3D Animation & Data Visualization in Autodesk Maya

1. Course Introduction: Welcome to the introduction on my course in 3D Data Visualization in Autodesk Maya. This course is intended for someone who's never opened Maya and it's really a good beginner class on using Maya for anything. But we will break this down into using it specifically for data visualization. I will walk you through step-by-step exactly what you need to do to recreate these four examples, a line graph, a bar graph, a pie chart and then finally, visualizing data that's on a map. I think there's some pretty clever solutions to creating this data visualization in Maya and we'll also take our renders into aftereffects for exporting as final movies. You can download free trials of all of these to follow along. Each series of videos on each one of the four subjects, they get progressively more advanced with the tools that we'll use in Autodesk Maya. So, if you've never opened up Maya, that's okay, you can just follow along step-by-step, click the same things I'm clicking, and use my exercise files as well to deconstruct what I'm doing. I'm excited to share this course with you and I hope you join me in learning about data visualization in 3D Maya. Thanks for watching. 2. Introduction to Maya: Welcome to the first video of the class. I'm just going to take an opportunity to say, "Don't be intimidated." There's a lot going on in this screen. We have all these buttons up here, we have all these different menus. We're only going to focus on about five or 10 percent of that. So, I will walk you through step-by-step, exactly what you need to use, and you also have the discussion or message me, if you have any questions. I know 3D can be very intimidating, it was when I first started learning it, I'm still learning it to, be honest. So, I never stop learning. It's one of those things, you will always be a student of this. So, don't be intimidated. This course is designed for the beginner to follow step-by-step and get the same results. Really quick, I wanted to take a moment to mention, you can download Maya for free and have a trial for one month. If you are a student at a university or somewhere, you can prove that you're a student, I would highly, highly recommend that you go for the free software for three years. There will be a little window that pops up that says it's a student version but other than that, you have a fully functional Maya. So, if you're a student at a school, definitely do this. Okay. Back to the video. So, let's dive in and look at what we're dealing with here in this software. Ignore all of these buttons at the top. We just want to learn how to navigate around this welcome sign. Your Maya should look something like this. This type of a view with a grid down here, your grid might be a different size, and you probably don't have this welcome sign, I just made that. We can just select that and delete it. One of the first things we can do is turn on anti aliasing. Might be able to see that the my view here is a little pixelated. If we create a new shape here, I'm going to hit F to focus in, the edges are a little rough, we can maybe see that. I don't know if it shows up on your screen. But there's an anti-aliasing button up here. If you click that, it'll just smooth everything out. Hopefully, you'll be able to see that on your screen even though it's probably difficult to see that difference on mine. That's just one nice little thing to turn on for your eyes. Next, let's take a look at how to navigate. You will need a three button mouse for this. So, if you're working on a laptop, you don't have a mouse plugged-in, pause the video and go plug in a three button mouse. Okay. For the three button mouse to scroll around, if we just start clicking, we're only selecting things. For us to be able to navigate with our mouse, we need to hold down Alt and then once we start clicking, now, we can rotate. If we hold the middle mouse, we can pan left and right and right click, we zoom in and out. Those are the three buttons, that's it. So, now we know how to move around. One thing to note is the center point that we're pivoting around when we view. If I'm over here and I want to see pivot around the sphere, I'm pivoting around the center of my view. As I did earlier, I can select the object and hit F. If that isn't working, you can go to view and say look at selection. That will do a similar thing and reset the center pivot to be far enough away from the camera that it's easy to rotate around. The menu on the left is the outliner. It shows what is in our scene. Currently, we only have the sphere. If you can't see this, go to windows, outliner. If your right side doesn't look like this, you can go to the top and hit this little box, and that will be our channel box. You can see there's also tabs along the side here that describe what each one of these are as we go through them. The channel box is where we'll do most of the work. We can click the middle mouse drag and a viewport to isolate different directions and change their values. See what we have selected here, like the sphere. All right. Thanks for watching the first video. Let's jump into making a line graph. 3. Line Graph 1/10 - Create data points: Let's start a new session to make sure we're all starting from the same page. Let's begin by making a line chart. I created this chart from the average high temperature in San Francisco. You may have some other type of data but this is what I chose just as something random to use to have data and we can begin by making these little spheres. So, we'll go up here to the top left under poly modeling and we'll click this little sphere. It may ask you to click and drag and that means your interactive creation is checked on. If you wanted to just make a sphere at the center of the world, the 00 grid down here, you can just turn this off and it'll make a sphere for you there. If you want to delete the one you did you can just select it from the Outliner and hit delete and then click that again. We'll hit F to focus up and we have the sphere. So, what do we do with it? We want to make 12 of these because we're going to have 12 months of the year and instead of duplicating this, which we could do by Command+D, hitting W and then we have the opportunity to move it. We could drag these out and keep doing that and do that 12 times, but it's hard to know the distance between each one and how far apart they are. So, an easier way to do that is to use a duplicate special option up here under Edit. We can go to Duplicate Special and hit this little square in the menu, it'll give us options. So, we get a new window and in the new window, we want to make sure it's a copy and parent. You can also go Edit, reset settings to make sure it's the default settings. We want to duplicate these out in the x-coordinate and how do we know what the x coordinate is? If you look down here on the lower left, you can see that we have coordinates and also you can hit Alt+B to change the background color, it might be hard to see the z on the blue, so you can hit Alt+B and change your background color. So, as we rotate, we can see its changing axes and we can see that the x is to the right. That's right and left really. Positive is to the right and negatives to the left. As we drag it, we can look up in the top right and see its changing a value here. We can type in a value if we want and we'll go determine them out. So, we know we want to go x and we have this big matrix of zeros here, once we're translate rotate scale and they're listed here an order x, y, z. So, we know translate x, y, z, rotate x, y, z. So, we want the x so we can do the first one under translate and let say 20 for good measure right now and we want to make 12 copies. So, we can say 12. Actually, we already have one so we can just say 11 and then we can hit Apply. Now, when we zoom out, we can see we have 12 spheres and in Outliner we can see we have those 12 spheres right here. Just to keep things orderly in Outliner and again if you don't have the Outliner, you can go to Windows Outliner. We can hit Command or Ctrl+G and group them all and we can name those spheres. We can close this window and now all we have to do is type in the amount that each month is. So, the first month is January, '57. So, we have the first one selected and I'm going to go back to a blue background because we have gray spheres and I'm going to type in 57 for Translate Y because Y is up and then it shut off the screen. So, where did it go? We can zoom out and see it and you can also hit F to zoom in on that and then zoom out to get a context of where it is in space and then we can just go down the row and do that for each one and I'm going to speed this part of the video up. Now that we have the spheres done, they're a little hard to see because maybe they're a little small. We can select all of them by clicking and dragging the viewport and then we can go over here and just make sure we uniformly scale in every direction. We can click and drag all of these in the middle mouse. You can also type in a value. Let's say two. Now to see these more in a graphical way that we would in a graph, we can go to an orthographic view. Meaning, there's no distortion from a camera. Just like a flat view. So, we want to see it from the front. If we hold down the Spacebar, we get the hotbox menu which is just a condensed version of everything up here on the top and it's a quick way to get to all the menu options. But when we press space and hold it and then click in the middle here on Maya, we have all the options of all the cameras and we can quickly go between them. So, let's choose front view and we will release the mouse. So, now that we're in the front view, we can't see our spheres. So, let's select the group and then hit F to focus in on it. If we compare this to the graph that we looked at from Google spreadsheets, we can see it doesn't really look the same way. The distribution isn't the same vertically because this graph starts at 55 and over here we're starting at zero. So, they're all bunched up vertically. We could go through and adjust those one-by-one but one nice thing is we could select all of them by clicking and dragging. Then we can go to the Translate Y because Translate Y is all up and down here. So, we can go to Translate Y and we can actually type in an expression to change each one based off of the current value in each of their Translate Ys. So, let's hit asterix. So, that's Shift+8, to get the Asterix and then equals and then we can just say times 10. So, that's going to shoot all these really high. So, let's hit Enter and then, they're way off the screen. So, let's frame up and we can see that distribution is much closer to what we have in the spreadsheet. It's a lot clearer what's going on here. So, the only issue is now we are really high up off of what is considered the ground in Maya. To get everything back down to the ground, we can just select all of these and drag them down. I'm of course hitting W to get the move tool to pull up. That's the only tool we're needing lately besides the scale tool. The other tool we have at our disposal is the rotate tool. But on a sphere, that's not super useful because it just rotates around its center. So, anyway, now we have the data points stretched out so we can see the difference between each one and we have them pulled back down to ground level. That's a great start and in the next lesson, we'll draw a 3D line. 4. Line Graph 2/10 - Create line between points: For this next section we're going to draw the line part of this line graph between each of these data points. So, to begin, let's go to curves and surfaces and we can pick this curve tool, the EP Curve Tool. When you click on it, we want to adjust the tool settings and also for any tool you can see the instructions for it down here in the bottom left while your cursor is in the viewport. We can see it says, "EP Curve Tool. Click on the window to add edit points. Enter to complete the curve." So, to edit the actual attributes of using the tool we can go to the little hammer here, the middle button, and it will pull up possibly in a new window the tool settings. We want to choose linear because we want straight lines between each of our data points. So, we can close that now and we can start selecting in the center of each of our points. So, let's choose our first point. Let's find the center of the sphere and we'll click. Nothing really happened that we can see but were still using the tool. We can see over here it's still selected. This is that icon that we chose up here. That means this is the tool you have selected. It also made a curve. So, we can middle mouse drag and move around and we still have the tool in usable mode, we're still using it. So, let's go to the second one and as soon as we click here we'll be able to see a line. Let's find the center. Now we can see the curve is starting to go between each of the points that we're selecting. So, let's do that for each one. Okay, now that we're done we can hit enter and we have finished creating the curve. If you messed up, you can just go over here and delete the curve and press this button again and start over and try to get it. So, now that we have this curve, it's starting to look like a line chart a little bit. This line isn't renderable though, and what that means is when and if we light this and start to use all the physics of light and all the fancy stuff to make images of this, these curves aren't visible. So, we need to put something down that's visible and it's polygons, like the ones that we made for spheres except we want a tube. So, let's go back to poly-modeling and click on the tube. Down here it has selected the cylinder and we can see. If we hit four we can actually change to wire mode, so you can see through things. If we hit five we can go back to shaded mode. Six and seven are also other modes like texture and lights but we don't have those yet, so we can only work or it's only useful to work in four and five for us right now. So, now that we have the cylinder, lets go back into wireframe mode, and if we hold down C and middle mouse drag it will jump to the curve. It didn't jump exactly to the curve and let me explain what just happened. Because this top one is yellow that means it's isolated, this top arrow, and that is the Y coordinate. Again, if we look over here to the bottom left we can see up and down as Y. Sometimes when you have been manipulating things on a certain axis, it'll try to remember that so that if we hold middle mouse and we drag, it will maintain that isolation and how we're translating it. That's not as helpful when we're trying to do other things like this snap to a curve, little shortcut. So, to get it to get out of this mode all you have to do is just click the center and we can see that now the vertical one is no longer yellow unless we hover over it like the other ones. So, now let's go back and hold down C again and then middle mouse drag, and now we can see that it's snapped to that curve and we can drag this along the curve anyway that we want. So, we just want that to start there. Let's rotate it so that it is in line with the direction of the curve, and we can kind of see that by lining up the wireframe of the cylinder with the straight edge of the curve. Sometimes it's hard to get small movements with this rotate manipulator, and what I like to do is hit the plus button and it makes them manipulator larger so we can move it over a smaller area and line it up exactly as we want it. Great. So, we can go back shaded mode if we want or stay in wireframe. What we can do now is extrude this cylinder over the entirety of the curve, and what that means is take faces of this and project it all along down that curve. To do that, let's go back to the perspective mode. So I'll hold down the spacebar, click and hold, and drag to the perspective view. Now we're back in perspective. We're still in wireframe. We can hit five again to get out of that. The other way we can get out of the front view if we're still in that is if you're having a hard time holding spacebar and holding the mouse and dragging and letting go, all that kind of thing. You can go to Panels and Perspective and just choose the perspective camera. Great. So, now we're back in perspective. We can kind of see what we're starting to build. We have the cylinder aimed in the right direction. We want it to go down the length of that line and we will need to select the faces we want to extrude along it. We don't want to extrude the whole thing, right? That would look weird. We just want to extrude the faces that are facing the direction of the line. So, let's hide this sphere so we can get a good look at the cylinder. We can select this sphere. We can go over here to Visibility and hit zero, which means off. We can also select it by toggling down the group for spheres, and we can see that pSphere 1 is grey. It doesn't look like the others. So, we know that one's invisible and we can see over here it is turned off. We can turn that back on over here. So, let's leave that off so we can see the cylinder. Let's go back to shaded mode by hitting five and let's click the cylinder and select the faces of the cylinder. Currently we're on object mode. We have the entire object and we can select it and move it around. But polygons are made of edges and vertices and faces, and right now we want to select the faces. While the cursor is over the object we can right-click hold and we have this new menu, and it gives us the option to begin to edit the different aspects of this polygon. If we had a vertex, we can see we have a little vertex dots. If we go to Edge, now we can select the edges. Again, we want the faces for right now. So, let's navigate over here and let's click and drag and select the faces. Great. Only bad thing is, we clicked and dragged and it selected some things we don't want. To deselect those things hit Control on your keyboard and hold it, and now we can see next to our cursor is a minus symbol. That means we're going to deselect those things. Okay, perfect. Now we can see, especially if you're going to wire mode, we can see the only things we have selected are the top faces. Great. So, now, we can select the curve and go to the extrude tool. There's a couple of ways to go to that. We can see this icon up here and we if we leave our mouse over it it'll tell us this is the Extrude. Extrude the selected component. But because we have selected the curve as well, we can see that's selected over here in addition to these faces, it is going to extrude these faces down that curve, so let's hit that. Great. That doesn't look like what we want. That just goes to the end of the line, doesn't go over the whole thing. So, how do we fix that? When we hit Extrude we got this extra little menu here and we can add divisions to it, and divisions are edges that go down a polygon and as we increase divisions, we can see it pops and it has more points to put along the curve. So, let's just drag this up really high and we can see it starts to get more edges that it's able to describe that curve a lot more accurately. When we get to these corners we can see it's not doing what we wanted to do, so we can just continue to increase these divisions. Clicking and dragging, it maxes out at 25 but we can select the box here and just type in a number that we want. Again, that doesn't look exactly like what we want so let's hit 60, maybe 100. We can just keep adding them until that's getting pretty close to what we want. A hundred and twenty looks pretty good. Let's inspect everything. It's looking pretty good. Now, we're still in component mode. Component meaning a vertex, an edge or a face, because we can still select faces and we can't go and select the entire object. To do that, we can right-click and go to object mode. Alternatively, we can click this little button up here, that will get us back into object mode. So, we also have the polyExtrude over here as an input and it gives us the same type of options that this window gives us, number of divisions, all that kind of thing. So, we can continue to adjust that as much as we want later even though that window's no longer up. We still have the options. It's just a little hidden down here under the inputs. Okay, great. Let's unhide the sphere by hitting Shift H or we could go over here and turn on the visibility by pressing one, and now we have the data points with a line through them. 5. Line Graph 3/10 - Rigging line for animation: In this lesson, we'll now rig this graph for animation. If you are not interested in animation or animating this graph and you just want to still frame, then you can skip this lesson and the animation lesson and just go on to the next ones. But if we want to animate this thing, we need to give ourselves ways to control it. So to do that, that's called rigging. So, let's begin. Let's click our curve over here in the outliner. If you don't have your outliner, I'll open again, that's Windows, Outliner. With our curve selected, we're going to introduce a new little trick called the isolate select button up here. It's a cursor with a dash square. When we click that, it will isolate whatever selection we have. Because the curve was on the inside of that tube, it's easier to select it from the outliner. Similarly to the tube, we can also select components of a curve and in the same way, if we right-click and hold, we'll also get options similarly to the phases that we selected on the tube. We have different types of controls for a curve. So, what we want is control vertex. We're going to right-click and let go over here over control vertex. Now we can see, we've gotten the points back that we originally created when we first drew the curve between the points. So, the reason why we're rigging it though instead of just animating these points individually, is that we would have to animate multiple things. We'd have to animate this point and then we have to go animate the sphere, and all that kind of a thing. So, we want to rig it in a way that we just have to animate one thing and I'm choosing the sphere. So, later when we animate it, we'll select the sphere and just animate that. We want this curve and the tube to follow along. Because we created the tube extruded along the curve, the tube is already going to follow this curve. So, we want to constrain these points to the spheres. To start doing that, we need to select the first one and go to the animation menu. You can get to it from this drop-down over here. Select "Animation" and then you have the option menu for deform. We'll click that and there's alot of options, but we are only interested in the cluster option. Click, Cluster and then we get this little C down here and we get a new item in the outliner called the cluster handle and with that selected, we can now move the curve as well. So, it looks similar to what we already have with the control vertices, but what this allows us to do is create a parent-child relationship. If we click the Cluster Handle we middle mouse click it in the outliner and we drag it to the top where we know the pSphere, which is the cluster, this is over. If we drop it in here, let me go back, I'm clicking, Isolate Select again to get back to see everything. Now that we have middle mouse drag this over the sphere, once we click the sphere, this cluster is a child of it so it will follow it. So, it's following it around as well as the tube that follows the curve. So, it creates these relationships that'll make it easier to animate each one of these balls. We can see that there's a little problem down here, not everything is going with the curve. That's because, when we extruded the cylinder over the curve we just selected the top faces. So to fix that, we can just create another cluster for this little section of the tube that we did not extrude over the curve. So, let's isolate the tube here by clicking the "Isolate Select". Let's go back to the faces by right clicking and dragging down to Face to select Face and let's click and drag and just select all of these bottom faces that aren't following the curve yet. Then we'll go back to the form a new and create another Cluster. Now we have another C and we have a cluster to handle down here. Again, we'll just repeat the same thing we did middle mouse drag it over pSphere. Now, we undo Isolate and we have the sphere selected and move it, the whole thing moves with it. There's still a little weirdness going on, it looks like one edge isn't following. So, let's look at that. I believe it's this edge. So if we right-click and now we can choose edges, let's just delete that edge. We can delete an edge by holding down shift and then right-clicking and we get this menu that says Delete Edge over here. Okay. Now, we have the sphere and now it no longer looks a little wonky there at that intersection. Okay, cool. So, let's undo to get that back in the right position and let's just repeat what we did for each one of these spheres. We'll do this next one together and then I'll speed the rest up. So, let's Isolate Select the curve again. Go up here Isolate Select, right-click Control Vertex and we'll select this Control Vertex to form Cluster, then we'll middle mouse drag the Cluster to the pSphere too. Let's unisolate that, select the sphere and now we have control over that sphere. Cool, all right. I'll leave it up to you to do the rest of these points. I'm just going to repeat exactly what I just did for each one of these points and I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Line Graph 4a/10 - Animation Part 1: In this lesson, we will begin animating, and it will be a lot easier now that we have the line graph rigged for animation. The c's that we see for all the clusters are a little distracting, so there's two ways that we could hide those just for ourselves right now. We can go to show and go down to Deformers. I think it's in the middle here Deformers, click that, and we can hide the Deformers that way. The other way we could do that, is a little more technical but what the heck. Will go up here to this little box. If you don't have that, there's these little vertical lines that turn into arrows. So, you can collapse these portions of the menu up here. So, you might not see in all of this mess up here, the option to write in anything. So, it'll be kind of the second from the last on the right. If it doesn't look like this, it might say xyz because it's probably, I think the default is this. But if we click this icon and hold it, we can select by name. This is just going to be an easier way to select all the clusters, because your outliner should look like mine now. There's clusters under each one of these and to select each one is kind of monotonous a little bit and takes too much time. Let's go to the select by name up here, and we'll just type cluster because we know that's how each one of those are named. The first thing in the name is cluster. I don't want to type in one through 12 or whatever we have. I can just hit an asterisk up here. Let me move my cursor so you can see it. So, it says cluster asterisk and I'll hit enter. So, the asterisk means, anything can be there after whatever I have before the asterisk. It's like cluster and then it could be whatever and it'll select it. For us, that means it can be cluster one, two, three, four, five, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. As long it says cluster, and then we put an asterisk to signal, I don't care what comes after cluster. Just select everything that says cluster. Then, whatever after that, I don't care, that's what the asterisk means. So, we have all the clusters selected, and that's a quick way to do that. In Maya, there's also, of course, there's everything under the sun in here. Again, just ignore this if you don't really- this doesn't feel like that's important to you. This isn't crucial to the course at all. It's just trying to teach you a little bit more Maya as we go along. There are these display layers over here. So, there's nothing in there right now, and there's this little tab that says Display. There these four icons and we can go over here, and we can say, create a new layer and assign selected objects. That tool tip might be off the screen a little bit. But if you hover over it and just leave your mouse there, that's what all say. So, because we have those clusters selected, if we pick this icon over here, it'll automatically add everything we have selected to this layer. Just to keep everything clean, we can call that clusters. Now, we have one button to turn on and off the visibility of all those items. If the clusters, the c's getting annoying, just click that. Okay, so let's get to animating. Because we did all the rigging, we can take each one of these spheres and just animate the spheres. So, before we start animating the spheres, we want to save the position that they're all in, because that's where we want them to end up. Let's go down here to the timeline, which is this little area that we can scrub this cursor back and forth, if you click and hold it. We're working in 24 frames a second by default, which you can get to. You can see over here there's a little drop-down menu. If you're in an earlier version of Maya, you might have to go to the settings over here which is this man with the gear, and it's up here, and we can pick our frame rate up here. But let's stick with 24 frames a second, that's what most movies are made in. We can scroll up to let's just pick like 60 for right now. We can select the sphere. Go over to Translate Y and we can right-click and say key selected. We can see this little red mark up here by the Translate Y, value is displayed, and we can do that for each one. We can shift select, each one, and then we can say right-click key selected. We could hit S and it'll key everything, and that's a shortcut for that. But just to be efficient with the keys, and so, we signal to ourselves that we only want to key the Y Translate. We don't want to take one of these balls and go over here or whatever. This is a graph, we would just want to stay in its y-axis, so we just want to key the Translate Y. So, now that we have this little red mark on the 60 time mark in the timeline, we can drag this back earlier, let's say 30. We can select all the spheres, let's do it from the outline of this time, and let's just hit zero. Actually, before we do that, let's take a look down here and make sure that our auto keyframe is on. If that was off and we change this value, it kind of gets what we want. But then, when we scrub the timeline, it disappears again. So to save, anytime that we move an attribute that is keyed already, that will auto key it. So, let's go to 30 and will go to zero, for all of those. Great, so now, they're all starting out at the bottom. Now, the only thing that looks on to me about this is the fact that, this tube that we scrub now, at some point it turns black. So, let's troubleshoot that. A lot of 3D, nothing works perfect the first time or maybe ever, but you kind of go along and do what you can and then fix things as they pop up. Like the cluster before, I'm suspecting that probably has something to do with that on the first sphere. So let's go down to where frame 30, where we know all of these spheres are keyed on. We can see this red little line down here. So, let's scroll over here because I'm guessing it's probably has to do with this first one. Let's take this sphere and drag it up. What's happening is, the tube is flipping. It's turning inside and out essentially. It doesn't know which way to go as everything gets even with each other. So, we'll just have to kind of cheat that a little bit and have this first sphere be like a little above each all of the other ones. When this is animating, it'll happen so quick. You won't be able to tell that little bit of a difference. This little kink in the tube is a little more noticeable. So, let's go to our handle, our cluster, the second one we made for this sphere. Actually, let's turn on the cluster so we can see it, and that we have it selected. We can hit e to get rotation, and if we select the axis that we want to rotate on, it'll isolate it and kind of get this a little pie chart looking thing that it will isolate and we can see how far we're rotating it. Conversely, we could rotate it from the channel box over here, by middle mouse dragging in the viewport, once we have that atributtes selected. So, I think if we key this, let's go to 60, because we know this is where it wants to end up in this position. So, we can key rotations only by hitting Shift E, and that'll key all rotations or if we just want to be very particular and only key that rotate Z which is the axis we will be animating it on to fix this problem. We can just right-click in the channel box and choose key selected. So, let's go back to frame 30, where we chose to begin the animation and we can rotate this down. Okay, great. So, we fixed that little issue we can hide the clusters again, and look at our animation. To play animation, you can hit the play button over here on the far right or you can hit Alt V on the keyboard. So, that looks it's something, that's moving, it's not super interesting so, let's make this look a little more appealing. So, let's do that in the next lesson. 7. Line Graph 4b/10 - Animation Part 2: In this lesson, let's make this look a little more appealing. We can start by adding a little bounce to the end of their position. When they go up to it, it'll kind of go past and then kind of settle, kind of bounce, spring back into the little resting position here. The idea is, if this is the end position up here, and this is the start position down here, we're going to go up and we'll go past that position so, this will be a new key frame up here. Then we're going to go down past the end position again, but not as far as this distance, right? We want to go shorter. So, we want to go maybe up here. These lines aren't indicative of going this direction. This is just me making room for having room to go up and down, and then we'll go again back but not as far as either these distances and then maybe back down and end on that position. We can choose all of these and deal with all of them. Because the first and last one are kind of ending and starting in the same position, we'll just ignore them. We can shift select all of the middle spheres and from the outliner and let's go to where everything ends. Let's go out maybe five frames and we will translate, create a new key frame on Translate Y, right-clicking and say Key Selected. Go another five frames and do the same thing. Go another five frames, do the same thing and I think that's enough. Basically, we're making a new end position. So, the end is really going to be 75 now. This first one, we're going to drag everything past where it should be. Now, when we go to 65, it's going to snap back to the original position. So, we know where the ground zero is, for where we're bouncing in between. Because we know we want to go passed that again down. When we go to 70, it snapped back again, and then we just slightly go up just a little bit. When we play that alt v, kind of springs so, goes up down back, up down back. A way to visualize that is in the Graph Editor. If you're familiar with After Effects or a lot of packages have this. If you do any type of animation, the Graph Editor is a very common thing and tool to have in any software. If you go to windows, you're going onto the animation editors and then you choose Graph Editor. Now, we can see green is for Translate Y so, we know that's Translate Y. We can see this kind of springy thing that we drew in Photoshop. It goes up, then down, then up, then down, right? That's what it looks like right here, up down, up down, okay? We can also leave this up. I'm going to drag this off just so we can see the screen. We can also edit from the Graph Editor but let's play back what we have and see if we need to make any edits. So everything kind of happens at the same time. What we can do now, is to offset the timing of everything, because it's all happening at the same time and that's not appealing in animation. If everything happens at the same time, that's a no-no. So, let's change that. Let's deselect the first one. We can control right-click and drag and deselect it. You could also control click it in the outliner. Let's take all of these keys and drag them down two frames. So, you can move frames two different ways, you can move them in the Graph Editor and you can move them on the timeline and I prefer the Graph Editor just because it's a lot easier to select everything. You just click and drag whereas, down here, you have to shift select and then drag everything and it makes it red and it's like where do I select and it's just kind of busy down here, it's hard to see. It's just not my preference. We could click here and just start dragging and it'll do the same thing you see in the Graph Editor moving it around, but I just like the Graph Editor. We have all of the keys selected, clicking and dragging. We have only the middle ones minus the second one, because that one's going to start the animation. That's going to kind of do a domino effect from left to right. So, let's hit W, and then let's hold shift, and middle mouse and then you see we have this little question mark pop-up with an arrow. It saying which direction do you want to isolate? So, the first movement our mouse makes is the direction it will choose to isolate it. So, it's a little sensitive, when you first start. If you middle mouse and then you go to the right now, it's isolated in left and right. It will not go up and down. If we wanted to go change the vertical values we could- our first movement with the mouse after we shift and middle click, could be up and down. If you mess that up just now, take your hand off the shift and take your right finger off of middle mouse and just start and try again, if that's too complicated for you. Just keep practicing that. Okay, so we want to go to the right by two frames for each one of these spheres, so, it'll be an offset of two frames. So, we'll one, two, then we'll deselect the next one, then we'll go pick our W again to get the Move Tool, select everything. Shift middle mouse drag one, two, deselect that. Select everything and W to get the Move Tool one, two, deselect one, two. I'll do it over here now, one, two. Again, that's command or control click over here in outliner to deselect something. Okay. So now when we select all the spheres and we look, and we can see each one is offset, and there's a bunch of red marks now down here in the timeline, that's okay. Because we know we did that on purpose and we did it after we did the animation that's kind of key. If you start offsetting things and then try to do this, you're just wasting your time. I did this intentionally, do all of the springy animation first together, and then do the offsets one by one, okay? So let's play back and see what we have. Alt+V, that's much more appealing than the first thing that we had, and I'm liking that quite a bit. So, that's the end of the lesson for animating. I will see you in the next one. 8. Line Graph 5/10 - Modeling background: Okay. Now that we have the animation done, let's focus on getting this thing finished. Let's create an x and y-axis, a background and then maybe some titles for each of the months. We'll start by creating the background. We'll go up here and click the square; and if we hit F, we can see, if we F4, we can see it is inside there. Let's drag that down by hitting W. We have the translate options, and by hitting R, we get the scale options. Let's just scale that up. Actually, one thing we can do to make this a little easier is let's move the pivot point back over here now. We can do that by holding down D, and now we see we have these new options as soon as we start holding down D. Let's hit the X and drag it back here. Now, when we scale it, we'll only go from that direction. If we want to make it exact, we can actually hold D and then V and then do this, and it'll snap two vertices. So, let's hit R again, and now we can scale this out as far as the length of the line chart. Down around over here is good, and let's try that down a little bit and let's make it a little wider. Now, we can see it's starting to have a place to live there. Let's make it a little thicker. Go back into shaded mode by hitting 5 on the keyboard. Now, we can get rid of the grid because we are now making our own floor here. So, we can go up here and click this little button to get rid of the grid. So, now, we can see how our own floor is turning out. Just to give it a little more roundness because it's so sharp, we can right-click and go to edge while our cursor is over the object, and then we can select all of the edges, and let's go up here to the bevel option. We can also get to it from the modelling tool set if we click the far left button up here and we get a new set of tools, and that same icon is over here for bevel. So, when we bevel it, it will divide everything down and try to round out these edges, and we get this new option to adjust different things. Let's crank up the settings to round off that edge a little bit, and then we can increase the distance of how far end it bevels with the fraction. I think that's pretty good. We can right-click and drag to object mode to get back to object mode, unclick that and it's a little nicer instead of that straight edge. Now, we can duplicate this, command D or control D, and we can rotate that 90 degrees. To make sure it's exactly 90, we can go over here, go down to rotate Z, instead 86, we can just type in 90, now it's exactly 90. We can do the same thing for our backdrop and duplicate this, rotate it in the X, 90 degrees. And we can move the pivot now to the bottom of this, we can hit D, hold down D and V and then we can drag it to the bottom. And then, if we hold V without the D, well, we have our W manipulator tool option on, it will just move vertex snap that object down. Now, we just need to move it back a little bit so we can vertex snap that again to the back. If we go into component mode, right-clicking vertex, we can select the top vertices and just drag them up to create the backdrop. We can do the same thing for this one that we rotated up, go to vertices and bring them down. I would vertex snap this by holding down V but then it'll smash and get rid of that nice little bevel we have, so we can just eyeball this since the camera is not going to be spending a ton of time up there or that won't be very noticeable if it's barely off. So, right-click and choose object mode to get out of that component mode and let's see. Let's move this over a little bit. Let's actually move all of that. Just go over here, and now it's a little easier. Shifts, click those, just drag them over, I mean drag them down a little bit. Okay. Cool. So, we have our little shelf, maybe let's pull these down so they're even. Go to the vertices, so they're even with the bottom here. All right. Great. Now, we'll add the 12 months to the axes and add some numbers to the vertical axis, the y-axis in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 9. Line Graph 6/10 - Adding text: Adding texts in the newer versions of Maya is pretty straightforward. We actually have this Text tool up here. They've introduced it in the last few versions of Maya. When you click it, it will change the Channel box now on to the Attribute box over here on the right. We can see that's selected by this button over here as the Attribute. We can go back to the channel over here. But to be able to change the text in there, we want to go to the type attribute node. There's all these tabs up here. I need to do something a little different. But for the housing of all the info that we're concerned about, it's under the type node which is what you'd expect by its name. So, we can type in Jan for January. We can drag that down. Let's pull up the grid again. We'll actually go to, so I'm holding down space, and clicking, and dragging, and letting go. We'll go to the front menu. So, we can see the grid and where it's lined up. Let's center the text. We can see it's lined up with that vertical axis. Problem is it's a little too big because it's going to run and we need room for each one of the months over here. So, we can reduce the font size quite a bit. Let's make that just an even number so we can remember it, and then we can hit the Type tool again, at seven, say Feb. Maybe we want to put periods here, and then we can hold down X like we were doing earlier with V. X means the grid. So, will snap to the grid. We want to center align that. Let's just see how far down and we pull this so we can pull all of them the same distance down, negative, let's say, 15. So, now we know negative 15 every time, and then we'll just do this for every month. Then, we can do the same thing for the values up here. We know that we're starting at 55 from our original data set. Now, we're putting a grid down. Let's actually adjust this to reflect closer to this because I think it would be slightly deceiving to have this be on the very bottom like it's implying it's zero or something. So, I think it's nice when it's in this kind of condensed view to have the first value well above this X-axis. So, let's make that edit right now, then I'll show you an easy way to do that. We can select all the spheres because we know that all the spheres control the way that we rigged it. It controls everything. So, we can go to the Graph Editor. We'll go Windows, Animation Editors, Graph Editor. We can see all the key frames that we made. If we click select and drag all of those and we hit W to pull up the Transform tool, we can do what we did earlier when we offsetted these in the X-axis and in time, I'm going to do this vertically in value. So, if we look at the graph here, it looks like 60. They're going by increments of five. So, we can do the same thing with our grid that we have here. So, let's pull up this sphere to this line and we'll call that 60. That way, we'll know everything else after it is going to be in relation, it will be in the right position. So, let's hover over here, hit W, and we'll hold down Shift, middle mouse, and then start scrolling upwards or not scrolling, but we'll start moving our cursor upwards. So, we'll get that right. I'm looking at that February month. We'll get that right on that grid line. We can see that the following months should be somewhat in that ballpark. Okay, and I'm just now realizing I think originally I moved the wrong sphere to the wrong data point, but of course, this is just a made up example. So, I'm not going to worry about that too much. We can go to May and pull that down. I think it's from January, February, March, April, May. I think May is too high. So, we can go over here and just select the top ones because we don't want to mess with where it's starting. We can just pull this one down because it looks like it's pretty straight, and then it pops up in June. So, February, March, April, May, and then June. Now, that looks right. Okay, so, you can go in and tweak this stuff on the fly as you're editing it. It looks like because we moved everything up that both of these edges are maybe too high. So, if we want we could do the vertex and pull that up. So, let's drag those up a little bit. Now, we can click through this side one and do the same. At F2, frame up on. Get it even with the top here. So, I also just hit spacebar here, and that's a quick way to jump between the four-view option here and the single-view. You can enlarge whichever view that you want. So, you could do it by the spacebar as we've been doing, or you can just hit spacebar by itself once, and it'll pull up the four windows and bounce back and forth. Okay, so, now we have January February, and we can do the rest of the months. Let's just group these together and try to stay organized. I'm setting command G to group things. Great. So, I'll continue to make the January and February just to show the numbers as well. It's the same process I'm going into the front view which you can get with the spacebar. You can see because I switched to the front view it's now this top right one which used to be perspective as now front. So, we have two fronts. So, we can just change that top right one back to perspective if we want. I'm going to go in and hit the text tool again and call this 55, move this over, and I'll hold on X. It looks like will be close to maybe that grid point and maybe 10 just to be in the neighborhood of the seven that we know that this text is. Then, I'll do the rest of these going up the grid and going down the months. I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Line Graph 7a/10 - Adding materials and shading: In this lesson, we will add some color to our graph. We have this gray shaded thing now. It's hard to see what's going on. So, let's take an overview of what we've done so far and get caught up. I made all of the numbers as we had done for all the other text. In the front view, I used the grid to help get them in the right place by holding X, and snapping to the grid. I made all the months and put them in their own groups. So, you should have something similar to this in the outliner, that looks like that. Now that we have the text in groups, we can select just the groups, and let's bring them to the front now. That looks pretty good. Let's start to add colors. So, let's select the background pieces and we'll add a new material. We'll do that by holding down right-click while our mouse is over one of them, and we'll scroll down to where it says, Assign New Material, and we'll release the right mouse. There's a lot of materials here, but we're going to keep it simple and use an old standby called the Blinn. Now, we have assigned the shader to all three of those. We can hit six and go into a mode where we can begin to see the color changes. We're in the attribute editor right now, which is this button under the attribute editor here as well. So, you can minimize that, bring it back. When I brought it back, you can see we don't have the same window that we had. That's not a big deal. We can see that we still have the Blinn over here in this tab. So, we can just click that tab. We can also rename the shader to be something else, backgroundColor maybe. I've already experimented and picked the color that I like. So, I'm just going to enter those values in here. You can also change to RGB. This is hue saturation and value. So, sometimes Maya is a little buggy, and depending on the update that you have, the version, you might run into things like this that we change the color, but now, it's not changing anymore. So, let's go out. I'm hitting space bar. Let's test these other views to see if they're doing the same thing. Yeah, it appears to be a glitch in Maya. So, let's run through a couple of things. I'm just throwing down a light and running through the different modes. Okay. So, it looks like we had to open up the Hypershade to get the color to work. Basically, Maya can be glitchy. That's why I say, post questions and discussion or message me, if you run into something like this, where you get a result you didn't expect or nothing happens when something should happen. Sometimes it is just a bug and I'm sure maybe they've probably been fix this by now. This is a pretty obvious one. So, I'm sure they fix this. I'd rather leave this stuff in the course, then edit this out, so you can see what actually happens in real life when you're using 3D. So, what I did to fix that was, I finally figured out how to work around it, and that was to open up what's called the Hypershade. That's just the library of your materials. So, to get to the Hypershade, you can click this little globe over here and this is next to all the window buttons. If you don't have that, it might be collapsed down like one of these little arrows. So, you can click that, and you can open up the Hypershade, and that seem to refresh the shaders, which makes sense, it's the library. So, that would refresh what we're seeing. Unfortunately, that's a part of working on 3D, is every time they come out with a new version of Maya, the things that used to work now don't work or they're just a little glitchy, and then they make updates forum. It's just a constant thing that if you use Maya or any 3D package, you'll have to get comfortable with troubleshooting stuff like this and not freak out. It's just part of working in 3D. So anyway, let's get back on track and change the color back to what I had it. So, if I click on the color here, and we'll remember the different kinds of colors that I've picked too lately. So, there's the last one that I did. So, I'll pick that, and of course, it's not working again. So, let's try to refresh with the Hypershade again. That seem to work again. So, I had to close the Hypershade and reopen it. Let's apply a new shader to the tube. So, right-click and go down to assign new material. For this one, I'm just going to choose a Lambert. It is pretty similar to a Blinn except it doesn't have reflections. So, I'm going to pick the color I had chosen earlier. One thing that I'm not a huge fan of now that I'm saying this, is how thick the cylinder is. We can change that after the fact. Even though, we've done all these things, and we've rigged it to this curve, and animated it, and all that stuff, Maya keeps a history of everything you do to objects. You can get to those in the channel box over here, and click that, and scroll down, and you'll have a history of everything that you've done. So, we can see we made the polyCylinder, we extruded it, and then the tweak and cluster are about the deformer, and then we deleted that edge over here as well. So, it keeps a history of everything that we did. So, let's just go back to the first one and click on that. It pops down a menu of things, and we can click on Radius, and middle mouse drag in the viewport. On hold, it changes the radius of the whole thing. I think we need a little smaller radius now that we've done some work on it. Then, I'm going to click all the spheres. I'm going to go to outliner, and Shift select them all over here, and hover over one of them, and right click and hold, and go to Assign New Material again. I'm going to choose another Blinn, and go to that color, and then choose a color I had found earlier that I like, and there we go. 11. Line Graph 7b/10 - Adding materials and shading: One other thing we can do is to add some lights. We can also add some grids to this by duplicating this out, and bring it up, and scaling it in. I'm just eyeballing this just for speed sake, but of course, you get very specific with this stuff if you need to be. So scale that in, just to have some kind of grid lines here on the numbers that I put in. I'm sending Command D to duplicate, I'm dragging those up, and we can do the same for the horizontal. So, I'm going to duplicate that, or actually, let's duplicate special from just this side one. So, I haven't duplicated it yet it's still just that one. So, I'll go to edit, duplicate special, I'm clicking the little square over here to pull up these options, and we have the options from the last time that we worked as well saved in here. So, we can actually just do that again, except we're going to need 12 of them this time, and I can hit duplicate special, and we get 12 of them. So, the only thing we need to do is to line those up with the grid of the months. So there we go. Then, we can scale all of them together to help make the grid a little better size and then push that back against this wall, and that stuff can just go straight through to the back. That's not going to hurt anything. Then, we need to make these little smaller as well. So, we can scale that down and push it back into the back wall, kind of even with the, you can see this front edge is even with the vertical ones. So, now we have a little grid as well. One of the last things we can do is to light it as well. So, we can go to the rendering tab up here and click a directional light, and nothing changed yet because we don't have lights turned on. So, we can hit this little light bulb or we can hit seven on our keyboard. By scaling lights, it doesn't really do anything, it's just for yourself to visualize what's going on, and let's go down with that, and let's turn on shadows as well, which is right next to the light bulb. So, it adds a little more dimensionality there, and you can adjust the angle of the light. Then, let's add an ambient light as well, which is this far left one. It just lights up everything as you can see, which is a little too much right now. So, we can go to maybe 0.2 and intensity. To get to that, I'm just in the attribute section here, and you can just scroll through the tabs and find the one that has the color and intensity for the light. Okay. So, I don't want to see the lights anymore because I think I'm happy with that. So, I can just say show and say lights. So, we can still see the lights. That's not the same thing as light ball up here, let's just seeing them, the manipulators i, n the screen. So, I kind of like that. Okay. Let's play that and see what we got. So, to export this from Maya, we are going to make a play blast. Play blast simply exports exactly what we see in the viewport right here, and we can adjust the dimensions that I will export, if we want HD, like 1080p. To test the framing and see where the camera is, let's press this little frame button up here, and that will give us the framing and it'll also tell us 960 by 540, which is too small. So, let's go up here to this little gear box next to the hyper shade that we talked about earlier, and those are the render settings. It'll open up a new window, and there's a lot of options here but let's just scroll down to the bottom of this first tab, and we can just choose a preset for HD 1080. Cool. Now, we can see that changed up here and now where in 1080. One thing we can do as well is to help sell the effect of this being 3D is to make a little animated camera move. So, let's do that in the next lesson. 12. Line Graph 8/10 - Camera animation and playblasting: In this lesson, we will animate a camera, so, that we can export a movie from here with an animated camera. We're currently viewing through the perspective camera, we can see that down here it says, persp. If we go to panels, we can see we have one perspective and then orthographic we can see our other views. We want to create a new camera, because we don't want to animate the camera, we actually use to navigate around, that would make a ton of sense and we'd constantly be adding keys and deleting keys, just to be able to navigate and see what we're doing. So, we want to animate on a separate camera, we click new and it will automatically put us in that new camera we can see it's persp1, we can rename that as renderCam, so we can make sure we're keeping track of that. Let's get it down here in the neighborhood and turn on the framing, so we can make sure we're framing it up correctly. Let's just do something subtle. So, let's go to frame one and we'll change to the channel boxes up here so we can see the translate rotates and we're just going to hit S because we are going to key everything on this and let's go all the way to the end maybe. I will just do like a subtle camera angle change, and because we have our- sorry, I had that window up there. Because we had our auto key on, it automatically made a keyframe here. So, when we start to scrub, that animation is already in there. Let's play back and see. I think that's pretty good. Now, we can export this as a movie in a couple of different ways. We aren't going to do a super fancy render, that takes a lot more time and we'll get into the width a little bit too much on that. For this first one, I just want to stay with a playblast which is what Maya calls rendering exactly what we're seeing in the viewport. So, let's turn off the guides now that we have it done correctly. Let's also make sure once we have these keyset that we're not all the sudden moving around and then we've changed our animation. So, I'm going to undo that. One way to do that is you can actually lock the camera if we select all of these attributes and then right-click, we can scroll down here and say Lock Selected so if I try to navigate now I can't. The other thing we can do, so we can view things simultaneously let's go to layouts two panes side by side and I can do that again, that's a little too fast. You go to panels and you can go layout two panes side by side. I just did it from the hotbox, the first time there, but this does the same thing and then we can change this one to perspective and now we have the persp down here and the renderCam on left side. So, we can navigate around here, we could even click this to select the camera or we could select it from the outliner. It's locked so we can see that the manipulator tool is grayed out we can't physically, we can't move that. So if we wanted to move it we can unlock it and animate it some more and pull that around. But I think it's okay for our purposes and now we can focus on exporting a movie. If we right-click in the timeline. Okay, I'm going to have to raise this software window of Maya app, just so that we can see the menu. We are still in the frame even though we're smashing with the viewport, that doesn't even matter, we can see that we're still similar framing. If I right-click on a timeline anywhere, I get a bunch of different options and the option we're interested in to export its called a Playblast. If I hover over this square and release, I get a bunch of options and I will reset the settings, so we're all working on the same page and we can export as a- and depending on if you're on a PC or a Mac, this might look a little different. But essentially it's, do you want to render in QuickTime or do you want to render an image sequence? QuickTime, this is just the Kodak to choose from and instead of window, we can choose From Render Settings. Because that's what is describing the dimensions the 1920 by 1080 HD. If we chose window, it would be this squash version and we don't want that, we want from Render Settings and then we want the scale to be one, because we don't want the scaled down version of HD. We want to save this file and you can browse wherever you want to save it to. For this first one, I want to show an image sequence, just in case you want to change the background and we want to make sure we're picking a png, which will have a transparent background here where we have this gradient, because in Maya, the background, if you're doing a QuickTime, you can just hit on B and change the color of the background, playblast out a movie and be done with it. But if you want to take it into something like After Effects and adjust the background or change it, it's a little easier to have an image sequence and have this B transparent around it. So, that's what we're going to do and I'll run you through After. Effects when we're done. So, I've chosen image, png, Render Settings, scale of one and I'm going to save this and make a new folder called playblast, double-click that and again make sure it's a png, I don't know why that doesn't automatically fill that out, and then say LineChart and it'll automatically give it the numbers for each frame and the sequence of pngs. So, this is where I would like change, we've already chosen png. So just double check everything, that is how you would like it and it will playblast this timeline. We've been working at 120 frames but if for whatever reason you have animation that's longer or what have you, then you can adjust that by clicking this little area of the timeline and dragging it out. You can also just type in whatever number you want here and it'll go to that and limit it to that and that's the amount of time you'll playblast. Okay. So, now we're ready to playblast and I will see you in the next lesson. 13. Line Graph 9/10 - Compositing in After Effects: Okay. Now we've exported the play blast. We can see where it exported here and we can switch over to After Effects and load in our image sequence, and can right click over here and say, "Import" "File". We can go to wherever we had saved it and you just need to click one of the images and it should register as a PNG sequence. If it doesn't you can click this check box and it will import as a sequence. We can see it is in 24 frames a second, if it wasn't in 24 frames a second or you changed the frames per second from Maya you can right-click on the file over here and go to "Interpret Footage", go to "Main" and in here we can choose what frame rate we want right here assume this frame rate but 24 is fine so we'll just go with that. We can click and drag this into a new composition button and it'll make a new tab here for the new composition and we can fit this and see that we have a transparent background. So, that worked out great and the only little thing is there are these, the axes and the cam that we had chosen. So, we can just click the layer, go to the mask box and click and drag it over there and instead of add we want subtract. We can do the same thing here as well and say "Subtract". So, now that we have our image here we can see it kind of just stops abruptly. We can actually extend that out if we would like command K. I can pull up the composition settings or you can go to composition, composition settings. Let's extend this by 100 frames so the duration will be longer and then I can minus out to see it and I'm going to duplicate this layer and then can go to time, freeze frame, and it made a little keyframe here. So, that frame will be held so we will have little camera move and I can hold there. If you're giving a presentation or something or editing this later it just gives you more options to have a little hold there at the end. So, we can make our background now. Let's right-click anywhere over here or you can right-click up here and say, "New" "Solid". We can pick gray of some kind maybe and hit "Okay", drag this to the bottom and I don't like that color so we can go to the effects controls right-click and say "Generate" "Fill" and then we can change that color to whatever we want. Turn saturation down all the way okay, and then let's do something like that and then let's make a vignette and choose an adjustment layer which is just one off of the screen here, right-clicking and l'm just do it up here. "New" "Adjustment Layer" and then in the effects controls we can right-click and add just a bunch of different ways you can do this, just going to add. Let's see this with curves. I'm going to drop this down and then that's dark and everything but I just want to darken the border. So, I'm going to go to the "Ellipse Tool" with this Adjustment Layer selected and I will double-click it and it will make an ellipse, the size of the composition and I want to go to "Subtract". Now, it's reversed it and I toggle down mask and feather the mask. So, I'm just clicking and dragging and it's made a nice little vignette. I think it makes it look a lot better. So, our movie is ready export from After Effects. We can do that by going to "Composition", "Add to Render Queue". The shortcut is also on a Mac command shift dash, and it'll add it to the render queue. We can choose what codec we want to export as. Apple progress 42 is a little overkill. I'm going to say H.264, summit data rate to 12,000. We don't have any audio and then we can specify a location here, say line chart save and we'll hit "Render". In the next lesson I will just do one little finishing touch thing that goes a little deeper into After Effects. So, if you're interested in that follow along to the next lesson otherwise you can just skip that. It's just a little flow of chart a little bit of glow to our render to make it pop a little bit more. Thanks for watching. 14. Line Graph 10/10 - Adding glow in After Effects: Okay, I wanted to have one little bonus video that focuses a little more on after effects and how to punch up something as simple as this playblast to just make it a little bit nicer. What we're going to do is glow these red balls, and we're going to do that with keying. So, we're going to want to key this whole thing so instead of having to do it twice between this held layer and this one, let's just pre-compose both of these. So, we'll go to Layer, Pre-compose and that'll add them into one layer. We'll move all attributes and hit Okay. Now, we just have one layer to work with which will be much easier. So, let's duplicate that one layer, and we want to isolate the red balls and we can do that through keying. So, let's go to the Effects Controls, right-click and go down to Keying, and choose Keylight 1.2 or whichever version you have. Keylight, and we'll pick the screen color to be this red. So, let's go over to this red, select that, and let's isolate this so that we can see that it's actually worked. So, we can see through to the other side. So, now that we have this isolation, we also don't want this background. So, we can actually add, let's add that background into the pre-composition. Let's jump in here by double-clicking and we're going to add this to the bottom. So, now we only have the red balls. So, we could have done that earlier but that's one of those things I didn't realize till after the fact, that's probably what we need to pre-compose as. So, we have this isolation. Let's choose a new solid, right-click it down here, New, Solid, and we're going to make it to be this red color that we chose, hit Okay, and we'll drag it below this layer that we keyed. So, now it looks pretty similar to what we had before. Let's just see what the difference is. It's pretty similar, you can't really tell the difference. So, what we want do is use this red and add it on top of this other red. By using an add blend mode, it'll make it look a little brighter like it's almost like a light source. So, I don't know if you noticed that change. Let me zoom in so we can see that a little better. So, this is normal and this is add. To make it glow, we need to blur this out a little bit. If we were to blur the red, that wouldn't really do much because it's just a solid color. So, what we need to do is blur what it is matted by to blur these edges. So, let's go up here to the line chart and go under the keying, right-click and choose Blur, Fast Blur. Let's repeat edge pixels and we'll just undo this so we can see what we're doing, and we'll drag up this blurriness. Let's turn off the visibility so we can't see the actual layer, and make sure that we are doing an Alpha Inverted Matte. So, now what we've got is this red solid being matted by this blurred out layer, and it's blurring this edge that we keyed out around these red orbs. So, it kind of fakes this glow effect. If we turn that on and off, you can see it does add quite a bit, it just adds a little life to this. We could go through and do a similar thing to the lines but I think for this purpose, I think the red orbs are just a nice little pop, a little ping to this graph. So, I'm liking where that's at and I think that's ready to render again, and of course we could do this more than once. We can duplicate this and make it even brighter. That's a little too much but I think it does help a little bit, so we can click here on the red layer and hit T to pull up opacity, and we can just dull that back a little bit just to add a little extra glow than what we had before. So, I think that's good. Let's render it, Command shift dash or question mark, and choose the correct codec that we would like. I'm going to go LT this time and hit Okay, turn off the audio and save it as glow. All right, that is how you make a line chart in Maya and After Effects. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next class where we will discuss more data visualization in Maya. 15. Bar Graph 1/10 - Modeling bars and background: For this class on creating a bar graph we're going to focus more on the renderer than the animation. But in the animation I am going to show you some different performers than we did in line graph. So, we're going to learn some new stuff and we'll get into some more of the fancy parts of the renderer this time whereas last time we just play blasted it straight from the viewport, this time we're going to make a render and have lights in the scene and get a little more technical with the render aspect and the shading and materials and whatnot. So, let's turn on the anti aliasing to get started up here and smooth everything out there. Let's go ahead and start making the bars we're going to use for the bar graph. We'll go over here up to the polygon cube, and again, if you haven't done this yet you can go to create polygon primitives and turn off the interactive creation so that when you click it will just make it and I won't ask you to draw it. We'll zoom in on the cube we just made, and let's go ahead and bevel the edges, we'll go up here to the bevel tool and because we're going to bevel all the edges so we can just not have to go on to the edge mode. To adjust it, now we have the poly bevel attributes already selected up here, so we can change the fraction and the segments. We can also go to a shaded wireframe mode up here, and click this to see where the segments are and the fraction is. We can also, if middle mouse is dragging here on the view port it goes too fast, you can actually go up here to this middle dial and it will change the speed at which the middle mouse drag moves the value. So now, it'll move much slower and we can get a little finer control over it. So, let's crank up the segments as well. Only bad thing about going to slow is the natural roots that only have a couple digits and it takes a little more movement of the mouse. So I think that's pretty good, I could object mode, I'm going to turn off the wireframe shaded and that looks pretty good and rounded, and I'm going to hit W to pull up translation. I'm going to hit D and V to change the pivot and drag it to the bottom, and then I'm going to hold X to get it to sit right on the floor. So, now we have our first bar and let's go ahead and let's just do six bars. So, we'll go up here to edit, duplicate special, and we'll click on the option box and let's just do five more copies, copy parent. Let's see how far 20 units is right now, okay, that's really far away. So let's reduce that to 10, so I'm going to undo while my cursor is in viewport and actually let's go to five. This scene will be a little bit smaller scale than the last one we worked on, you know what? Let's go to three. Now, let's group all of these and let's make the floor. Let the plane up here and we will scale that up by hitting R and then click in the middle here, and we can increase the divisions over here under poly plane. If we click that we get subdivisions width and height and we can select those and do those at the same time and I'm going to make this go back to medium speed, so that goes a little faster. I'm creating more subdivisions here because this is going to be our floor that is going to be like an infinity background a lot of photographers use, where if we go to the form and non-linear and we create a bend to former and we look at that and it's just right now it says curve that's going vertical which it's hard to tell that it's doing anything is to form anything. But if we click on "Bend" over here we get a curvature option, we can start scrolling that and we can see it is rotating in this direction. So, if we hit E to pull up the rotation we can swing this around 90 degrees, and we can swing it down even with the ground and as we do that we can see what it actually does. So, root zero rotate 90, 90, and so it's not exactly what we want, we want this part to be flat so we can go to high bound, actually it's a low bound, I'll mouse drag that to zero. Now when you look down at this, I'm going to turn off the grid now, we have this infinity what's called an infinity background in photography. Cool, and let's just center up these six, and one way to do that too is to say center pivot under modify, I'll have the group selected, so it'll assign the pivot and I can get this back down to the floor biting D and V and dragging to the bottom, and then I can hold V and isolate the X direction, so don't go back into shaded mode. Now, that we have the bars and the background done, we'll rig the bars for animation in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 16. Bar Graph 2/10 - Rigging for animation: In this lesson, we will make the rigs that we will need for each of the bars. So, let's click on the first one and we'll go to Deform, Lattice. We get this kind of a grid around our object now. If we right-click and hold, now we get the option to edit lattice points. So, this lattice lets us manipulate the object. The only thing we need to remember is the fact that we didn't have subdivisions vertically. So, if we drag it left and right, it's going to pivot from the lowest subdivision which is down here at the bottom. But if we add extra subdivisions here in the middle, this would deform as you would expect it. It would only adjust at the top or whatever. But for us, we're just going up and down, so we don't need those subdivisions in the boxes here that are going to be our bar graphs. So, the only other thing we need to change for this lattice, we can go back to Object Mode, we have the lattice options over here in the right like most objects that we've been changing. You can change the divisions for each one, but we're only interested in going up and down and five is a little overkill. But I will say that we would want a division. We want to animate this section together because we don't want to stretch the bevel out and have that get bigger as we go up. We want that to all move together. See how it is stretching at the bottom here if we scale up. It doesn't really look that good. We want to maintain this bevel as it's animated upward. So, we want our lattice to withhold, at least one section of this lattice to hold that top part of the bevel so we can move it up together. So, but five is a little overkill, so we can reduce that down to four. That looks pretty good. So, what we can do now is we can actually set keyframes on these lattice points. Let's set the first one and then we can go up here to 30 and hit W to get that translate and then we can just move that up. Now, we have a way to animate the bars. In the next lesson, we'll get a little more specific on how to be particular when we are animating these. I'll show you the grid options here in the next video. Thanks for watching. 17. Bar Graph 3/10 - Bar animation: So, I've gone ahead and repeated what we did in the last video over the other bars and now we have all these lattices here and the outliner is getting a little messy, so we can shift select all those and middle mouse drag them into the bars group since they are a part of that. Now we can move everything together if we need to and we still have the animation on that one. But, what if we want to get very specific and know exactly where we're dragging these so it work on a grid like a chart does? We could go to the front view actually and turn on our grid. If we go into wireframe, we can see through the backdrop and it's a little distracting because it has its own subdivisions. So, let's go over here and just hit Control H or you could have it selected and turn off the visibility over here biting one or zero, turn on and off. The grid that we have is really big, so, to use these as a measuring stick would be kind of difficult. So let's change the increments that the grid is set at. Let's go to display and the first option here is grid and let's go over to the option box. In this section we are going to see the units that it's using are pretty big, so we can take two zeros out. I think of each one of these and let's go ahead and hit Apply. That'll leave this Window open if we hit Apply and Close, it will close this. So, let's hit Apply so we can keep making changes and that looks a lot better but it's hard to see and it's just all the same, we can't really see increments of maybe 10 of these. So, let's change the colors of some of these. Let's try the red one. So, now we can see we have these increments here and that's pretty helpful. We can also change the axes if we want. I like keeping the ones that there are the most of the subdivision lines, it's best to keep those neutral. If you do something crazy with those is just gets too much to look at. Okay. So now we have these grids to work with and we can animate the lattices a lot easier. Okay, and we can scroll down and start going to our lattices, right-clicking, lattice point, hit S, go to 30 and we can use the grids here as a means to make sure we're hitting the right values for whatever that we're trying to recreate here. I'm just making these up so you might have an actual data set that you can decide on a y axis increment value. So, you'll notice I've actually forgotten to hit the S button on these and set a key at the beginning. So, what we can do is the lattices have a special option to reset them. So, I'll go back and we're on print 30 and I'll hit S. Choose these, hit S. Choose those and hit S. Choose those and hit S. So if you forget to do something like this, it's not the end of the world. So, we can go back to deform, scroll down here to edit section, and go to the lattice and we click this part up her, we can actually tear off that menu because it's something that we're going to use more than once. So it's nice to just leave it up here instead of having to go back to the menu every time. Let's go to the first frame and click on a lattice that we forgot to set the original point. We can say Reset Lattice and it will set that key frame for us because if you remember, over here on the right, we have the auto keyframe on. So when we reset it, it's going to make a keyframe for us. Whoops! I'm on frame three. Reset Lattice. Cool. Okay, cool. Reset Lattice and Reset Lattice then we have animation of our bars going up. Great. I'll see you in the next lesson where we can continue animating and finishing out scene. 18. Bar Graph 4/10 - Refining the animation: So, I've moved all of the lattices into the group for the bars and we've animated them. Now I want to slow all of them down, they all go a little too fast, and I want to delay all of them to start maybe 48 frames in, let's just say 50 frames in. So, the easiest way to do that is through the dope sheet. Last time on the line graph, we worked on the graph editor and we changed the key frames in here if you remember that, we can actually go to the dope sheet here and open that up or we can go through the animation editors up here and click dope sheet. We can turn on what's called the scene summary here and it will select everything in the scene for us, which is the main reason I open the dope sheet anytime is for this tool. Because it's hard to know in the graph editor that you've selected everything. There's no scene summary really that I'm aware of for the graph editor, so the dope sheets were where to do that kind of work. So, let's go to frame 50 and then we're shift middle mouse dragging, I guess you don't really need to hold shift, you can just middle mouse drag that down to 50 to start, and let's double this at least a 50, let's go to 120 for this. So, I'm going to select that, and I can actually type in a value with something selected and then it'll move it down there. So, now you can see we've moved all of them together, and we didn't have to go through and right-click, and go to lattice point, select each one, and then find that in the graph editor and moved them down one by one. The scene summary and the dope sheet is very, very helpful when you're animating. So, now that we've done that, I think the timing looks pretty good and we have a little time beforehand if we want to do a camera move later on, and we need to extend this out because we've gone to the limit over there on 120 because we also want to offset these. So, let's go back to the dope sheet and select the second lattice because the first lattice is fine where it's at. Let's turn off the scene summary here because we don't want to change everything in the scene now, we just want to affect these lattices. We'll pop those down so we can see all of them, and we will offset them by six frames, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. We'll deselect this one, then we'll go back here and move them down six more frames, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, deselect that one, and let's see how that looks. Okay. So, in this lesson, we got a little more comfortable with the dope sheet and we offseted the frames. So now, let's start to dig into making this look good in the camera view and in the render. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks. 19. Bar Graph 5/10 - Adding materials: So, let's move into making this look a lot better in the render view of things, let's unhide the plane, our background. I'll turn off the grid and we can hide the lattices as well, because we're done with those and the bender former, and we have this grid and it doesn't really have anything to sit on, it's just floating a little bit, so let's give it a little bit of a pedestal before and move forward real quick. We just scale this out and then we're going to use the group to just lift these up to the floor. We can actually hold down V and snap it to the top there, it's going to jump around trying to find which vertice we're trying to snap to. If we go to a different view, it might be easier and let's bevel this as well, up here we get the bevel and turn this down, crank up the segments and now they have somewhere to sit and let's bring up the bottom here so the bevels kind of even it's not just going straight into the ground. Some right-clicking over the box to select the vertice option and then selecting them and pulling them up, just kind of eyeball this to see that we're just above the floor and right-click and dragged up object mode to get out of that, okay, that looks a lot better. So let's start adding materials to our objects. Let's select the background and right-click and go down to assign new material. This time instead of using the old standbys of Maya, we will use the new standbys which is the Arnold renderer, which ships with all of the new versions of maya. We can select the shader and go down to the standard surface which is what you're going to use 90 percent, 99 percent of the time when you're using Arnold. You can select that, and our attribute flips out over here a little bit and we can scroll over to the Arnold surface, and we can leave the AI there and we'll call this background, and let's give this a darker color. Something like that, and let's turn on our hyper shade. We saw that glitch in the last series, where we had to turn on our hybrid shade to see these changes take place, which is odd and hopefully they will fix that, and select all of these bars and we will do the same thing right-click, assign new material. Go to AI standard, and let's choose a green type of a color that's a little bit brighter, and we can save this grey for now, and if we go to the render view, so there's these options up here, the hyper shade we know we've been hitting, and that opens up and had refreshed earlier. We have our render settings here, which we can choose our renderer up here, and if you don't have the Arnold renderer here and you haven't been able to follow along with the materials of this point, sorry about that, you can go to windows, settings and preferences and go to the Plugin Manager, and you can load, scroll to the bottom and load mtoa bundle, and check this box and hit refresh. It'll load the materials and then this will be an option now. Let's change this to HD 1080, and we have it as the Arnold renderer, and that's enough for now. If we hit Render, and actually there's two render views, there's the one that's built-in in Maya. If we click one of those boxes up there, it's going to be all black, because we don't have any lights in our scene and this is the Maya render view, I had this box up here, there's also the IPR which will update in real time and try to constantly catch up to each change, and then this button just pulls up the render view, but it doesn't actually render anything. Once we have this open, we can hit these two boxes. This one will give us a region to select and render if we're just trying to update a certain area, and then the far left button will render the whole thing, but let's use Arnold's built-in render view just because we're using their shaders, and let's hit the play button, and we can see that again it's black, there's nothing to render. Let's make sure that the render view is the preview we're making is less than what we are actually going to render the final thing at, because that's going to waste a lot of time for our test resolution, okay, cool. So it is set at 50 percent, if it's not, that's definitely something nice to do. Might even actually go to 25 percent just because it will be faster in the end. So in the next lesson, we're going to dive a little deeper into lighting the scene. Thanks for watching. 20. Bar Graph 6/10 - Lighting, Part 1: So, there are several different ways to light scenes and lighting in and of itself is its own profession and skill, and people devote their whole lives to lighting things in 3D. So, we'll just scratch the surface and do what we can here to kind of introduce you to the concepts. So, if we go to the rendering tab up here, we can see we have several different options, but since we're using the Arnold Renderer, Arnold has its own set of lights up here and we can tab this out, so we can keep that, and it doesn't include the directional light, but it will use the directional light if we click that up here in the top left. Let's just scale this up so we can see it. It doesn't actually affect the intensity or anything by scaling it up or moving it for that matter, just rotation of direction. Now, if we go to that same Arnold render view, we will and hit play over here, we will begin to see something. So, let's turn on the frame to make sure that we are framing this up correctly. And now we can see that we have a light in our scene, and this is going to try to update automatically as we're moving around the view port so, you can get real-time view of what the lighting is doing. If we change the direction or the intensity over here, we can move this out of the way and bump up the intensity and we can see that it is much brighter, but this isn't, the green and the purple work well together, but let's make something a little more moody and striking than just using one directional light. So, let's delete the directional light and let's close this for now. I'm going to create a torus and bring this up, and I'm going to go over to the polytorus options here and increase the radius. I get my camera kind of in a way that we may use at the end, just to get an idea. What I'm doing is we're going to use this torus as a light. So, I'm going to rotate this up and you can actually bookmark views so, you can go up here and click this bookmark and will have saved this view so, I can go out of here and move this around and then to get right back to that exact same view, I go to View, bookmarks and this camera view this first one is what saved. So, increase the section radius and increase the radius more, because I want it to be a little bit off to the screen. Just what I'm looking at is this edge here, I don't want to really see the source where it hits the ground, and you'll see why here in a little bit. So, with this selected, let's go ahead and add some subdivisions to make that a little more rounded. With this selected, we can go to the Arnold lights which we kept up, up here, we still have over here and we can select mesh light, and what that does is it creates down here if we look in the outliner, we have this kind of light attribute parented to the mesh and it's kind of hidden, it is in this red wire frame which indicates it is a light now, and let's open up the render view to see what we did. We hit play, and we can't see anything, so that's telling me that the intensity of the light is not enough, and you can do the intensity or the exposure. Let's first mess with the exposure, I'm going to say 20. So, that is definitely too bright, but we can see the light is working now, and we can start to mess with the values which can be fairly sensitive, so finding the right value may take a little playing around with, and let's also change the color so that this isn't just white, we see this white rim down here. I don't, let's make it a little more colorful. Let's make it a red, something dark so we can see this kind of a rim light, and I'm liking where this is going but this is too much, so what can we do? We can actually change the attributes of this material here and how it's receiving this light, so let's scroll over to this material, the AI background and move this out of the way, and let's scroll down to specular, right here. That means basically the reflection, as we move this, we can see, we can actually turn off the specular completely. So, now we got rid of that, I want to do that but you can see how quickly we can control these attributes and roughness will just kind of diffuse that across the surface more. So let's increase the roughness a little bit, so it smooths out that edge, we don't have this hard edge anymore maybe increases specular a little more, and that's looking a lot better. So, let's continue lighting in the next lesson and create some more fill light so, we can see the front of these. 21. Bar Graph 7/10 - Lighting, Part 2: Okay we left off last time with just this back rim light created from this mesh, this torus that we put in the background back here. I mentioned I want it to be just off the screen, and you'll be able to see why if we scale this down, and let these edges pop into frame. It makes this a black circle where the inside of the torus is and that's not ideal. It's a little distracting to the eyes. So, I like to keep these just off of frame. Maybe go even a little wider in case we do some kind of a camera move. We can adjust that later as well. Let's make a light that fills out the top and the middle here. So, we're are going to make a cylinder, rotate that down, and again, I know that I can freely move the camera around because we bookmarked that camera view. Let's scale this out and up, and move this up. I move this forward as well just to get a little closer to the action, and we can make this be a mesh light as well. Let's make this exposure brighter. Let's see, what was the other one like, 10 or 15? Cool. Now, we can see, sorry, down here that was off the screen a little bit. As we crank this up, we can start to see the front of these a little better. Let's give this a color as well. Let's go back to our bookmark view to see the progress here in the render. It's definitely looking a lot better than the one directional light. If we leave this, so I accidentally docked to the render view here, so we can just select this tab and drag and get it back off here. If we just let this go and don't move the camera change anything, it'll constantly try to update and smooth out this render so we can see a better version of it. One thing I'm noticing is there's, might be hard to see on this screen, but there's maybe some hard edges here. Even though we beveled it, it is not smooth yet, and in Maya, you can press three, and it will smooth the geometry. So, let's do that for all three of these. We'll add three, and it'll just smooth it just a little bit more to take out any rough edges we're seeing on these rim lights of the bars here. One other thing we can do to increase the visibility of these bars is, in the shader themselves, even though they're lights, there isn't an emission attributes in the Arnold render. If we go to the Arnold shader for the bars, which we can rename to keep track of this, we can go down to emission and turn up the weight. As we do that, we can see it update in the render view, that it is look at the floor especially it's emitting light that's being reflected. If we turn that down you can see the floor isn't as reflective of the bars. It being white is not doing the color that we want so we can go back in and select that color so it emits the right color as well. So, let's turn that down maybe a little bit. Maybe somewhere in here, and this is an attribute we could actually animate on. If we right-click here and we set a key, and we went back here and turned it off, as we scrolled up it would animate. Let me set a key. Sometimes when you do attributes like this and set keys by right-clicking, the auto key won't necessarily pick it up. You can also see down here that we're not seeing these tick marks, since because it's on the side of a attribute here so it's not really sure where to pick up which key what we have selected. Is it the object keys that we're looking at? Or is it material or is it something deeper inside the attributes? So, just be aware once you start messing with this stuff, it can feel a little hidden sometimes, not knowing where the keys are. But as we scroll up in the render view, we can see it updating that it's slowly glowing and turning on in this a light emission attribute that we have here. Let's get up here to where it's turned all the way on and we can just break this connection and get this back to where we want it just to leave it on. Maybe somewhere in here. I want to crop this region here just to focus in on the floor, and so it's not trying to rerender the whole thing. I was up here and I click this icon and then just clicked and isolated this area. One thing about the floor that I'm not really liking is just how smooth it is. So, we can go into the material, and go down to geometry and we can add a bump map. It's as what it sounds like; it's a map that creates bumps on the surface. It doesn't with a texture, it doesn't actually to form the geometry. It's only in the render that we'll be able to see this best. It will try to update in the viewport but, let's add a fractal here. A fractal of course is just a procedural way to texture things, meaning, we can update it in real time and we don't have to bake a texture down out of Photoshop or something like that. So, we can see over here now let's finish rendering. It's very smooth, and that might be the look that you want and you want to go for. But just to create some contrast in the scene, and so not everything is smooth. Let's make the floor a little rough. So, we can click fractal, and now we can see it mapped fractal on there. If we use these two buttons, we can go in and out of the two points that are going in and out of those nodes. So, we're back in the shader, we of course get back to their by clicking on any of these because they're all on the same shader. Sorry, we're actually on the floor. We can see bump mapping fractal1, and we actually see in the viewport here too, it looks crazy. There's a lot of disturbance in the floor there. Now, it's just totally black down here. So, we know it's too much. We can go into the attributes of the bump mapping by clicking this little arrow, beforehand I had this checker box which meant, you can add a texture in any of these places. Now that we've added it, it's saying there's something here, go in and adjust it. Let's bring down the amplitude of the fractal. We can right-click on the swatch here for it to update. So, we can actually see what we're doing. There's more contrast here if we dropped the amplitude down and right click, we can see it's much less. Let's bring it way down. We just want to make a little subtle roughness there on the floor, and let's go one moreover clicking this in and out point here, and let's bring the bump depth. This is the height of how much it's thinking that you're trying to create a bump. Let's go to something very small. Now, we can see in the render view it's giving us a nice natural roughness to the floor and it's not totally smooth. Since it's a fractal, it's a repeating pattern. But it's big enough that, you won't be able to probably recognize patterns here. But for our sake, it helps us not have to create a texture in somewhere like Photoshop, and then export that and then bring that texture in. We can do it all within Maya right here. So, that looks pretty good. Let's zoom out, and turn off this crop. So, let's go back to our bookmark view and see where we're at. I'm like now this is looking so far, and I think now we'll add some of the text and maybe a camera move, and start to finish this one out. Thanks for watching. 22. Bar Graph 8/10 - Adding text: Okay, now let's add some text to this, so we can get a sense that it's actually a bar graph with data. Let's go up here to the T and add a couple of attributes here or go to the type tab here, so we can get to the attributes so we can adjust. I'm just going to name these things A B C D kind of a thing. I'm going to duplicate this, so it'll save that and then I'll go back to this. So, we use this as one node to make all of our texts and then I'll duplicate that and go back to the first one. [inaudible] [inaudible] and duplicate that and we'll hide this first one, because that's what we've been using to make the text with. Then, we will scale all of these down. We'll move them to the front here. If you can see in our Render View, we can't see them that well. So let's use a Surface Shader in all of these, it will just be a nice white shader. So I'm going to new shader, Surface Shader and we'll just drag that to white. So, now we can get a better view of those and go to the front view to orient all of these. Just take them up a little bit, so they're in the center. Then one by one, place them in' the middle here. I'm going to group these. Go back to Perspective. Those stand out nicely against all the other colors. We can make the text for the side as well. Actually, we already have this one, so let's just unhide it and keep typing. We can just make a random kind of values here, just go in 10 increments. So, I'm just doing the same thing I was doing before using this as a kind of generator to duplicate out and then changing it back and duplicating it out. We're going to hide that now with control H and then let's grab all of these and add that Surface Shader. Since we've already created it, we can just right-click and go to assign existing material. We know it's a Surface Shader is probably the the most reasonable we did and it is. Let's scale it down to something similar to the X axis A B C D attributes here and let's go to the front view and we can snap these to the grids that we made earlier. So, take the first one and let's go up here. If we hold down X actually, we can snap it. So, it's consistent to the same grid. So it looks like, lets go to that one. I don't know if we made enough here let's see where our animation goes to. Actually, and because we are raising our bar up, they no longer hit the exact grid lines that we had. So, just keep that in mind. We could group all of these and actually set them off by the same value. So if we say Y axis group, group this. We know that we moved all this stuff up together from the group. If we scroll over here, we can see translate Y as 0.476 and actually copy that and paste it in this and it will be offset by the exact same amount. So, we can be very specific on what we're doing. So, that looks a little weird though, to have that all the way at the top. So, I'm just going to undo that. We'll know that, that's what's happening and how to fix it. Go back to a Perspective View and I think we are ready to move on to animating a camera move. See you in the next lesson. 23. Bar Graph 9/10 - Camera animation: Let's start animating the camera. I decided to animate the y-axis group as well, just to add a little more animation to this. Let's go and see when the animation starts here for the bar graph. So, maybe start in here and let's set a keyframe. We'll have it done maybe over here. One thing we can do as well, just so we have clean numbers to work with over here because we can see it's like 0.031. We can actually go to Freeze Transformations, and if we do that it will reset everything. So, now we have a scale of one, which is very nice and easy to animate. So, let's select all those and hit Key Selected. We'll just go back in time to 45 and we'll just say zero. They all disappear, because they were scaled down to nothing. So, that might be a little distracting to have it come out of nothing, so let's have it be 0.1. Let's go to the Animation Editors, Graph Editor, and we can see the scale for each one of these. Let's select that and this is basically graphing. I'm holding a command and shift and right-clicking to squash, and stretch, and zoom in and out of the graph. It's basically saying start slow, speeds up, and then slows down again. I'd like it to have a really slow finish. So, I'm going to select this handle, and you can see I can't drag it, and change it. I can move it up and down but I can't extend it further. So, one thing we have to do is go to Curves and go to Weighted Tangents. Now, you can see the handles changed. Now, I can move it around freely. So, let's have the end position, go a lot slower. That also means that we have to make up speed over here, so it's going to move faster in the middle. So, let's see what that looks like. So, I like that. Then, we're going to offset each one of these, and we'll select the bottom three. Let's just hit A to zoom in here, select and then we'll hit W to get the translate and shift and middle click and drag to the right. Four frames, dislike that one. Two, three, four more frames, and we'll do that again. One, two, three, four more frames. Let's see how that offset looks now. So, that's nice, it just adds a little more motion to this. Now let's start on the camera move. When I do camera moves, I like to split my screen. So, let's go to Panels and let's make a new camera first. We'll call this the Render Cam. We'll go ahead and go to the Render Settings up here and make sure that we are going to render from the Render Cam, that's an important step. Let's get the render cam and the neighborhood, and then let's split the screen here by going into Panels, Layouts, Two Panes Side-by-Side. Then, we will click the frame button here so we can see the frame of it. Let's change this one by spacebar, dragging up to perspective view. We can also get to it up here in Panel's, Perspective. We can turn this one off because we're no longer using it as a framing things. We have this camera selected, and let's just get it to be exactly in the middle, so we're going to zero that out. Swing it down low. Let's see. Let's have it start back here and rotate down a little bit. So, we don't even see the bar graph, it's going to reveal on. So, let's go back here the beginning, hit S to key everything. Then scroll forward about when things are going to start to be animating. Let's move this forward and let's rotate this up. Then, let's go forward a little more and have it just keep drifting forward as it completes. So, you can see it's not updating over here as I'm clicking and dragging. It's annoying that I can't see. It's only updating along view. Let's change that in the Preferences over here on the bottom. Click the little gear with the man over here, and we can go to the time slider section and say, Update view, All. So, we can do that. Now, when we scroll, it will update all of them. So, let's play this Alt+V. I think it's going too fast. The rotation's a little wonky. So, I like to adjust these things in the Graph Editor. So, let's look at this. I'm going to translate. Oh, we're starting too far away, so let's drag that value down so it's able to travel as far. Let's drag both of these middle points down, so at the end it's very slow, it's almost flat. Then, let's have this. Let's see. I should really end over here somewhere I think. Let's drag this one over, and we'll go to Curves, Weighted Tangents, and we can shift, middle mouse drag that to make it slow down quite a bit. Let's have it have like a slow start as well. See how that looks and watch over here on the left side. Yeah, that's a lot more dramatic reveal, that slow start. I think it could end later still, the rotation part of it. I think it just stay drifting almost all the way to the end basically. So, I'm just dragging that translate Z. You can see which one you have selected by the little boxes over here. Good thing I mentioned that because I had the X selected by accident as well. So, I'm going to undo that and select only the Z and drag that all the way down, and Curves, Weighted Tangents, and drag this out quite a bit, and try to keep this angle flowing pretty well to the transition to be slow. Let's play that back. Something feels wonky there. Yeah, have some keys here. So, looks like we're accidentally rotating some of these. So, we'll just delete that. I think it slows down too abruptly. Let's go back here and add back in a keyframe. We just want to translate Z. So, I'll right-click and say, Key selected. Yeah, this is like a wonky area. So, when something like this happens, I like to reset and go back to auto tangents, and you can do that by clicking this button up here, for auto tangents. When you set a key like this, you can see where the kinks are. After you've been manipulating stuff like this, you can see what it's naturally trying to do mathematically to smoothen and what you're trying to force it to do. Probably dial this, smoothen back a little bit because it was too sharp of an angle when I was trying to come down over here. So, probably still not ideal. Let's see. Let's just drag this back so this angle isn't as steep coming in. What does it look like? Okay. Let's see what that looks like. Yeah, it's still stopping in a weird way. If we just delete this one all together and then drag this out, so it's just one smooth motion. Yeah, definitely I like that more. Let's see if we can get away with putting that back out here again. Now that we have more distance, we can probably drag this back out. It's working pretty well. This can probably start a little slower. Yeah, I think this is coming out too far, you can see where the tangent handles. You don't really want to have one overlap the other, so we don't want vertically. We don't want this one to be over here because then it'd be clipping this one and that means we're going to have a really sharp area right here. So, let's make sure that has some room to breathe, and play that back. I think that looks pretty good. Let's drag this back out. This is a lot of what animation as is basically changing it until it doesn't look bad. You're not going to start out with it looking amazing. I can tell you for a fact no one does. Yeah, maybe Glen Keane. Look him up, he's a master. There are masters out there but most human beings. You're going to constantly be fighting the stuff and tweaking it, so just get used to that and expect that it's not going to look perfect the first time you try it, and be ready to just hit undo a lot and try different things if something's not working. So, I like where this is that. In the next lesson, we will finish up the Render and set that off. Thanks for watching. 24. Bar Graph 10a/10 - Maya rendering: So, now that we have the animation done. We're going to render the sequence out. Before we do that, let's set the project which is really something we should do at the beginning of it. But since we're not using textures and we're not having to go into that a thing very heavy. Setting project, isn't as particular but it is very important to do that. So, we'll set the project and we will- basically what that does is it creates a directory for things to save in. So, we'll create the default workspace, so, that when we go up here to the render settings with the little gear and the clapboard over here, it will automatically fill in where it's going to save the images that we're going to render. If you look at the path up here, it takes this from the project settings. So, that's important. So, let's scroll up and we'll name this bar graph and we will- the big important thing is to say, name.number.extension. That means we're going to render multiple frames out. You can see name.extension a single frame and we want multiple frames. So, let's change it to that. Four numbers padding which you can see it change up here if we add extra numbers. We don't really need that because we're not going into the thousands or tens of thousands. Then, we need to set the frame range. We're going from 1 to 200. So, we can say 200 and one of the last things we need to do, we can make sure we set this when we did that earlier and we're HD and one thing we need to make sure as we are- whatever a file format you want to export in is fine. Whatever you're comfortable with JPEG or EXR is just a 16 or 32 bit file format that will give us more information and compositing. So, if we go over to Arnold renderer, that will give us some options here that will be important. Let's open up the render view up here this little clipboard and let's escape out, because we want to test something a little bigger. We want to test maybe the real deal. Let's do the 1080. If we click the "Camera" up here icon, it will give us a wireframe so that when we are selecting this it's going to do the first one based off of the last one we did. But I'm most curious about the noise we're going to get from the floor. This little texture that we added. So I'm going to click this and let's see what noise we get here. So, as you can tell when we do HD, the render time definitely increases. That took 40 seconds just to do this little sliver of the frame. So, you're going to expect the whole thing is going to take quite a while. Especially 200 frames, this could take several, several hours. So, just be aware that you could render out a smaller resolution down here to make it go a little faster and we're actually going to probably make it worse and slower by adjusting these quality settings by taking a look down here at all of this noise. We want to get rid of that, so, let's save a snapshot, and go up here to this little button, it says keep image. We press that we'll get option to scroll here, and we only have one image saved. So, there's nothing to scroll to. But let's make a change, let's up both of these by one digit and see where that gets us. So, what these are the sampling values. The camera value is multiplied by each one of these. So, it's you can see it as a total manipulator and if we want to get specific on each aspect of a material, we can do that individually down here as well. This is subsurface scattering which is skin, we're not doing that and we don't have any volumes in here so we don't have to worry about those two. But we can see here if we render a new version of this and since we kept the last one, we'll be it will be able to compare the two and once this is done rendering, I will compare that and show you. Okay, just by increasing those settings, you'll see that our render time went from 40 seconds to two minutes and 10 seconds. Again, just for this little chunk. So, let's keep this and now we can switch back and forth over here. I'm going to increase this just so that we can all see this a little better and zoom in and hopefully you can see on your screen the difference when I scroll back and forth. There's a lot of noise here and there's definitely not as much in this one. So, for that almost two minutes extra of render time. We eliminate a lot of this noise and this noise is also because the types of light sources that we have in our scene are these almost like they're individual area lights. Those are more expensive when it comes to rendering and that's just something to expect depending on the lights that we're using. It was just the directional line this would be a lot faster and we wouldn't have as much noise. But we're trying to make this look and a little more moody and that's what we have to work with. So, taking back and forth, this noise may not seem to be that big of a deal. But when you get into animation and you have each frame having its own variation of this noise it looks crazy noisy when it's played back in real time because you have this jittering of all this noise all over the screen on every frame. This noise doesn't stay static and stay in that one spot. It will change and move every frame. So, in animation and rendering, eliminating this noise is very important aspect and getting the render settings correct is very important. So, I like where we're at here and we can close this preview window and we can go back in here and make sure that we have all of our settings done the way we like them. I'm not going to turn on motion blur because that just cranks up the render time as well. We are going to have most of the default settings on these other tabs are fine and you won't have to measure them until you start doing more specific things. Let's make sure it's HD, I wanted 200, bar graph and we can close that and we can go to render and when we hit render sequence, it will open up that preview window and it will begin rendering every image and the render preview window and I'll save it in a directory that we chose from when we set the project. So, in the next lesson, we will look at these images together and make the final movie. Thanks for watching. 25. Bar Graph 10b/10 - After Effects rendering: Okay, now that we have rendered our bar graph, let's go into After Effects, right-click, Important, File, and bring in the image sequence. Make sure this is checked. So, that brings it in as a sequence and not a single file, and we can drag this file to the New Composition window, and let go. One thing I've already done is changed this to 32-bit, which just means there's more colors to work with. By default, this is going to be an eight-bit, and you just change it to 32, and that just gives you more latitude to move the colors around if you decide to add adjustment layers and color the bar graph a little bit. The other thing we can do for this one is, because of this space up here, you can add text by right-clicking anywhere and say New, Text and type in something. We can hit P to pull up Position and click and drag on the Y-direction to bring it up, and we can hit T to pull up Opacity and make a keyframe over here somewhere, creating the stopwatch. We can go forward and just turn this down to zero percent. Now, we have a little fade on for the bar graph. Just in case you want to add some text to this, that's how you do that. Okay, let's try a little something as well to plus this up. I'm going to duplicate this layer and go down to Keying and Keylight. I'm going to select the screen and I'm going to solo this layer so I can see what I'm keying. Let's just go to Screen Matte. Okay, let's try to screen balance, and I think that will work. This time, I'm looking to try to isolate the green by keying it, so that we can use this as a method to pump up the green area of the bar, just like we did with the red dots in the line graph. So, now that I have my matte, I can make a new Solid. Let me turn on solo this. I'll make a New, Solid and I'll select this green color, hit Okay. Now, I'll bring this down below are keyed image sequence and I'll solo these two layers and I'll say Alpha Inverted Matte. So, now we just have the green. If you remember from line graph as well, what we can do is change this to Add and it glows this area of the image a little bit. The other thing we can do here is go to the keyed image layer, and Blur, Fast Blur. We want to turn on Repeat Edge Pixels because if anything was close to the edge, it would not grab it and there'd be a little line here. So, I'll just crank this up and I'll just add a little bit of a glow to these. Of course, we could change the color of this by going to Generate, Fill. Let's start here and just see if we need to adjust this color, maybe more green and maybe brighter. I think that helps a little bit. Then we can just turn the Opacity down just a touch, just so it's a slightly more subtle effect, and then we can also turn this effect on, so we could animate the Opacity. To set the stopwatch, to set a keyframe, I'm going to drag it down over here somewhere and then I can turn this off by going to zero percent. Then that way, it looks like these are lights emitting and turning on. So, we can adjust the Opacity as much as we want and I'll just add a little more to the final render and we avoided having to do this in Maya, which is nice because we have a little more control in After Effects and in compositing, and it's a little quicker feedback, so it's nice now how to do little tricks like this in After Effects because then the sooner you get out of Maya, the quicker things go usually a little bit on the render side of things. I did have to turn down the render size of this because the 1080 render was taking 10 minutes of frame, and when I went down to HD, it was taking about four minutes per frame. So, over 200 frames, that's the math of the time it takes is quite a while so you just want to figure out that math as well when you're rendering in Maya and see what you can save for time-wise and After Effects by doing these little tricks. Now, we can add this to the Render Queue by hitting Command Shift? and we can pick the codec that we want. On a Mac, I like that one. Let me turn off the audio and pick where we want to save it with this one and hit Render. So, we finished the bar graph. In the next series, we will look at making a pie chart with some new methods in Maya and different type of Shaders and lighting, so join me in the next series. Thanks 26. Pie Chart 1/10 - Creating pie chart base: In this series of lessons we will cover the creation of a pie chart and we're going to do it in some creative ways and use tools that we haven't used yet with regards to rigging, and lighting, and shading and everything. So we're going to cover a lot of new ground in this section as well and to get started let's change our grid back to a usable size. We're going to go to display grid and click on the option box and I'm just going to add a zero here to these dimensions so we apply, it's a little more dispersed and I'm going to turn on anti aliasing up here and making a pie chart you would think that we would start with a cylinder, and we would somehow animate this cylinder around in some way but in reality there's not a good way at Maya to section this off and animate it and read it in some way. You know like trying to delete those faces and then, you know there's not like a deformer or a rig that would, let us take this all the way down to 0 percent and then in a radial fashion. So I've devised a creative solution to that, which is oftentimes what you have to do is get familiar enough with the tools to know how to use them and in ways that maybe they weren't meant to be used. So we're actually going to start with a square which I just created up here on the top left, you can get too from poly modeling as well, this square. And we're going to crank up the subdivisions on the depth all the way up to 50. And we're going to be working with a pie chart that totals 100 percent. So to make that easy let's scale this to 10 in one direction and it'll make sense in a second why we're doing this. So this essentially is going to mean 100 percent, but we're leaving out a digit just so we're not working at a massive scale here. So now that we have this we're going to turn it into a cylinder like we had before. We're going to do that with the deformer, we can go up to deform and you need to be under modeling or animation they both have the deform options up here and go down to non-linear and click bend. We've used this before making the backdrop and we're going to use this in a more extreme way this time around. So let's crank down the curvature we get to the bend tool by clicking the inputs over here and I'll drop-down more options and we're going to crank up the curvature to 180 and then we're going to rotate this down 90 degrees, and as we do that you can see that it's turning this into a circle. I'm going to type in 90 just to be exact. And it's good to know as well that when you create the bend deformer it is going to create the size of it based on the size of the object. So it's important that we first scale this object up 10 and z direction on the z axis so that this is the correct size for that length. We wouldn't want to start scaling it after the fact or wouldn't- the edges wouldn't meet perfectly here. So we have the circle and we can go back into the square, now a circle and go down to the first piece of it's history called the poly cube. When it's first created all cubes have this option down here where we cranked up the subdivisions earlier that's what allows us to have this radial option. If we crank this down, you'd soon see that, you know we no longer have a circle. So we'll keep that up high and we will adjust the width and I've done this before so I know the exact number that we need but basically you can zoom down here, maybe turn on wireframe and just make sure that these edges meet really well. And you can also toggle the speed of your middle mouse drag. So that when I'm here, I'm middle mouse dragging the value and it's kind of fast, the values are moving too quickly. So I can go change the speed of my middle mouse drag up here and now it's much slower and manageable. So undo that and we can see that we have one line there. It's gotten all the way down and I'll go back out a wireframe so you can see what we're doing. We're going from something like this and we're just scaling it all the way down, we could go past it and we don't want to do that and have things intersecting each other. We just want it to be exactly there together. So takes little eyeballing to get that right. So now we have the cylinder out of the box and what this allows us to do for the pie chart and why we pick 10 over here, is that, let's say a piece of the pie chart should be 20 percent. So we should be able to go over here and hit two and that is 20 percent of a pie chart. So we've kind of in a smart way built this box into something that can be used easily. If we had scaled this just arbitrarily to some number, and then we'd have a lot more math to do to try to figure out what is actually 20 percent. So the other thing we want to do before we start duplicating the cell is add more subdivisions. If we go in here and let's say, let's go back to this, let's just say 50 percent, slide five, these edges are pretty sharp, and we can't really bevel these edges because they're actually coming down here to meet and it'll get really messy in here. So when we smooth an object, you can hit three to do that. If there's not enough geometry to support the faces and vertices and all that, it'll collapse in on itself like this. So we need to add more geometry, more edges here so that when we smooth, which will be our method to smooth these edges out instead of beveling we need to add more edges here. Let's go to the Modeling section and go to Mesh tools an Insert Edge Loop. Now let's go down here and we want to add several edge loops, almost as close as we can get. And I'm just clicking on any edge here and it'll make this where we can scale this down. So what this does is the closer it is to an intersection It'll start supporting that area better. You see how it doesn't collapse now and the outsides collapse. So watch this, we'll pull one out here closer to the edge we get the more it help support it. So we'll put it close to the edge. Hit three and see how it doesn't collapse as much. Now i need to do it in both directions, we just did it radially now it's still vertically it will further help that edge stay together. And you can kind of see the difference, we did this vertical one on the top and see how rounded this one is, it's kind of blocky. So let's add one to the bottom down here too. You can see it automatically, just pops there and that's a much nicer edge. When we get out a component module you'll be able to see it a little bit better but I just wanted to show you that because especially when we start rendering and we get reflections and things, this area will be possibly problematic. So we want to go ahead and really beef that up so it won't have kind of artifacts of odd reflections down here. So let's get out of component mode, we can go up here and hit this middle button and we're not smooth yet so let's hit three. We can see it's still a little bit. I hope I still have the edge tool, so still making edges. You can see what tools you have over here highlighted. So let me just undo that, select that again. So you can quick select the last tool you had over here, if you have de-selected it, say if I go to Selection or something and get right back to that same tool. I just want to lay a couple more in and get really close to the center line here, as close as I can get. Now when I hit three, let me get out a component mode so we can see it a little better. You know when you're back here, you won't be able to see that. That edge get too crazy and we have these nice rounded edges here. So here's the difference and actually let me turn off selection highlighting here, you actually have something selected and not see those highlights. So I can toggle between one and three and we can see how much better that is going to be when we start having reflections and see it be a little bit smoother. So we have created the first piece of the pie chart, in the next lesson we'll duplicate that out and create more of those. Thanks for watching. 27. Pie Chart 2/10 - Cleaning up the rig: So, now that we have one rig made, we're going to use this multiple times now that we have it already built. But we need to clean it up a little bit because since we started from a square, I'm going to turn off selection highlighting, that always gets me whenever I do that. If you turn it back on you'll see what you have selected. Because we started from a square, our pivot point is not in the center, and that'll be a problem later on when I rotate the stuff around. So, before we start duplicating things, we really want to make sure we've cleaned up this one kind of template rig before we start duplicating it. So, let's hold down D and V and that'll vertex snap to the farthest point here, then we let go. So, now we can rotate around. Well, here's the other thing. So, the bend informer isn't moving with the polygon shape yet, so when we move that around, it's almost like this polygon is moving through at a former. So, we want to kind of lock this in and there's two ways to do that. We had parented things before like the cluster handle to the sphere and the first line graph lessons. We could do that as well, but the problem is because we're using scale to drive the value of the sphere, if we started scaling this it's going to scale the bend deform as well. I'm just going to go back to normal speed on the middle mouse drag, and so that's why we can't use parenting as we have in the past so we have to do something a little different. On parent this, you can select the handle here and the viewport or from the outliner and hit Shift P. You could also just middle mouse drag it out anywhere. So, I'll do that one as well, whoops another way. So, you can middle mouse drag things in and you can middle mouse drag them out. So, another way to parent something to something else and have it follow it is with a constraint, which sounds like what it is, it constrains it to those transformations either its rotation or translation. So, instead of, if we parent something we'll pick the child first and then the object and hit P and it goes in this direction right, child to parent in the order of which we're selecting things. When we're doing constraints it's the opposite. So, we're going to pick the parent first and then the child and we all go to animation constraint and we can go to parent constraint. We're going to make sure that we have maintain offset on and hit apply. So, we see that in the channel box over here we get these blue values where we're used to seeing only red when we have keyframes. Anytime this is blue in the channel box, you know that there is constraint on the object. So, it will show up in the outliner over here as a chain length. Even though this band handle is not underneath the cube like we have parented things, it will follow along now. So, we can scale this up, sorry we'll scale it up only in the Z and it won't follow the scale because if you notice we didn't constrain the scale attributes, we only constrained the translate rotate and that's just part of a parent constraint. There's a scale constraint as well, and basically a parent constraint is just a point and an orient constraint combined. That's both of them, because a point is translations and an orient is rotations, so that is constraining things. In the next lesson, we will duplicate this out so we can use it some more. Thanks for watching. 28. Pie Chart 3/10 - Duplicating the rig: We are duplicating something like a rig. We have to be very careful when we're duplicating it, because if we just select the geometry, you may command D, and let's scale it now, on the Z. It doesn't do what this one does, and when we scale it in the Z, that's because we broke the relationship to the deformer that we had. So, we need to duplicate the deformer with the geometry. So that, it will be able to have copies of itself and work the way that we expect it to, and the way that we built it. So, this can be useful sometimes if you're modeling things, and you don't need to make any more adjustments with the deformer, and actually, you'd rather get rid of the deformer. You can just duplicate things out and then keep working with them. But we want to copy this whole rig. So let's select the cube and go to edit, duplicate special. We'll go to the option box. I'll reset settings. So, we're all on the same page. I'm not really concerned about translate moving it with each copy because we actually want it in the same position here in the center. In reality, before we do this, it might be good, just for keeping it clean, I'm going to hold down X and just drag this to the middle, so we know we're at zero, zero. We want two more copies, because, let's look at the data set that we're going to be working with. We have three values. I just made up these numbers, but it makes a nice clean percentage amount for this example. So, we're going to need two more copies. So, let's put two here, wanting to duplicate the input graph. The input graph means, what inputs are influencing this object and we know it's this deformer that we created. So, that means duplicate the input of all this stuff. We want to assign a unique name to the child nodes, because if they don't have unique names then everything will reference back to the first parent. So, all of our duplicates will behave according to this first deformer. We want them to be independent, so we can make their own percentages. So, let's click the polygon and hit apply. So now, at liner, we can see we have two more. Let's shift select the middle cube, the second one we made. Let's isolate, select it up here. Anytime I do a duplicate special, I always want to test this stuff to make sure it worked the way I'm expecting it to. So, we'll go over to scale Z, and in fact, is working. So, I'll unisolate this up here, and we can see it's not following along. They're all doing their independent thing. So now, we have our three pie chart pieces that we're going to use to create this pie chart and I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks. 29. Pie Chart 4/10 - Positioning pie chart: Okay. Let's start making this look like a pie chart. You need to rotate all of these out, so they're not on top of each other anymore. So, let us go to this one and we'll rotate it in the y-axis, which we can get to here on the manipulator, or we can middle-mouse drag in the viewport somewhere. We want to make sure if wherever middle-mouse dragging, we're not doing it over the manipulator because then it will think we want the manipulator. So, we middle-mouse drag over here. I would like to say I'm smart enough that I know the exact number that should be, but I just had to eyeball it a minute ago, and so I know what it should be. Sometimes it's easier to just keep messing with stuff until it lines up than to go to the chalkboard and do a bunch of math every single time. You can get pretty far by just zooming in on things, going into four sometimes and seeing where their edges line up. Moving the camera around to see where that is going back and forth and doing that kind of a thing. Also, remember you have this little tool here, but see even more work on this scale it won't get you far enough, so you need to edit the value over here and I can guess that it's so close to 135, which probably just be 135, which it should. Great. So, one thing I'd like to do is separate these values in the y-axis because right now it's all, they're all the same height and it's hard to tell which piece is which. Of course, we're going to give each piece its own color later, but to help further differentiate each piece I think it would be good to the scale on the y by the same value that we're seeing over here. So, at the scale of one, 6.6 would be 0.66 and 0.9 would be 0.09, and this one would be 0.25. So, now vertically, we've also separated it and it's in the right percentage based on how much radial area it takes up. Thanks for watching this lesson and in the next one we will begin animating this. 30. Pie Chart 5/10 - Animating pie chart: So, now that we have our three pieces of the pie in the correct place, let's animate them, so they can rotate on from their Z-axis as we have set up the rig to do so. So, let's start with the big piece first. We'll select it. Let's go somewhere maybe 40 frames just to give us some room to work. We'll set a key on Z. Right-click, Key Selected, and we'll go up here. I think maybe two seconds would be enough, so that'll be 48, so that'll be 88 be up here. I'll key again, Key Selected. So now, we have two keys. Let's go back to the first one and let's just bring that down to zero. Let's also animate it's visibility because we don't want to see this very thin piece and the render just hanging out, and then it starts doing the rotation. If you don't have this rotation now just from doing that, you want to make sure that your auto key is on of course, over here, this little button. So then, we have this rotation, but I want to just animate it on over one frame. So, let's go back to frame 40, key frame to visibility, and go to the frame before, and turn off. Great. So, we have this motion of it fanning out. One thing we could do as well is have it rotate from one side. To do that, we would have to counter animate the piece. So, right now, it's fanning out from the center of itself and let's see if we can get that to go from an edge. So, what we want to do is key the Y rotation, go Key Selected, and we'll go to frame 40, and we will swing that around. Actually, let's do it to this side because I think it'd be more interesting to go a descending size, we're going from the biggest to the middle to the smallest. So, I'm going to start over here and it's 19. What was that? 135? I don't understand how they're not the same value. I guess their center is different. So, I'm going to scale up the manipulator and let's get that pretty close, as close as I can get it. So now, I might put that visibility frame on the same frame because this single frame looks terrible. So, I think the first trim we want is actually that one. So, let's go into our graph editor. We go up Windows, Animation Graph Editor. We will isolate the visibility by selecting it here, and we can click drag, and select it. I'm holding command and Shift, and left clicking to adjust the scale of the view that we see. When I click W, I'm going to hold down the Shift and drag to the right. So, that should put it. The first frame that we see actually has some thickness to it instead of that super thin wonky view that we had. Because we rotated it to the starting point, it's basically counter keyed itself. So, whereas we were animating from the center, if at the same distance of keys that we're going from the scale, the same distance here or also animating the rotation, we can do what's known as counter keying it. So now, it's fanning out from the side and we can do the same thing for all the other ones as well, so that they look like one initiates the next one in this domino effect. So, let's go to frame 88. Let's select the next one and we can key the Z scale. Let's also go ahead and key the Y rotation because we know we're going to do that. I'm going to reduce the size of my manipulator now that I'm zoomed back out. Sometimes you can get it so big. You don't realize it's actually in the view port, and you start moving your cursor, and you can affect the manipulator values. So, double check that sometimes if you have one of these selected. One other thing to note as well as we're keying things is what axis we are working on. If you hold down E and press down with your left mouse button, we can rotate things in different modes. So, right now, we're in a world mode, so everything is going to rotate. Sometimes you have to refresh the manipulator by scrolling through. This is the Y rotation for everything if we're using the world rotation manipulator. If we switch to object, we can see how the X-axis flipped. I can go back to world. See how it now it's over here because it's trying to follow, this is the X-axis vertically on our screen right now. If I switch over to the object, now it's to the side, and that's because remember, we had rotated this into this position, so the object thinks this direction is X now. So, it's just something to keep in mind. It might be a little confusing. We can go into it deeper and other lessons, but just wanted to touch on that in case you ever accidentally get into the wrong mode. Sometimes you can go into Gimbal and you can't select in the middle of the manipulator where normally, if you're an object or world, you can select in the middle. You don't have to be isolated on an axis. But if you somehow get into Gimbal mode, and you're not able to manipulate, and you have to use the axis, it's probably because of that. So, we'll go back to world and we'll have to remember what we're doing now I get on these little tangents. We set the key for the first key on this and the previous one, we went two seconds. So, let's just go, it's a smaller piece. Let's just go somewhere over here for now. We can change it later. I'll set a key on both of these again that's in position. Go to the start again, and we'll go to zero, and we will rotate this around. Looks like it lines up pretty well and we can key the visibility off here. Go forward one frame, turn it back on. Cool. Let's see how that looks right now. Just for our own sake, I'm going to turn off the deformers. So now, we can just see the pie pieces. Hold V to play. Cool. I think that timing feels right. I think maybe the second one could start sooner maybe in here. So, we get this and drag this back a few frames. So, I'm in the graph editor hitting W. I'm going to hold down Shift, soon as I zoom in. I like to zoom in if I'm only moving a few frames. I like to get this one up here that's telling us the frames. This is 88. This is 89, frame 90. If we were like this and we tried to move frames, it's such a small distance with our mouse. We can end up moving it 50 frames in such a very short distance. So, it's nice to hold down command and Shift on a Mac, and left mouse click and drag this to be the right scale for how many keys we're going to end up moving at, which is just a few. So now, I'm going to hold down Shift and middle mouse drag, maybe four frames. Pull this out of the way. Let's play that again. Yeah, that feels like they flow a little better. Cool. So, with that in mind, we can start four frames before the end of this one, one, two, three, four, and that will be the start of this one. So, let's key frame the Visibility, Scale, and the Rotate Y, Key Selected. We can scroll down a little ways, key it again. Now, let's go to the first frame, and we can take the scale to zero, and then take the rotation over here, and then we can move forward one frame, and key the Visibility, and go back, turn it off. Okay. So, let's see what we have now. It's a little distracting when you have it selected to see what it actually looks like, so I'm deselecting it. It looks about right to me. I think you could adjust the timing depending on how long this animation needs to be or doesn't need to be, but I think that's a good stopping point. In the next lesson, we will continue on getting the animation in a good spot, and grouping things together, moving on to materials and shading, and go into a few more advanced concepts, once we get to those points. But thanks for watching and see you in the next lesson. 31. Pie Chart 6/10 - Adding Text: So, now we have our pie chart, let's add some color to it because it's getting hard to see what's what here. So, we're not going to get too far into the materials on this one, but just so we can differentiate them. Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to right-click and go down to Assign New Material and we're going to use Arnold again on this but a Shader. We'll use the Standard and let's just go over here. I have all this history, let's use these arrows to scroll through all the tabs, go to Standard Surface. Your Shaders are always at the end basically so you can look for them there. I'm just going to make some generic colors for now, Assign New Material, Shader, Standard. Let's make this red, same here. That's off the screen a little bit but just assign new Shader, Standard, like this yellow. Okay, doesn't look right now, but we'll work on that later. Now, we can just at least see what we're working with. One interesting thing I want to try to do, which you can see on this graph. We have the legend is built into the pie chart and eventually, we're going to animate this or the camera, so we're going around it. I want to be able to see the legend no matter what happens with the camera later. So, let's go ahead and build that legend that will follow everything before we get too much further into shading and lighting. So, we have 25 percent, nine percent, and 66 percent for ABC. So, there's little lines popping off there. I'm going to go hide the Deformers as well so we can focus on this. Let's make the lines and the text. So, let's go create a sphere and scale it down. Pull it up. Let's have it be somewhere in the middle of this piece. So, we know what it is and let's make a tube and let's hold down D and V and pull its pivot all the way to the bottom and then let's hold V and vertex snap. Actually, what we can do to get this to the center, so with vertex snap, we're going to go to the outside of the sphere. We're snapping to vertices of the sphere which are on the outside. But if we want this to snap to the center of this object, let's parent constraint it without an offset. If I parent constraint this to the sphere with an offset, it'll stay over here but if I uncheck that box, if you remember earlier, it'll snap this to the center of that as well. So, let's go, let's do that. Let's go to animation constrain and open the option box here and then we can select the parent first and then the child. We will uncheck Maintain Offset. Watch what happens, boom! It goes right to the center of that thing, it's pretty cool. So, turn that off. See what we're dealing with. You can see the blue channels that it is pinned to that. I'm going to just actually break the connections on the rotations. So, I'm going to right-click with those selected and say break connections. So now, we just have the point. I can rotate this around but I can't translate it and the idea is that, if we scale this down enough, this will be the line and this little dot can be the indicator. So, let's get this out here and we can get it down 90 degrees. So, it's on the same plane horizontally and then we'll get it to be perpendicular to what would be a radian or edge. I've to really go into my geometry memory here to know what terms to use. So, scale this down and another thing is, you can actually isolate scaling. So, if I want to scale the radius of this down but not the length, I can hit Control and the axis manipulator handle but I don't want it to scale and do that. So, see how it's not getting longer but it's just the radius. So, that's one little thing, control and then selecting the manipulator. Then we need some text which has massive. Let's go over to Type and we'll say, I think this is A, isn't it? Yeah, A 25 percent. So, let's say A 25 percent. I got on here, yeah. Okay, let's center that. What in the world. Sometimes mine does some goofy stuff, so I think I might have to separate these into two different texts pieces. So, let's duplicate this out, go back to the first one, make our 25 percent. Let's duplicate that out. Let's hide the first one. Scale both of these down, shift selecting them from outliner and let's rotate them down. Actually, it won't really matter the rotation because I'll show you here in a minute what we're going to do. Let's get the pivot centered on each of them though. So, actually, we're going to do this in a group. Sorry, I'm thinking about this as I'm doing it. You'll see where my head's at here in a minute. So, let's just get this working as a unit together. So, you have this, make sure we haven't rotated anything. Yeah, rotations are clean and I just want to get this in the center, so I'm at its Spacebar, click and went to front view. We can even turn on the grid oddly enough, we made it so big that it's out of the way now but that's okay. I can just actually use. Based on your current view, you can have like a tile action safe thing going on or like add a grid. So, it's nice when you can add in a line stuff up. Basically, 25 is in between these fives. So, now this A should go right in the middle then. So, I'm going to center the pivot here because I want to scale this down and if I scale from over here, it's going to mess up how I'm centering things, so modify center-pivot scale it so it's a little, not as big as the A, I think. This would be the right design choice. So, now we have these two. Let's group both these together. Let's just call them what they are, A and oddly enough, Maya won't let you type in numbers here by itself. So, you have to start with text. Let's group both of these and instead of hitting Command+G, I'm going to type in group down here, where it says Mel. Mel is the Maya expression language. So, if we actually type in group and we hit enter, it will center the group on our selection. If I hit Command+G over here, it will center the group on the world 0,0 position. So, that's not super helpful to us. We want to have it based on our selection to be centered on that. So, now we have our group and let's go back to our perspective and what we can do is, let's go and parent the shapes here. We can hit Command+G on these because we know they're already at the center, so that's fine. Then we can put this group inside that pie chart group. So, now it's all going to move together. We want this stuff to follow as well, let's parent this to the sphere, so it's one less thing we have to worry about. So, just shift select to the child to the parent and hit P, we can see over here it parented itself. I'm just going to duplicate that twice. I'm just going to move these up here so that they're together. I'm just middle mouse dragging them, and I'm going to temporarily move the pivot to the center, so I'm going to hold down D and X, and that way, I can rotate it around. Isn't that nifty? I'm just going to duplicate that again because I want to change this center pivot again. Should be even over there. So, that looks pretty good, and we can take these and parent them to the pie chart group as well. We can drop that down so we can see what we're working with, and go back to shaded mode. The main thing I want to show you is this little trick, because if we're moving the camera around, we can't really read that text very well. So, let's go ahead and bring in our render camera so we can test this out. So, let's go to Create, Cameras, Camera. Just pull this out for right now and just have it over here hanging out, and we'll call that the render cam. We'll mess with that more later. But why I brought that in is because, I want to aim this text to always be looking at the camera. So, no matter how this group, top group gets rotated or the camera rotates around, like we are now but we can't really read what that text says, this will point straight at us. So, let's select the group, the A group. We can see the z-axis is forward. So, we want to constrain, sometimes this happens where it get a little chaotic here trying to move around the screen and accidentally select things. We want to take the group here, this A group and point it always at this camera. So, we can do that with an aim constraints. So, we're going to pick the parent first, then this group and go to animation constraint. There's an aim constraint here. We'll just open this option box and we don't want to maintain the offset. We want this to look the aim vector is Z. So, we want to change this from one and the X. Even though it's not written here, this means X, Y, Z, that's the order. We can see that the up vector is correct. Up is Y, which is the green one. But the aim vector should be the Z which is X, Y, Z it's the third one. It's a little hidden thing just working in 3D. Up here its X, Y, Z. If you see three values is probably X, Y, Z. So, now that we have the maintain offset off, it will snap and start already go ahead and start looking straight at the camera as soon as we hit apply. Boom. i don't know if you saw that move a little bit but watch as we move the camera. Let's just transfer the camera around, see how now that A is pointing right at the camera? So, it gives us a better chance to actually read that text no matter what happens later, and we get some animation for free if we end up rotating this pie chart, it's still going to point right at the camera. So, how cool is that. Awesome. All right. So, we have all that done. In the next lesson, we'll progress with the shading and add a little more animation to the pie chart. So, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 32. Pie Chart 7/10 - Adjusting animation: This lesson, we will add a little more emission to the pie chart and refine some of the materials, and start lighting, and getting into the fancy render stuff. So, let's take a look at what we have. From the render cam, let's just go into that flat view and we'll zero out the group that we made. So, we look just straight ahead. We can't see the pie chart. So, I want to remedy that. Let's grab both of these. Let me go back out to the Perspective View. Gosh. Sometimes that happens when you're right-clicking so much you pick the wrong thing. So, let's just lift both of the camera and that up a little bit. Because I'm going to rotate the pie chart down, go back to the render view, so we can see what we're looking at here. Cool. Have it at an angle. We need to animate the text and the lines on. If I thought about this more, I would have probably start with A because that makes more sense. But that's okay. We're just getting concepts in here. So, let me go to the pie chart and go to text lines. I want to move the pivot point back to the center of this thing around about close to it at least. I'm going to go back to perspective view so we can get in here. So, move the pivot point down and to its center. I'm just going to rotate around to see. Just keep moving it to the center and, eventually, it will get there. When you're in 3D, this is part of the thing of working on 3D is making sure it's actually in space in the right spot. So, let's see. That one's in the right spot. This one isn't because we duplicated it. So, I'm just going to change that real quick, D and V, snap it and get it right in the neighborhood, and then just hold D and get it in the center. Okay. So, we can animate all of these together, and then we can offset them in time just so that they're consistent. So, I want to scale. First, we'll animate the scale but let's make the anchor key so we know where we're going to end up. So,we end up there. Let's go back to 60 and scale this down. I mean, that's pretty good. I think the mean of this animation is the pie chart. We don't want to take away from that by making the lines too fancy. So I think just that simple of a thing is fine. Then we can grab the groups and do the same thing. We have scale here. So, now that the lines are out, it's going to the last frame that they're on, maybe a couple back. Let's key select that. We don't want to hit S. Select all the scale axis. Key selected. We don't hit S because it has a constraint. If we hit S, it's going to add this blind constraint thing, and you don't want to do that. So, don't hit S if something has a constraint on it. It'll get a little messy. Let's go forward here, on a five and another key on just this on the scale. Then we'll scale. Go back to the first frame that we keyed and scale it down to zero. So, now we play it back. I think the animation on these can start a lot sooner, because since they're starting from zero, they have a long way to go. So, we're going to shift select on a timeline to select keys. Then just click on the middle arrows and drag them back. So, I think that's fine. So, now we just need to offset the timing of A group, which is the top two. So, we're going to shift select these keys and drag it down from the middle arrows here. Check where it's starting from. I think it can go later. I think this one can go sooner too. Of course, every time you watch an animation, you see things that can be improved on. It's too much. So, it's a constant thing to tweak and get right. I like that flash. What was that flash? Oh, okay. So, this is something to look out for too in Maya. So, I was moving keys around, and there's this little thing up here called- no, I didn't actually have it. Let me go to a polygon. Yeah, it is something to look out for though. Sync timeline display will only display keys based on your selection of the channel box. So, if I select scale X that has no keys, it looks like there's no keys in the timeline. When, in fact, there are keys here. So, just be aware of that, and that if that's turned on, that's what's happening. But I like to have that off because I don't want it to be dictated based on what I have selected in channel box. So, I think I probably just need to leave that be. So, let's see. We need to delay B. Sorry, this line and that one. Now, we have the keys over here. We can shift select them in the timeline and drag them over. That seems about right. I'll view to play it, A, B. I think these groups are scaling up too late. Yeah, I think they could all go forward. Cool. I think that it is working. The other thing we can do is slightly rotate this whole group around. So, let's go back in the render view. I'm going to reduce the manipulator. We can see it's off. I'm going to change it back to the world manipulator because I want to go just across here. I'll star over here where the animation starts. Actually, let me go in the middle here. I want to save a keyframe on the rotations because I like that. I want to save this position. Let's go past it this way. I'll rotate in. Then it can go a little past here. We can also animate the camera in a little bit. I think a slight rotation, more might be nice. Then let's delete this middle keyframe that we saved and see if it's in the neighborhood of where we had it or wanted it to be in the middle. I think we can delete it and let it do its thing. So, now we have the animation of the pie chart, the texts, and all of it together. It's all aimed right at the camera. So, if we animate the camera, and as this rotates around, all the text is pointed right at the camera view so we can read it. Okay, great. Let me just adjust this because that's annoying me. I swear, every time I look at something I'm just adjusting things, always trying to improve it just a little bit. Okay. In the next lesson, we will continue on with some lighting and the materials. Thanks for watching. 33. Pie Chart 8/10 - Lighting: Before we go any further, we want to make sure that we are working inside of a project that Maya recognizes, because we're about to pull in a texture file in a little bit. So, it's just good practice to set the project earlier on. So, go down to File, Set project, you want to choose a folder that makes sense for you and I choose the Maya folder here and create a default workspace. So, when we go and Save as, it will go ahead automatically put this in the right place. It'll put this in the Maya folder Pie Chart and we can go ahead and save that. That's fine. So, I'm going to split the paint here so we can see what we're working with, and we're going to go ahead and work on some of the materials and lighting. We're going to light this in a different way than we have before because we want reflections on the surfaces of the Pie Chart. As it rotates around, it will expose a different piece of the face to a different angle of a texture we will light with. That texture is called a high dynamic range image and I won't go too detailed into it. Basically, it's an image that Maya will take the brightness information and light the entire scene with it like a globe that we're on the inside of. So, let's go to Arnold tab up here and let's go over to the Globe, you can also get to it from Arnold Lights and say Skydome light. You can see in the background here, it has made a little dome. So, let's turn on the IPR render and see what we have. So, it looks like as we get on these glinting angles, we get some nice reflections here because we actually have this big white piece out here where we had a void earlier. I turn off the Skydome light, well, it's going to go black first. So, let's go ahead and bring in a directional light as well. So, we have some type of light in the scene. So, I'm going to go to the rendering tab and click the directional light, let's scale this up just so I can see it and rotate it down and then turn off and get in here and see this, see these reflections here and then when I turn off the Skydome light, watch what happens. All those reflections go away. It looks really boring now. So, the Skydome light adds a lot especially when we are going for this clean look that's brightly lit. So, that is pretty helpful when we're trying to achieve that look. I think the backdrop here could increase in brightness and I think it just has a normal lambert. So, let's give that an Arnold shader as well, right-click Assign the material, Shader, AI standard, and call that background. It's a little too bright now, so, let's bring down the color a little bit and let's bring down the specular maybe all the way down, let's see, somewhere in there for now. Let's add the same shader for the text lines as we have on the text. Just to be consistent here, go for it so I can get the text here. I'm going to right-click and I do it up here so you can see it. Right click and say existing material and we named it text lines. So, now we can see the text a little bit better, it appears this is freaking out somehow and this could be from, I don't think it's a coincidence that is the percentage, it's the percentage sign on each of these. So, we can make our own real quick. I swear sometimes this stuff just never ends. There's these little problems like this all the time. So, I'm going to speed up that process and you can just, basically, I'm going to make a couple of cylinders and my own box line and I'm going to put them in the right places. So, hang on one second and I'll get those replaced and I'll see you soon. Thanks. Okay, so, now we fixed that. It's one of those little things you just always have to have this amount of patience and have attention to detail whenever you work in 3D because that's stuff, that kind of stuff pops up all the time when you're going to find stuff like that that just isn't working and it's, it's quicker to make it by hand. So, great. We have that fixed and let's move on to the materials. I am going to increase the render view here by going into the Render settings and scrolling down and making sure we're in 10-80 because I know our test preview resolution is going to be half of this. So, just by increasing that one when I go back in here to IPR, it will be much bigger. So, we were talking about the Skydome light and right now, it's just a white background which is nice but it'd be nice to have some texture to this reflection. So, we can do that by adding an image to the Skydome light. If we go to the color of it by going in the Attributes Header of that by clicking this button, we can click on this checker box and get the option to add a file. So we'll click File and now it has added a file node but there is still no files associated with this file node. So, we have to click the folder and add a file and I have this HTR somewhere. So, I have this HTR, you can see there's a mirror ball which I'll probably make a course about at some point and we can open that up and we can see immediately the change in the render view and in our view, we can see it has mapped this image around and it has changed the color a little bit because it's a lot of blue and it has changed the type of reflections that we get. We scroll around and find where we get these reflections. Now it's not just a flat single image, it's actually some texture to it, there's a brighter spot here, there's a darker spot here. So, it adds a little more realism to the render when you have an HTR added to it. You can see how there's these streaks of light now instead of it just being all on. So, that's that I can't add a lot. We may need to adjust a little bit to bump up the light because it's a little bit darker. So, if you also if you're working in an earlier version of Maya, I'm currently in Maya 2018, you want to make sure that the color space is set to Raw for this HTR. Okay. Let's select the Skydome light and let's make sure that we also have the format is selected is the mirror ball so it's projecting it correctly. We can increase the samples just a little bit and let's increase the exposure. We can see it's brightening the image as we're doing that, and we can get somewhere in here and it's a very cool image meaning temperature of the light, cool, meaning blue. So, we can compensate for that a little bit by making the directional light that we added in warm. So, the directional light also has a color. We can click on that and we can go to something yellowish and we can increase the intensity of this and see where that gets us. So, it evens out the color, so it's not just all blue now. For the shadows, I want to increase the light angle. We can see right now the shadows are very sharp on the floor and I don't really like that, I want it to be somewhat soft. So, this is also something note, Arnold has its own tab. I've been adding some values to the wrong area, we want to make sure that we're in the Arnold tab and we can scroll down here and increase the angle here is what we want. It will make the shadows get softer and softer. Let's crank that up. So, now you can see those edges are really soft. So, we want the angle under Arnold for the directional light for that to happen. Great. So, we've come a long way in adjusting lights, we've added a Skydome light which is giving us nice reflections now off of the Pie Chart and we've adjusted the Skydome light. So, in the next lesson, let's adjust some of the materials on the Pie Chart. Thanks for watching 34. Pie Chart 9/10 - Creating glass material: Let's adjust some of the materials. Currently, I can't really read the text that well. So, I'm going to go in here and for the text lines, let's just turn this black for now so we can actually read what each of the lines are. Later on, we can adjust this if we want to but I think that's good for now. The main thing I'm concerned about in this lesson is, I want to make the pie chart appear glass-like. Let's select one of these and we'll go down to the transmission, and if we turn that up, that means it should go opaque. We can see that happen here but we've lost the color of the glass. The other thing that we need to do to make sure this works properly for Arnold is go to the Shape node. I'm scrolling over here up at the top on the tabs. I'm going to go to the Shape node, scrolled on Arnold and make sure opaque is checked off. This is a little funny thing that Arnold does that you just need to make sure that this is checked on if you have any transparent materials going on. So, I'll just make sure later on that we're taking care of. So, I'm going to go and do that for both all of these materials. I'm going to go back to the material for this blue one. Let's go ahead and call this blue. I picked out an image I liked off of Adobe kuler, just a screen grab. I can see the RGB value is down here and that's what we're going to use. So, we're working on the blue one right now. So let's look 12, 148, 235. We want to make this in the transmission tab because as you can tell, even though there's color up here, and actually now that we've cranked up the transmission all the way to one, there's really no reason to have any diffusion color for the base, what they call the base. So, in transmission, we want to add these RGB values, 12, 148, 235. So, I'm switching to RGB so we can get that color scheme, that range. So, I'm going to say 12, 148, 235. Cool, and we can see that update in the render view over here. Also, remember when we added this geometry in earlier, let's get up to one of these edges and see how this changes now that we have some light and things to work with. With selected, let's hit three, and we can see this edge is rounded a lot nicer than what it was before. This is a very sharp edge, which you might also like that aesthetic, we can maybe keep that. But just having that geometry in there at least gives you the option to smooth this later on, because sometimes you never know when you're going to get odd reflections off the edges of things. You can really tell on this view, this edge right here and this edge, let's hit one and watch that go away. It becomes a very sharp edge as soon as we go back to one. So, if we had three, it's very smooth. So, it's just up to you, but it's just nice to see that in action now that we actually have something to work with. So, I'm happy with that color right now. Let's do the same for this one. We can go to transmission and turn the weight all the way up. Let's see what the red value is, 180, six and six. Then, let's change the yellow. Turn the transmission all the way up, and let's see what the color is, 231, 228, 31. So, now we can see this in action a little bit. I don't think the render view liked the fact that we have this on white to begin with. For some reason, it's now showing it as not visible in the viewport. If you remember our trick from earlier, let's see if this hybrid shade trick works again by updating the viewport hopefully. Yeah, that's just a quirky Maya thing, I guess. So, let's turn the transmission back up and we should have this color back here. Okay, cool. So, we've adjusted the materials to look like glass and if you can see, the shadows are now actually glass-like and that's working pretty well. Let's animate the camera and the next one, and call this a day. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks. 35. Pie Chart 10/10 - Compositing in After Effects: Now we have the pie chart renders done, let's open them in After Effects and export them as a movie. So, we can right-click and say import file and find our render folder, pie chart. Make sure OpenEXR sequence is checked. So, it'll bring in all of them. We can drag it down into a new composition. We can Alt-click 8-bit to make this 32-bit. We can scrub and see our animation. Great! We can adjust this as much as we want in After Effects, by adding more effects over here. Let's see if we can't, pump up the color just a little bit. We'll go at the Curves adjustment. We brighten it up a little bit. Bring down the dark areas, just to touch. I think that adds quite a bit. We can add a vignette by going to new Adjustment Layer. We can add another Curves Layer, or let's just do it with Levels to mix it up. We can click this little arrow in the middle, which is the Gamma. We can drag that down to darken the image a little bit. Maybe drag the black one down as well. Let's look at the blue channel. Let's just drag the black point up, because it looks like there's the white area here is getting a little too blue, so we can adjust the blue channel by itself and you can see how we can bring up that. It'll make it more yellow, but we can get it to a point where it's whitish and not as blue. Let's see, it's somewhere in here maybe. So, you can turn that on and off. Remember, this is the vignette. So, let's just go to the Mask Tools, Ellipse Tool and double-click it. We can invert it by going to subtract. We can blur out this edge. We can maybe drive this to be a little bit darker. When I click this button here and that just turns off viewing masks, so we can see the edge a little better. I'm going to drag the gamma down a little bit more. I think that looks pretty good, so we can turn this on and off to see.. I think that does add quite a bit and I think we're pretty good. So, we're going to add this to the Render Queue now. You can go to Composition, add to Render Queue, pick our Codec, go into Format options, turn off the Audio and save this out and hit Render. In the next series of lessons, we will cover how to visualize data from a map. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next series. 36. Map 1/8 - Adding map image: Welcome to the last series of classes in this course. We'll be trying to visualize this map in three-dimensions. If this series of classes I've had in this course is like a video game, this last series would definitely be the boss that you have to beat at the end of the game. This is like the King Cooper of this series. It's going to take quite a bit of patience, and back and forth, and fine angling. We are going to use Photoshop, so if you don't have Photoshop, you can download a free trial of that or use a free image editor of your choice, Krita or Gimp, something like that. So, let's jump right in to what we're going to be doing. We'll switch over to Maya and let's throw down a plane. We'll just go ahead and start diving into shading this thing because essentially, the visualization of this is going to come all from the shaders. So, we're going to spend a lot of time in the Hypershade, which is up here as this little ball. So, we'll open that up. We'll just have it over here by this side. I'll actually, I'll delete those. I'll close those out because we're going to use the Attribute Editor here on the side. So, I'll close that and then we can pull this over here over the outliner, so we can see what we're doing, and let's go ahead and throw down a new material. I'll right click on the plane, assign new material and I will give it a standard arnold material. We will go ahead and throw down the image that we are looking at here. So, let's map in to the color, the image. I'm having this little checker box over here to pull up a new window to create a file node. I'll click the folder over here to be able to map in in this little blank area where the image is. So, I'll go to the map, source images, and I'll just use the screenshot for now. Let's add six to pull up the textures. One thing we're going ot see it's a little squashed and the quickest way that I figured out how big this image should be in the dimensions of it, I just go to the finder on my Mac. How you can get the properties on a Windows as well, just by right clicking and going to get info or properties, and we can see this is 3,218 by 2,482. So, we'll just scale this accordingly to get the right dimensions, 3,218 and 2,482. Of course, what we're only going to do it in the x and z-axis because that's all that really matters to get the dimensions. There's no height to a plane. So, that looks like we have the right dimensions as far as the width and height. So, now we can scale this back down to a little bit more manageable size, now that we know we have this done correctly. We can also freeze transformations. If we go to Modify, Freeze Transformations and now it'll give it a one over here. So, the other thing we need to do is let's go and turn off the grid. Another thing we need to do is crank up the divisions on this. So, I think that's probably a good starting point. Basically, what we're going to do is, we are going to use this grayscale information. The grayscale information of this colored image and it's going to drive the height of a displacement map. Essentially, a displacement is we can see if we go over to the group node of this shader, this little blue in one, we have three options. When we've only been using the surface shader, we have volume and displacement. Displacement happens at render time, so we won't see it in the Viewport, we'll only see displacement happen if we go up here and start Preview Rendering. What displacement does is at render time, it will affect the height of an object based on a value of black to white. So, that's why we're going to use this as a grayscale image to drive the modeling of this plane to be a heightmap, so the darker areas will be higher than the lighter areas. So, we can visually see, with height, what we're dealing with. Okay. I think that's a good introduction into this series. In the next few classes, we are going to dive deep into this, and we're going to use a lot of Photoshop as well to tweak this map. Thanks for watching. 37. Map 2/8 - Adding displacement: Welcome back. Let's go ahead and apply this texture as a displacement map as it is. Because even though this image is colored, it still has value information in it. That's all the Displacement Shader we will look at and the Hyper shadier. So, if we just click Out Color from our image node and drop it over the Displacement Shader, it will map in here, nothing really changes because, as I mentioned earlier, you only see it at render time. In Maya 2018, it is happiest if you're using Arnold Shaders, if you use the Arnold Render View. So, open that up and will hit Play. We can kind of see, that I think we're already starting to get a little bit of displacement possibly. It's very subtle and one of the things that will help us is by adding more subdivisions. We've cranked these up quite a bit. There's also a trick kind of like a displacement map only happens at render time. You're going to add more subdivisions at render time as well. I also mentioned that I added two lights, I added a directional light and an ambient light. You can see in the Outliner here. Just so that we can actually see what we're looking at in the Render View here. So, if I didn't have those, this would be all black. So, make sure you add two lights in as well or at least one light. Okay. So, we're not getting any displacement in this render. So, we can use the trick of adding more subdivisions at render time. The reason why we would want to do that is because imagine trying to describe four different heights in this one square. There is not enough information to do it. If we select this face, it can only go up or down. There's no dividing it and describing four different heights at the same time. It needs more subdivisions here to do that. So, we can do that at render time with this object selected. We can go to the Attributes and if you scroll down, I'll start at the top, so you can see. You can drop down this Arnold menu and then scroll down to the bottom of that, and there's a Subdivision option here that you want to drop down and choose the Catclark type. We want to add iterations and an iteration is how many times at render time, it will subdivide these squares. So, we want to do it at least four more times. As we add that, we need to change the View in the View Port so it'll update this Render View. We can see already that, that's been a huge difference. We can actually see a height difference here. See how this is going in a little bit. So, it's not going enough. So, we can drop down these displacement attributes and increase the height to 10. That has helped quite a bit. But we also might need some more subdivisions, because you can see here the render, it kind of looks like there's some tearing at the edges, and it might not have enough geometry here to define these hard edges of the color changes. So, let's increased iterations to six. Then we'll adjust our View Port, so it'll trigger an update over here. Okay, that took a little bit longer. As you add iterations, it'll be a little more computationally difficult for the Computer. My fan is working pretty loudly on my iMac and depending on the hardware you have this might be a little more difficult for you to do and it might be a little slower because it is a little more expensive on the render time. So, now we can see this really got us a lot further by increasing the iterations and the Height map. The only problem with this is, it's going in the wrong direction. This is a population increase map, and it would make more sense I think that we would see it come out of the Map and not go down into it. So, we want to reverse this effect, but it does look pretty cool as it is already. If I do say so. So, let's reverse this effect from the Hypershade without ever going into Photoshop yet. We can go to the Reverse node. I already have a pulled up, but you can start typing in the Search option up here, and as long as you don't have Arnold selected because if you have something selected down here, it will only search in that area. So, if I start typing in reverse here, it won't show up. It's a Mayan node. So I need to be under the Maya tab. So, I can click Reverse and it'll drop it in here. We can now map this Out Color to this Reverse, and this Reverse back into the Displacement Shader. So, it's a pretty simple process, it's just going to reverse all the data which is colors and values and we'll map it back in here. So now, when the Render View updates, it should be the opposite of what we're seeing and that might take a second for it to catch up. Okay, so that took a minute to update, but now we can see it's definitely reversed what we saw with some possibly unwanted artifacts. So, if we hadn't reverse this in general with a displacement map, it thinks black is going down and thinks white is going up and gray doesn't do anything. So, when we have black borders and we reverse it, so you know, we haven't reversed it, black is going down. But we reverse it, so now black is going up and white is going down. So, with black going up, all of these state and borders are now being raised. Because it's a slightly pixilated image, it's very jaged, and it doesn't look great. We've also see these very small little divots in the surface where it looks like possibly county lines are drawn in the Map with little white. If we zoom in here, we can see very little white dashes here. So, depending on the resolution of your image, you're going to have more or less unwanted artifacts of this. But, where it's fairly straightforward there's just squares here, this looks pretty good up close and there's not much to change about that. But this is going to be the reason why we want to jump into Photoshop and clean up this image and it may test your patience because that will take some time to clean up all of these edges in Photoshop. But in general, this is the effect that we've gotten. And if we take the Directional Light, we can accentuate the height differences a little bit. So, I'm going to rotate the Directional Light to be flatter, so it'll throw more shadow to accentuate these different heights. One thing we can also do in Photoshop is, you can see how down here the height difference between one color to the next isn't a tone. It's kind of hard to see, so there's not a tone of contrast in the height. So we can adjust that in Photoshop as well. So, that's it for this lesson and applying a displacement map. We learned about that, how to adjust it with the attributes over here when you select the polygon and adding iterations, increasing the height of the displacement, reversing an image, so we get the opposite of what we're seeing where black is supposed to go down and white supposed to go up we're going to reverse that, now black is up and white is down. In the next class, we're going to start to jump inside of Photoshop and adjust all of these borders. Thanks for watching. 38. Map 3/8 - Adding contrast: Okay. Now let's take a look at this image as far as the gray scale values. So, I've gotten a little head start here in Photoshop and I'll walk you through each layer that I'm been using, we can look at the gray scale values by creating a new layer and hitting Shift F5 or we can go to Edit, Fill and bring up this box and fill it with black and then if we turn the blend mode here to color. It will apply that to all the layers below it. So, we can see the values here, and one thing to conceptually understand about displacement mouse is it's expecting a range of everything between white to black and that's how it's going to create contrast and have different heights for different colors and values. If we're not using that whole range, then we're not taking advantage of the contrast and heights that each value can have. So for example, the darkest area of this map is right here and I'm just going to paint down on a new layer. Some black. This doesn't even come close to being black. So, we need to increase the contrast of this image. So that the whites are wider and the dark areas are closer to black. So that there's more contrast and heights as well because that's what this is going to translate to differences in values of white and black are going to translate into greater differences in height on our map. So, let me just delete these two layers. We can do a curves adjustment here and I just added these points and made a little S here. When we turn this on we can see we're driving the image to have more contrast, the left side of the curves panel is dark areas. So, we can make them push them darker and push this closer to black. So that looks pretty good and the wide areas are closer to white so there's a greater difference, of what we're going to see in the image. So, let's bring that into Maya real quick we'll save this out. I'm going to choose grey contrasts that has the name and save, or place it. It's okay, now let's go back to Maya and instead of using the same color node for the displacement as well as the color let's bring in a new file. So, let's say file. Click here, and I'll get a new set of nodes and I'll map that image that we just saved grey contrasted. I'll open that, I'll map that into the input of the reverse because we still want to reverse the colors, and we could reverse colors in Photoshop or here it doesn't really matter. So, now on this updates we should have greater heights between the different colors and values. So now that it's updated, zoom in and we can see the differences between these colors are much taller than what they were before. This is much higher, the difference between this value and this value now those are big differences. So, it's a lot clear where those differences are now that we've increased the contrast of the displacement map. In the next lesson, we'll go further in Photoshop to adjust the image to work better for us. Thanks for watching. 39. Map 4/8 - Cleaning borders: So, now that we have greater contrast, let's address all of this mess like the borders and how we can do that in Photoshop. So I'm going to switch over to, I'm going to hit stop on this so it's not rendering in the background constantly, and I'm going to switch over to Photoshop and let's take a look at this layer. We need to decrease the value of these borders and clean up. If we want to clean up these county borders that are just these little lines right here. So, how are we going to do that is with a selection and the best way to do that is, let's turn off these layers and work from the original, and let's get somewhere and go to select color range, and I want to get down here close and select this black and I'm going to shift select the black around it. So it's going to add to that selection and we're previewing it as a quick maskery and also do a white matte. So, now we can see we have actually selected all the borders and it looks actually pretty clean, I'm kind of surprised. So, let's hit okay, and now we see we have a selection of all the borders, and let's get in here and make sure it looks like the edges aren't totally right. So, what we going to do is go back to select, modify, expand by one pixel, hit okay, and now we know for sure we've got all of those borders. So, depending on how we want to address those borders, we can paint over with this stuff selected. So, let's say, for example, in this area over here, if I want to not see the border I can just paint over this right? And ideally I'm doing this on a separate layer so I don't mess up the original image. But if I painted over like this, there's going to be no high difference across the border, and that's an option for us. The other option would be to lower the opacity to something just above the very bottom value, which let's go over here and see what the bottom value is. No change is this color. So let's put that down, looks like it's pretty much the same color as the white over here, so we can just go based off of that. We'll color pick that, and I'm just holding down all to bring up the color picker, and then we'll click on the color here and we'll look at the brightness, and the brightness is at 100 percent. So we know that's pretty much a white, is considered the area of no change in the legend. So let's do something just above that, maybe like 90 percent of that, and we'll hit okay. Now, let's do just for fun, let's do the state of Louisiana. Now with this 10 percent value here are actually 90, we've taken 10 percent away from what the bottom part of the map height should be. So, this should be 10 percent higher than that essentially. We can paint in on this border this color, and I'm just doing Louisiana so that when we update this we can visually see the difference pretty clearly between the other parts of the map. Okay, so let's save this out to the same file that we did before and then we can just update it in Maya. Let's save, replace. That's okay, and we'll switch over to Maya and in hyper shade. One thing I'd like to do to kind of refresh textures after I adjust them, select it, right-click, and go to refresh swatch. Now, let's navigate over to Louisiana and wait for the new render to pop up and see what the differences between the state of Louisiana's border and the surrounding borders. Okay, now that we have updated the scene, let's take a look at Louisiana. One problem is when I exported it, I didn't turn back on all of these layers that helped us out. So we need to make sure that those get turned back on and save the image again, and I'll right-click again on the file node that has been updated, refresh swatch, and then move around in the view port a little bit. And now we should be able to see a big change here on this border in Louisiana. Let's watch for that to take place. Okay, that looks like that was the issue and I just needed to close and reopen the Arnold render view. So, now if we look at the state, we can see the border is there and we can see some differences between the heights of everything. So, the other remaining issues are the fact that it's not super clean. If we look in here, it's really noisy because in the texture it looks like there's maybe rivers and things that are mapped in and county lines here in the white. So, we'll start to address that in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 40. Map 5/8 - Fixingvalues 1: So, before we get to the final details of the internal parts, let's make sure that we're getting a difference between these two colors. It looks like they're being treated the same so we need to adjust that in Photoshop. Because the colors are different, that doesn't mean the values are different. It looks like they're probably being read as the same value even though the color is different. So, let's address that in Photoshop. So, before we do that, let's just fill all of this with the color that we have selected. So, I just hit Shift F5, I'm going to pick the color that was on my brush, which is that top one here, and I'll say, Okay. So, now we have a border that's for the most part, right. Looks like there's some areas here that didn't get picked up, so we could maybe go over these a little more with a brush just to make sure they go white. Okay, now that we have that filled, let's deselect it, Command D, and let's click the I here to isolate it. Turn on the black just to make sure that the selection is correct for us here, and it looks pretty good. So, now let's look at the color issue we were having. I'll just turn on the original color and let's turn on the black to see the difference. If we look here, the issue is even though these are two different colors, the value is the same. So, Maya sees these two areas, and I'll just mark them here, sees this one and this one as the same but if we look at the color, they're two different colors. So, over here on the map, the lower green should register, it looks like it's this color. Yeah, that's that color right there. So, we need to select that color everywhere and fill it with something with a darker value. So, let's delete that layer we were just testing out on, let's make a selection the same way we did before, Select, Color range, and we'll select that color. It looks like it's doing a pretty good job. It looks like it's maybe trying to select something else. Let's go to the None option, so it is trying to select a darker color. So, let's turn down the fuzziness, and we'll switch back to none. It looks like we'll have to bring the fuzziness down quite a bit. So, let's go back to the white matte, and we'll do it just right when we're starting to not see anything. We'll reduce the fuzziness until we get to where these county borders start to disappear. So, somewhere in here, say, Okay. Let's make a new layer and we'll color pick this and then hit Shift F5, and go into color and we'll select that or we could have just done it over here too. Let's look at the brightness. The brightness is what we had for the borders of the states, the new borders. We had 90 percent brightness, B is for brightness. So, we need to make that darker. We could make that maybe 10 percent darker. So, it's the same color but the value is less. So, let's hit Okay and let's fill all of that. Cool. You know what else we can do? While we have this selected, let's go ahead and go to Select, Modify, Expand, expand this by two pixels, hit Okay, and then let's refill it. What that did was get rid of the borders. We're going to do that same thing with the other colors real quick. So, let's go, Select, Color range and let me make a new, let's cancel this and make a new line, we'll do light green, and then this one will be the purple-grey kind of. Let's go to Select, Color range, select that and the fuzziness looks about right. I'm also looking on this image here because we don't want to select any white around the outside. So, I hit Okay. Now we'll go to Select, Modify, Expand, Two pixels, Okay. We'll see, Shift F5 with this color and we'll go, Okay. Oops. We'll hit Shift F5 and we're going to select a new color, which is the purple, we'll hit Okay. So, now we got rid of those county lines that were distracting, and we can do that as well to these other colors. Let's drag these layers down below the border layer, which was this one. We need to name that. So, turn that on. So, now that's looking a lot better, a lot cleaner. So, hopefully in Maya, it'll pick that up a little better. Let's save this out, and let's remember to turn back on the curves and the grayscale black here. We'll go File, Save as and replace that file again, turn to JPEG. Let's go over to Maya, we'll refresh this file, and then we will restart the Arnold RenderView and wait for our render. I have to remember to hit Play. Let's take a look as we zoom out how much cleaner this looks now compared to what we started with. The borders are much better, the differentiation of heights is better. We can begin to see where the patterns are relative to what we're seeing in the legend over here. This is much, much nicer and I'm pretty happy with this. So, let's stop here for this lesson and I'll see in the next one. Thanks. 41. Map 6/8 - Polishing in Photoshop: So now, we have this in a pretty good spot, let's further refine it and take a look at some issues we still have. The text here is way too far raised to the point that we can't read it. We can read the percent increase decrease up here, we can read the legend. Looks like it's working pretty well. So, we need to address this text and we also need to adjust the shader because, if you can see this we're getting these little tiny white pings on our image. That is from the shaders reflection and the fact that we have a ton of geometry and probably at these points, it's maybe turning an edge or a face kind of weird. So, it's catching the light in a way that if we animate this, it is going to get super sparkly, and these things will be popping all over the place like there's glitter on this. So, we want to turn down the reflection on the shader. We want to reduce this text. So, we're going to do the text first and Photoshop real quick. So, I'll switch over to that and we can see, we can pick the color because I like the height of this. I like the height of this text that we can barely read. It's just above white and I think that's what should be true for this font or here. So, on a new layer, I'm going to use the brush. Let's actually pick this and then we'll just turn the opacity to maybe 90 and let's see what that gets us. I think that'll get us pretty close. So, we don't want to pick up our brush and then go again because then it'll just repeat that 90 percent. We just want to click and drag totally and have that happen all at once. So, let's compare, let's pick this and we can paint it over here and let's pick this. I suspect we might, we'll probably have to do this so all again, this is much darker than the one up there. So yeah, look at that, we need to get closer to this top one. So, let's select that again and let's go to may be 10 percent and let's go over this while still holding it down. Looks like we can go again, so I am lifting up my pen and dropping it back down, because I'm trying to compare this color, this value to this top one here. You basically just want it just brighter than white. So, I'm going to keep going over this with 10 percent until it gets where I want it. Because you also have to remember, we are going to have the colors coming from the diffuse texture. So, that looks pretty good. So, I can erase this stuff up here and zoom out. Let's see if there's anywhere else that needs fixing like that. I think we're pretty good. So, I think we're done with this image in Photoshop now, let's save it. Gray contrast to JPEG, save, replace. Okay. Just delete that and we'll call this bottom left title overlay white. When we got two of these and we've got two these, let's delete one, and so that looks pretty clean. Call this original in this working and I'll save this as a Photoshop file that I will share with you all. Displacement map edit, Photoshop layers, save, place, okay. So now, let's update the file, clicking it and holding down right click. Refresh swatch Miko and then we can bookmark this here this view or, it's such an obvious change we don't really need to bookmark. What I was going to say was you can bookmark views and then get back to them and I think we did that in the bar series. So, you probably are familiar with that. So, let's move the camera around to trigger this to render a new version. So, it looks like it's not updating properly, so let's close that out and reopen it and hit play. Okay, and it looks like we just have maybe some little extra paint that we did on the edges of this thing, yeah. So, let's clean that up super quick and Photoshop. Okay. Now, we're pretty good. There's still two little pieces there but we can fix that later. So now, we need to address these little pinging little white dots. So, if we select the geometry and we get to the shader here, AI standard surface and we go down to the specular, we can just turn the weight off. Now, we can see we got rid of that which is pretty good. The other thing we can experiment with, just in case we're going to do close-up shots. Let's blur out that image real quick in Photoshop and see if that doesn't get rid of some of this edge noise. So, let's switch back over to Photoshop, I said we're done but you never know. I'm going to hold on Alt, Command, and Shift and E. It's a lot to all down, and then that will not flatten everything, it'll just bake everything to the top layer. So, on this layer, we can do a blur. Let's just do a Gaussian blur first, let's see what that looks like. Let's go to some of these edges. What are we looking at in looking at West Texas? It looks like, let's go over to West Texas which is up here and toggle this preview. It does look like there is some noise here which we could also paint. It's all up how much work you want to really do. Let's just say okay on that, I can make a new layer and start painting in these little areas that are noisy, like this and pick the color going here, maybe make my hardness a little less, so these edges aren't so hard. I can start to clean up those areas that are noisy. You can see little borders here that we might have missed when we were doing those big selections. If you're going to go into an area and do some close-up shots, you might as well spend the time to clean this up and make sure that it's a little less noisy. It's really as much work as you want it to be because you could do this endlessly and that you'd still find little stuff like this to fix. So, let's just get some of the big ones here and yeah. So, that's just as an example of what you can do. But the main thing that we're looking at there was blurring as well so, let's save this out. Great contrast and just real quick, the TX file is what Arnold makes whenever you use it. So, we haven't touched that, we haven't created that. That's something Arnold made on its own when we use that in Maya. So, you can just leave that alone, otherwise, I'll just have to keep recreating it every time that it's using it. So, let's go over here and refresh. Let's remember what this looked like too. We can actually, I'll just take a screenshot of this and we can pull it up here, because we're going to close this to do the refresh. So, let's select the file, right click, refresh, let's bring back our Arnold Renderview and play. So, let's take a look between the two images here. I'll just zoom in as we were to get to the same area. So, the one left is blurred using that blurred new image and this is the one on the right. We can see it greatly improved, we can see this border now is totally gone because I think we did that paint over right there. This look garbage here on the right and Maya, the edges are just a little bit smoother. Look at this ridge here and these dark areas, that's all smoothed out here by doing that Gaussian blur. We can probably do it, the Gaussian blur even more drastic and get these ridges and stuff small smoothed out. But I'll leave that up to you to finesse because that could take some time. But you get the idea, going back and forth between Photoshop, adjusting this stuff, look at this little red here on the on the valley of this down here and look over here, it's like almost totally gone. So, you can spend a lot of time in Photoshop and really clean these images up, so that when you use the displacement it will do it as accurately as possible. In the next lesson, we'll finish this out with throwing in some more lights and maybe a camera move and animating the displacement, and I will see you in the next video, thanks. 42. Map 7/8 - Camera, lights, render: The displacement were working pretty well. Let's address the kind of look of the lighting here. So, I think the main thing we're going to want to do is probably bring in a sky dome light, to just brighten up the whole scene. So, I'll bring up the Arnold under view and hit play. Okay great. So, I kind of like the direction of the lights, only problem is if we want to read this legend later, that shadow is going to be a problem. So, you may want to reverse that, that actually looks quite a bit better already. This is the thing I love about Arnold render view is, just being able to see these changes right on the fly, it's such a huge help. So, I think that looks pretty good. Let's go in here and let's make a camera move. So let's turn this off, we'll make a new camera, we'll select it, and one kind of bug I've noticed in Maya is, it freaking out over here with creating new cameras. Sometimes it'll put crazy new values over here, and so we just want to zero those out, and the other main one we want to zero out is the center of interest because if we start rotating around now, center of interest is way the heck out there, so we're going to end up translating the camera pretty far out. So, I think we actually have to have some kind of a value here, so now, yes this will luckily work. So, now we're in "persp" one which we can rename render cam, and let's bring up the framing here at the top. Let's get something like this, I think a camera move kind of like this would be kind of cool. Just to see it go from flat to kind of raise. So, select the camera and let's zero out the translate X so we're kind of nowhere in the center, and let's go down here to the key frame area the timeline, and let's do this on frame 100, let's just set S. Now it looks like, I think was for trying to type something up here, so whenever that happens I just like to select this top bar of the viewport and set S again, and make sure we have auto keyframe on over here. Let's go down to frame one, and we'll just pan this down to something like that, and I'm going to zero out the X again to make sure we stay centered. Maybe zero out the rotate Y. Now let's play this back, that looks pretty good. It's a little fast, so let's drag out this keyframe, shifts select it and timeline, and then grab the middle handles. Let's play that back again. And it ends just a little abruptly on these keyframes. Let's open up the graph editor and grab all these keys, and we can't change the tangent handles, so we want to go to curves, weighted tangents. Now those handles pop out and we can just drag these over a little bit. Let's see what that does. Should slow down. I think that's good, we can just drag this out a little more, so we have more room to pull these back over. I think we can go even further with this, drag it way over, and I'm just middle mouse dragging, holding down shift. I'm dragging those over, hold V to play it, yes that's a lot smoother. I like that slower finish on the camera. The other thing we're going to animate here, is going to be the displacement, and we can do that by going into the shader. Let me just save this because I haven't saved it yet even. Let's go to file, set project, and we'll go to map, set, create default work space, file, save as. We'll just call this "map". In the shader of this object, actually not in the shader but in the shape node of Arnold. Let's adjust the height, let's see, let's open up the Arnold render view and see how much this affects the height, hit play. Okay, now with this selected and in render preview, let's turn down the height, let's turn it down to one, and it appears to not have changed anything. Let's go scroll through the timeline, and so it was just a render preview issue with Arnold. But it does look like the height will be our ticket to animating the displacement. Let's go to frame zero here, frame one, and let's have it start at zero. And we can right-click on the text here and set a key, and let's bring it up. Maybe even still like 15 or something. On attributes like this even though we have auto key on, we still want to make sure we're setting keys because sometimes, most of the times, Maya doesn't pick that up and auto keys that, so we need to do it our self. So let's close that and make sure 15 isn't too crazy on the height, we'll reopen it. So, 15 doesn't look too crazy and I think that looks appropriate. Let's go into the directional light and go into Arnold. Let's increase the samples if we remember from the pie chart one, the samples did a lot to solve this noise issues and the shadows. Let's increase the angle here to just get a little softness and the shadows on the edges of them. So if we crank that up a little more let's just go all the way, yeah we can see it go really soft there. It gives it a much softer feel with the softer shadows. So I like that look, let's turn up the intensity just a little bit. If we double it, what does that look like? I think that's closer to what we want and let's just add a little bit of color to this, not a ton. So it feels like it's lit by maybe a lamp or something. Let's pick the ambient light and let's do the opposite and make it cool where we made the directional light warm. Just turn that up a little bit. Instead of ambient light, and to be honest, I'm not even sure that Arnold registers ambient lights. That's a mild light, so let's just duplicate the directional light here. Resettle now, we can see it goes really bright and let's just put this away down 0.2. I'll make this really blue. Okay, and then we'll do an opposite direction here. So it'll fill the shadows a little bit. We'll just turn this around. Play, as you can see now the shadows are a lot more blue than they were. There might be a little too much because remember we push this pretty far a minute ago. Just dial back that blue. Seems to be working pretty well, it's pretty clear image. You don't want to get to moody with a map that's a pretty straightforward thing. I think that image looks pretty good and we can scroll through here and stop that or reset it. It's kind of frustrating that it doesn't register the height map. We won't be able to see that until we actually render it. So we have to just kind of trust that that's going to animate properly. While we're talking about it, let's go in here, we'll open up the graph editor. Just because the camera moves slows down so much, let's make sure this does the same thing. We'll go to Weighted Tangents. I will just shift drag that out so it slows down a little bit towards the end. I think this will look pretty cool. I'm having to kind of just visualize it in my head because this doesn't update, but let's just kind of go to the middle and see where it ends up being during the middle of the animation of the camera, just to make sure I'm not too crazy here. Yeah, this seems to make sense, like we'll see, that's a big enough difference I think from two seconds and we'll see this much height be gained over nothing. So I think that makes sense and then it'll kind of finish out at 15 up here. So cool, I like the lighting. I like how this works. Let's go to the render options here to make sure we have that all set. We'll go name that number to our extension to make sure we have a range and we'll go to see where the camera stops. Camera stops around here. You know what, let's drag. Let's try that one out because I don't want the camera and the height to stop at the same time. It looks like they're kind of really close to each other. So, let's just have it finished around 220. So we can select this, actually type in a value here for the frame, this is frame and this is the value so it's 15 high and it's at a time on the frame 220. So, I think that makes sense then we can just end this at 230 because then we can just hold the frame really at 220. Let's just do that because 10 more frames can be another hour depending on how long this each frame takes to render. So I'd rather hold that frame and aftereffects and render blank frames where nothing's happening. So we can turn this to 200 and name this Map. We are going to make sure we pick the right camera and that we are going to render in 720. So one last thing that gets a little bit in the weeds but it will add a lot later on, it's called AOV tab where I've add the z pass which I probably won't use. I just selected it from here and I clicked here to put it over in active. We're going to make an ambient occlusion AOV and that just means there's going to be a separate pass for ambient occlusion which is the physical properties of light being able to bounce less where edges meet basically if that makes sense. So let's add a custom AOV and we'll call it AO for ambient occlusion create, and under this, we'll drop down and we can select it and the [inaudible] editor we get that node essentially. Under Default Shader, we want to click the checkbox or click the checkered box and let's go down to the Arnold Shaders and click AI Ambient Occlusion. Let's crank the samples up to six and that will work. So now we have everything ready to go ready to render, render cam is set and the path is right because we've set the project. Let's close this out and let's go to render, and go down to render sequence and click this option box, and make sure that we have the render cam selected. That's very important. So let's render sequence and close and I'll just save this one last time. So, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next class where we will finish this up in After Effects. Thanks. 43. Map 8/8 - Compositing in After Effects: So, now that we have the map renders done, let's import the files in after effects important file and navigate to where you have the folders. If you did the ambient occlusion pass, if you're following along with that part, you'll have a separate folder for that. So, let's select one of those files, make sure it says sequence checked on down here, and light open. Let's take a look at what that ambient occlusion thing is all about. So, right now it just looks like a white plane, and as the heights are animated on we're seeing it be black and white, and it's black and white like this because we're going to multiply this over the bottom image. So that we'll only get these black values to come through. It'll essentially accentuates the edges of things and where there are like these borders of the states. So, that'll help when we have this other color information, and things are kind of getting busy. It'll help ground these edges a little more. It'll be physically a little more accurate to what would actually look like if this was real. So, let's bring in the beauty pass, and that's just what Maya calls the color information. So if you've separated these out it'll be under a beauty folder and we'll just select one of the images here and bring in drag and drop at the bottom here. Let's select, so we can see we have it underneath there. Select this top ambient occlusion pass and we'll choose a blend mode of multiply. Cool. So, let's turn this on and off and see what we did. You can see where these edges are, it kind of helped ground them in a little bit. Let's go over here and turn this on and off, and this is something you may or may not want, but I kind of like it, and of course we can adjust it. We can just turn the opacity down if we think it's too much. Then we could also color correct it, so we clamp the black and white values. But for now, let's just turn down the opacity of that just a little bit, so it's not as strong. Cool. I think we can pump up the colors of the map a little bit. So, go to color correction, hue and saturation, and let's just go to the greens and bring up the saturation of the greens a little bit. I think that helps bring him up a little bit. Let's add a curves adjustment and brighten the whole thing, and then bring the dark values, keep those where they're at. I think it will also help once we add a background, so we'll go right-click new solid, and let's just choose maybe some kind of a blue. Let's see, and we'll drag that to the bottom, and let's make a vignette adjustment layer, bring that to the top. Go to color correction and bring in a curves adjustment, and just drag that down in the middle. Then we'll double-click the ellipses up here and change this to subtract, drop this down so we can get to feather and further this out as we've done in the last videos, and I might just bring this down below the map. So that doesn't get these edges here, I don't know if you've noticed that but I think it looks better if it's just on the background maybe. So, we can bring that down, and we further this out a little more, you can hit end so you get quickly to the mask, and further this out a little more. Maybe not, maybe I think that's too strong of an effect. So, I go to T and just drop the opacity a little bit. Cool. So, now we have our animated map, and we can add this to the render queue and go to LT. Okay. Turn off audio and save it out. Thanks for watching this series of tutorials, I really appreciate it. Please share your work if you followed along and done this as well. I'm really curious to see what you guys make, and definitely reach out to me if you have any questions or run into any problems. This is so far the longest course I've recorded. So, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was informative and a congratulations to you for getting this far and finishing all of the training. So, thanks for joining me, and I hope to see you in my other classes. All right. Thanks.