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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This very brief tutorial is intended to familiarise the user with the basic layout of animation tools in Maya. It assumes that the reader will consult help files to find out more about each tool.
1. Channel Editor
2. Layer Editor
3. Shelf
4. Toolbox
5. Timeline
Okay, so Maya looks pretty daunting, especially if you go hunting through all the menus, but from an animation point of view it’s not that hard to use once you know where things are.
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T his tutorial will explain how to export static textured models (meaning no animation yet) from Maya into Crysis. I’ll update this tutorial as I learn more about the process and more tools become available. Big thanks to Psychojohno and Spiderdan for their tutorials which taught me a lot!
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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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This tutorial outlines the process of preparing a 2D digital file for tool-pathing with FlowPATH for use with the school’s abrasive water-jet cutter. The water-jet is only capable of 2D cutting operations, and has extremely limited control of the depth of the cut so work should be designed with 2D lines and with the intention that the lines will be cut completely through the material – not etched. Depending on the hardness of the material it is possible to etch or score a cut instead of cutting all the way through, but this should only be done with ductile materials as it will cause shattering or breaking in more brittle materials.
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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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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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