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3D Paint Tip |
3D Paint Tip by Alex Alvarez. Ok, this drove me nuts for a good week...
If you are using a 3D paint package to paint texture channels of a multi-patch
NURBS model, you may find that when you import your textures, your edges
display artifacts when rendered. Make sure that Wrap U and Wrap V are
off for all of the 2DPlacement nodes in your scene. If you are painting
Bump, make sure that Adjust edges is turned on for the Bump2D node. |
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Animation - Flipping a Bottle Cap |
Flipping Sosro Crown (Flipping a Bottle Cap) by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a
misterdi. This tutorial will discuss on several issues, how to build the
geometry for the crown, how to bake rigidBody simulation, and how to adjust
the result. Modeling, UV texturing and animating. |
Animating Clothing |
When you animate your character, the cloth solver calculates the collisions
and motion of the cloth. Before you begin animating your character, you
need to move the character from the dress-up pose to the animation start
pose. If want to drape the garment about the character in a particular
way, you can use the drag control to adjust the garment. |
Animating a Domino Effect |
Domino effect animation. This tutorial will discuss on several issues,
how to setup the geometry and how to apply passive to active key switch
among them. |
Animation - Body Language |
The intention of this research was to take a close look at some animations
and see if I could identify the gestures and expressions used to give
character to the models. I started off by looking at some standard body
language cues from a non-verbal dictionary on the web. |
Animating Layered Bump Maps |
This tutorial is for anyone who would like to know an easy to animate
a layered bump map. I will be making veins on a head look as though they
are pumping. This method will allow for certain parts of your bump map
to be affected while the other parts stay the same. |
Animation - Lead & Follow |
The Zen of Lead & Follow
The Context of Animating Forces Instead of Forms
Keith Lango 8-25-04You guys ever play Follow the Leader when you were kids? One kid does
something, the other kids follow along? The leader kid goes out into the
yard and the rest tag after him like a conga line. At the foundation of
good animation is a bit of this Follow the Leader thing. Problem is a
lot of us don't see it and it shows in our work. Follow along as I unfold
the tale.... |
Animating Piano Keys |
Animating Piano Keys with Rigid Body by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a misterdi.
As we already have a lot of headache animating the piano player, now there
is another challenge, how we animate the piano keys following the player?.
Animating Piano Key with Rigid Body
by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a misterdi It is possible to do a key-frame for
each single touch of the finger, but it is a pain in the arse when they
ask to change the piano player animation. So, we need to find out a system
that each key knows when they are pressed by the finger and relax back
to the rest position when the finger is lifted. To make live easier, we
could use a rigidbody rig to do the task. Here is the setup and work flow. |
Animation Principles |
Principles of Animation: Toy Story. The intention of this research was
to closely analyze a few scenes from Pixars "Toy Story" to see
how they were using the principles of animation. The principles of animation
I've listed in this page is not restricted to the ones outlined in "the
illusion of life". I went through a few other books and articles
to come up with this list of principles an animator has to look out for
while animating. So I've included blinks, dialog anticipation/follow-through
and some other issues which has to be kept in mind while animating. Also,
while analyzing the scenes from "Toy Story" I realized that
its not a good idea to try to use all these principles in each and every
scene in your animation. |
Animation - Mouth Shapes |
Preston Blair phoneme series. I've often looked for good examples of
3D phoneme mouth shapes; but there isn't that much material available
out there publicly - It's about time someone uploaded some. So, here goes
:o) Extended
Preston Blair phoneme series. |
Animation - Pickup |
Easy Object Pickup, How to have characters easily grab objects and keep
them in their hand. |
Animation - Rigid Body Collision Detection |
This tutorial shows you how to detect collisions between rigid bodies
and how to use the data to drive your animations - welcome to the land
of rule based animation. I'll assume you are familiar with the basics
of rigid body dynamics (setup, attachment to fields etc.) - if not, please
consult the manuals |
Animation - Rolling Ellipse |
Rolling Ellipse PT.1
This tutorial shows you how to roll an ellipse on the floor, using Maya
expressions. Have no fear, I won't go too much into mathematical details
here, but will provide you with ready to use expressions for copy and
paste. If you really want to dive into the wonders of elliptical calculus,
you'll find the links to sites I used to obtain the mathematical background
information at the end of this tutorial. I'll assume you are familiar
with basic Maya workflow (expression editing, geometry creation, etc.)
and some basic math, your angular unit should be "degrees". |
Animation - Rolling Ellipse Pt.2 |
Rolling Ellipse PT.2 - Wacky Vehicle
While you have learned in the rolling ellipse tutorial how to roll an
ellipse on the floor, we will now use this expression to build a funny
moving vehicle. As I am no artist I won't focus on modelling issues, but
on the math to make this little thingy move. |
Animation - Rolling Tire |
Rolling Tire with Stationary Bulges. |
Animation - Yoyo |
This tutorial was written by Chas Jarret and invloves animating a yoyo
with the attached string wrapping around the fingers of a deforming hand.
It contains some interesting techniques for solving the problem of realistic
string movement between the hand and yoyo and also, an ingenious solution
for getting the string to seemingly twist and wrap around the cg fingers. |
API - Maya Help Page |
Maya API Help Page by Michael B. Comet. This page is for use with people
interested in developing Maya Plugins. It has some basic information and
sample code for the Maya SDK that may be of use to C++ programmers. |
API - Maya How To |
Long list of tutorials on Maya API by Bryan Ewert. |
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Breath Vapor Simulation |
More and more, cold weather scenes are being shot in mild climates,
or in enclosed studios for budgetary, temporal and comfort reasons. Since
the climate on these shoots is not cold, we lose the little natural nuances
of reality. Therefore, it becomes incumbent on the special effects department
to add these little nuances to add to the scene’s overall believability.
One major nuance to contend with in such a shoot is the visibility of
breath vapor when an actor or animal exhales in the cold climate. To that
end, it has become the job of the soda caffeine-addled animator to add
digitally created breath vapor to these actors or animals to further the
illusion need for the scene. |
Bug Surfacing |
Tutorial for speech animation. This page is intended to help people
that are trying to learn the process of surfacing a model in Autodesk
that will eventually be used as a "patch" model, or converted
cleanly into polygons. People would create a model like this for several
reasons. These reasons would include that need to export a model to "Flesh",
or "Amazon Paint". The model that is shown is one of the head
from the ride film "A Bug's Life". The process shown here, if
followed with persistence, should be able to produce 2 models. One model
will be a morph base, the other, a morph target. |
