Intro to Maya - Animating

It's Mathematics and Physics classes all over again with this session...

To bend an object, subdivisions must first be added to the object (Much like a spine, one is not able to bend without the series of vertebrae that forms it), which can be found in input. Make sure the object is not stretched just yet when adding them in, otherwise the subdivisions will not be spread out evenly (A mistake I had immediately made when we commenced with our experimentation), in some cases that is, as this did not happen when trying it out on my laptop after that.

After that, you can simply bend it by first selecting the faces of half the object and moving and rotating it (A little more tedious than it sounds actually).

… But, if you however wish to make something a little better looking than a bent cigarette, there are the deformers.

Deformers

After selecting an object, you can create a deformer (Make sure you are in animation mode though) by selecting the various types in the non linear menu which can be found in the create deformers menu, a handle will then be created right in the centre of the object (Which you can see in wireframe mode) and in the outliner (It will probably be easier to select the handle from there too instead of attempting to pick it out from within the polygon model itself).

More than one deformer can be used on an object, so keep playing around! And of course expect some serious mishaps while you are it.

Bend

After selecting your choice of deformer and creating the handle within your object, the values in the inputs menu of the channel box can be altered to change the appearance of the object the deformer is practically warping. For my case, I will normally just use the rotate, move and scale tools when adjusting the handle, but things can get pretty messy if you aren't too careful. This tool is most definitely useful for creating cup handles.

When using the move tool on the handle alone.

After messing a little with the rotation tool.

And here it is with the scaling tool.

Note: Values for the low bound will be negative, so if you are attempting to add in a value equal to the high bound, don't forget to add in a "-", otherwise it will automatically be adjusted to 0.

Flare

I'm still not exactly sure what this one does, so I had to look up on it to understand it better. Flare deformers let you flare out or taper in any deformable object along two axis (X and Z), I'm still not entirely sure what you can make out of it alone… but it seems to make some decent looking urns or slightly deflated balloons. Anyway, I couldn't use any of the tools for this deformer, and so had to make do with typing in the values I wanted instead into the box by the right (Also I know you can actually change the values with your mouse, but somehow that doesn't work for me).

When changing the curve value.

Start Flare Z, End Flare Z will pretty much do the same thing but will instead
alter the top of the object. The same effect will take place with Start and End Flares X,
except it will be done in direction of its own axis.

Okay, I'm not too sure what happened here when I changed the value of the High Bound.

Sine

Sine deformers let you manipulate any deformable object along a sine wave. It is mainly the wavelength, amplitude and offset that should be considered when messing around with the values of this deformer. So let's have a quick refresher on wavelengths, the wavelength of a sine wave can be measured between any two points with the same phase… this should be applicable to here, but at the moment...

While this deformer might sound simple, it is actually a lot more challenging to create a wave than one might think, especially if you can't figure out what values to put in, below you will see the monstrosities I have created.

1 wavelength

2 wavelength (???) 

2 amplitude

1 offset (Seems to just reverse it?)

Squash

As the name suggests, this deformers allows you to squash and stretch any deformable object along an axis, what you pretty much need to do (For more basic uses that is) is to use the scale tool to squeeze and stretch the object in whatever way you want.

Squash deformers can also create a sense of volume in an object.

Twist

Again it's pretty much as the name suggests, you can give your object a little twist or go all out and make it look like liquorice, once selecting the deformer, simply go to the twist menu in the attributes editor, and toggle around with the start or end angle.

This will make for some good rope modelling.

A little more about this deformer can be learnt from here.

Wave

So wait… if the Sine deformer creates wave forms… then what of this one? Well apparently it doesn't create those sort of waves, instead, it is able to create a slightly more bumpy or watery texture for a polygon plane or even, create ripples.

And here's a tutorial on how to create a realistic looking wave.

Set keyframes on everything and clean them up, auto key can be a problem and will not accurately translate the movements you want in your animation

Shift and control to select something to be placed in the custom bar

To create equal subdivisions, add them in immediately after the object is created before stretching

Don't forget to delete the history of the alteration when modelling

Graph Editors

The graph editor (Which can be found in Windows>Animation Editors) is an editor that graphically represents the various animated attributes in your scene. The animated attributes are represented by curves, that allows you to create a more convincing animation when altered with, such as the acceleration and deceleration of a pendulum.

More notes will be available in the Study Task 2 post.

Rendering

Rendering an animation in Maya is probably one of the most tedious processes I have ever seen, not only does it take awhile to have the frames converted into a folder of separate images, you will then have to put them all together in After Effects, but thankfully that doesn't take too long.

Extra Notes

1. To create a custom texture, first off, create either a blinn or lambert (Doesn't really matter which one you choose) shader. Next up, create a file shader, a graph should be created in the work area after, and in the seemingly empty file, select it and choose your texture in the attributes editor. Finally, select the blinn or lambert shader, and assign the texture to it.

2. To create some bumpy textures, go to the texture panel in attributes editor and click on the checked box next to the bump mapping section. In the Create Render Node palette, click out one of the textures from the 3D textures section. Once selected, messed around a little more with the values available.

3. Sometimes you wound up creating way too many shaders while figuring out the best one for your object, to clean up your hyper shade workspace a little, simply go  to the edit menu and select Delete Unused Nodes.

4. Apparently I have the worst hearing ever since I actually thought I heard my lecturer telling me to try out a water texture for the base when he had instead said wood (How could I actually confuse those two…?). Though honestly, both look pretty awesome:

Thank you Matt! This really looks so much better than the checkered texture.

5. The middle mouse button is able to move objects out of groups in the Outliner.

6. After altering a model, don't forget to freeze transform and delete the history as usual.

7. Press S for key framing.

8. It might help to set in a NURB plane and centralise it to the object you wish to animate.