Animations, whether they are in movies, television, or video games, would not capture the viewer’s interest if they were not accompanied by music. Music can set the tone for a scene and is generally added after the animation has been completed. It takes a large amount of work to coordinate a piece of music with a final animation, especially when specific movements must occur at certain times in the song. This paper describes a method of automatically synthesizing an animation that synchronizes with the input music. Our system allows the user to choose a piece of music and a character and outputs a synchronized animation that expresses the emotion and intent of the music through movement.
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There are various benefits to rendering using the command line instead of though Maya and this tutorial will guide you through the process on a windows operating platform. If you have a scene that is particularly complex scene or render then having the extra available memory that Maya would have been using if it were open can really help. Using the command line method is also a quick way to change settings for your rendering of multiple files. If you needed to render a low-res preview for a client for example you could do that using this rendering technique rather than having you open up a series of files to edit them all individually.
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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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The following tutorial will take you step by step through the creation of a natural environment in Maya. You will also setup a character inside the environment and to add interactivity in Virtools. This tutorial introduces you to Maya’s 3D Paint Effects allowing you to paint in 3D. A few strokes can paint trees, grass, flowers. The paint strokes from your brush are converted into 3D objects inside a 3D space. Maya’s ability to convert 3D Paint Effects to polygonal objects is helpful to create content for interactive environments. This tutorial requires Maya 5.0 and up.
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Alias|Wavefront provides a fully integrated solution to address your complete game production pipeline, and one that measures up to the demands of next generation game consoles. The video on the left shows how some of our customers have used Maya to hurdle into the realm of next-gen game development.
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This tutorial is designed to build familiarity with using Maya’s 3D paint tool on 3D geometry. You will learn how to paint on 3D geometry with 2D repeating textures directly within Maya. If you have not done so already you should download the images referenced in this document at the following address: http://www.persistentvisions.com/Tutorials_Main/3DPaint
You may optionally substitute in your own repeating (or non-repeating) image files)
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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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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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