Maya

Info on Maya.

Practical Stuff

• Getting into JAC 247: check out the key from the Art Library. Be sure to return it!
• Logging in. I'll tell you the username/password. Please remember it, and don't give it out.
• Where to store your objects: Either bring a flash drive or iPod or other portable media or upload to your Puma account via Fetch.

Here is part of a model built in Maya. It's just the temple from the first tutorial. It'll give you something to play with.

Help

There are some good built-in readings. Go to Help > Tutorials, which will open up a browser window. Then, click on Tutorials and look through there.

Tutorial Summaries

They have quicktime videos, which are nice, but not easily skimmed. Here are skimmable reminders from them

Navigation:

• tumble (rotate around x) or spin (rotate around y) option+mouse-left
• track (move along x) or pan (move along y) option+mouse-middle
• dolly/zoom (move along z) option+mouse-right

Transforms:

• SPC to toggle four views (perspective + orthographic views). Depends on which view the mouse is over.
• icons for move, rotate and scale are along the left bar
• x axis is always red, y is green, z is blue
• can operate on several objects or on parts of a single object
• Window/outliner brings up a list of object and you can select by group or part.

Create and View Objects

• Primitives can use polygons (flat facets) or NURBS (curves). Use Create/Polygon Primitives/Cube (or something else). Click on the box at the right edge of the menu item.
• info box at the right (Channels)
• "5" to see shaded objects
• "4" to return to wireframe

Component Selection

• object mode (default) or component mode
• select component by right-click-and-hold, then select "face" and click on the desired dot or drag over faces to select them.
• add faces by shift+click
• to deselect faces, control+click them
• to go back to object mode, right-click-and-hold, then "select"

Operations on Polygons (under Edit Polygons menu). Sarah uses:

• Split Polygon Tool
• Extrude Face
• Merge Vertices
• Merge Multiple Edges

Also Polygons/Smooth, but save this for last.

Secret Menus

• menu of menus below "file". Default is "animation," can choose modeling (most of the time), dynamics, and rendering (to preview).
• panel/window menus above them. Options like "shading," "lighting", etc.
• "Marking" menu by click-and-hold

Keyframe Animation (later)

• Time slider at bottom to control animation
• Select object and press "s" to set keyframe
• Select a frame using left-click in the time slider
• press play on the time slider control to play the animation

Preview render

• To change materials, right-click-and-hold
• Elaborate material GUI, with color, transparency, and textures
• to see textures, press "6"
• click clapboard icon to render
• click more elaborate clapboard icon to view the Render Global Settings window.

OBJ exporting

A common file format for 3D objects is OBJ format. It's plain ASCII and seems (so far) to be mostly materials, vertices, texture coordinates, normals and faces. Exactly what you'd expect. (Maybe that's why it's what I'm seeing.)

To get this in Maya, go to Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager ... Then, choose objExport.lib and click on loaded and auto load. Then click on close.

When you're ready to export your object, go to File > Export All, and choose OBJexport(*.*) from the Format menu.

Advice

The following comes from the Maya book and the online manual.

• Save often. Save drafts, so you can go back to earlier versions. Take detours; it's a good way to learn. Disk space is cheap, so if you come up with a naming scheme for your files, you can save many drafts without getting confused.
• Set the command history a bit longer
• Turn on the shelf tabs (using the black downward triangle to the left of the shelf)

Other Info

• You can see the affine transformations in the "Channels" editor (rightmost icon in the tool bar). You can edit these values, so if you want a cube exactly on the surface, you can set the Y translation to 0.5. (This is covered in online lesson 2.)
• You can group objects. I think this corresponds to a subtree of a scene graph.
• In the multi-perspective view, you can select one and discard the others (for example, to get a large side view) by clicking on it and pressing SPC. (Covered in online lesson 2)
• I think the light is defined to be where the eye/camera is, and moves with the eye/camera, rather than being fixed in the scene.
• Lambert1 is an interesting default material. What is it? Seems to be Hue=Saturation=0 and Value=0.5. In other words, a 50% gray. Found this by selecting an object, switching from Channel Editor to Attribute Editor, then choosing the initialShadingGroup tab. The Color attribute seemed right, and clicking on it produced a color picker from which I read off these values.

Lab

Build something that would be fun. If you're feeling uninspired, try to build a hammer. Or look around the room and find an object (maybe a bottle of hand-sanitizer) and try to model that.

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