You are on your way to ensure that you produce the clearest photographs possible. Read this guide carefully before you start cleaning your digital SLR image sensor.This guide will help you clean your sensor safely and effectively.
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Read the rest of this entry »
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:
Read the rest of this entry »
01 Jul
Posted by jj as Design & Graphics
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Read the rest of this entry »
During this tutorial we’ll explore a number of features of Maya’s dynamics toolset.
In part I - the ‘membrane pore tutorial’ - we’ll create a scene with a turbulent membrane that also has a ‘pore’ dynamically floating in it. Next we’ll create a swarm of molecules that collide with the membrane (and can otherwise only traverse it via the pore opening). We’ll gain finer control over the behavior of individual molecules in the swarm through the use of expressions. Finally, we’ll add goals to the entire swarm and control the degree to which these goals affect the swarm’s movement.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
The new era of NFS graphics started with this game Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 is a 2002 racing video game, serving as the debut Need for Speed (NFS) title of Black Box Games and the first Need For Speed for the “next-generation” of consoles. Hot Pursuit 2 draws primarily from the gameplay and style of Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit; its emphasis was on evading the police and over-the-top tracks featuring lengthy shortcuts. Even though the game allowed players to play as the police, the pursuit mode was drastically less realistic than preceding versions of NFS, as players merely needed to “tap” a speeder a certain number of times to arrest them, as opposed to using actual police tactics, such as spinning the offending driver, as well as utilizing spike strips to immobilize a speeding vehicle (as in real life).
Read the rest of this entry »