Welcome to Maya, the world’s leading software application for 3D digital animation and visual effects. Maya provides a comprehensive suite of tools for your 3D content creation work ranging from modeling, animation, and dynamics through to painting and rendering to name but a few. With Maya, you can create and edit 3D models in a variety of modeling formats and animate your models using Maya’s suite of animation tools. You can create convincing visual simulations of rigid and soft body objects interacting in the physical world using the computational dynamics and particles tools. Maya also provides a range of tools to allow you to render your animated 3D scenes to achieve photo realistic imagery and animated visual effects
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This document is intended to be a guide or a reference for those who, using Maya to create their characters, want to export them into the Quake III Arena engine. It’s based on our experience at the Virtual World of Art (VWA) where we wanted to create our own avatars for our environments, and reflects as well some particularities due to the specific needs of our project, that might not be the same of the average user willing to create boths for the game. We just use Quake III Arena as an engine for a very different context than what the game itself is about, but I think that it can be a useful reference nevertheless for those Quake III Arena enthusiasts that, using already Maya to model, texture and animate their characters, would like to see them fighting in Quake III Arena.
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This tutorial is designed to introduce several approaches to animating various cellular process using advanced dynamic systems such as nCloth and Hair.

Maya dynamics are powerful but take some time and practice to master. This is mostly because their implementation in Maya is less than intuitive. To understand why the various dynamic systems are set up the way they are you have to understand that historically, as each version of Maya has been introduced, additions have been made to the dynamics. Particles and rigid body dynamics have only changed a little since Maya version 4. Maya 8 introduced the nucleus dynamic system which is used for nCloth and is rumored to replace the current particle system in upcoming versions of the software.
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Viewing the Maya 3D scene Introduction Camera tools Workflow overview Viewing objects in shaded mode Grouping objects The Hypergraph Selection modes and masks Pivot points Save your work Beyond the lesson Lesson 4 Components and attributes Introduction Template display Components The Attribute Editor Surface materials Save your work Beyond the lesson Getting Started with Maya 4 Table of Contents 3 Polygonal Modeling Introduction Preparing for the lesson Lesson 1 Modeling a polygonal mesh Introduction Setting modeling preferences
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