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.

Before we begin, if this is your first interaction with Maya, let’s spend a few minutes to practice basic viewport navigation and transforms! Create a primitive polygonal cube: Create -> Polygon Primitives -> Cube. Refer to the “Maya Keyboard Shortcuts” sheet (on the ‘Tutorials’ page) to move around the perspective viewport and move/scale/rotate the cube.

Download Villus Capillary - Your First Maya Scene from A-to-Z