How to Cheat in Maya 2010

Tools and Techniques for the Maya Animator

Eric Luhta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136136771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Programmation de jeux

Take your animations to the next level with this essential guide to Maya 2010. Packed with character animation techniques and the secrets of professional animators, How to Cheat in Maya 2010 provides the tips and tools to help you create high quality animation in the most efficient way possible. This comprehensive guide to animating with Maya contains gold-mine coverage, including animation techniques, using Maya's tools with the 12 animation principles, working with constraints, and even foolproof lighting tricks to show off your work.

With this essential handbook, learn which circumstances call for which techniques, and how to get quality results fast. You will not only learn how to be productive in Maya, but also be given access under the hood to the actual scene files of a professional animator. Covering such topics such as pose to pose blocking, layered animation, fixing gimbal lock, facial animation, and much more, How to Cheat in Maya 2010 is an invaluable resource for artists and animators alike.

-- See "under the hood" of a professional animator's workflow with beginning and ending scene files for every technique and workflow example in the book.

--Complete, step-by-step walkthroughs of essential techniques every animator needs to know such as walk cycles, pose-to-pose blocking, lip syncing to dialogue, and much, much more.

-- Proven "How to Cheat" series - Learn to create impressive, appealing animations using the fastest techniques possible, containing everything you need to know about Maya as a character animator.

--Includes rarely discussed topics, such as reading spline curves, avoiding gimbal lock, animation layers, creating appealing lighting for demo reels, and features interviews with some of the most experienced animation leads and TDs working in the industry

-- Learn to apply these professional techniques to your own animations with the accompanying downloadable resources which include all scene files to follow along with, as well as final versions to study in the Graph Editor

1
Workflow Foundations

A LITTLE BIT of workflow goes a long way, especially when animating. Maya offers multitudes of options for customizing, but lucky for us we only need a handful to make our work smooth sailing. This chapter will show you everything you need to organize tools, maximize performance, and unclutter the interface. As in so many things, the basics carry the most weight, so let’s get to it!

Setting Up Projects

SETTING UP YOUR ANIMATION PROJECT is a crucial step to staying organized. Defining a project tells Maya to create a centralized folder structure and keep everything in it, in addition to keeping you from going crazy. Any data created in Maya, such as scenes, materials, renders, etc. will automatically be placed in the project’s folders. For simple animation tests, this is moderately useful at best. But when you get into more polished work that may have multiple shots, sets, textures, lighting, and renders, projects are absolutely vital. Getting into the habit now will pay dividends in your future work. This is basic and introductory information, but it’s important enough to still be the first thing in this book!

1 Create a new scene in Maya and go to File > Project > New.

4 You won’t see any indication you’ve created a project until you save your scene. Save it, and in the dialog that appears, you’ll notice that Maya has already navigated to the Scenes folder in your project. From this point on, Maya will keep everything organized.

2 Name your project (be sure it’s something awesome), and then click the Browse button. Navigate to where you want to save and choose it as the location.

5 You may have noticed when we created the project there was an Edit Current option. This lets you edit the folders. Note that if you change a folder name, it will not rename or delete the original folder, but instead create a new one with the name you entered.

3 The list below are the folders that Maya will sort its various files into. Click the Use Defaults button and the standard folder names will be filled in for you. You can rename them or put in alternate paths if you want to change locations, or create nested folders by using a backslash. When you’re finished, click the Accept button.

6 The Set option is how you change the current project. It’s possible for Maya to tangle up where to save when moving between different projects, so use the Set Project button whenever you open a scene from another project.

HOT TIP
Use File > Project > Edit Current to organize your scene files as you work. This is particularly useful if you decide to do different versions of your animation in the middle of working. Using the backslash to add folders into the scenes folder can keep things from getting messy, especially when you have lots of incremental saves and variations.

Workspace Layout

AN EFFICIENT WORKSPACE shows you everything you need to see, and nothing you don’t. Maya’s default four panel or single panel layouts leave a lot to be desired for animating, so let’s create one that shows us only what we need. While different tasks call for different layouts, there are several tried and true versions that many animators employ. If I think about what information is vital when animating, the three most important to me are: the camera the animation is staged in (shot cam), a view I can navigate through to see what I’m working on, and my graph editor curves. Here’s a battle tested panel layout that sets u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• How to cheat, and why
• Acknowledgments
• How to use this book
• 1 Workflow Foundations
• 2 Splines
• 3 Graph Editor
• 4 Techniques
• 5 Constraints
• 6 Gimbal Lock
• 7 Blocking
• 8 Walk Cycles
• 9 Polishing
• 10 Facial Animation
• 11 Animation Layers
• 12 Lighting and Rendering
• Index
• What’s on the DVD