Category Archives: Learning Maya

Maya 12 – let’s get back into this

Alrighty I’m prepping for doing an honors thesis short film in Maya and want to take some time to get more aquatinted with the software. So we’re back to blogging woo woo! Today I started a tutorial on modeling a steampunk firefly. I learned: Put reference images in ‘source images’ folder so it will automaticallyContinue reading “Maya 12 – let’s get back into this”

Maya 11 – a sit down with a pro

The other week I sat down with a professional 3D artist at Warner who graciously answered a lot of my Maya questions and showed me some great tricks… I learned: For shading, to clean up the material library go to ‘edit’ -> ‘delete unused nodes’. Within the node graph we can press tab to quicklyContinue reading “Maya 11 – a sit down with a pro”

Maya Day 10 – first animation!

Today I redid the shading for Linky, and did this very simple animation! Maya only crashed twice and froze once… I’m a little perplexed how this is the industry standard at this crash rate hah. I learned: While this was mostly review of previous knowledge, this helped me conceptualize how hypershade works. I got experienceContinue reading “Maya Day 10 – first animation!”

Maya Day 9 – speed tips and animation basics

Today I watched a video on how to speed up Maya and went through the interactive tutorial to learn the very basics of animation. I learned: To speed up Maya… in hypershade, hit the top left button to pause the loading of swatches. In viewport, turn off AO, shadows, motion blur, and also one canContinue reading “Maya Day 9 – speed tips and animation basics”

Maya Day 8 – rendering Linky

Today I just had some fun rendering out my Linky character (Maya only crashed twice!) I learned: To move all objects around a singular point (if they are grouped), select one object -> press up arrow (selects group) -> then move! This solves the problem I was having yesterday 🙂 I also got general experienceContinue reading “Maya Day 8 – rendering Linky”

Maya Day 7 – oof exporting

Today I went over this handy tutorial about exporting Maya assets as FBX then bringing them into Unreal Engine. I learned: There are two main ways to go about exporting as an FBX, either joining all the meshes together and doing a scene export, or exporting the objects individually. If one does a scene exportContinue reading “Maya Day 7 – oof exporting”

Maya Day 6 – exporting render layers

Today I finished the second part of the render layers tutorial and watched a different fantastic hour long tutorial which also went over render layers. I learned: To batch render all the layers separately one can go to render sequence settings and check “all render enabled layers” which will render any layer that has theContinue reading “Maya Day 6 – exporting render layers”

Maya Day 5 – render layers intro

Today I mostly watched this great tutorial on render layers then played around with it myself on a pre-existing scene. I learned: In render layers, there is automatically a master layer which is setup to output all AOVs (arbitrary output variables… which is basically any data from a shader than can be output to aContinue reading “Maya Day 5 – render layers intro”

Maya Day 4 – practice rendering in Arnold

Today I delved more into rendering in Arnold with this great tutorial, and then had fun making the image below. I learned: I learned to make a new project (that has all the proper folders) one goes to File -> Project Window -> then select where to create it! Quite simple. Then make sure toContinue reading “Maya Day 4 – practice rendering in Arnold”