A tutorial on how to make an animated giant whirlpool with foam and spray. Inspiration from Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End.
1. Start by creating a NURBS or a polygon plane. NURBS is propably best, but I used polygons on this one. Make it a high resolution, like 80×80.
2. Go into Polygons>Mesh>Sculpt Geometry Tool. Or if using NURBS go into Surfaces>Edit NURBS>Sculpt Geometry.
3. Model a valley in the middle of your plane.
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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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Hi. In this tutorial I gonna show Ya sum stuff about Maya PaintFX. There are various possibilities to use PaintFX. You can paint: attributes, expressions, scripts. You can also make your own script or expression and paint it on. In this tutorial I’ll focus on making grass, adding sum dynamics and animating it. So let’s get started.

Open Maya and create NewScene. I use the HotBox coz this is the best solution for me to navigating through Maya interface. You can use standard menu sets of course if you more like it :)
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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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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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The goal of this tutorial is to create an animation that takes you through some of the typical steps in a 3D pipeline: project set-up, modeling, surfacing, animation/dynamics, rendering. I have broken out the compositing/editing steps into a separate tutorial entitled “After Effects Compositing Basics.” Although this tutorial aims to cover many of the steps that went into creating the animation, certain starting materials have been prepared for you.
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Importing & animating a receptor
1) Importing molecular data into Maya
2) Using constraints and dynamic motion paths to animate the binding event
Membrane with scattered proteins
1) Creating a softbody membrane
2) Using constraints to attach molecules to the dynamic membrane surface
3) Using MEL to scatter proteins automatically
Extracellular Matrix
1) Using particles and MEL to create a dense mesh for the ECM
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Using After Effects to composite image sequences rendered from Maya opens up a large number of possibilities and offers flexibility that is hard to achieve using Maya alone. While on the one hand a little extra work, foresight, and some knowledge of After Effects is required, the payoff for the additional effort is usually worth it. You don’t need to master every aspect of After Effects to take advantage of this workflow. A few simple tricks and techniques can add a lot of life and character to your animation. The techniques described in this tutorial are the same techniques used in design houses when creating animations for the entertainment industry.
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