This tutorial serves as a rapid overview of Autodesk’s Maya software. The 3D production pipeline can be broken down into several distinct activities and skill sets - we will cover all of these to give you a sense for building an entire scene from start to finish. The biological topic will be to create a visual depiction of how calcium chelation can affect cadherin flexibility. The tutorial is divided into 5 sections, each of which focus on an aspect of the 3D pipeline:

1) Importing PDBs & modeling – assembling a cadherin monomer
2) Basic animation – calcium chelation
3) Skeletons, rigging & kinematics – setting up the cadherin rig
4) Dynamics & softbodies – using particles & fields to drive skeletal motion
5) Surfacing, lighting & rendering – rendering your scene

Each of these areas is described in greater detail in a series of online tutorials aimed at using Maya for biological visualization purposes. These can be found in the ‘Learning’ section of the website: www.molecularmovies.org. Several files have been prepared for you on the computers – these can also be downloaded from the website. They include:
• starting geometry files - two PDB-based geometry files exported from Chimera as .vrml and then converted from .vrml to .obj format (this can be done in any number of applications like Deep Exploration or Cinema4D.

Download pdf SBGrid ‘Quo Vadis’ – Workshop Tutorial