Space Scene in Maya TUTORIAL

First full Maya tutorial

Open Maya Autodesk 2011
Go to Surfaces and create a sphere
Press 5 to fill in the wireframe
Make the sphere HUGE. Press r to open the resize tool and zoom out and resize over and over and over again until you have a REALLY big sphere (its up to you how big).
Right click and hold. Choose assign new material.
Pick a Lambert and rename it "space"
Make the color black
Select the sphere
Under the rendering drop down, choose paint effects-->make paintable
Open the outliner and select the sphere you just made
Now open the visor by going to window-->General Editors-->Visor
Choose galactic
Choose a paint effect
Under Rendering, double click the tool all the way to the right, the 3D paint tool.
Select the sphere in the outliner and scroll down in the 3D paint tool and choose assign/edit textures.
Make the size x and size y about 2000 to increase the detail of the brush.
press assign/edit textures to confirm
Be sure to check update on stroke and save texture on stroke in the 3d paint tool
Decorate the sphere in any way you feel like.
Move the camera inside the sphere and make another sphere
duplicate this sphere until you have a bunch that are all over the place inside your bigger painted sphere
Once you have all of those sphere,s select them all and make a new material and name it stars
Make it white
Under special effects of that lambert, turn up the glow intensity
Choose a good viewpoint and RENDER

TAPE: THE SEQUEL

To improve on the tape commercial, we attacked the project with new life! After an epic struggle to obtain the footage of our classmate from a past project, we began work. Maurice's volcano camera path was changed to give it a more cinematic motion. That is perhaps one of the most noticeable changes in the project. Maurice also created a tape man title sequence at the beginning, where tape zooms onto and off of the screen. We fleshed out the story more, and made a few improvements. I imported Jamada's helmet from a previous project to my demons file. We decided to use that for a head instead of using a still image. After I adjusted the transparency on parts of the facemask, I added elongated spheres. I added a material that was then colored yellow, and under "special effects," I turned up the glow. I placed those spheres inside the head. I added horns on the top of the helmet. I kept the bottom of the facemask solid but the top with the eyes transparent to give it a more supernatural feel. Jamada added a BUNCH of new things, such as destroyed, headless demons,a blood spattered wall, and a beacon for tape man in the sky. He duplicated the footage of the running classmate, to make it appear that they are running from something. He made the footage cast shadows and the wall that they ran past accept shadows and added a light. Jamada put everything together at the end.

Maurice: I learn how to work with the camera Maya much better then i did be fore i had a hard time with the camera moving it around the volcano i had a lil help with the camera and how to move the key frames and move them to make it longer in time.

Jamada:
* I have learned to situate where your working and not let anyone touch your stash
* Organize to the teeth not just with in the file
* Never Say Never! (Tee Hee)

Commercial project time! II

Surprise! I was recruited to a SECOND project. In this project there was a magic pen. There were two people in this group, Corina and Nuru, and Nuru is kind of NU (hahaha get it?) to the class and the software, so it was going a bit slow or something. Whatever the reason was, I was asked to help with their project and animate a pen that writes without someone moving it. There is a layout in photoshop similar to After Effects, where there is a timeline, and layers can be sequenced to create frame animation. I turned off the visibility of every layer, so that everything would move faster, and I clicked "Make frames from layers" and photoshop automatically sequenced each one into a frame animation, where each layer was a different frame. There were a LOT of layers, so it took a long time. I then animated the pen, which was an OBJ file that allowed it to be manipulated in photoshop like a 3D object, so that the erased bits reappeared as the pen moved over that section of the poem.

Commercial project time!

This project was to create a commercial for a product. I missed about a weeks worth of this project due to dental problems, but once I got back, I was placed in a group with Jamada and Maurice. I was told that we were making a commercial for some sort of super tape. Jamada prepared a shot list for our green screen integration, while Maurice did something like creating a volcano. This project was extremely frustrating for me because what I was told to do changed right as I would begin work. First, I was told to create a bat and I was almost done with the wing, but then I was told to make a demon. Then when I was starting that, it was changed again to me making a montage of tape photoshopped into historic pictures. I eventually decided not to do that and just create the monster from scratch using the "sculpt geometry tool." I would make polygons and increase the number of divisions, so that when the figure was sculpted it wouldn't be blocky. After I made the entire character, I rigged it with a skeleton and animated it. I got the rendered sequence of images to Jamada and he placed the face of THE SITUATION on it. I also created 3D tape, which was just a matter of making a couple of simple shapes and creating textures in photoshop

Character model

First character model assignment in MAYA. After much procrastinating, which is my usual style of living, I decided to make a spider. But it was a spider...WITH A TWIST. It has a scorpion's tale. Anyway, here is the quick and dirty explanation of the process. We had to get two images of the object, one from the front and one from the side. I obviously did not handle a spider and get it to pose for me. I found pictures online. To model in maya, you need to place the two images on two planes by assigning the image to the material and then orient those two planes perpendicular to each other. So I did this, and luckily the general shape of a spider is pretty simple. A few cylinders for the legs, and spheres for the body. For the tusks, or whatever they are called on a spider, I used pyramids. I manipulated the vertices to get them curved, and to get the legs to look smoother, I moved the edges and extruded edges. For the tail, I just made a torus and deleted a few sections. For the trident tip, I used pyramids and a cylinder. I extruded faces on the pyramids to make arrow tips. Then I combined everything into one gigantic polygon. Then I keyframed the camera to move around the spider. Youtube is being stupid, so the upload will come later.

Final Product

Collaboration: all the cool kids are doing it

For the all-city art competition, I began an epic journey with two of my Gallery 37 classmates Christian Grayson and Kristian Harris. It is a story of battles, danger, special effects, and suspense. This is that story.

 We began with absolutely no idea what we would do. None at all. My only idea was to have an unknown secret agent planting a bomb that would implode rather than explode. We ended up deciding to make a video to be a trailer for a video game. My job would be to create the environment in Maya and compile sound effects, and the green screen live action would be done by Christian and Kristian.  Christian did the special effects and Kristian put everything together in an After Effects composition.

My main purpose during this journey was to create an environment completely from scratch in Maya 2011. I was tasked with making a compelling level for the characters portrayed by Kristian and Christian.  We brainstormed and decided on a city scene. In order to do that, I had to create a polygon in Maya that was the shape of a sphere. That sphere would eventually have a picture of the sky "assigned" to it. What that means is that when the image is rendered, instead of showing the inside of a ball, a sky would show. Next, I added a plane that would be intersected by the sphere for the ground. This is a little hard to visualize, so there's a screenshot of it.

When the camera is inside the sphere and positioned above the plane, if you render it with pictures or colors assigned to them, it looks like an environment. So in order to make it look like the city is a floating city, I assigned an ocean material.  Now, it looks a little dim because there is no light inside the sphere. When I added a light and placed it inside the sphere, it looked like the image below.







So I also had to add a light, and change the render settings so that the objects would cast shadows.  Once I created the buildings and the ground and the walls using the same process as for the sky and ocean, I had to add a new camera and animate it so that it moved through the environment. I saved the animation as a series of images, with each frame being an image. Then, I gave all of that to Christian and Kristian.

The others:
Kristian
"My contribution to the project was keying out the green screen footage. Keying is basically taking the color out of the green screen that way you can put any background behind your footage. Another thing i did was going through the footage that we collected. Then found and picked all of the usable parts, then go through that and pick the things we wanted to see in the final project. I did the animation of the health bar using photoshop. I also put the final composition together."

Christian
Within Blake, Kristian, and I video game trailer/teaser I created the final "showdown" between the two fighters and all of their effects. The final showdown contained the two characters shooting beams at each other resolving in everything blowing up, therefore leading into a giant flash so nothing else can be seen by the human eye.

     Within the final showdown of our video game trailer, there were only two effects that were demonstrated, which was a "aura" and "beam exchange." In the video game trailer, the two fighters have these type of "auras" that is revolving around them to demonstrate that they are powering up. Creating both the aura and beam exchange was fairly easy, but confusingly time consuming. I created the auras by using a effect within Adobe After Affects called Particles. What I did with the particles was flipped it 180 degrees and added a extra effect, which I had to download called Trap Code Shine. After finishing the affect, I duplicated the effect and masked out the aura to revolve around the characters. The "beam exchange" was created by making a mask and making that mask extend in time to make it seem as it is shooting out. When the mask was completed, I once again applied the Trap Code Shine to make it cooler. As soon as I completed the beam 100%, I motion tracked the beams to the characters hands to make it also seem as if the beams were being created from the palms of their hands. Once the beams were shot from each of the opponents palms, the collision created a giant blast that was created by using another affect within After Affects called Lens Flare.

We downloaded free sound effects online and used them. We also used the song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk

Title Sequence PROJECT

For this project, I decided to try to make a title sequence for a made up company that makes horror films--Grim Studios. My original idea was to create letters that moved as if they were alive, because they were running from Death or the Grim Reaper. Death would touch the letters, they would fall down, and the flesh would rot to reveal bones, which would then turn into dust and get blown away. To do this, I needed Maya 2011, but our trial ran out and so I had to make the letters as 2D images in Photoshop, and use the shatter effect in After Effects to make 3D text. To do that, I disabled gravity so that the images wouldn't move down, and changed the custom shatter map to the layers themselves. I hardly did anything like this, because a lot of time was spent looking for tutorials on how to do the effects I wanted, and many of them required plug-ins. There was also a side project that our entire class was doing as a group, and that ate up a lot of time.

I had to scale down my idea a lot, and instead I added an effect called particle world i to simulate rain. I imported each 3D letter as compositions, because I wanted them to be able to move independently. However, they don't move at all in this version so that is a little irrelevant. Because they were imported as compositions, I had to make a new solid for the rain to go on, or else it would only cover one letter at a time and the whole effect would be ruined. In the effect, I changed the radius of the effect , the birth and death color of the individual particles, the particle type, and the physics of the particles in order to create the illusion of rain. I got a skeleton hand off of google images for Death, and added a distortion effect  to each letter composition to look like melting flesh, which was easier to do than rotting flesh. Then I synchronized the beginning of the distortion to the frame that the hand touches them in.

Face in the Crowd

BEHBEH (baby)
the face that looks up

Who is Tron? (extra credit)

Tron is the program likeness of the user Alan. He was created to stop the MCP (master control program) of Encom who had become too restrictive on the actions of the employees. He helps Kevin Flynn defeat the MCP and escape the grid. In TRON: Legacy, he was originally meant to help Kevin create the perfect world, along with Kevin's program CLU.

Title sequence

Doctor Who titles for the fifth season of the revived edition

I chose this title sequence to show because Doctor Who is one of my favorite shows, and I think this is one of the best title sequences the show has had in its many years on TV. I like the way the logo manipulates the perspective of the letters to make one of the key elements of the show, the Doctor's time machine. I also think the way the actors names appear makes sense with the environment and doesn't take you out of the experience of flying through the time vortex. I think the music in this one is the most urgent and exciting.

Other Doctor Who title Sequences
The 1st Doctor


The 4th Doctor


The 10th Doctor