The Getting Started Guide for Maya 2008
May of us are familiar with the Autodesk Maya 2008. It one the most renowned and best 3D animation software. It is used by many motion pictures companies and Industries to design 3D models and animations. It is an leading software in 3D digital animation and visual effects. Maya provides you an set of features by which you can work on 3D creation. It also supports a multiple modeling formats. The interface of Maya 2008 is fully customizable for those who believe in increasing the productivity of their work. The guide contains the complete reference i if you interested to join the the 3D world of animation Industry.
Index : -
- GETTING STARTED
- OBJECT MODELING AND CREATION
- WORKING WITH A POLYGONAL SHAPE
- NURBS
- CREATING SURFACE AND ANIMATION
1). GETTING STARTED
Launch Maya 2008 in your computer. Before going further just look at all the tabs and menus in the Maya 2008 window. When you move a mouse over a button it will denote a name of the tool. Normally whenever you launch Maya a help windows appears at the first. It is can also be referred. The window is looks like as the image below.
Refer it properly so that to get familiar with the user interface. The middle gray window is the workspace. It is the place where designs and animation is created. The sheet of boxes downs give you x, y and z axis. By this it gives an dynamic 3D angle.
2). OBJECT MODELING AND CREATION
This lesson teaches to create an simple 3D object in Maya with moving and rotating it to get an 3D angle. Click on the File Menu at the top of Maya window and click on File > New Scene. Here a box will pop up to save changes. Click on Save and give a desired name to the Scene. By default Maya 2008 comes with pre-installed shapes and designs. This material is for practice. To select an object click on the Polygon in the Workspace Menu of Maya 2008. A shape in reference to the image will be on the workspace now. Click on the axis x,y,z on the gray screen without living the mouse click and rotate the object. These option can be selected from the Toolbar also.
3). WORKING WITH A POLYGONAL SHAPE
It refers to connection of three flat surface interconnected to each other like Triangle. You can also take a example of a human face. Select some objects from the shapes menu. Move and rotate them.
4). NURBS
NURBS standa for Non uniform Rational B splines. It uses a method with describes curves and surfaces mathematically for 3D applications. NURBS are specifically characterized by the smooth organic forms they produce. The model designed in NURBs can be modeled quickly. They be edited by using a variety of techniques. It is advance option of Maya 2008 used for Industrial purpose, automobile designing, etc.
5). CREATING SURFACE AND ANIMATION
Here comes the best part. Maya 2008 lets you to apply multiple action to the object which gives life to your 3D Scene. There are large numbers of tools available which help to create animated objects. There are many options in Maya by which you can create an animation as per your requirement. The first one is 1Keyframes and the Graph Editor. It is place where a user set a keyframe. A value is assinged to an object attribute. Like for a example translate, rotate, scale, etc. at specified time. Many animation systems uses the frames as the basic unit of measurement to play a scene. The fps ( frames per second rate ) it used to set the motion o animation. When a number of keys is set by a user Maya generates the attributes values between those times when the scenes is playing. The second option is Set Driven Key. In this process the user can attribute value to a time in the Time slider. Different values are applied to get the animated result. The third one is Path animation. It allows a user to animate a object along a path which is specified by a curve. Means the curve controls the motion of the object. Here Maya automatically calculates the motion of the object for the animation based on the positions that were set at the keyframes. Example a moving train, a running dog, etc.
After this you can get to the advance level to animation. The help window will give lot of example related to animation movies and objection creation. Maya 2008 is an awesome software for creating 3D animation. This guide give the user a start to work with Maya 2008. The after getting familiar with the software the user can go exploit much advance features provided by Maya 2008.
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