Maya Workshop Series

by Brian Immel

 

Intro to Maya

In this workshop, we will cover the basics of Interface Navigation, User Settings, Personalizing Your Interface, Basic Modeling, Shaders for Beginners, Simple Animation Techniques and Rendering.

NURBS Modeling

I will be talking about various methods for modeling with NURBS including creating NURBS curves, creating surfaces from curves and modifying NURBS surfaces.

Polygonal Modeling

This workshop will cover the basics of polygonal modeling for character animation. I will go over the basic tools used in Maya to create and modify polygonal geometry and converting polygons to subdivided surfaces. I will also talk about various strategies for modeling for animation.

Texture Mapping

In this workshop, I will demostration the various texturing possibilities within the Maya environment. I'll talk about the difference between using the Multilister and Hypershade, shader networks, applying shaders to different surface types, procedural maps, external maps and mapping UVs for polygons.

From Storyboards to Animatics

In development !

This workshop deals with scanning traditional storyboards and preparing them for animatics using After Effects. I will demostrate various techniques using Photoshop to cut out objects from the storyboards for animatic purposes, timing in After Effects, using the Timestamp filter, nesting compositions within After Effects, sound track, rendering in After Effects. Time permitting, I will also briefly talk about 3D animatics.

Animation Basics in Maya

In development!

Animate, animate, animate! We all want to animate. In this workshop, I will talk about the various keyframing options available in Maya and a few strageties for animating in 3D. I will demostrate how to use and understand the Graph Editor, Dope Sheet and time permitting the Trax Editor.

Enveloping

In development!

I will talk about three different types of enveloping options that are commonly used in Maya: Rigid Binding, Smooth Binding and Indirect Binding. This workshop will demostrate the pros and cons of each binding method.

Dynamics

In development!

This workshop will cover how to create and animate Particle systems, hardware rendering particles, set up for simulation, and demostrate Soft-body simulations.

Lighting

In development!

This workshop will focus on the basics of lighting, 3D color theory, light types and their uses, and shadows maps.

Rendering

In development!

In this workshop, I will talk about how to render a still frame and sequences within the Maya environment, motion blur, Ray-trace rendering, resolution settings, file types for output. I will also demostrate how to write simple scripts (in dos) for batch rendering multiple files. Finally, I will cover a common render errors that may occur during the rendering process.

Post-edits

In development!

In this final workshop, I will talk about some things to consider before outputting to tape or DVD like render layers as a time saver, post-render effects and tricks in After Effects, and creating a master DV tape.