This tutorial will take you through the process of creating an animated plasma membrane using Maya’s unique Paint Effects module. Much of the tutorial will be focused on how to create a custom brush starting with the Paint Effects base brushes that ship with Maya. Paint Effects are ideal for situations in which a very […]

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During this tutorial we’ll explore a number of features of Maya’s dynamics toolset.
In part I - the ‘membrane pore tutorial’ - we’ll create a scene with a turbulent membrane that also has a ‘pore’ dynamically floating in it. Next we’ll create a swarm of molecules that collide with the membrane (and can otherwise only traverse […]

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During this tutorial you will be creating a low resolution ‘stand-in’ model of the reovirus sigma 1 protein (the tentacle-like trimeric protein that extends out of the virus’ turrets). The 3 monomers are thought to be in a flexible conformation during the early phases of the viral life cycle – once the surface of the […]

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This tutorial is a continuation of the “VIllus Capillary” tutorial where you went through the basics of creating a Maya scene from A-to-Z. You’re now ready to stitch together a final movie from the individual sequences of images that were rendered in Maya. In addition to simply ‘stitching’ the sequences together, we will explore a […]

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The following process was used to create a custom rig to study the conformational morphs of the HIV gp120 receptor as it binds CD4. A cartoon model can first be generated in Pymol, VMD or Chimera, exported as VRML and then converted to OBJ for import into Maya.

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Dynamic Parenting refers to a situation where the inheritance of an object’s transform channels can be turned on and off, either by keyframes or other means, during the course of an animation. Commonly this is used to allow an animated character to pick up and put down objects. It is also very useful when controlling […]

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Several PDB viewers, including Chimera and Pymol, are able to export molecular representations as VRML files. VRML files can then be converted to a file type that can be imported directly into the 3D application of your choice. By default, Maya is able to open/import .obj, .fbx, .mel, .ma and .mb files (among others). Plugins […]

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In this tutorial, we’ll explore different methods for modeling, rigging, and animating DNA. There are many ways to approach this macromolecule in Maya and each has its merits depending on what the model will be used for in your scene. We’ll start with a simple ‘plank’ DNA model that is roughly based on what is […]

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