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 brief handout gives a short introduction to MAYA. Only the most important and basic commands are listed here. For further information and special knowledge to all the commands you can temporarily lend a MAYA manual at the Lynn studio. For any other questions contact us.
In this intro several abbreviations are used:
LMB – Left mouse button
RMB – Right mouse button
MMB – middle mouse button
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This short tutorial implies that you know the basics of Maya. Please refer to the many available Maya Tutorials on the net on how to work with materials (textures) and how to apply them to objects. Just one quick tip: Many drag-and-drop operations in Maya are done with the middle mouse button. You can apply textures/materials to objects this way as well as moving materials from the upper window in the Hypershade Editor to the lower window in order to edit the material (right mouse button -> Graph).
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Solve complex production challenges and create breathtaking 3d with Autodesk Maya 2008 software. Create engaging and lifelike digital images, realistic animations, and extraordinary visual effects with Maya 3d modeling, animation, effects and rendering software. Whether you are a film or video artist, game developer, graphic artist, digital publishing professional, or 3d enthusiast, Maya 2008 helps you realize your creative ideas. Complete Complex Modeling Tasks Faster Maya 2008 provides new and enhanced tools for both the high-level manipulation and component-level editing of polygon models. Redesigned support for Smooth Mesh previewing and workflows lets you create and edit smoothed meshes more efficiently.
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Maya Blend Shapes Guidelines • Do not use identical names. Since the FBX plugin is not case sensitive, conflicts may occur when merging back using the same letters for a given name (for example: big, Big, BIG are all the same). Use different names. ! Note: When renaming, use the “prefix hierarchy names” (>modify) command in Maya to rename a complete hierarchy. • Do not delete the target models from your scene until the file has been exported in FBX format. The FBX plugin needs these models to export the Blend Shapes. • Use the default options (“Origin:Local”, and “Check topology:On”), except for the deformation order option. In the Advanced tab, use the “Front of chain” and not the “Default” option. • Use only one Blend Shape input per object. Do not use the “Create Blend Shapes” command more than once on the same object. • Generate the Blend Shapes on each geometry separately. Do not use the entire group (like the head group), but instead use each part of the head separately.
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FBX plugins are used by Maya to import, export, and convert files using the .fbx file format. This document describes how to install Maya FBX plugins on Windows® and Mac® OS X systems. Plugins for Maya are available for use with Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X. Manual Installation In order for your 3D software to use these plugins, you must manually move these files into the proper directories. This section describes the naming conventions, supported software versions, and the installation process for manually installing, disabling, and removing the FBX Plugin for Maya. !
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Moujou is a plug-in for Maya which allows you to access the powerful automatic tracking of boujou from within the Maya workspace. It is very easy to use – just load your image sequence and click on the ‘Track it’ button. The results will be delivered straight into your current scene using standard Maya components and there is no need for any further refinements before the track is useable. Image-based masks can be imported to guide the tracking. They can be used to hide areas of the image that may be causing problems, or to help track moving objects such as cars or trucks. Any black and white image can be used as a mask. Camera path smoothing is also available to fix any spikes or noise in the camera path.
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