Gnomon « Design « Maya Tutorials

Once finished with the flame's dynamic animation, it is now time to focus on how it renders. This will require us to pay special attention to the brightness, coloring, transparency and edge quality of a flame. A flame's color tends to be bluish at the base but orangish towards the tip... sometimes reddish. This can be easily achieved by mapping the surfaces color with a ramp. A flame also tends to be brighest in the center. This can be mimicked by turning on Translucency for the material. It is the transparency which will be a bit more involved. A candle flame is more transparent in the center than the edges, and more-so at the base.

Such effects require the ability to specifically determine particle emission at certain UV coordinates of the surfaces. This can be accomplished in a couple of ways: easy and involved. The involved technique requires us to use rigid body collisions, where the Rigid Solver has Contact Data turned on. This attribute allows some 'read-only' attributes to be accessible on the rigid body, such as 'contactCount' and 'contactPosition'. We could then query these attributes and use them with the 'emit' mel command to determine particle creation. But for those who prefer to avoid expressions, we are going to discuss a much simpler method using Softbodies.

Specular/Highlight Pass - rendered by turning off 'emit diffuse' on all lights.

Above is a scene created primarily from polygonal surfaces with textures taken from a library. The environment fog has not been added yet so that you can reference changes with Simple Fog. To add the environment fog go the the Render Options within the Render Globals and click on the box to the right of the Environment Fog field.

Above we have a head built out of 198 patches as seen in hardware shading. All of the patches have positional and tangential continuity as well as matching parameterization, being '0 to # spans', although '0 to 1' works as well.

So, here's a simple example: you need to texture a doorway. Well, in the above image, the doors are a single NURBS plane, as they do not need to open. You need to ask two questions... what is the closest the doors will get to the camera, and what is our final output resolution? If the above example IS the closest we will get to the doors, then let's also say we are rendering at 640x480.

Above you can see my marking menu for tangents. Simple enough, except that figuring out the MEL command to put into the marking menu quadrants is not all that easy since they removed the tangent pull down menu that used to be in 1.5 and earlier. (why'd they get rid of it eh?). So if you jump to the Scripts section you'll find the mel commands in there which I turned into global procs.

But, an important note is that I grid snapped the elbow, forearm, wrist and middle finger knuckle so that they are in a perfectly straight line. This way you know that the axes are aligned properly. We can now rotate the elbow so that the skeleton would better fit a model as in Figure 2.

3. Duplicate the primary object and put the copy on another layer called 'shadow object'.

But, an important note is that I grid snapped the elbow, forearm, wrist and middle finger knuckle so that they are in a perfectly straight line. This way you know that the axes are aligned properly. We can now rotate the elbow so that the skeleton would better fit a model as in Figure 2.

This tutorial will make several assumptions about your knowledge of the software as I am going to try to keep this as short as possible. We will be addressing modeling, softbodies, goals, springs, fields, lights, hypershade, render utilities, the connection editor and shader glow.

Above we have a single surface NURBS head which I modeled from a primitive sphere. Modeling organic shapes by inserting isoparms and pushing/pulling points is a common technique which is very quick and works well when a patch model is not needed. But, notice in the above image how the texture map of a checker pattern is not evenly placing itself along the surface. Basically, when you use the above technique to model, you will end up with funky parameterization. So in order to get a lot of texture detail in the neck, you may end up needing a 2k texture, at least with this model... which is a little big for certain applications.

Above you can see my marking menu for selecting things which I have mapped to Alt+x

Above you can see my marking menu for tangents. Simple enough, except that figuring out the MEL command to put into the marking menu quadrants is not all that easy since they removed the tangent pull down menu that used to be in 1.5 and earlier. (why'd they get rid of it eh?). So if you jump to the Scripts section you'll find the mel commands in there which I turned into global procs.

3. Duplicate the primary object and put the copy on another layer called 'shadow object'.