1. What this means is that we can create as many points as we want on the curve by supplying numbers between 0 and 1. This allows us to scale a curve up to an arbitrarily large image without any loss of precision: perhaps the car designer only needs the curve to be viewable on a piece of paper, while the builders of the car need the curve to physically be much larger. But either way, all the designer and the builders need are the two polynomials and the four control points.

The only difference is that the builders of the car would probably generate far more values of t in order to make sure the manufactured curve on the body of the car is perfectly smooth. So, Bezier mathematics—as well as NURBS mathematics—allows us to build unambiguously specified curves and draw them out at any scale with just a handful of CVs and some mathematics. And, if we want to finetune a curve that we are using on the body of a car, we simply move one or more of the CVs around in 2-space until we like the shape of the curve.

There is no need to start from scratch. On the left is a polygon Sphere. Note how many more straight lines it took to define the polygon sphere—and it is not even smooth! The left side of Figure 2. On the right side of Figure 2. It is sectioned in a similar way, but it is smooth because it is made out of curved lines. Instead of having to create a smooth sphere by using a very large number of polygon sections, a NURBS sphere can be created with a small number of CVs, along with some mathematics that, again, is similar to Bezier math.

We cannot do this in polygon modeling. If the number of subdivisions were increased, it would not impact the shape or size of the sphere! The only line that controls the shape and size of the sphere is the single curve that is being moved when we open up the sweep.

Look at Figure 2. It is made by moving a circle in 3-space. Contrast this with a polygon torus, which is a mesh of 2D polygons. We can supply a set of CVs that, along with some mathematics, define a circle, and then we can rotate that circle through 3-space. Some repetition is warranted, as this is a very important distinction. How could we define a polygon torus? We see that polygon modeling is all about forming meshes out of polygons, while NURBS modeling is all about defining indirectly curves and then moving them through 3-space.

Then we shift-select the leading edge of each surface, as in Figure 2. The immediate result is in Figure 2. After we hit enter to end the Stitch tool, we get the continuous surface in Figure 2. An isoparm is a curve that lies on a single plane. Also, an isoparm lies along the sweep. But rather than creating actual straight lines, this will later result in a surface that has smoothed edges. The series of curves made with the CV Curve tool is in Figures 2. In Figures 2. An important point is that since the shape in Figures 2.

Then, in Figure 2. Only this time, it is made out of one piece, not two. We adjust its height and width in Figure 2. The resulting table top is in Figure 2. The final table is in Figure 2. The only step that has been left out is creating the four feet for the legs. Now, we have completed our glass-top table and have made it by a largely different method. W e now get down to the nuts and bolts of determining what aspects of Maya the beginner should focus on.

The interface of a sophisticated application like Maya cannot convey how it should be used; in this chapter, we look at a handful of concrete examples so that the reader can begin to develop an intuitive sense of how to build models with Maya. Our goal is to allow the beginner 3D animator to create complete 3D projects while only having to master a relatively small subset of Maya.

The important thing to note about Maya is that it provides many, many ways of getting a given job done, and it also supplies numerous specialized tools. A complete understanding of Maya typically takes years. In this chapter, we take an initial look at the key tools used by modelers who are crafting meshes with polygon geometry. Another is to replace tools with similar ones, delete a redundant tool, or merge two or more tools into one.

But the basic organization and nature of the tools is only very rarely changed. Also, each year, when a new version of Maya is released, a menu item will appear in green if it is new or changed; this is another way of orienting yourself when Maya seems to look a little different.

We start with Figure 3. For polygon meshes, there are a lot of choices. If you want to move, rotate, or scale the primitive, you can first create it and then use the appropriate tool by finding it at the left side of the Maya Viewport. But I discourage the use of the Scale tool to change the scale of an object. Consider Figure 3. These menus are where polygon modelers spend much of their time. The Boolean menu item actually provides three tools, Union, Intersection, and Difference.

They are a quick way of creating a new shape out of two different polygon meshes. But the result of using a Boolean tool can be an object that behaves oddly later in the modeling process. The issue is that the Boolean operations in Maya are a bit unpredictable and unstable—to put it mildly. Smooth is a tool that can be used to add detail and simultaneously smooth either selected faces or an entire object. The beginner might find the result of the Smooth tool to be unexpected, as it will create new faces that are at an angle to existing faces, as we saw with the T-shirt; it takes time to develop an intuitive understanding of exactly what it does to a mesh.

In Figure 3. It contains a somewhat eclectic set of tools. Add Divisions is a good way of adding detail to a selected face. Bevel can be used to smooth a single edge, as it turns an edge into a plane. Bridge can be used to create a number of different modeling effects; one of the most common uses is to create archways. We will also make use of a few other tools in this dropdown. In the Mesh Tools menu see Figure 3. Multi-Cut is a more localized and surgical tool, while Insert Edge Loop tends to add detail to large portions of a polygon object, as, much of the time, it adds a loop of edges that wraps entirely around an object.

These tools are a powerful alternative to using more traditional polygon tools to flesh out the details of a polygon object. One of the key reasons is that sculpting tools, as well as a handful of other tools in Maya, allow a polygon mesh to be manipulated in a way in which the impact of tool is strongest at the location of the cursor and gradually decreases as we move away from the cursor.

In recent years, sculpting has become a very popular modeling technique. Two widely used 3D applications that are largely devoted to sculpting have emerged and gained large user bases. With the addition of these tools to Maya, I have pretty much stopped using Mudbox. Most sculpting applications, including Maya, support touch screens and pressure-sensitive pens; I tend to do my sculpting with Maya on a Microsoft Surface, then move back to my more powerful desktop machine to continue working.

Obviously, we are doing this before smoothing the shirt. We have shift-selected the narrow faces that form a loop around the end of the sleeve, and then extruded all of them simultaneously. We now delete the ends of the sleeve; see Figure 3. Note that Maya often pops up a small box that details the settings of a tool; it gives us a chance to change them within the Viewport.

In this case, we see the Divisions setting of the Extrude tool. Our example shows us how to add a seam to the end of a T-shirt sleeve. As a simple example, consider what would have happened if we had smoothed our T-shirt before deleting the end faces of the sleeves and the bottom faces of the T-shirt: we would have been left with an extremely tedious job of deleting large numbers of faces.

There are things a beginner can do to lessen the impact of finding themselves in a modeling catch First, frequently make numbered versions of your. By using reference images, you will be far more likely to get proportions right and add the relevant detail to your model. And yes, appropriate detail is critical to making a model look realistic! It is a Chilean territory, but its indigenous population is Polynesian. On the island, there are several hundred statues, called Moai, that were constructed by inhabitants between and The statues represent the ancestors of the inhabitants.

Some of them are close to 30 feet in height. Some of them consist only of heads; the Moai statues that have bodies have disproportionately large heads. Figure 3. In this case, the main goal of using a reference image or, in this case, a reference image and a reference miniature is to make sure we capture the FIGURE 3. What are the miniature. What are the dominant facial features? These statues are aged. How does this affect the details of their geometry?

They are shown in Figures 3. We might have preferred to have had about half as many divisions and then we could have used exactly one subdivision for the nose; but we need the cylinder to ultimately be smooth, so we start out with more subdivisions to make it easier to smooth the entire cylinder later.

In Figures 3. We line up the cube to encompass a little less than half of the cylinder, then we shift-select the cylinder followed by the cube. We then subtract the cube from the cylinder and get the result seen in Figure 3.

The remaining half-cylinder does have a back on it. One distinction is worth noting. Consider the nose of the Moai. Now, look at Figures 3. In the first figure, we see a noselike shape being made by first going into Face mode with a right-click to get the context-sensitive menu that allows us to choose between various modes , then extruding the face. After this, the extruded face was rotated with the rotation tool available at the left side of the Maya interface. In the second figure, we have gone into Vertex mode, shift-selected the two bottom vertices, and then pulled them with the Move tool.

The two results are very similar. The difference is that in Figure 3. Besides adding edge loops, the only operations used to turn Figure 3. This last tool was used to add detail to the mouth. The way it works is shown in Figure 3. On the left cube, we have gone into face mode, then applied the tool. Note that if you pull up the settings of the tool, you can choose more than one level of subdivision. On the right of Figure 3. After the subdivisions were added, vertices were pushed and pulled to make the mouth have an irregular shape.

The reason we are doing this is so that later, the edges of the mouth will appear to be damaged by age. First, it was Smoothed several levels. This can be seen in Figure 3. The settings for that tool are in the right side of Figure 3. Several were adjusted in this example. The Radius U is the upper bound of how wide of an area the Sculpt tool will affect. The first two Operation settings control whether the tool makes an inward or outward dent.

The Max. A Surface Pro was used to do the sculpting, as in Figure 3. This replaces the mouse and left-click.

With a pressure-sensitive pen, the maximum is only reached when full pressure is applied to the pen. Thus, a pressure-sensitive pen makes the sculpting faster by making it unnecessary to frequently stop to change the Max. We will take a closer look at sculpting in Chapter 4, and in particular, we will look at the new sculpting tools in Maya.

The reason we are doing this is that the tool we are about to use to make the arch, the Bridge tool, only works on a single object. Although these two cubes are physically separated, they are now one object in the Maya database; they will move, rotate, and scale together. Two combined objects can be separated again by selecting the combined object and then using the Separate tool in the Mesh dropdown.

If you have trouble going into Face mode by using this context-sensitive menu, you might need to go to Object mode first. Note the settings of the radio buttons. Also, the number of Divisions is set to 20; this is so that we will have stones in the archway that are approximately the right size. By choosing an even number—20—we are assured of having a middle stone at the top of the archway. The result is in Figure 3. First, we go into Face mode, hold down the Shift key, then swipe with the cursor, selecting the two vertical sections of the archway, as in Figure 3.

When you shiftselect the faces, the selection will grab all of the faces around the sides and backs of the two vertical sections. Finally, we use the Insert Edge Loop tool to add an edge between each stone on the top of the arch.

This will be used to model the mortar between the stones. A stone material will be used for the larger faces on the top of the arch; a white mortar material will be used for the narrow faces.

The final result is in Figure 3. There are some other things that modelers can do to make sure that their work is precise and that they waste as little time as possible making multiple objects match each other in size and scale and line up properly with each other. We can also use one object primitive to help craft another object into a model. This is a good way of making sure that a model built in one scene will import as an. Just set the units to be identical in the two scenes. Now, consider Figures 3.

We have created a Pipe primitive and a Cylinder primitive with the same diameter. Having done this, it is now easy to line them up in 3-space, as in Figure 3. We can use the center vertex of the cylinder as a guide for extruding interior faces of the pipe; we know to stop the extrusion when we have reached the middle vertex of the cylinder.

In this way, we extrude three different faces around the pipe to line up with the exact center of the cylinder; see Figures 3. The resulting geometry is in Figure 3. Note that we have gone into wireframe mode in Figure 3.

When we are done, we delete the cylinder. Instead of the glass top being held up by a lip that goes around the table top, the glass is being held up by the three cross-pieces that meet in the center. Now, consider Figure 3.

This is the Snap Align Objects tool, and we begin by choosing the 2 Points to 2 Points alignment setting. We then go to the scene, right-click on each cube in turn, and go into Vertex mode. We then shift-select two vertices on each cube.

After running the tool, the two sets of two vertices are lined up, as in Figure 3. Points alignment setting; this gives us the result shown in Figure 3. There are a handful of different ways to line up objects with each other and with the axes of the 3D grid. Consider the bottom cube in Figure 3. Most modelers, however, find that bringing an image into a scene makes it much easier to closely mimic the dimensions of the object.

At the bottom middle, the Image Plane tool is open, and we select an image from the file system of the computer. To the far right is the Attribute Editor for the Image Plane object; we clicked on the tiny yellow envelope icon to pull up the window at the bottom middle of the figure. The image plane can be moved around the scene freely, so we can use it as a modeling guide.

Often, we create multiple image planes so that we have images of all sides of an object we are modeling. There is a website called the-blueprints. Another site is drawingdatabase. The four images in the figure could be separated with an image editor, then placed on four separate image planes. These planes could be positioned appropriately in 3-space, with the developing model in the center of them.

Thus, the dimensions of the design images should be used to carefully scale the four image planes; if an image is 24 by 12, for example, we make sure that our image plane is twice as wide as it is tall. The loop was drawn on the x-z plane in the top-left orthographic view; see Figure 3.

Notice that in Figure 3. The extrusion tool can thus be used to make things like walls. I n recent years, sculpting tools have become highly popular among 3D modelers. In this chapter, we look at the sculpting tools supported by Maya by stepping through some basic examples.

We also begin to look at the use of materials in Maya. Sculpting, compared to using traditional polygon modeling tools, is in many ways a better intuitive match with the way an artist thinks. Then, if the model needs to have organic aspects to it, such as areas with freeform curves, many modelers may, at this point, turn to using sculpting tools.

Sometimes, a modeler will use sculpting tools from the beginning of the modeling process if the model is intrinsically organic. We have looked at a tool that has been in Maya for some time and is used for sculpting. But some years ago, Autodesk bought not just Maya from Alias but also a product called Mudbox, which is a dedicated sculpting modeler, often used to craft biped and quadruped characters, especially the faces of characters. Autodesk then began to incrementally move many of the sculpting tools found in Mudbox to Maya.

These provide a powerful, modern collection of polygon sculpting tools. In Figure 4. I have chosen 2, 4, 2 in Figure 4. I have also right-clicked, pulled up a context-sensitive menu, and chosen Lattice Point.

Now, by pulling on vertices on the Lattice deformer, the head can be deformed. The Lattice deformer is an extremely powerful and general-purpose tool and can be used in a wide variety of situations where a polygon model needs to be asymmetrically rescaled. The Lattice deformer should be added to our core, basic set of key polygon modeling tools that we began pulling together in Chapter 3.

In this example, as seen in Figure 4. This is the beginning stage of turning the Basic Head into a Moai head. This squares the jaw. The forehead has also been pulled downward, and the nose is being squared by pulling outward on it. Notice that the S, T, and U values are chosen to give the correct points for pulling on the model, as well as to control the scope of a pull action. The magic of the Lattice deformer is that pulling on a vertex has a decreasing impact as we move further away from the vertex that is being pulled.

Also, the more control lines there are in a given direction top to bottom, left to right, and front to back , the smaller the area that will be affected when a vertex is pulled on. The reason a second Lattice deformer was used was to further limit the scope of impact of pulling on a given vertex. I often use Lattice deformers in the early stages of sculpting in order to rough out various areas that form the surface of the model.

It is very difficult to teach the sculpting tools because they are used in a freeform fashion. The best approach is to sit down with a base model, like the head, and experiment with the various tools in the Sculpting Tools dropdown.

In our example, the Grab tool is being used first. It can be used to pull on an area of the surface of a model, thereby enlarging it in a controlled fashion. Thus, we cannot cleanly separate the characteristics of the Sculpting Tools from the other tools provided by Maya.

The settings for the Grab tool are the size the surface area that will be affected by the tool and the strength how far a section of the surface will be moved. The settings are in Figure 4. It is simply called the Sculpt Tool. After selecting the tool, by right-clicking, a context-sensitive menu appears. Then, in Figure 4. The settings of this tool can be seen in Figure 4. The Size and the Strength are both set at This tool is then used to give the result seen in Figure 4.

Notice that the Invert box is checked off; this tells the tool to pull outward and not push inward. The Sculpting tools are very forgiving, in that we can often use them to organically fix a problem rather than having to undo some number of steps, as we often find ourselves doing by using the Control-Z key with standard polygon tools.

It is applied to the nose, with the result shown in Figure 4. Next, in Figure 4. Its settings are in Figure 4. Our Moai head is unfinished, but Figure 4.

We will return to sculpting later in this chapter, but for now, we turn to putting some stone on our Moai. I personally find its materials easier to work with than the materials of mental ray. Working with materials, however, in most rendering engines, is very similar. Although there are many attributes of material objects, there are two main steps to creating a material. First, we decide what the material should look like with respect to color.

We might make it blue—or we might make it look like a brick wall. Second, we usually add something to the material to give it more depth. For example, if we give our material a red brick color and do nothing else, our model ends up looking like it has a photograph of a brick wall plastered on it.

We will look at these three techniques more closely and carefully compare them later in this book, but for now, we will choose bump mapping, which results in quicker renders than displacement maps, and yet produces very nice results for the most part. There are countless materials from the real world that we could imagine mimicking in Maya. Consider every brick wall you have ever seen. Or every rock. Every kind of roof you have ever seen on a house. Or every street surface, cloth, leaf, or wood floor.

It looks a lot like a photograph of something taken at exactly a right angle from the surface of the material. But there is one very major exception: a seamless texture must tile, without leaving any visible seams, left-right and top-bottom. There are many places on the Web where these can be purchased or sometimes downloaded for free. Generally, we need high-definition images, ones that are at least by pixels.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the more high def the images we use, the longer our render times will be. By using seamless textures for the colors and bump maps of our materials, we can create virtually limitless numbers of different materials. Arnold for Maya only supplies a small number of presets, in particular, for glass and for a few reflective metals. But it is very difficult to create a 3D project without having to work directly with seamless textures.

Our workflow for putting a stone material on our Moai will be as follows. First, we will use a seamless texture image that looks like stone to create a Maya texture that is then applied to the color attribute of the material. In other words, a seamless texture image, one that wraps around top-bottom and leftright, is used to create a Maya texture, and then that texture serves as the color of the material being created. Then, we will use Photoshop to take our stone texture image and create from it a second seamless texture image that is grayscale.

This texture image is used to create a second Maya texture, which is then used as the value of the bump map attribute of the material being created. The material is then applied to the object, in this case, our Moai head.

Note that the second texture image, because it is grayscale, captures the changes in lightness and darkness in the original stone seamless texture image. The resulting bump map allows us to give our material a deeper sense of relief.

Figures 4. Figure 4. We can see from Figure 4. In Chapter 8, we will see that there are some legacy Maya lights we can use with Arnold, as well as some native Arnold lights that are available with the Arnold plug-in to Maya.

It just happens that there are some legacy materials and lights in Maya that predate Arnold but do indeed work well with Arnold. This is the generic Arnold material that you will use over and over to create materials for your models. Remember that a material is part of a large collection of items, some data and some procedural, that is called a shader.

Without a shader assigned to it, a model would just be a wireframe vector model with an infinitely thin—and invisible—surface. When light is shined on the surface of an object, it is the properties of the shader that make the object appear in a render. When an object is first created, Maya assigns a shader that contains a Lambert material that is colored gray to it. We then create new shaders and replace the default shader that is assigned to our objects.

Shaders and materials are objects, as well. On the right is the Attribute Editor for our Arnold material. The cursor shows us clicking on the checkered box to the right of the Color attribute of the material. In response to this click, the window on the left pops up.

We use it to create a texture that will be used as the color of the Arnold material. We click on the item that is a bit more than halfway down, called File. We are going to create a file texture, which is a texture that is made from a seamless texture image. The texture is an object in Maya; the seamless texture image is a piece of data, like a JPG or TIFF; and the texture image is assigned to that texture object.

It is the texture object that is then assigned as the value of the Color attribute of the Arnold material. The JPG in Figure 4. The seamless property means that the shader can use this image and tile it however many times are necessary to cover the surface of an object.

We can then adjust a large number of attributes of the shader and the objects that make up the shader to tailor the look of the rock. Note that it is rather low def; it is by pixels. The dpi is When we use Photoshop to create a grayscale version of the seamless texture to use as a bump map, we will need these two pieces of information.

On the right is the Attribute Editor of the File Texture. We click on the yellow envelope icon and the window on the left pops up. We then locate the seamless texture image in the file system. Maya then assigns the image to the File Texture, which has already been assigned as the Color attribute of the material. Next, we create a Photoshop project—see Figure 4. We have gone back to the window on the right side of Figure 4.

We have found the Geometry menu, opened it up, and clicked on the checkerboard icon to the right of the Bump Mapping attribute. This allows us to create another File texture. We repeat the steps we used to assign the Color attribute of the material. Only this time, instead of creating a colored File texture, we create a File texture using the grayscale image.

This new File texture is then used as the Bump Mapping attribute of the material. So, in Figure 4. Specular refers to the highlights or bright spots of the material; by making it 0, we are ensuring that there will be no such highlights.

Essentially, these attributes will tell the renderer to make the rock look dull when light hits it. We right-click on the Arnold material we just made. Notice that to the left of the Arnold material is the goldish-brown material that was imported into Maya with the human head, and two materials over is the default Lambert material that Maya assigns to all new objects. When we right-click, a context-sensitive menu pops up; we choose Assign Material to the Selection.

The human head in the Viewport must be selected when we do this. Now the rock shader has been assigned to the human head.

Normally, it is necessary to perform numerous single-frame test renders during the process of putting materials on objects. The Viewport gives us a good idea of what wireframes look like, but not what a rendering will look like. We then set the Renderer Selector to Arnold Renderer and click the rectangular white icon on the far top left of the window.

This renders the human head with the default light bouncing off the Arnold rock material. The result is—well, terrible. The most noticeable thing is that the rock granularity is too large. The graph in Figure 4. Both the color and the bump map have placement nodes. These nodes control tiling of the two seamless textures.

In the case where the bump map image is a grayscale version of the color image, they must be tiled i. The resulting render is in Figure 4. This looks pretty good now. There are two things we could do to improve this material. One is to further refine the way the color texture and the bump map texture have been laid down; we will not do this here, but we will show this technique in a later example—it involves adjusting the U, V grid of the surface of the Moai.

To fix this, we will deepen the bump map. On the right of the figure is the Attribute Editor of this node. We then change the Bump Depth from 1 to 4. In this example, we will highlight the Stamp tool available in Maya. We start out with a very short polygon cylinder created from the Create dropdown menu. It has 20 for the value of the Subdivision Axis attribute on the third tab in the Attribute Editor of the cylinder. The Height of the cylinder is.

The Subdivisions Height and Caps are both 1. They are visible in the right-hand side of Figure 4. With the settings of the tool set as in the figure, we run the tool by hitting Extrude. The result is in Figure 4. We then run the Extrude tool again, with the settings shown in Figure 4.

The result can be seen in Figure 4. It turns out that there is a back side to our sun face that we do not need, so in Figures 4. Now, we will create a crescent moon by overlapping two very short cylinders as in Figure 4. With all of the Boolean tools Union, Difference, and Intersection , two things must be kept in mind. First, if two primitives such as Cubes or Spheres have been modified significantly since they were created, the Boolean tools might not behave as expected.

Finally, we might wonder why these are called Boolean tools. Boolean algebra involves operations that always result in one of two values, true or false. Equality is a Boolean operator. Two items are either equivalent or not. But addition is not a Boolean operator.

Sometimes, we want to perform Boolean mathematics on sets of things. In this case, we are taking sets of objects, performing operations, and then seeing what is in the resulting set. Why do we call this Boolean? Look at it this way. For each item in the two sets, after we perform an operation, we are asking: Is this item in the resulting set? If we perform a Union, then everything in both operand sets is in the resulting set. If we perform an Intersection, only what is in both operand sets ends up in the resulting set.

When we perform Boolean operations in Maya, we take two sets of points or vertices in 3-space, and then we perform a Boolean operation on the two sets. Then we look at the points or vertices that were in the original sets and ask: Which points or vertices are in the result and which ones are not?

The moon can be seen in Figure 4. Our sun face is all one object now. See Figure 4. Why once or twice? This can very quickly overwhelm the memory of your machine and create a scene that will take a very long time to render.

Be careful smoothing! Then we choose Import… We import an image of an eye, and then, in Figure 4. In the left half of the image is the result of imprinting this eye image onto the moon.

We return to our sun face later in this book and put materials on it. The face of the cube has by subdivisions, so the stamping will be smooth; the more polygon faces, the smoother the edges of the stamp lines.

An Arnold default material using the gold metal preset has been applied to the cube. The resulting render in Figure 4. It has a fairly high face count so that our sculpting will be smooth.

The sculpting tool does not add faces to an object, and it uses edges as bend points, so it is necessary for us to have a large number of faces if we want the result to be smooth.

We are making a rock. We will vary whether the Invert box is checked off as we gently sculpt our rock. Since it started as a sphere and has only been modestly rescaled, this is a logical automatic uv rewriting selection to try first.

It turns out that it will work well. We also give it a bump map value of. We create a grayscale version of the rock texture to use as a bump map. We apply the material, with the texture tiled 4 by 4, and we get the rock seen in the render of Figure 4. T his chapter is devoted to working with materials. The overriding issue is the same as with modeling: given the complex materials systems supported by Maya and the Arnold renderer, what should the beginner focus on?

We look at the work that must be done outside of Maya generally with Photoshop , ways to create materials that will lead to photorealistic renderings, and some tradeoffs between getting some tasks done entirely in Maya or partly in Photoshop.

We will use Photoshop to help prep textures that will be used to create materials.