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 large number of objects need to be seen from a distance (in this particular situation, the number of lipids on the surface of the membrane). Lets start by designing the brush.

Creating a Base Stroke
Designing a custom Paint Effects brush requires the adjustment of a myriad sliders and attributes. The process is not terribly straight-forward. The best way to learn is get an idea of how the paint effects controls work and then experiment. As you gain experience you’ll find yourself becoming more comfortable with creating brushes. However, no matter how much experience you have, working with Paint Effects will almost always come down to trial and error with all of the various settings. This section of the tutorial is a walk-through of a typical custom brush design exercise. I will explain the controls that I use and what I hope to achieve when adjusting their settings. There are many ways to create a particular effect using a brush, the methods I describe are just a few.
1. Create a new Maya scene, this scene will be the devoted to designing the brush, once you have something satisfactory, you can export the brush from here to any other scene.
2. Create a Polygon plane, scale it up so that its about 2 x 2 units, set the subdivisions in width and height to 4.

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