Certificate in Maya (CM)

Overview

Maya® software is a tool of choice for those in the film, television, game development, and design industries who desire a high-level of control over their 3D content workflows and pipelines. Artists and designers select Maya because of its intuitive user interface, which facilitates customization and fine-tuning of effective workflows, and technicians (technical directors and programmers) choose Maya for its reliability, open architecture, wide range of supported platforms, and the ease with which it can be incorporated into any existing or new production pipeline.

Productivity-Enhancing Workflows
Get unmatched productivity through a combination of performance and workflow features, including marking menus, 3D manipulators, selective display, brush-based tools, selection management tools, and unlimited levels of undo. Advanced data and scene management functionality give you the flexibility to work the way you want.

Comprehensive 3D Modeling and Texturing Toolsets
Access a full suite of production-proven polygon, NURBS, and subdivision surface modeling and texturing tools. The polygon workflow tools, including advanced selection functionality, attribute transfer tools, an interactive UV layout and unfolding mode, and optimization tools—have also been designed to promote efficiency.

Powerful Animation Functionality
Animate characters and other scene elements with a comprehensive range of specialized keyframe, nonlinear, and advanced character animation editing toolsets, including animation layers, graph and dope sheet editors, constraints, expressions, a nonlinear animation data editor, full-body inverse kinematics (IK) system, skinning functionality, and Maya Muscle.

Advanced Visual Effects Tools
Produce any visual effect you can imagine, from highly realistic natural phenomena to stylized, 2D “painterly” effects. Maya software delivers dynamic interaction of hard and soft bodies determined by physical rules, along with the state-of-the-art visual-effects technology of Maya nCloth, Maya nParticles, Maya Fluid Effects, Maya Fur, Maya Hair, and more.

Flexible Rendering
With Maya, you get the freedom to choose the right renderer and rendering pipeline for your project. A unified user interface and workflow provide easy and consistent access to the Maya hardware and vector renderers as well as the powerful mental ray® for Maya and mental ray for Maya network rendering (Satellite) options. You can also use the Render Layers and the Render Pass tools to create an efficient workflow from Maya to MGNCLP® Toxik™ software and other compositing packages.

Tools for Extending and Customizing Maya
Customize, extend, and manipulate Maya. The fully integrated Maya Embedded Language (MEL) and Python® scripting languages give you high-level access to every aspect of the software so you can create custom windows, reconfigure the user interface, and issue commands from an HTML page. Moreover, the OpenMaya API/SDK completely unlocks the power of Maya for C++ and Python developers, providing direct, low-level access to all scene data required to make effective plug-ins and new types of nodes, shaders, manipulators, file importers and exporters, and more.

Course Contents
(• 3 months • 6 days a week • Classes : 1 hr. Theory & 1hr. Practical)

1. Maya Interface Introduction

Maya User Interface
Shelf of Maya
Status bar tools
Tool Box
Playback controls
Animation retargeting
Restrict the direction of a surface's jiggle
Deforming particles
Per-particle field attributes
Per-particle goalU/goalV attributes for poly goal objects
Expression applied before and after dynamics
Multiple random number streams for particles
Textured surface emission for poly surface emitters
High quality interactive shading
Hypershade performance improvements
Node filtering improvements in Hypershade
Imported shading network optimizations
Transfer surface information
Simplified shader connection workflow
Integrated contour rendering
Paint Scripts Tool improvements
Paint Sculpt Map
Rendering Fur in mental ray
Effect of lighting intensity on Fur
Improvements for Cloth objects
Cloth UV set
Visualizing Cloth stress
Per-face collision depth
The Splines
NURBS
Subdivision surfaces
Standard mode and polygon proxy mode
Polygon proxy mode

2. Animation in Maya

Previewing animation, Playback
Ghosting animated objects
Motion Trails, Playblast
Muting animation
Adding sound to your animation, Importing sound
Baking simulations
Animation Snapshot and Animated Sweep
Animation Snapshot-generated geometry
Animation controls
Time Slider, Key ticks
Time Units, Current time field, Range Slider
Animation Start Time, Animation End Time
Playback Start Time, Playback End Time
Playback controls
Animation Preferences button, Animation controls menu
Copy, Cut, Paste, and Delete
Snap, Keys, Tangents
Playback Looping, Sound
Sound File, Start Time
Playblast, Working Units (Time)
Timeline, Playback Start/End, Animation Start/End
Height, Key Ticks, Timecode
Snapping, Timecode Offset
Playback (Update View), Active
Playback (Looping), Playback Speed
Play every frame
Animation
Steps before Current Frame (Ghosts)
Steps after Current Frame (Ghosts)
Frames Per Step (Ghosts)
Sound, Waveform Display
Repeat on Hold, Repeat Size, Playbiast
Use contiguous audio files with animation
Play an audio file, Delete audio from your scene, Keys
Auto Key, Keys in the Attribute Editor
Cutting, copying, and pasting keys between scenes
Keys clipboard, Driven keys
Linking multiple attributes
Breakdowns, Inbetweens
Set key preferences, Set Breakdowns
Set Inbetweens, Nonlinear animation
The Trax Editor
Character Mapper, Visor, Outliner, Clip Library, Create clips

3. Character Setup in Maya

Using skeletons
Forward Kinematics
Inverse Kinematics
Blending IK and FK
Skinning your character
Smooth Skinning, Rigid Skinning, Indirect skinning
Creating deformation effects
Deformers as modeling tools, Deformers as animation tools
Constraining objects
Point constraints, Orient constraints, Parent constraints
Scale constraints, Aim constraints
Geometry constraints, Normal constraints
Tangent constraints, Pole Vector constraints
Animation-constraint blends, Character sets
Skeletons, Skeleton components
Joints and bones
Create a joint chain with an IK handle
Reroot skeletons
Pose joints with FK
Display bones as boxes
Label the skeleton's joints
Skinning
Deformable objects and skin objects
Direct skinning methods
Bind pose
Double transformation effects, Point tweaking skinned objects
Painting smooth skin point weights
Painting skin weights on masked vertices
Mirroring smooth skin weights
Copying smooth skin weights
Holding smooth skin weights
Using smooth skin influence objects
Hand muscle bulge with influence object
Creating a hand's skeleton and smooth skin
Using influence objects to prevent unwanted deformation
Flexors
Deformers, Constraints
Constraint node behavior
Constrained and target objects, Target point
Target orientation
Target scale, Target vector, Target object weights
Constrained object's position
Character sets
Creating Character Set
Animating Character Sets
Keyframing character sets
Creating expressions for character sets
Using motion capture for character sets
Motion redirection, Character mapping

4. Maya Dynamics

Particles
Particle objects
Emitters
Sprites
Spheres
Blobby surface
Fields
Stand-alone fields
Object fields
Volume fields
Air field
Effects
Smoke effects
Animating with dynamics
Set the initial state of dynamic objects
Dynamic relationship editor

5. Rendering ( The Real World)

Surface texture
Color, Transparency
Specular highlight (shine)
What are specular highlights?
Highlights
Highlight color
Reflections
Shading networks
Shading group node
Render nodes
Render node attributes
Render node connections
Surface, displacement, volumetric materials
Surface material
Displacement material
Volumetric material (atmosphere)
Layered shaders
Layered textures with the Layered Shader node
Double-sided shaded surfaces
2D and 3D textures
Environment textures, Layered textures
Procedural textures
File textures, Texture filtering, Texture mapping
Normal mapping (default)
Projection mapping
Stencil mapping
mental ray for Maya Shaders
Maya base shaders, Custom shaders
Custom shader libraries
Surface relief
Bump maps
Displacement maps
Displacement Bounding Box
mental ray for Maya displacement
Feature-based displacement
Non-feature based displacement
Backgrounds, Basic color and texture backgrounds
True reflections
Simulated reflections
Fog, smoke, dust, and silt
Simulate fog, smoke, or dust
Baking illumination and color
When to bake objects
Visualization vs. the final render
The key to successful rendering
Viewing cameras vs. rendering cameras
Maya camera types
Static and animated cameras
Focus and blur
Make a camera renderable
Save sequential camera movements
Tessellation and approximation
NURBS surface, poly, and subD tessellation
Approximation, Approximation nodes
Create an approximation node
Approximation styles
Interactive Photorealistic Rendering (IPR)
Test render a low-res still or frame
File formats
Bitmap vs. vector, Adobe Illustrator (ai)
Adobe Illustrator (version 8) file format, Alias PIX
AVI (avi), Cineon (cin), Encapsulated PostScript (eps)
GIF (gif), JPEG (jpg), Macromedia Flash (swf)
Maya 1H- (iff), Mayal 6 IFF (iff)
Quantel (yuv)
QuickTime Image (mov), RLA (rla)
Scalable Vector Graphics (svg), SGI (sgi)
SGI16 (sgi), SGI Movie, Softlmage (pic)
Targa (tga), Tiff (tiff), Tiff16 (tif), Windows Bitmap (bmp)
File output location, Pixel aspect ratio
Resolution
Render passes, Color pass
Shadow pass
Diffuse pass
Specular pass
Custom shadow and reflection passes
Render speed, Reduce memory
Reduce file size (Maya Vector renderer)
Maya render diagnostics
Hardware render diagnostics

Free Lab Access