A Few Notes to Review + Video Tutorials!

Day 1:  Review for 3-D Animation!

The pipeline for constructing a 3-D Scene in an efficient manner:

1) Stay Organized! Place your files in the proper locations! Keep your scene named properly!

2) Create a basic shape that represents the size of a character in your environment.

3) Use basic primitives to represent the objects within a scene.

4) Assign basic shaders to these primitives to establish color relationships.

5) Utilize light sources to properly assign light to each area!

Basic Tools:

W- move

E- rotate

R- scale

G- repeat last command

q - exit tool

b- soft selection

shift + . - grow selection

alt + b - change background color

f - fit to selection/frame window

ctrl + a - open attribute editor/channel box

ctrl + delete - deletes an edge loop( 2014 version and up only)

1 - standard mode

2 - subdivision mode with cage

3 - subdivision mode

4 - wireframe

5 - shaded mode

6 - texture mode

The UV texture Editor helps an artist assign custom textures to models!  We can create a PSD network that specializes in refined mapping of different types of surfaces and materials onto a model!

Types of Modeling Tools:

Basic movement tools (move scale and rotate)

Sculpt Geometry Tool

Lattices

Advanced Selection Tools (To Vertices, To Edges)

Convert > Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons

Subdivision Modeling: Mesh > Smooth

The Channel Box gives us NODES to adjust our models at every stage of production.

The Attribute Editor lets us adjust shaders at every given stage of production.

Animation: We must set keys to show movement over time.

We can set Auto Key Frames by turning on the Key Button.

We can set motion paths, and then anchor a character to said motion path.

We can also create blend shapes, which will make a return when we get into facial animation!

Rendering a scene is done within our RENDER SETTINGS for our animation! There, we can change the size, quality, and amount of rendering needed to properly produce a image or movie we are satisfied with!

PROPER SYNTAX FOR NAMING OBJECTS "camel case syntax":

"objectName_subHeading1"

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TUTORIALS
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An overview of Maya's Basic Tools

An overview of Blend Shapes

Strategies for making a short film using Blend Shapes.