Introduction

Welcome to Introducing Maya 2011 and the world of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Whether you’re new to 3D graphics or venturing into Autodesk’s powerhouse animation software from another 3D application, you’ll find this book a perfect primer. It introduces you to Maya and shows how you can work with Maya to create your art, whether it’s animated or static in design.

The first edition of this book was written out of the author’s need for a solid, comprehensive, and yet open-ended teaching material about Maya for his classes. This book exposes you to all the facets of Maya by introducing and explaining its tools and functions to help you understand how Maya operates. In addition, you’ll find hands-on examples and tutorials that give you firsthand experience with the toolsets. Working through these will help you develop skills as well as knowledge. These tutorials expose you to various ways of accomplishing tasks with this intricate and comprehensive artistic tool.

Finally, this book explains workflow. You’ll learn not only how specific tasks are accomplished, but why—that is, how they fit into the larger process of producing 3D animation. By doing that, these chapters should give you the confidence to venture deeper into Maya’s feature set on your own or using any of Maya’s other learning tools and books as a guide.

It can be frustrating to learn a powerful tool such as Maya, so it’s important to remember to pace yourself. The number-one complaint of readers of books like this is a sense that either the pace is too fast or the steps are too complicated or overwhelming. That’s a tough nut to crack, to be sure, and no two readers are the same. But this book offers you the chance to run things at your own pace. The exercises and steps may seem challenging at times, but keep in mind that the more you try, even the more you fail at some attempts, the more you’ll learn about how to operate Maya. Experience is the key to learning workflows in any software program, and with experience come failure and aggravation. Nevertheless, try and try again, and you’ll see that further attempts will be easier and more fruitful.

Above all, this book aims to inspire you to use Maya as a creative tool to achieve and explore your own artistic vision.

What You’ll Learn from This Book

Introducing Maya 2011 will show you how Maya works and introduce you to every part of the toolset to give you a glimpse of the possibilities available with Maya.

You’ll learn the basic concepts underlying animation and 3D and how to work with the Maya interface. You’ll then learn the basic methods of modeling—creating objects and characters that appear to exist in three-dimensional space and that can be animated. You’ll also explore shading and texturing—the techniques of applying surfaces to the objects you create—and you’ll learn how to create lights and shadows in a scene. Animation is an enormously rich topic, but the practice and theory provided here will give you a solid footing. Then, you’ll learn how to control the process of rendering, turning your images into files that can be viewed. Perhaps Maya’s most dazzling capability is its dynamics engine, software that allows you to make objects behave as if controlled by the real-world laws of physics.

After you’ve finished this book and its exercises, you’ll have experience in almost everything Maya offers, giving you a solid foundation on which to base the rest of your Maya and CGI experience.

The goal of this book is to get you familiar enough with all the parts of Maya that you can work on your own and start a long, healthy education in a powerful and flexible tool.

You will, however, learn the most from yourself.

Who Should Read This Book

Anyone who is curious about learning Maya or who is migrating from another 3D software package can learn something from this book. Even if you’re highly experienced in another 3D package such as Lightwave or XSI, you’ll find this book helpful in showing you how Maya operates, so you can migrate your existing skill set quickly and efficiently. By being exposed to everything Maya has to offer, you’ll better understand how you can use its toolset to create or improve on your art and work.

If you already have cursory or even intermediate experience with Maya, culled from time spent learning at home, you can fill many holes with the information in this book as well as expand your experience. Self-education is a powerful tool, and the more you expose yourself to different sources, opinions, and methods, the better educated you’ll be.

In addition, this book is invaluable for teachers in the CG field. This book was written to cater to those who want to pick up the fundamentals of Maya as well as those who want to teach classes based around a solid body of course material. You won’t find a better basis for a class when you combine this book with your own curriculum.

How to Use This Book

Introducing Maya 2011 approaches the subject in a linear fashion that tracks how most animation productions are undertaken. But the book has numerous cross-references, to make sure the chapters make sense in any order you may want to tackle them. You can open this book to any chapter and work through the tutorials and examples laid out for the Maya task being covered. Feel free to browse the chapters and jump into anything that strikes your fancy. However, if you’re completely new to CG, you may want to take the chapters in order.

Although you can learn a lot just by reading the explanations and studying the illustrations, it’s best to read this book while you’re using Maya 2011 so that you can try the exercises for yourself as you read them. If you don’t already have Maya, you can download a 30-day trial version of the software at www.autodesk.com/maya. This book also includes a CD that contains all the example and support files you’ll need for the tutorials in the text, which is valuable as an educational aid. You can use the example files to check the progress of your work, or you can use them as a starting point if you want to skip ahead within an exercise. The latter can save the more experienced reader tons of time. You’ll also find it valuable to examine these files in depth to see how scenes are set up and how some of the concepts introduced in the book are implemented. Because Maya is a complex, professional software application, the tutorials are both realistically ambitious and simple enough for new users to complete. Take them one step at a time, and find your own pace, accepting aggravations and failures as part of the process. Take your time; you’re not working on deadline—yet.

How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1, “Introduction to Computer Graphics and 3D,” introduces you to common computer graphics terms and concepts to give you a basic overview of how CG happens and how Maya relates to the overall process. This chapter explores the basics of CG creation and its core concepts. In addition, it describes the process of CG production and discusses how to establish a commonly used workflow.

Chapter 2, “Jumping in Headfirst, with Both Feet,” creates a simple animation to introduce you to Maya’s interface and workflow and give you a taste of how things work right off the bat. By animating the planets in our solar system, you’ll learn basic concepts of creating and animating in Maya and how to use its powerful object structure.

Chapter 3, “The Maya 2011 Interface,” presents the entire Maya interface and shows you how it’s used in production. Beginning with a roadmap of the screen, this chapter also explains how Maya defines and organizes objects in a scene.

Chapter 4, “Beginning Polygonal Modeling,” is an introduction to modeling concepts and workflows in general. It shows you how to start modeling using polygonal geometry to create various objects, from a human hand to a complex locomotive engine.

Chapter 5, “Modeling with NURBS, Subdivisions, and Deformers,” takes your lesson in modeling a step further. It will show you how to model with deformers and surfacing techniques, using NURBS to create a patch model detail for the locomotive you modeled in Chapter 4. You’ll also use subdivision surfaces, a hybrid between polygons and NURBS, to create a starfish.

Chapter 6, “Practical Experience,” rounds out your modeling lessons with two comprehensive exercises showing you how to first model a child’s toy wagon using polygons as well as NURBS surfacing, and then build a decorative box to use for detailed photo-real texturing and rendering.

Chapter 7, “Maya Shading and Texturing,” shows you how to assign textures and shaders to your models. Using the toy wagon you created in Chapter 6, you’ll learn how to texture it to look like a real toy wagon as well as lay out its UVs for proper texture placement. Then, you’ll create detailed photo-real textures based on photos for the decorative box model. You’ll also learn how to take advantage of Maya 2011’s ability to work with layered Photoshop files.

Chapter 8, “Introduction to Animation,” covers the basics of how to animate a bouncing ball using keyframes and moves on to creating more complex animation—throwing an axe and firing a catapult. You’ll also learn how to import objects into an existing animation and transfer animation from one object to another, a common exercise in professional productions. In addition, you’ll learn how to use the Graph Editor to edit and finesse your animation as well as animate objects along paths.

Chapter 9, “More Animation!” expands on Chapter 8 to show you how to use Maya’s skeleton and kinematics system to create a simple walk cycle. This chapter also covers how to animate objects by using relationships between them. A thrilling exercise shows you how to rig your locomotive model from Chapter 4 for automated animation, one of Maya’s most productive uses.

Chapter 10, “Maya Lighting,” begins by showing you how to light a 3D scene as you learn how to light the wagon you modeled and textured earlier in the book. It also shows you how to use the tools to create and edit Maya lights for illumination, shadows, and special lighting effects. mental ray for Maya’s Physical Sun and Sky feature is explored in this chapter as an introduction to some sophisticated techniques for mental ray lighting.

Chapter 11, “Maya Rendering,” explains how to create image files from your Maya scene and how to achieve the best look for your animation using proper cameras and rendering settings. You’ll work with displacement maps to create details in a model. You’ll also learn about the Maya renderer, the Vector renderer, and Final Gather using HDRI and Image-Based Lighting through mental ray for Maya, as well as raytracing, motion blur, and depth of field. You’ll have a chance to render the decorative box to round out your skills.

Chapter 12, “Maya Dynamics and Effects,” introduces you to Maya’s powerful dynamics animation system as well as nParticle technology. You’ll animate pool balls colliding with each other using rigid body dynamics and, using nParticle animation, you’ll create steam to add to your locomotive scene from Chapter 4. This chapter also shows you how to use Paint Effects to create animated flowers and grass within minutes, and it introduces you to using Toon shading for a cartoon look to your renders.

Hardware and Software Considerations

Because computer hardware is a quickly moving target, and Maya now runs on three distinct operating systems (Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7, Linux, and Mac OS X), specifying which hardware components will work with Maya is something of a challenge. Fortunately, Autodesk has a “qualified hardware” page on its website that describes the latest hardware to be qualified to work with Maya for each operating system. Go to the following site for the most up-to-date information on system requirements:

www.autodesk.com/maya

Although you can find specific hardware recommendations on these web pages, some general statements can be made about what constitutes a good platform on which to run Maya. First, be sure to get a fast processor; Maya eats through CPU cycles like crazy, so a fast processor is important. Second, you need lots of RAM (memory) to run Maya: at least 2GB, but 8GB is a good to have, especially if you’re working with large scene files or are on a 64-bit system. Third, if you expect to interact well with your Maya scenes, a powerful video card is a must—although Maya will mosey along with a poor graphics card, screen redraws will be slow with complex scenes, which can quickly become frustrating. You may want to consider a workstation graphics card for the best compatibility (rather than a consumer-grade gaming video card). Several companies make entry-level through top-performing workstation cards to fit any budget. A large hard disk is also important—most computers these days come with huge drives anyway.

Fortunately, computer hardware is so fast these days that even laptop computers can now run Maya well. Additionally, even hardware that is not officially supported by Autodesk can often run Maya—just remember that you won’t be able to get technical support if your system doesn’t meet the company’s qualifications.

The Next Step

By the time you finish Introducing Maya 2011, you’ll have some solid skills for using Maya. When you’re ready to move on to another level, be sure to check out other Maya titles from Sybex at www.sybex.com.