When 15-year-old Daniel Grigsby attended the 6th Form Open Evening, an event showcasing pre-university courses available for study, he had no idea his destiny was about to reveal itself. He immediately headed over to the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) stand with an air of curiosity and child-like excitement. “What’s Maya?” he asked the man behind the stand, as he pointed to a small book on the table. “It’s computer animation software. Films like Spider-Man®, The Lord of the Rings™
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In this beginners guide we discuss how to build a simple humanoid character and how to animate it. It was not our intention to give a step-by-step guide on how to build a character and how to animate it, because there is extensive amount of literature available on this. This guide can be used next to the “Learning Maya 5 Foundation” book as a source for more information and explanation. We found that although the book is very clear on what actions to do and what the actions will result in, it lacked somewhat in explaining the meaning of concepts and the reasons for performing actions.
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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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The Maya interface
Now that Maya is running, you first need to understand what you are seeing. There are a lot of items displayed in the Maya user interface. The best way to begin is to learn the fundamental tools and then learn additional tools as you need them. Begin by learning some of the main tools.
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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:
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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 known about the molecule’s proportions, and then look at different ways to deform it. Next we’ll import a PDB coordinate set for B-DNA and experiment with different representations using particles. These first two methods assume that the helix does not need to unwind and melt. Finally, we’ll go over a programmatic approach to building DNA using PDB data for a single base pair – this method will allow us to twist and unzip the double helix.
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Maya 3D Shockwave Exporter is available on the Windows platform only. Great graphics and fast interaction—these are the goals when creating 3D content on the Web. This tutorial describes how to balance these goals when using Maya’s Shockwave 3D Exporter. This tutorial assumes you have Maya experience, but not Macromedia Director 8.5 experience. Do not expect great art from this tutorial; the focus is on learning the exporter and optimizing your scenes for export. Loading Maya Shockwave 3D exporter Before you begin, load the Maya Shockwave 3D Exporter plug-in. 1 Start Maya. 2 Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager. The Plug-in Manager window opens. 3 Locate MayaShockwave3DExporter.mll and turn on Loaded.
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