3D Medical Animation in Autodesk Maya

1. Course Introduction: Hi and welcome to my course on 3D medical animation. I wanted to take a second and introduce you to the topics I'm going to cover in this course. First off, my name is Lucas Ridley, and I'm an animator. I've worked in studios like Sony and Industrial Light and Magic on movies like Michael Bay's Transformers and Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The software we're going to be using is Autodesk Maya, which is the industry standard that I've used in the all the studios I worked for. You can download a free trial of this from Autodesk website. Similarly, you can download a free trial of after effects to fall along with compositing sections, where we'll take our 3D rendered images and composite them together inside of aftereffects. This course is aimed at the beginner, but there's something in here for all levels. I've divided this course into four different examples. The first one is cell division, where we'll create a cell that will divide twice. Then we're going to model and create some chromosomes and use some of Maya's motion graphics tool sets to create a crowd of them, and then we will create DNA in two different ways, a more beginner way and a more advanced way. Then we'll get into blood flow, which is the longest section of these four examples. There's a bonus section at the end of the blood flow example where we will control the blood cells to actually create a heart shape just to show the type of control that you can have with particles and these blood cells in mind. There's something for everyone in this course, so I hope you'll join me and learn about 3D Medical animation. Thanks for watching. 2. Maya Introduction: Welcome to the first class of this course. Because it is geared towards people who have never used Maya, this initial class we'll talk about using Maya for the first time and if you've already used it for the first time, then you can skip this class. If you've taken one of my other classes that discuss this, or if this is your very first time, hang around and we will explore the Maya interface together. So very quickly to move around, we need to hold down alt, and we need to have a three button mouse. Each of the three buttons do something different. In the left mouse, middle mouse, and right mouse all do something different. So play around with that, but that's how we navigate around as getting comfortable with that. So let's make a sphere real quick. If we go up here to the poly modeling tab, and we click on this little sphere here will get a sphere. You can see there're some lines around this thing and if I grab and start moving it, that's actually rotation. I can see that I've rotation selected because it's over here, selected in this little tool panel and the hotkeys for this are q, w, e, r, and q is select. So if want to select something I can click and drag or select it here. Then the next one is move, which we now have manipulators to move. We can also click in the center and move it freely around and then we saw our rotation just a moment ago. We can freely move if we click in the gray area here or isolate on a certain axis, we can scale similarly and we can see all these values changing over here in the channel box and you can see that's named right here on this tab that goes up and down the side, it says channel box and we have that open by having this little box selected up here on the top right and that toggles different menus that we can access. So the channel box shows us where the transformation information is so if I move this over, we'll see eight and I can type in here and get very specific if I want and I open up the tool settings over here and I can just dock this by dragging it and wait until this blue line pops up and then let go of the mouse, and then when I click the tool button over here again, it'll get rid of that. We can control the menus over here and it's nice to have the outliner up all the time, but you can also undock that and we can close that out and we can get back to it up here under Windows and outliner. So that's helpful. Always have up and so you can see what you're creating in the scene. Because sometimes if we're looking over here, we might not be able to see what's just off the screen and remember every little thing that we made. So it's nice to have a list and it's easier to select things from over here as well. So if we want to view this from the right side, we can go over here to the right side and try to line this up with the three button mouse thing and try to figure this out or we can just go to the right camera. We can get to that under panels and go to orthographic and go to the side view. We can also hit spacebar and you can see that it pops up these four views and we can change this one to perspective, holding down spacebar and that brings up the menu of all of Maya. So everything you see up here, you get just by holding down space so you won't have to go up here hunting stuff around. You can actually just get it right here and it's also quick to move between cameras. If we click here in the middle and then drag around, we get to see which camera when we unclick our mouse that we go to. So we can go to the left view. We can go back to perspective and when we hit spacebar over one, we can maximize it again and if we want to change the time, we can click and drag down here. We can add more frames clicking and holding this type in a number over here at 100 and don't feel like you can really break anything in here. It looks very technical and it is, but it's here to be used and free to experiment with width. So have some fun with this. We've learned how to navigate around with a camera, how to move things, and where that information is stored. The final thing that we need to do is to set our project and that's how Maya knows where to save everything. If we're going to make textures or we're going to create caches, which just means saving little pieces of this scene out and then so we can have it already processed and to bring back in or all these little things that Maya might need to save in certain locations. I need to know where it is. So the project needs to be set and we can do that by going to file set project and then navigate to a Maya folder, and I have the blood flow project set right here. It'll ask if you want to create a default workspace and you do, because that'll just store some basic things that it'll try to remember next time you open up this scene like which camera you had selected and all that little stuff. So we'll say create default workspace and so now we have the project set. I hope this has given you a little bit of comfort in navigating around, moving things and controlling the interface in Maya, I just don't want you to be intimidated by everything you see in the software. We're going to follow a step-by-step approach in each one of these little series and just follow along with what I'm clicking and you will learn how to use Maya on a project basis. So I'm not going to go through every single button. I'm only going to use what we need to do to go from a blank scene to the final render and in that process, you will learn tools. But what I'm not going to do is just boringly list off what every single thing does in Maya. I get bored by that and tutorials I watch and/or even teaching and so I love teaching projects. So that we can have a goal and try to achieve that goal and learn things along the way to that goal. I hope that you feel comfortable now using Maya a little bit and we can continue to the next lessons where we will dive deeper into the series on creating 3D medical animations. Thanks for watching. 3. Cell Division Maya 2020 update: Particle/Mesh Creation: This is an updated lesson for Maya 2020, and nParticle creation. If you're using anything before Maya 2020, just follow along in the next lessons, or if you're using Maya 2020.1 or 0.2, you can also follow along normally. In Maya 2020 and in Maya 2020.3, you need to press enter after each particle creation to create separate particles. You can select them separately. In Maya 2020.4, we're going to cover that in this video here, which is a more involved process and we need to animate with scale instead of translation in later lessons. We're going to quickly go over that creation process here. Here we are in Maya 2020.4, I'm going to go the Effects tab and go to the nParticle creation tool here, and just hold on X, so I can snap to the grid, and create these two particles. Now, I can't select them individually, so I'm going to go to Animation, Deform, and Cluster to create one cluster for both of these nParticles. Now, I can go to convert the nParticles to polygons. You can find the Blobby Radius Scale in the Attribute Editor over here. Because we have one cluster, we can actually just use the scale attribute to separate these two particles from each other or combine them together, instead of in the other versions of Maya, where we are translating individual points by separate cluster handles. If you're in Maya 2020.4, this is maybe the route you'll have to go. Of course, in future versions of Maya, you may change it again, so just be aware of those changes, and workarounds like the one we showed here, or in Maya 2020 or 2020.3, where you need to hit enter after each particle you create, so you can select them separately to create the clusters like we do in the normal course lessons following this one. Thanks for watching. 4. Cell Division Maya 2022 update: Particle/Mesh Creation: Welcome to this updated lesson for Maya 2022. I'm using 2022.1. If you are in a newer version of Maya 2022 or above, this lesson is for you because the way that you control particles have changed. Once again, every version of Maya, they like to switch things up and keep us on our toes for some reason. We are going to create the particles, and then we're going to constrain them and then animate them, and then we can see it after the fact. Whereas before, we could see it dynamically change interactively, we can't see that anymore, so we have to animate it, the constraints first, and then we can see the mesh interact. There's a little bit of a blind animation occurring until you playback. I'll show you what I mean here in a second. We want to be under the Effects tab here. Go to Effects, then go down to the nParticles menu and go to nParticle Tool. Now, we can just make four particles. I'm going to hold on X so they lay on the grid, and you can press the "Grid" button here if you don't see your grid. I'll hold down X. Then left mouse button click in these four quadrants just to make it easy on myself, and then hit "Enter". Once I hit "Enter", they will be created. Once they are created, we can go ahead and constrain them to a transform constrain. We were doing clusters last time. What we want to do is use a nConstraint. I'm going to hold down right mouse button and then go to Particles, then I can select "Individual Particles". If I hit "W" on my keyboard, then I can see the manipulator is on the particle that I'm selecting. Then I go up to the menu and choose "nConstraint", "Transform Constrain". Now, you can see it made a dynamic constraint and the outliner. It's also something we can't select here in the viewport, which is fun. Being sarcastic, excuse me. What I'm going to do is select the Particle again, and basically do this for each one. I'm going to hit "G" on the keyboard because that repeats the last action. It knows the last thing I did was create a transform constraint. It just saves me from having to go back in the menu every time. Now that I have these four, I can convert the nParticles to a mesh. I need to go to Modify, Convert, and then choose the "nParticle to Polygons". Once I choose that, I can go over to the particle shape node in the attribute editor. Once I choose that particle shape node, I'm going to toggle down the Output Mesh option here, and I'm going to increase the blobby radius scale until I can see my mesh. You can see that they start to interact there. The other thing I'm going to do is decrease the mesh triangle size. Each triangle gets smaller, which means the resolution of the particle gets higher. Once I have that done, I can begin to play with this. The one limitation I mentioned earlier is the fact that in earlier versions, if I was to begin moving the constraint which I can't click by, I can't select by selecting it in the viewport, you just select it from the outliner. If I start moving it now, you won't be able to see a change. That's because of the evaluation that the nucleus needs to do in relation to this new nConstraint where before, we were using a deformer. Having to use this nConstraint introduces that limitation of not being able to see this interaction on the fly in real time. What we have to do now is I'm going to hit "Shift W" to hit a key frame on the transforms that translates. Then I'm going to move forward in time to sometime, and then I'm going move this dynamic constraint over and have auto key frame on here, the red box here. That will set a key frame automatically for me on the value that changed. Now, when I go back to the beginning and I hit "Play" by hitting "Alt V" on the keyboard, now we can see that it is behaving in the way that it used to in the earlier versions. Obviously, limitation is that you have to go back and forth and the fact that I guess you can scrub a little bit, but because it's basically a simulation, you'll get this warning down here. You can see it says, "Warning: Nucleus evaluations skipped frame, change too large." What that's referring to is the fact that we were scrubbing and we weren't playing from the start of the simulation, which for this nucleus, you can see will be Frame 1; Start frame, Frame 1. For us to simulate this simulation, we have to play the whole thing. That's why scrubbing may give not super accurate results, and you'll want to play from the beginning. You can see how it has difficulty updating, especially if you go and reverse, it's not going to be able to keep up. But if you scrub forward, you can see what's happening. But you'll want to animate that and then scrub or playback to be able to see that change now. That is essentially the work around now that we'll have to use, at least in this version. I'm sure they will change it again in the next version, and I'll create another updated video. But thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Cell Division 1/7 - Particle Creation: In this series of lessons, we're going to look at cell division. We are going to create essentially, I'll just show you for an example with polygons real quick, we're essentially going to create two spheres, one inside the other. If I go to four you can see the inside of this. Essentially we're going to create these two systems. Where the outside one will be the cell membrane and the inside will be like the nucleus. For this to happen, we're actually going to use particles. But I just want to show you what we're going to set up theoretically here in the next few lessons. To do this, as you can see already, we're going to need at least two elements. If we're going to divide this at least one time, we need two more, so that's four. If we're going to divide each of these two another time, that's eight. You know right off the bat, we're going to need at least eight particles, because each particle is going to represent one of these two elements. Let's get started. I'll delete these and I'm going to set the project first, go to file set projects, and I will create a new folder called Cell division. I'll set the project and I'll create default workspace. One thing I like to do too is use the project window to make all the folder, so we have a Scenes folder. I'll hit Accept. Now, when I save, it should be in a Scenes folder. Just keep things organized. Let's go to the Effects menu, and we'll scroll down to effects and then choose nParticle. We'll choose the particle tool because we're going to place them ourselves. I'm going to create four of the particles, 1, 2, 3, 4, and you can put these anywhere. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to hit Enter. Now, you can see we have nParticle1 and nucleus. Since we're going to control the animation of this, we don't need the nucleus to affect this particle system. I'm going to go ahead over to the Attribute editor and under nucleus, I'm going to turn the gravity off, because we don't want our particles to fall with gravity. Now, with the particle selected, I'm going to right-click and go to particle. I can select individual particles, and I will select one and go to the modeling menu. You can also get to what we're going to use from the animation menu as well. But basically we need Deform and we need the cluster option. I'm just going to rip this off. You rip off and use by just letting go over this little kind of a bar. With that particles still selected, I'm going to choose cluster and I'm going to select this particle over here now. I'll make another cluster. I'll choose this particle. I'll make another cluster. Clusters are essentially ways to control certain geometry and in this case particles. Whoops. I didn't have the particle actually selected. I want to make sure we're right-clicking here and go into particle and then selecting the individual particle and choosing cluster. Now, we have a handle for each one of these particles. Before we go any further, we want to rename all of these clustering handles. I'm going to select them and go to this top right area,, and we want to make sure we're on the renamed tab. You might not see this one and if you don't, you can hit this little arrow here and it'll unminimize that and maximize it into the menu. We can start typing in a new name and I'm just going to call this MembraneCluster. It'll give each one a unique name and you can see we have the four here, so now we have the cluster handles. Let's take them and hold on X and snap them to the center of the world grid. Now, let's create four more particles just as we did before. Let's go up to the Effects menu again and go to nParticles, particle tool. I'll just click anywhere and say 1, 2, 3, 4. I'll hit enter. We'll do the same thing again and I'll just speed this up because this is the same thing we did previous time. We're basically just adding clusters to each of the particles, and I'll see you in a second. Now, with all of these cluster handles made, I can rename them again and go to this rename menu and choose Nucleus. Now we can hold down x and snap these to the world center. Now, these cluster handles are each controlling the membrane and nucleus separately. But we want to be able to just control one and have them both move. Let's go in and parent the nucleus to the cell membrane of each one. We can do that by middle mouse dragging each one and to their respective numbers. We want the same numbers from the nucleus to follow the same numbers of the membrane. Now, when we move one membrane, the nucleus inside of it will follow it. Great. It doesn't seem like we've done anything here, because there are no visual indicators besides the cluster handles. But in the next lesson, we will create the actual geometry here and start animating this. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 6. Cell Division 2/7 - Mesh Creation: In this lesson, we will create the mesh for the cells. Let's go to the end particle one, which is our membranes and we can also rename that, so we can keep track of the two separate particle systems. Within particle membrane selected, we can go to Modify, Convert, and go down to nParticles to Polygons and let go. Again, nothing appears to have happened but in outliner or we can see we have the polySurface and if you don't have the outliner open, you can go to Windows and Outliner. With polySurface selected, let's look at what we have in the attribute editor over here. We have the polySurfaceShape, time node, MembraneCluster and if we keep scrolling, we can see we have a nParticle1_Membrane, which is what we named it, Shape1Deformed. We want that one. If we scroll down here to output mesh, there's a lot of options here, but we're only concerned at the Output Mesh. If we increase the Blobby Radius Scale, we should be able to start to see some polygons, and I'll hit "5" to go into shaded mode. I will also lowered the mesh triangle size so it's literally the size of these triangles here. I'll lower that to something like 0.1 for now and as soon as I lower it, you can see now it becomes more rounded. I can continue to increase the scale of this since this is going to be the membrane, we want it to be the larger of the two spheres. So looks pretty good and we can always adjust these later. Now if we go into the MembraneCluster, we can drag one of these out. We can see we already have this cell division happening. That's pretty awesome. Really quickly we already have the cell division where the geometry is trying to stay together, and that's pretty great. With that in mind, let's continue on and do the same thing for the nucleolus system. We'll click on "Nucleolus" and go to Modify, Convert an nParticle to Polygons. Again, now we have this new polySurface in the outliner, and we can scroll over to the nParticle to NucleolusShape. Under Output Mesh, we can also increase this and just so I can see the mesh on the inside of this membrane, I'm going to hit "4" and start cranking up this cell membrane, oh sorry, this nucleolus of the cell. We can drop this down to 0.1 as well so we have a sphere and now we have the cell membrane and the cell nucleolus altogether. Now if we try to move the cluster, you can see we're getting cell division of the membrane and of the nucleolus. We have two levels of cell division. When we go into shading and we create the cell membrane to be transparent, will be able to see inside to this nucleolus. That'll be pretty neat. Thanks for watching this lesson, in the next one we'll begin animating these clusters and the cell membranes and nucleoluses. Thanks for watching. 7. Cell Division 3/7 - Animation Expressions: In this lesson, we'll begin animating the cells. To get started, let's first talk about what we want to do. That's essentially to create a situation where two of these cells move together and they move out here, and then one of their pairs divides again. Now we have cell division happening twice. That's just the gist of what we want to do, but we also want to add a little more flavor to this and create some little bit of wiggle in the nucleus. We can also do it for the cell membrane as well. But right now I'm just going to focus on the nucleus. Essentially we want to create an expression, so we get animation for free basically of just the cluster wiggling around a little bit. It gives some internal animation. I think it will look nice once we have the materials applied and we see a little bit of jitter in here with some activity of the nucleus. Instead of having to hand animate this thing wiggling around, we can create an expression. Instead of creating an expression on the cluster itself, which would limit us later if we want to hand animate some of the cell, we want to put the expression on something higher up. The only thing higher-up right now is currently the entire cell membrane with the cluster. We need to create something in between these two where we can put the expression and it will affect only the nucleus. To do that, we can pretty simply just group the nucleus. Also you'll notice over here that, wherever we created this handle originally and then we snapped it to the center that we have these bits of values here. If we zero these out, it would go back to wherever we originally had made that cluster. Instead of trying to zero this stuff out, if we just group this right now, it'll create zero values for the group. When I hit Command G or Control G on a PC. Now with this group, we can put the expression on the zeroed out values instead of having to mess with the nucleus. Now we can do the expression here and later, that'll free us up to have an empty channel box here. So now we can add keyframes here later if we wanted to. If we started doing all this animation and later we decide we want to animate the nucleus and we already have an expression there, then we're totally stuck. We need to plan ahead and rig this in a way that will give us the most flexibility. That's why we're going to create this empty group up here to hold the expression and will affect the child, which is the nucleus. The expression we're going to create is pretty simple. It's essentially this group1. We're going to duplicate this out for each of the axes, translateX, translateY, and translateZ. Right now I'm just showing you one line of the code. Basically we'll reference the noise command, and then we will say, do this noise command and have it be the time which we'll constantly change as the timeline is playing, this number will change and we'll times this by X, some number, which will be the frequency. How often do we want this noise to affect it? The Y, this number over here will be how far and how much we want it to affect it at this rate. It'll make sense once we start playing with this expression. But just wanted to explain a little bit. I'm going to copy this and we'll go back to Maya. With a group selected, I will select one of the options here and go to Edit Expressions, and we'll get a new window here. You can see we already have this group1 translate, and we can copy this and paste it here. But since I've already copied it from the expression itself, I'm just going to paste the expression in. We need to change these values here. Depending on the size of the scale of the scene that you're working on, these values might be different for you. But I'm just going to start with something like 1.2 and maybe 0.2. Remember, this is how far it's going to move. Since the nucleus is inside of the cell membrane, we don't want it to move outside of the cell membrane, which is not very far. You can see right here on this grid, a cell membrane is only slightly wider than two units. We want to keep this number well under two units. So 0.2 is going to do is pretty well I think, and just have some slight motion there. We can copy this whole line now, and we can paste it twice. We can change the X to Y and this X to Z. So now we have all three axes of translation. We have X, Y, and Z here, and they're all being affected by the same values. Let's change this just a little bit so that they are all slightly different in the values and the frequency of how they're affected. This will create a little more random variation, now that we have this done, we can hit Create and you can see this cluster already moved a little bit. Now if we play the timeline, you can see we already have some movement here with that cluster. I can just hide this first one so we can see it with the shaded mode on. I'll hit [inaudible] and we can see that's already moving. We got all that animation for free. We didn't have to do anything. That's pretty nice. Of course, we can always update this expression later. Let's go back and we'll do the same thing for these other groups. Let's select each nucleus and hit Command G. Now they're all children of their own group. Let's go to the second group now. We can actually just copy and paste the entire expression we already made. Let's go to Select Filter and By Expression Name. Here we have this expression 1, and that's our expression we already wrote. We'll just copy this, and let's go to group2, and we'll select any attribute over here and go to Edit Expressions. Now we can just paste this in and change this one to a two for each one of these. So now we have the same thing for group2. Similarly, we want to change these numbers just a little bit. So each cluster is slightly different from the last one. So I create, and now you can see there will be two clusters moving around. It looks like one following the other a little too much, so that was probably in our amplitude or our frequency. We can change these numbers even more to help separate those two things. Maybe I'll change the amplitude over here to 0.3 and I'll hit Edit. Now let's see if we have a little more separation here. Yeah, now they're not doing the exact same thing, which is nice. Now we can do that for the rest of the groups and go to Edit Expression, and we can just paste this in. Change group1 to group3. I'll do this for this group and the next one, and I'll see you here in a second. I'll speed up the video. Thanks. Now that we have this done, let's play this back and see all of the four nucleus cluster handles moving around. We can see we solve cluster handles in the middle and those are the cell membranes. Let's unhide the cell membranes. In the next lesson, we will animate the cell membranes and have them divide. Thanks for watching. 8. Cell Division 4/7 - Animating Cell Division: Now that we have the expressions written for the nucleus on the inside of the cell membranes, let's animate the cell membranes themselves and get the cells dividing. I'll select the top two clusters of the membrane and let's go somewhere around frame 20 and we'll hit S and when we hit S, you can see that we create a little red tick mark down here, which means there's a key frame on that frame and you can see all of these channels turned red. If we want to be very efficient, we can also just hit Shift W so that we set key frames only on the Translate. We can also right-click them and choose Key Selected. Now let's go down in the timeline to around I think frame 60. Let's just move this over a little bit and not all the way separated because we also want to take these membrane clusters and move them out to the side as well because we don't just want one moving away from it, we want them both moving away from each other. So let's go to frame 20 again, set a key frame on the Translate, go back to frame 60 and we'll pull this out to the side as well, about the same distance away as the previous one. Now let's hit Play and it's pretty basic and gets the job done. Let's see if we can't make this just a little bit better. So let's go to somewhere where they're about to split and slow them down just a little bit. Let's go to in here, maybe right in here and we'll select all the membrane clusters and we'll hit Shift W and we want to try to create the illusion that there is some friction here and some surface tension so that when they divide, they have a hard time actually separating and then when they get to this point then they would pop apart. So let's set another key frame where they're about to separate and then we can just Shift Select these last two key-frames, and then click and hold down on these middle yellow arrows and we can move the key-frames out so that we're slowing down this little section right here. So let's Play and see what happens there. You can see how they start dividing pretty quick and then when they get to where they're about to separate then they slow down. It looks pretty good. I think we can speed up this last little part, so I'll Shift Select that and go down and I think we can also do a little bounce once they separate. So let's go to frame maybe 83 and set another key-frame and we can select to the clusters and go back towards the middle here and same thing with these two and we don't want to get them so close, they actually start connecting again. We just want to give it a little bit of a balance here. So I'll go back out. Same thing with these and then we'll do it one more time or they go into very sadly and then back out again, cool. Now let's go back to the beginning and hit LV, it looks pretty good. I think we can change the timing a little bit. I think that they can use a little adjustment and the timing so that it's a little slower on the balances so we can drag these out and give us some more time here in the timeline. I'm just giving these a little bit more time each, see when they break apart now they're much slower and look a little more appropriate. I like how that looks and now we can do the same thing for these other two pairs. What we can do is actually Copy and Paste the animation we've already done and we can do that by going in the other direction. So let's focus on these two first and we wanted to buy these in the Z-axis. Let's select the first one, and we'll go to the Windows, Animation Editors, Graph Editor and with command and shift and right-clicking, I can resize and frame up how I'm viewing this so we can see that all the animation is on Translate X and as we saw before, we want to Copy and Paste this Translate X animation we've already done, and we want to put it on Translate Z over here and time. What we're looking at right here is time along the bottom and value on the Y-axis. I can isolate the Translate X and select it and I'll hit Command C to copy it and I'll go to Translate Z and I'll hit Command V and already you can see that it has pasted it in here and let's take a look at how that looks as it stands and I'll just add some more frames. We can see this goes to at least frame 230 over here so I can just type in a number here 230 and let's play it back and see if that is close to what we want. That looks about right actually. So now we need to do the same thing for this other membrane and we can actually take the animation we already have on Translate Z here and Copy that over to this other cell membrane cluster, I'll select that. I'll go to the Z Translate and I'll Paste that in here. You can see we're kind of duplicating our efforts here, we actually want this key-frame to be where we are at 120 here. We can just Delete all of these and click and drag this over to 120 and I'm shift middle mouse dragging again and let's get that on 120 and we can bring that up to be even with this neighbor key frame to the left, cool. It will be doing the exact same thing, but we want them to separate, so we need to flip this animation in this axis. We need to go in positive Z. Right now everything is going down into the negative numbers here so let's select this and we can see that this value of 1.076. Let's remember that and select these keyframes. I'll go to "Edit", "Scale." We want to scale the value here. We'll go "Value Scale." We want to go a negative one. We want to go in the other direction. We want to pivot point of that 1.076, which is right here. We want to pivot from this point and we want to scale in negative. So we want to go up this way. We'll take all of these and we'll go up here. We'll select all of them. With all those values entered, let apply. You can see it flips everything up here. That works out. Let's play this back. We can see that some of the animation isn't exactly the same because the cell membranes will lose a little bit of their volume every time that they divide. When we were doing this first animation, there was a lot more surface. This type of connection happened much closer than it does over here when we're copying that same animation. There's less surface area and they're smaller spheres now. It's not exactly happening where we want it to. Let's take both of these clusters and we can select the animation in the graph editor. Now, that we have both of the clusters, let's scale this up so we can see what we're doing. I'll hit scale by choosing R. I'm going to put my cursor in between both of these values. I'm going to move the viewport so we can see where they're touching. In this section, where my cursor is in the middle here, you can see it's right in the middle, with the scale selected, shift middle mouse and drag these in. It's a bit of a delicate process. That's why I say zoom in as much as you can because the more you zoom in, the easier it is. Again, we're in the middle of these two lines because we want to scale them evenly and just shift middle mouse drag them in to where they're touching a little more. Let's see how that looks. I think I could go a little closer. Let's do that one more time. Something like that. I'll play back. That connection looks a lot better now. We'll do the same thing to this other side. Let's choose this cluster. We can actually copy the animation again that we did on this left side. Let's go to the first membrane cluster and we'll copy the translate Z. We'll go to the membrane cluster two, which is actually the third one because we're starting at zero here, zero, one, two, three, you [inaudible] this four. You need to remember that. Let's choose the translate Z. We see that in hit, "Command V." Now again, it paste it where it was originally, but we can see what the difference is. We can drag these down to be in line with its neighbors. We wanted to start over here. Let's choose one of these other ones and see where they animation started. Frame 120 is where we started. Let's just start everything at the same frame for right now. I'll delete all of these keyframes so I have room to slide these over. We'll do the same thing for the next cluster for Translate Z, click, "Command V." I'll delete these and just drag this down. It's in line and on Frame 120. Great. Now, you can see we have the same issue though, because we copied and pasted the same cell membrane. Let's just undo that real quick and grab this second one. That's the one we want, because we want to go in this other direction. Select "command V" again. Now, we can just drag this down to be in line with that Z starting point here. I can close the graph editor and let's take a look at this. I'll go from the beginning. That's looking pretty good. I'm going to extend this out a little bit. Now we're going to adjust the timing of the animation because everything is happening at the same time. All the frames start at the same time. Let's have this settle be a couple of frame different for each one of these because they're bouncing back and forth on the same frames. Let's select the second two and will go where the bounce is, here. We'll just click and drag. We can move these down two frames. When we play back, we can see that there should be some offset here now. That just seems a little more natural because the timing of things are important. Everything doesn't happen at the same time in nature, so it shouldn't in the cell division. We'll do the same thing on these cell divisions, lets choose this cluster. We can actually offset them with each other and between the pairs. Let's select both of these again and have these two start later. Since they finished a couple of frames later. Let's go maybe four frames. see if that's a good offset. Looks pretty good. Then, we can offset this last one in the settle. Let's offset this by two frames. Then lots offset the settle of one of these by two frames as well. I'm just shifts selecting and I'm sliding everything down two frames [inaudible] V. That looks a lot more natural with each of them finishing at their own time. In this lesson, we learned to animate and create offsets and use the graph editor. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will create some shaders for this now. Thanks for watching. 9. Cell Division 5/7 - Cell Materials: In this lesson, we'll start to create materials and lighting for the cells. But before we do that, let's make a few more adjustments to the animation. I'll select all the clusters and let's add a little more time at the head of animation because currently we only have 20 seconds to get oriented and see that there's one cell here when we start to render this thing. So let's give ourselves a little more time and I'll increase the time range to 300. I'll just select all of these and slide them down in time maybe to frame 40, to have a frame 40. So we get two seconds almost to see this kind of single cell and the nucleus on the inside. The other thing I want to do is select the cell membrane and I just want to scale it down and wide. That way, it'll just not be a perfect sphere and look a little more cell like. So when things separate, it'll be flattened here. So I think that'll look a little bit better and the final render so that it's not entirely spherical. Cool. Okay, Let's select the cell membrane and we can go to right-click on the object and go to assign new material. Let's go to Arnold shader and will choose AI standard surface and if you don't have the Arnold render available, you can go to Windows settings preferences and turned it on in the plug in manager and you can scroll down to MTA, which is right here, MTA bundle, and turn that on if you're in a version of Maya before, I think 2017 or 2016.5 They only recently started to include Arnold in Maya. So this is more for the most recent packages of Maya between 2017 and 2018 and beyond. So now that we have this material selected, let's add some lights. Let's go to Arnold and we'll go to lights, sky dim light. So now let's preview what we've created by going to Arnold render preview. To initiate the render preview, we need to hit this Play button. So it's very white and that's also because our shader is white and the light is white. I'm going to first save this as materials for we go further. First let's turn off the sky dome light in the background. So I will go down in the attribute editor of the light and turn cameras to zero. So now we can just see the cells. So let's go to the material by selecting on the membrane and the outliner and go over to the AI standard surface shader. We can call this membrane and change the color to something like a blue. So we can see a little better. Let's scroll down here to transmission and turn the weight of that up a little bit and now you can see we can start to see the inside cell membrane and it's pretty distorted right now. We can adjust that by using the incidence of refraction right here. So 1.52 I believe, is a mathematical thing. You can look up on Google and sentence of refractions for certain materials and I'm pretty sure 1.52 is glass. So we actually command and middle click in this area, or we can just use the slider. We can use the slider here and we can see the distortion of the inside starts to go away. So that's pretty interesting and we can also see this before the cells divide, we can see this update, especially it might be helpful when the cells are actually dividing to see how this connection is made here. So we can see it's also fairly rough here and we're going to increase the amount of the size of the triangles down so that there will be more of them when we do the final render. But for now to speed things up, we'll keep that low. So let's go to the specular and let's just increase the roughness of the speculate a little bit. That way it'll diffuse this out in the transmission a little bit. We can also add extra roughness and the transmission attribute. So now it looks like there is actually a material this is being transmitted through the light, and we might want to also turn on the opacity. So if we go down here to geometry of the material and we turned down capacity, nothing happens. So there's one little trick and our own that you have to do to allow opacity. So let's close this for right now. So we can see this and we'll go over to the shape of this poly surface, will go down to Arnold, scroll down to opaque and see that it's checked, and we want to check this off. For this material to be transparent, we need that off. So let's turn back on the Arnold render view and now you can see it is somewhat transparent. We can look at the alpha channel and see that it is actually going through this layer. So let's go back into the material and make some adjustments. So we can turn the opacity all the way off pretty much if we wanted to. But I like to keep it somewhat opaque. We can also adjust this after we have materials on the nucleus. So let's add a material to the nucleus. I'll close this, select the nucleus and right-click on here and go to assign the material, and will add another AI standard surface. Let's make the inside of this red so we can see it. I'll go back to the Arnold render preview so we can see what we're doing and that play. Now you can see the inside of the nucleus here. So let's look pretty cool. So now let's push this effect much further. Let's create a little more disruption because these cells are very smooth all the way around. That's something you may want and that's fine. But for me, I would like to see a little more roughness here and so we have a little different surfaces to see specular highlights. So I'm going to close this for now. I'm going to select the membrane and go to deform, texture to form. I'll go over to that tree editor and the texture where it's looking for something to adjust. I'll add a fractal. I'll click the little checker box over here to the right and go to fractal and see if it makes it really crazy right now and we can adjust those settings. We can go to click this little button to get back to the texture to former tab. Of course dropped the strength. But the main thing we want to change is the direction right now it looks like it's up and down, which is the handle of the texture to former. So we can change that direction. But I would rather it be the faces, the normal of the face. So it should be shooting out in all directions in this radial fashion. So for direction we should choose normal. So now you can see it's all splayed out in every direction, but it's crazy. So let's drop the strength a little bit. So we still have that little bit of roughness, but it's not too crazy. But one issue we're running into is the fact that the subdivisions aren't great enough to smooth everything out. So we can see that we have these little pointing areas of the mesh and if we go into the Arnold render view, we'll see the same thing. We can see it's very choppy, but already it's added a lot more detail, a lot more interests I think, to the cell membranes. But let's get rid of these sharp edges for now. So with the mesh selected, we will go down to the polysurface shape of this and under Subdivision, we want to turn on the type to catclark. What this says is at render time, it will smooth out and sub-divide the surface another time. We can see it's already smoothed out all those very sharp edges and everything's looking a little more bumpy instead of sharp. That's pretty cool. The next thing we're going to do is continue to effect the shader. So let's go back into the Shader for the cell membrane and let's increase the transmission. As we increase the transmission, you can see we're losing some of the color. Under Color, let's add this blue color back in and then just reduce the saturation a little bit so it's not too crazy. I just want to make sure we're keeping this color as we're increasing the transmission. To reduce the distortion of this, we can lower the Index of Refraction a little more. Now we can come see the interior of the cell and the cell nucleus. But we still maintain these rougher outer edges. That's looking pretty good. We can also reduce this texture deformer it looks like it's maybe where we would have a nice smooth parting of the cells. It's looking a little rough, we're not getting that nice connection here. Let's go into the Texture Deformer again. We just need to drop this offset down so that we can actually see that division taking place. We can scroll back and make sure that's looking the way we want it to look throughout the whole animation. Cool. That seems to be working. Let's jump back into the material. I don't think we necessarily need the opacity here for this. I think we're going to get enough out of that transmissions so I'll scroll on here to Geometry and increase the opacity back. It's a little denser cell membrane here. I think what we need is a little more specular to see the edges of these cells. We have specular all the way up and we could reduce the roughness, but it's not really going to get us more specular. There's one more option in the Arnold Standard Shader and that is the coat and that's essentially like a top coat of a car. You have the paint and then you have a top coat on top of that. So if we increase the weight of this, you'll be able to see that we're getting a lot more white highlights in the specular areas and that's making it look a little more shiny and cell-like to me. That's pretty cool. I think we could probably reduce the texture deformer a little bit. Before we do that, let's just increase the catclark of this mesh. We had it only set to one so we have a little bit more room to increase that render time. We can go back to the Poly Surface Shape down to Subdivision and we can increase the iteration to two and we can watch it update and smooth everything out that much more. The red nucleus is dull right now, so let's go into the material of the nucleuses and we can scroll over in the attribute editor and get to the standards surface of the nucleus and let's turn on emission. Emission is essentially creating it as a light. We can hit red and we need to turn up the weight. You can see it's getting much, much brighter as we turn up the weight. Now we're maintaining that saturation while it's still inside of the cell. That's pretty cool. I think the one thing that's bugging me still is I think the texture deformer is a little rough on the cell membrane. We can go back to the Texture Deformer and just decrease the strength a little bit more. I Just want to break up this silhouette. I just don't want it to be a perfect edge all the way around. That's looking a lot better. I think we can do the same thing on the nucleuses, so let's add a texture deformer to those. Select the "Nucleus", go to "Deform", "Texture", and over here, let's make sure we choose "Normal" and map in another fractal. So its passes out and that's okay. We can just reduce the strength and decrease the offset a little bit and just keep dialing this down until we get it to be the size we want. We can also see it in the view-port over here. Split the screen a little bit. Let's drop the strength way down. Maybe turn up the offset to keep the nucleus big. It looks like we're doing a pretty good job of getting this irregular silhouette to the nucleus, so it's not perfectly round as well. The other thing that we're going to do of course, is to turn on the catclark for the nucleus. So let's go over to the Shape again and go down the Subdivision and turn on catclark and we can see it will smooth out those sharp edges again. That's looking a lot better, a lot more organic. I'm liking where this at. The only thing I'm thinking right now is it might be nice to see the texture deformers animate because if you look in the view-port here, you can see that we moved all animation down to frame 40 and the nucleuses are all moving around from the expression we created. But the cell membrane itself is completely static and one way we can adjust that is by animating the fractal of the the cell membrane. So let's go to the texture deformer here of that one and go into the texture and to the fractal. In the fractal settings, you can see down here there is actually an animated button. We can turn that on and we can just say, in the time attribute, we can just go equals time and maybe we can say times two. So we're writing an expression right inside this attribute. When we hit ''Enter'' it'll create the expression. So we're basically just saying this value should always change as the times played times two, so it should be twice as fast. If we playback, we can see it's probably way too much. So let's go into the expression. Let's eight-click on this and say ''Edit Expression''. We get this familiar window and let's say 0.5 times 0.5, so it'll be half as much as the time as played. So we'll hit ''Alt V'' to play back and we can see it's still pretty busy. I'll escape out of that and we can just keep adjusting this. I'll say 0.1 and I'll hit ''Edit'' and we can play it back again. That actually looks pretty good. It's giving it a little bit of noise to the cell membrane. It's undulating with the texture deformer. I might go down just a little bit more, 0.08 and see if that's even better. I'm actually liking that quite a bit and I think that adds quite a lot to the animation in these moments where it's completely still, and I think that looks great. Now that we have this done, let's close the expression editor and let's get into rendering. So I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 10. Cell Division 6/7 - Rendering: Let's get into Rendering. So let's create a new camera for the render. Let's go to panel's perspective new. That gives us a new camera. You can see it down here name persp1, perspective 1. Let's double-click that and say renderCam. Let's go to frame one. Let's zoom in. Let's get pretty close. We can go peer to the film gate and hit this little box so we can see the dimensions. You can see it says 960 by 540, and that's telling us the dimensions that we have. So let's go ahead and change those in there under settings. This little gear will next to the hyper shade with the clapper. We can scroll down and say HD, let's do 720 and close that. Now you see that updates here. So let's get pretty close to this. As this divides, let's start to back the camera. So now the camera is selected from the outliner up here. We can hit S and here we know we want to be further out. Maybe your rotated just slightly. So let's see how that goes. I think I want the camera to be started a little more over here because I want to see that division, that little moment when they split a little clear. So let's get this all the way around. This is the moment I want to see with the camera. So let's see where that goes. Play that back. Then we can keep the camera move going up here and zoom out and kind of go to a more bird's eye view. Keep rotating around. We know it's keying as we're working because we have the auto key over here in the lower right, this little red box. So that's good. We don't have to hit ass every time we want to make a key. So let's go to the end and just continue this rotation a little bit and see what that looks like. So we go out, we see the cell divide. Then this is where it gets a little wonky, it looks like. So let's go into the Graph Editor. Let's choose the rotation. Let's just hit a keyframe here. Let's keep the rotation down. So I just hit S and then I can click and drag a middle mouse. Drag this down to keep it focused in the area that we want it to be in. So that looks pretty good. Just going to adjust this tangent handle here. I can just select the tangent handle and move this around. So I think that's looking pretty good. I had all B, which is changes the background and the viewport it's about V, which is what I want. I think we can lower this, rotate X a little bit too. So let's look at these last little bit of rotations here and just keep them going. Let's find out where the Z is. The Z is not doing anything. The X is looking good. It looks like we're going, let's keep going up a little bit. Let's see what this one, yeah, that's okay. Just kind of scrub the timeline and this is just kind of noodling and whatnot. I think we do need to be over here because anytime that there's kind of weird kinks in the curves is usually indicating something is not right. So I'm editing this and to make this curve a little smoother. Then that means I'll have to go back into rotate X and probably just this a little bit. Let's see how that ends. I think that looks pretty good. I think we just need to go up a little more. So I'm choosing the Translate Y and I'm just going to pull this up a little bit, I think that will help frame up the final image here pretty well. So now we have an animated camera and we can see the cell division happening. I think it's rotated up too much. We open up the graph editor again. Sorry, this is animation for you, this just takes little tweaks and just this constant little back and forth. So if you ever get into 3D, should just start to get used to that. Because that is what 3D is all about. Just constantly making these little tweaks. So I'll play back. That's pretty good. It's going up too quick. We don't want the rotation to stay here. Now, it's this weird kind of like the camera's going up and it's rotating down, not at the correct rate. Like this is not rotating down quick enough. So I think we need to do something like this. See, this is the magic of animating, it's kind of voodoo at some point. You just kind of start moving things around until it looks right. Sometimes an experiment, that's what it's all about. So that looks a lot better. I think we're good to go now I think this is good for a render and of course, you can always render it out and re-render it. But rendering is a little expensive, so you want to make sure it's pretty locked in by the time you start rendering. Let's just take a final look at this Arnold Render Preview before we kick off a render. That looks pretty good. We're going to scrub the timeline so we can see, make sure that we're seeing actual cell division part happening clearly enough. That looks pretty good. We can see the nucleus is going apart and all of these divisions. So that's great. I hit F accidentally and we just went crazy. So because I'm in the renderCam, is that the keyframe over here and I'm going to just delete that and will pop back to where we were. But so this is looking pretty good and I think we are ready to render. So let's go into the Render Settings up here, and we'll choose the renderCam as the render roll camera. We set the image size that we wanted. Let's go to name number.extension because we want to render out a sequence when you go from frame one to frame 300. Let's name it CD for cell division. I think everything looks pretty good. So let's go to the rendering tab here, and we'll go over to render. Let's go, make sure the test resolution is at the Render Settings. Then we'll go down to Render Sequence. Make sure renderCam is selected and make sure the alternate area is also the images. Just double-checking everything. Let's hit Render Sequence and close, and I'll see you next lesson. Thanks for watching. 11. Cell Division7/7 - Background & AE Compositing: In this lesson we will composite the images that we created from Maya for the cell division. We're also going to jump back in here in Maya, here in a second, I'll show you why. I'm going to jump over there to After Effects and going to group this other one to clean up this after effects file, and to drag and drop into the group folder here, just try to keep things tidy as we go along here. I'm going to right-click and go to Import File and navigate to the cell division images folder here, and hit open, ensure it open the whole sequence and will have to interpret the footage to 24. We can drag and drop that into a new composition and make sure that we're working in 32-bit, so I'll just click this and get a 32-bit. We can play this back and we can see everything is working pretty well. But one thing when I looked at this render earlier was the fact that there's no background, and with a camera move, having no background, it's hard to have a point of reference of the camera motion. That's the reason why I think we should go back into Maya, and instead we could create a solid here and have it be some color or something and be the end of it. I think because we have this camera motion, we would benefit from having a background that matches the carrier motion, so something out of Maya. Let's jump back into Maya and take a look at making a background real quick. Let's create a sphere, and I'm just going to scale this up, and instead of using the manipulator, I'm just going to go over here and put in something really big. You can see it went from gray to being black, and that's because we're on the inside of the sphere and the normals, I'll just jump into perspective here, I'm just hitting space bar and clicking and holding down and dragging over to perspective view. The reason why it goes from gray to black is because geometry has what's called normals, and normals basically say, "tell us which way the face is facing," and right now it's facing outward. All of these things are single plane, they don't have two sides to them. The inside is usually black, and so we can reverse those normals though, so they are pointing inward. We can go to the modeling menu and go to the mesh display and reverse normals. You can see it says normals here are gray. We know that reverse isn't applying to the geometry like itself, it's just the display of the normals. You can do the math in your head on like, I'm going to display menu, I'm under the normals section, so I should do what I expected to do. I'm just going to go into object mode, and now you can see that it is in fact gray, so that's important when we put textures on this that they'll show up facing inward. The other thing we need to do is to make this not visible in the lights, because right now it's probably blocking all the light to the cell itself. If you were going to render these together, that would be a problem, and even though we're not going to render these together, let's just play this out like that's the case. We can go to the attribute editor and scroll down to the visibility options or in the shape node or shape little tab here. I don't know if you remember when we did the opaque thing, that's in here. We also have the visibility here and we can turn off, cast shadows, and we can turn off all these other things, self shadow, whatever else that you don't want the render to see. But that's enough for us, and we're actually just going to turn off this stuff because we've already rendered this and it would just take more time to render that out, so let's actually go to the render common, apply the texture based on what we can see through this view. Let's turn off the grid too so we can see it a little better. Let's right-click and go down to assign the material, and it can really be any of these, I would need really need reflections and crazy stuff, so I'm just going to choose a Lambert for now. A Lambert is just like the default Maya shader. If you make any geometry, it's going to have Lambda 1 applied to it. Let's go to the checkerboard here of the color, and we'll map in a procedural texture. Procedural means, you get it for free. Depends on what background you want, we could use simplex noise and to see it, we need to turn on six so we can see actual textures in the view port. I'm just going to call this B G, so we know background and then click this little arrow, we can get into the noise itself. I'm not too concerned with the color of the fact that it's black and white, because we can change that and after effects and compositing. I just want something that will give us some type of texture and the background so that we can see the camera motion. Let's just turn this up a little bit and crank up this, and I think something that'll give us an organic feel like we're inside of a cell or something like that. Half the time I was just playing around with this stuff and just seeing what works best. I'm not really knowing or expecting a certain result. A lot of times, especially when it comes to fractal procedural textures, it's usually hard to tell what exactly is going to be the result. So we can just play with this until we find something cellular like. You can see I've gone to the rigid or ridged, I guess, there's no noise type, and you can see the settings on the right and follow along with that. This is our background texture now, and let's go down to the timeline. I'm right-clicking and it's off screen a little bit, but there's play blast down here. I'll click the little square to the right of it, and I'm going to say from under settings. Let's make a quick time went on. I think I'm going to blur out this background anyways, so it doesn't have to be exact, let's turn off show ornaments, and browse to cell division movies is fine. Just saved C D, B G, save and play blast. Now you can see and say having a render everything with all of the headaches that comes with rendering, since it's the background, we can just do that. Now we have the background and it gives us a point of reference for the After Effects file and the camera move in here. Let's bring in the movie we just made, we'll open up this movie and drop it in here, and just for fun, let's just do a blend mode of color on the solid that we threw in there just to see how or what that does, just colorizes it a little bit. I can already tell it's a little too strong and have an over effect. I'm going to go to color correction and I'll have a curves, and I'll just drop that down, and maybe this is how the highlights appear. I can just drop these down so they're not as bright, and maybe drop the lower end dark values here. I'm going to go into the blue channel and just lift up the blues and the dark areas, see where that takes effect. Because we're colorizing it, we can't see that happen, so let's just turn that off for now and try to colorize it with curves. I'm going to lift the blues and the darks, and the whites, I'm going to go to red and just drop that down to make it more blue, or we could go the other way, of course, and make it more red since it is a cell, let's do that. I'll go back into blue, and I'll just reset that, and now I can see it's more blood like type of a color. Maybe we can just go back to RGB and darken that a little bit. When we play this back, this gives us a sense of space and a camera move, which grounds the motion and the animation a little more than if we just had a solid background. I think that's a nice little touch that we can also reduce again, I think it's a little distracting how bright it is. I think we can keep dropping this stuff and then we can color correct this to be a little more vibrant. I'll throw a curves on the cells and just increase the contrast a little bit by lifting the bright areas and darkening the dark areas, and I think that already does quite a lot. I'm going to go into the background here, I'm just going to blur it out a little bit, and we'll go into the camera lens blur. You can see we have these edges here that aren't being blurred scene when I turn on repeat edge pixels, and that gets rid of that. Let's increase the blur amount and see how that goes. I think that looks pretty good. I think the color red is a little odd, based on this type of almost pink purple that we have in the nucleus. I want to keep working on the curve color and just turn off the curves. Let's try something else, let's go into hue saturation, and there's this little colorized box down here, and then we can shift the hue around with this toggle. I'm going to crank up the saturation so we can see where we're in the hue. You actually see that bar change up here too in the effects panel. But it isn't update on map, you have to let go. Let's do something close to what the nucleus are, and then just drop the, that's bizarre, let's drop the saturation down and darken it a little bit. Let's do it even here, will do new adjustment layer, and just right-clicking here again to get that option, and hit enter to rename things, and I'm going to create another curves adjustment here, and I'm going to lower that from the middle, and I'm going to double-click the ellipse tool. If you don't see that, you can just click and hold it and you should get it down here, then I'm going to make the mask that we just made here, subtraction and toggle this down so we get to the feather and feather this out quite a bit. Now I think this looks much better. You can tell from where we started, if we didn't do that background thing, let's just see what that looks like. Let's just turn this off and turn this on. That doesn't look terrible, but I think it just adds a little more interest in, and you can follow the camera move more when you have this stuff in the background as a reference point. Yeah, and of course you know, you can change the color and all that stuff compositing and make those decisions later, which is really nice. Now that we have that, let's just add it to the render queue by going to composition, add render queue, we can scroll down and choose a codec from this menu, I like Apple ProRes 4 2 2, it's a lossless format and turn off the audio, and we're rendering a QuickTime, and I can just say cell division, I render save, and I'll render this and I'll see you all in the next series. Thanks for watching. 12. Chromosome 1/6 - Intro: Welcome to this series of lessons where we will model and animate procedurally a bunch of chromosomes. Anytime you start to model something, you always want to look for reference. So just typing in chromosome here and Google images, you can see the type of shape that they are. Sometimes there's a lot of variety in those shapes. We can also take a look at Wikipedia to get a description of what we'll be making. Essentially, chromosome is made of several different things. Tightly wound chromatids. From a distance, they will look like a solid piece. So that's what we'll focus on, is animating this last phase here. What they're calling the metaphase chromosome. I want to jump into Photoshop real quick just to draw what we're trying to make. Of course, we're essentially trying to make this X shape, and it has four legs to it. There's this dense area here which will just flow together. It's a repetitive shape in that. We can see the arms are all very similar. This section is just repeated. With that in mind, we can actually just model one of these areas. Then procedurally with some of the motion graphics tool sets in Maya, we can just duplicate those across to that side, and then we can duplicate them both down here. Then we can duplicate this whole thing out multiple times to make a lot of these and animate them as well so their positions can move. We won't have to animate each one by hand. So knowing that you have a better understanding of why, we're going to focus on just one of these little arms first and then we will duplicate those out in an efficient way so that we're not having to duplicate our efforts essentially. So we can take advantage of some of these tools in Maya, especially some of these animating ones, when later we want to have a whole crowd of these things and we don't want to have to animate each one by hand. So let's jump in Maya and get started. 13. Chromosome 2/6 - Modeling A Chromatid: So whenever I start a new scene in Maya, I like to set the project first, so I'll go to "File," set project and I'll create a new folder in the project Maya folder I've already started, and I will just say chromosome. If I can spell it correctly. Chromosome, and with the folder selected, I'll just say set and I'll say create default workspace. We can also go to project window here, just above where we clicked last time, and if we hit "Accept," it'll make all of these folders in that folder we just made. It's a nice way to quickly get all your folders made, and then go ahead and save this scene, and if I click "Save scene as," it should take me to that scenes folder just made, so it's a quick way to go about making all those folders. If we jump up one level, we can see all those folders are already made. So that's pretty efficient, and I'll just call this one chromosome. The first thing I'd like to do too, is to hit the "Anti-aliasing" button up here, and let's start by creating a tube. So we'll go to the cylinder up here under polygon modeling, and it'll pop in a tube here. I'm going to start by putting the pivot down at the base here, so I'm going to hold down D and also V, so D moves the pivot and V is vertex snap. Because I know I want this pivot to be on the lowest vertex, I can just snap it until it's at the bottom. Now I'll hit "W," to get back to translation mode, essentially, and hold X to then do grid snap to bring it up to the floor level. Now with that done, I want to create some more subdivisions so we have more geometry to work with. If I were to try to start moving this around, I'm limited by how many edge loops we have on this, so I need to add more edge loops, and when you first create any object, there's a little bit of history you can get to under the channel box here, and for this one since it's a cylinder, it's called poly cylinder. If we click that, we'll get these extra options here, and we can click one and the middle mouse drag to create more geometry. So I want the height to be more because I have no subdivisions and the height as well as the caps, I have no subdivisions there. So I want to increase those a little bit, and if you hit "Three," on our keyboard, it will smooth the object, and that's a quick way to smooth something visually but not add more geometry. There's also a smoothing option from the modeling menu but that adds a lot of geometry. Let's do that now so we can see what happens. If I click "Smooth," you can see how many more faces of this adds, and that can in turn slow down your machine. So we want to try and take advantage of keeping things as light as possible. Now we have the tube, and remember we're trying to make one leg of the X shape of the chromosome first. So we want to make this a little thinner and longer, so we can go back into the poly cylinder and we can change the radius and drop that down, and you can see if a middle mouse drag and things are moving too fast, you can actually go up here to this little speedometer looking thing and click that a few times to change the speed of your middle mouse drag once from the view-port. So maybe goes something like this, maybe add some more subdivision heights, and maybe increase the height a little bit here, and you can see it's going from the middle. So we could actually just scale this up in the y-axis by hitting "R" and then scaling it up. Then I might add some more subdivisions to the height. Basically, I want to try to keep it even, so I'll make these look square-shaped and not rectangular, each face of the cylinder that is. So with that done, I want to make a point, and I can do that by right-clicking on the object and go to vertex, and now I can select all the vertices, but with this much geometry, it's hard to select one little edge. You can say I miss some over here, so either I like to go to a new camera view, so I can hold down the space bar and click in the middle of this, and I can get to all my cameras. I can go the right camera, and now I can see and select linearly and horizontally exactly which ones I want. So we can hit "B" and we get soft selection, and then we could just scale this down to a point like this, but then we're also left with all these faces that we don't really see in the point down here, so I think it's best to get rid of those faces first. We'll go to face mode by right clicking and dragging and letting go at face, and I'm going to turn soft selections so it's easier to see. Then I'll click one face here, I'm just sending Q to go to select mode, and I'll go to its neighbor and just double-click that one and it should select all the ones around. Now, the trick to remember that is, there is a shortcut to grow a selection. So if we want to grow a selection, we should start at the center of it so let's do that from the center. Will click, and actually cylinder is a little weird because it's actually see this as a loop. Let's go to the one level up and then we can select an edge loop. Then we'll hit "Shift and period" repeatedly and it'll grow the selection out. We can grow it out to select all of the bottom faces, and we are currently in a smooth view, so we can hit "One," and make sure we have all the bottom faces, will delete those, and then we can go to the edge by right-clicking and going up to edge while our cursors over the object and then double-click the "Bottom edge now," and we can turn back on soft selection and then hit "R," to get the scale. We're going to scale this whole thing down, and it will go to somewhere around in there. That looks pretty good. So I think this could be a little skinnier, but I like the height. So to isolate the X and Z, which are these blue and red arrows here on scale, I can control click "V," vertical one, and that means scale everything but the one I'm clicking essentially, so we can click that one and scale it down to make this a little more narrow. When I hit three, you can see this top here is pretty flat still. Let's get rid of some of the geometry so that this can be a smoother edge. When we're looking at this in profile, I want this edge to be a lot smoother. We'll go back to one, and then I'll go to edge mode and turn off soft selection so we can see our selection. There's a couple of things we can do it. We can drop this edge loop down. We can delete one by holding down "Shift" and right-click and go to delete edge. Then we could double-click the center one and expand it out. We're essentially trying to reduce the amount of geometry in this area and kind of help it smooth out as much as we can in this kind of one view mug shot. I call this three and then one. We can select these edge loops and just kind of scanned them in to kind of help it ease that edge a little bit. I'll drag this one down a little bit. We're already getting this in this view so that when we smooth it, it's even more pronounced. We could probably do even more because, you know, when you zoom in on something, it might look smoother than it is, but from out here, it doesn't look all that smooth. Probably need to be a little more aggressive with us and take out some more geometry. Let's take out these two, shift and right-click and get to delete edge. Then I will drag this one out with scaling it out and then lowering it a little bit, and then scaling this one in. Let's say three and see how that looks. Looks a lot smoother, especially from a distance. I think we're getting good spot and of course we can continue to change that later. Next, let's get a little bit of a bend to this because you remember it's an x and we don't want to just rotate this and have it be a straight line. We want it to bend a little bit. For that we have a bend to former. If under the modeling tool set, if we go to the form and down to non-linear, and I'll just tear the software second. We can click the Bend to former. You can't see right now. You want to make sure that all your show things are on. These are attributes that you can see are types of objects and whatnot. Everything's on so we know it's in there somewhere. That's probably just hidden inside of the geometry. We can hit four. We can see there's that line in there. It's also been added to our out liner, which if you don't have your out liner opened, you can go to Windows and out liner and with bent handle selected now we can go to inputs of the been handle just where we are finding the cylinder options where we added more geometry earlier. We can go to curvature and a middle mouse drag that up. We can see the whole thing is starting to bend. Now that kind of looks like a banana, but we want it to be only curved at the bottom here. Let's go over to the bend and remove the high bound option so that the top part will not be affected by the bend to former. We can even move the bend to former down a little bit. If we want to get a little more curve lower, I think right in here, something like that looks good. We can change the shaded mode so we can see it a little better. I think like something like that will work pretty well. Now let's select the geometry and we're going to delete the history as a way to get rid of the bin handle. Also at the same time save this bend former deformation in the geometry here. Switch over to edit, delete by type, and go to history. Now we have this kind of permanently locked in here. Now let's hold down D and V again, there are pivot point back to the point of the chromosome. I guess this is a single chromatic, if we're being technical. Let's hold down x and get that back to the center world. That's looking pretty good. Now with that in the center of the world, let's create a little texture this. We'll go to deform and of course we can close this one out, we're done with that and go to deform and texture deformer which has a very seldom used one. For right now we can just hit create. It looks like nothing happened, but we do have the texture performer handle over here. We can go to the attribute editor and go to the textured or former tab. We can see it's looking for a texture right now, it's just black. If we drag that up, we can see it's trying to deform it in white. That's pretty boring. It's just moving the whole thing. But what we want to do is affect this with a texture so there's variation. The easiest way to do that is with procedural textures. In this case, it'll be a fractal. We'll click this checkerboard over here. We can click on the fractal. You can see it's all pretty messed up and that's not exactly what we want. Let's click this little and output here. You can see that we get back to the textured deformer tab. Under the texture deformer tab, we have a couple different options to change how it's affecting the geometry. Go onto direction, and instead of Handel, let's go to normal. That just means the normal of the face. All these faces are pointing outwards so it'll deform it in that direction. This looks like a huge, big blob right now, which is not helpful. We just kind of want to add a little bit of variation of this thing so we can just reduce the strength of a little bit. We can also go back into the texture. We could change the amplitude here. We could also increase the ratio so there's greater frequency and texture. We can go to frequency ratio as well. You can see it kind of looks like the texture itself is getting moved over this and will only be able to see it as much as there is geometry here. That's why we've put more subdivisions here earlier in the lesson. Because if those weren't here, then there would be nothing to move basically. We also need to keep that in mind when we're doing this texture deformer. That if there's no enough geometry and we're doing super high-frequency stuff. There's no texture there to describe that. We kind of have to find the sweet spot between having too much geometry and what we want to see. Let's do something like that and then go back in and output tab here are the little button up here on the top right. We can increase the strength. Then we'd also offset this to kind of keep it close to its original shape. You can see how you can quickly get out of hand a little bit. But I think this is looking maybe like we need to reduce that frequency ratio again, because I do want to see some larger pieces of texture here. That's looking pretty good and maybe just dropping the strength down. Now we have one piece of the chromatin. In the next lessons we can duplicate this out with some procedural methods inside of Maya. I look forward to doing that with you. Thanks. 14. Chromosome 3/6 - Make Tons Of Chromosomes: Now that we have this one leg modeled, we can duplicate it out with Maya's MASH tool set. It was intended for motion graphics, but you can use it in any way you want. I's basically a procedural way to duplicate things and animate them procedurally meaning you can assign values to it and even random things. So you don't have to hand animate every single little piece. Because we want a time these, we don't want to have to animate every single chromosome. So with this chromatic or this leg of the chromosome selected, we can go to mash and create mash network. If you don't see this, you either have a version of Maya that's before 2016.5, I think is when they first started to use mash. If you do have a recent version, you can go to "Windows", "Settings and Preferences", "Plug-in manager" and just make sure MASH is loaded right here. You can make those checkmarks. So with that loaded, we can go to "MASH", "Create MASH Network." We do want instances, and we can say "Apply" and "Close." You can see it merely jumped everything down. The one thing we forgot to do is to freeze the transformations of that one piece of geometry. So MASH takes the pivot and assumes the pivot is that world space. But let's undo this. You can see when we select on this piece of the chromosome. If we go to the channel box, you can see we have these values here. So zero to this little piece is actually over here. That's why it jumped everything down there, because it's taking the zero of what it's finding and its transformations. So if we want this pivot to be here and for MASH network to think this is the pivot point, we need to zero all this out. We can do that by going to Modify, Freeze transformations and it will zero everything out. So now when we go to MASH and we say Create MASH network, it will stay right there and everything will pivot where we want it to at zero world space. So when we create MASH, this is just the default. So let's go to the Attribute editor and you can see we get two things. We have the MASH menu. This is where we get to select all the different influences we want to have on this network. Then we also have the Distribute tab here. This is just the default like I said. Maya had to choose something so it shows linear and it shows 10 and a distance of 20. So this is just the default. There's a lot of other options here, but it had to pick something to give to you or give to us. So it shows this. We only want to, and we don't want it to be a distance of 21 to be nothing. Now they're right on top of each other. So I need to rotate this around. So rotate y around 180 degrees. Now we have a mirror image of itself. So the only issue with this is because we are going to duplicate the system out once again, MASH won't recognize this as a pair. It'll only take this piece if we duplicate this out, this MASH network again, to make the bottom half, it'll only take this piece. So we need to go into the MASH editor and from the menu we can select Replicator. I'll say add replicator node. Now on the replicator tab, we can save the replicants we want to have is one. So now we have the other half and it's by default just thrown out here behind it two units we can zero that out. We can drop down the rotation tab here and then rotate that down as well. So now on one little system, we have created the entire chromosome from one piece. So that's pretty cool. The one thing that we can do as well to create some variation is go into the Random node and we can left click that and say Add random node. Of course it moves everything around because usually defaults aren't what you want them to be. In this case, they're trying to move the position around. We don't want that, we want to move the rotation around. So let's add a little bit of variation here. We can also change the random seed. If this isn't what we want, we can just drag the random seed around to be something like what we want to have. So I think something like that looks pretty good. It's not uniform and you can also do this to scale if you wanted. We could click on Uniform scale so it all moves together. But I think that might look a little weird and not medically accurate. So we can just leave that alone. Now with this chromosome done, we can duplicate this network and create a MASH network of that. So to make a copy of this MASH network, we actually need this not to be an instance. We needed it to be geometry. So we can change that pretty quickly here. We can click on this middle button here. which will give us another menu and say Switch MASH geometry type. It'll give us instead of an instance node now it's a repro mash. That means this is actual geometry now. With that selected, we can create a new MASH network from it. We want this one to be an instance for sure. So I'll hit "Apply" and "Close." Now you can see that we have a copy of this whole network. So that's pretty cool. Again, this distribution is just the default distribution. We could have any kind of distribution that we want. You can choose grid and create a big distance here between them. Then we can say how many that we want in the grid and increase that number quite a bit. It doesn't slow down mile all that much really. So let's get these a little further out from each other. So now they're all in this uniform position, which doesn't look very natural. To adjust that, we can add another random node to this. So let's go to the random node in this new MASH network that we created. We'll left-click and go Add random node. We can change the random position here so that we no longer get those straight lines. We can also have some random rotation and we can slide these all the way up so they're all different types of orientations. Of course, if you don't want it to be that extreme, you can always go in and adjust these as you want. We could also make different scales, but of course again, that's a little wonky. You can have a random seed here. So that's pretty cool. We've created an entire chromosome network here without having to do a ton of work. It's pretty quick. We can rotate around and the viewport updates and everything works pretty well. So this would be fine for us, but I want to add a little bit of animation and make it look a little more organic. So let's go to the MASH network again, and let's go over to Signal. I'll click "Add signal node". You can see they've already moved just a little bit. So what signal does is it adds a signal through these positioned points and also rotation if you so choose. So we could increase this and see as we hit play, which is down here on our timeline, we could scrub through and see it animate. Or we get hit play down here. Now we get all this animation for free. We didn't have to touch, if you do the math on the grid, we probably have hundreds and hundreds of these chromosomes. We get all this animation for free. If you want to adjust it, you can adjust these sliders and dynamically change every single one. What I'll do is just reduce the noise scale. So everything moves a little bit slower. With the Play button turned on, you can actually change it in real time. So I'm going to increase the timeline. So I'll select on here and I'll say maybe 500. So I'll just give it some more road here. So when we hit play, we can have more time to see the changes take place. I'm going to turn off the grid as well so we can see only the chromosomes. I'll hit "Play" and then I'll start to slide this slider down. We can see it update in real time. Maybe 0.1, that's looking pretty good. These look like they're floating in some fluid and rotating. We can maybe increased the rotation a little bit and all axes. It looks pretty natural. So in this lesson we did a lot, we learned a lot about MASH, we learned how to duplicate a MASH network that it needs to be a geometry, this repro MASH. We learned how to get a lot of animation for free. The next few lessons we will shade these chromosomes and animate the camera and set up some lighting and rendering. Thanks for watching. 15. Chromosome 4/6 - Create Chromosome Material: Let's create a material for our chromosomes so they're not all gray. With the ReproMesh selected, let's right-click anywhere in the view-port. You could also unhide it. Anytime you make a mesh network at hides the objects, you can see the previous two objects that we made a mesh network up or both hidden. You can hit Shift H to unhide it and you can hit F to zoom in on it. We could right-click on this and go to assign a new material. Let's just create a simple Lambert shader. A Lambert is a Maya shader, so you can find it in any of these menus. Here's Lambert. I'll click that. I'll make a new shader over here and we can name that chromosome, and if I adjust the color, you can see it's not updating here. This could be a Maya 2018 issue, but if you toggle the texture node on, and it could be a mash issue as well that this is the only way that it views material as a texture. Your texture mode is six to get texture mode, you go to five and this is on our keyboard what I'm hitting. You can also see it update up here. This is the texture mode getting turned on and off. Typically, if we're not in a mesh network, you don't need the texture node on because there is no texture applied here. It's just a color but because this is a special instance with the mash network, it might interpret things differently and that's the reason why. We'll just go with that for now and pick that. We can choose any color over here that we want. If we click on the little color box, we get this little menu and we can select maybe a blue color, something brighter and something like that is working pretty well. But it doesn't look very interesting. We can make it a lot more appealing by adding a few more nodes to this material. It will make it look have this X-RAY effect so that every piece will have this rim light around it. So to do all this work, we're going to need to open the hyper shade. Now, hyper shade is just scenario where we have all of our shading nodes available to us. If we go up here to the so or we can click that and I'll open up the hyper shade, might take a second to open, here we can see all of our materials we named the Lambert2 chromosome here. If we click that, you can see we get it over here and the attribute editor and if we click these in and out buttons here, it'll map the chromosome material. To be able to apply this effect where only the edges of things relative to the view of the camera have a rim light, we need to essentially get that angle off of this piece of geometry or every piece of geometry. We need to say, this face is facing the camera, whereas these edges are facing perpendicular to the camera, pointing out to the side. As this is a cylinder, the front of its facing us and the sides are facing away, facing to the sides. So we need to get that information so we can map in and basically say where there are sides not facing the camera that should have a different type of color to it. That is called a sampler info node. We can get that by typing and sampler here. You can see sampler info. If I click that, it will create the node for us. Everything I've just described is what my calls a facing ratio. That just as the name implies, which direction is that facing facing basically. It'll make more sense once we get this connected, you can visually see the difference. Let's click this down here. Let's add a ramp note as well. We'll type in ramp and click the ramp. So we'll take this and bring it over here, and because we recently selected the blue color and the ramp, we can go to the selected color and choose that blue color from that menu. Then we can select the little white dot down here and choose the gradient of that one. We could choose the same color as a starting point and then just take the saturation down and the value up so it's brighter. Great. Let's map in the ramp for right now. So I'll go out color, goes into the color of the shader and as I do that, you can see it does update and it could be a mash issue where not all of them are updating it. So let's toggle between five and six and you can see by doing that, it refreshed the view-port. Now they all will update. This isn't the effect that we're going for yet, so we still need to keep building it. So the, the ramp is mapped into the color now. But we need to get this facing ratio information into the system somewhere. We want to get it into the V coordinate. So the U and V coordinates, to explain this, I'll open up the UV editor. You can get to from several places. You can get to it from the shelves. You can get to it from the modeling menu under UV, the editor. It's essentially a way to describe a 3D object in a 2D space. The bottom line down here is u. I'll just unhide the cylinder for right now and you can see the UV is on actually all that great and we probably have done a better job of creating the UVs. We can always update them. If we wanted to create more or different UVs, we can do that. But it's essentially a way to unwrap an object in a 2D space and flatten it out. The reason for that is so that we can apply textures to it. Because you think about like a globe, you can't take a square piece of paper and tape it around the globe. You have to cut little sections out so that the edges of the paper lineup perfectly when it's wrapped around the three dimensions of a globe. Same thing is true for every 3D object. So we describe that in a u, which is this x axis down here, and a v, which is vertical up here. It's a UV space. The reason why I described that is because in the material, the ramp is trying to figure out which direction does this blue and light blue need to go. You can see they're all going from the bottom to the top. We could update this position of the ramp and you can see it will slide up the chromosome. We'd have it just be a sharper edge, and you could update that. Because the UV space, as we saw on the UV editor, was from bottom to top here. Let's drag this back out. Now that we understand a little bit about UVs, it will make sense when we plug in the facing ratio. I'm just clicking on this little three-bar so we can flip all of these attributes over here to the right because this is the output side, and this is the input side. We want to output the facing ratio. I just selected these and clicked this button a few times. We can get it this or to the output. I'll take the facing ratio, and I'll map it into the V coordinate, and I'll let go. Instantly you can see that we're getting this effect already. It's in the opposite direction because the ramp is going in the wrong way. We can just select the ramp and swap out these colors. Just click and drag the top-little dot and flip them around. Now we can slide these out, so it's a smoother, kind of a gradient. We can see that at glancing angles, the chromosome will be brighter. It will be this other color of the gradient. You can see, the more the faces face away from us, the more they take on this color here. We can always adjust this and change it. You can tweak these values now that we have an understanding of what the UV coordinate is, and you can make it more pronounced and more dramatic if you want it to. Maybe take this all the way down. The other thing we can do, if we want to make this more bright, we can actually go past the one value that we're seeing here in value. This is hue saturation value. We can actually put in a two here and go brighter than what we're seeing. It's a little trick that's not obvious if you're just starting out in 3D that you can actually do something like that. Let's increase the saturation a little bit and get back to the blue color. The other thing we have at our disposal is the fact that we can always go back into the texture to former and increase the strength because we never deleted the history on this original cylinder. We still have that information available to us that we can increase the strength of this, and it should update all of the other ones. If we toggle through, it'll update, and you can see how it's a lot more rough here. We can pick up more of those edges and the sides of this effect happening. I think we went a little maybe too strong on the value. It's getting a little bit out of hand so we could bring that value back down to something closer to one, and something in there. Looks pretty good. It gives this x-ray type of look to it, and we could choose not to render these with a renderer. We can actually just playblast what we're seeing in the viewport. If we wanted to do that, we can make it look a little better by adding some fog to give it a little more depth. Let's go to shading from this viewport window here, and we can turn on hardware fog. Now you can see that it fades away in the distance, and we can adjust all of these settings under the option box here. I just click this little option box, and it pulls up this other window. We're going to adjust the distance at which everything starts to fade away, and we can change the color of what we're seeing. We could change it to be a similar blue color. Maybe it gets darker as it goes away. Something like that, and we can bring the distance closer to the camera. I think something maybe, actually a little lighter and something in there. Now we have a backdrop for free. If we hit "Play", we can start to see all these floating. Now, that we have this fog, it appears as though everything is floating in some type of fluid. It's pretty cool. Now if we wanted to just take this as it is. Let's just hit "Escape" so that we stop the playback. Let's reduce this backdown, so it's something manageable. We could animate the camera by creating a new one. It's throwing us back into the zero-zero space, and you can see we left that piece on hidden. We can hide that again, so we don't have this stray gray piece here. We can back up a little bit, and we can go to the first frame and select the camera either from the outliner by going to persp1, which is the perspective one, and we can hit "S". We can just scroll forward, and we can fly through this space a little bit. Let's back it out and see what that gets us. I'm hitting "Alt V" to play, is a little hot key. This is a pretty quick way to animate chromosomes in a camera and not have to deal with lighting and rendering, and a lot of technical things that can bog your machine down and take quite some time to render. We'll get into rendering in a later lesson, but I just wanted to show this method. In case you need to do this and get it out quickly and not want to mess with any lighting or shading or anything like that. Let me just bring up this bottom part so you can see it. But if we right-click on a timeline, you can scroll down and click "Playblast". If we click it, it'll just start play blasting, meaning it will render the view we see at the viewport. Let's click the options and see what we have. The first one, if you're on a Mac, this basically means quick time. If you click this one, this is an image sequence. But I would recommend for playblasts, to just go ahead and do a quick time. We can see it from render settings, or we can see it from the window if we wanted to. But the render settings are taken from this little clapper box with the gear. We can click that. It's mainly taking this one from the bottom here, where it has the image size. We could do something bigger like HD_1080. We can keep that from render settings and know that'll be 1080p. We can save it in a location and just hit "Playblast", and it'll run through the timeline and playblast this animation of the chromosomes and the camera move that we did. In the next lessons, we will actually add some light and render this out of a renderer to show you a little different option, that'll take a little bit longer, but it might look nicer in the end. Thanks for watching. 16. Chromosome 5/6 - Lighting And Rendering: In between the lessons, I took the liberty of animating the camera a little bit to get it to pass by some of the chromosomes a little more closely. You can take time to do that and just adjust the camera as needed by choosing it as the view and navigating around, and you can see here, as long as auto key is on over here, it'll set a key frame wherever you navigate to. You also just want to be careful that you lock that in, and don't move this view later. Now that the camera move is done, there's one more thing we could do. I wanted to show you with the material, because the edge that we created is cool, but it's not super bright. It's kind of dull, and there's one aspect of the mire renders that you can take advantage of, so let's map out the material. We can select the repro mesh and hit the in and out button here to map out what the connections are, and we can see this Lambert group, and we can map that out. Also, if you have geometry selected it's actually just quicker to hit this little ball, with these two little tabs here and it'll map it out. We have all this stuff set up and that's all the technical font stuff, the facing ratio and all that. We have this ramp that's made and we could just pipe that ramp into these other attributes. One that could work pretty well is actually the ambient color. We click the color of the ramp and drag it and let go over the ambient color, and you can see it brightens up all of these edges quite a bit more. Depending on the look that you're going for, you can take advantage of these other aspects of the material to increase those edges. Now with that done, let's light and render the scene. We'll go to Arnold and lights, sky dome light. Then we will choose Arnold and Arnold render preview. To see what that does, I will need to hit the play button up here. Now we can see everything is very brightly lit, and especially with that new adjustment we made to the shader. Let's check out the alpha channel because we want to be able to play our own background in compositing, and as it stands, it looks like it's all white, and we can check the Alpha by clicking this circle checker box, and we can see it's all white in the Alpha channel meaning there is no transparency. In the sky dome light, we can scroll down to the visibility and choose camera go down to zero, and we can see it update here, it's still lighting the scene. It's just not affecting the Alpha channel. We can check that again in the alpha channel C and D. We do have a black Alpha channel here, so we can put on our own background in later if we want, so that's good. There's actually one thing I want to update with this before we render it, and I want to scrub in time to somewhere where we can see it. Check out these sharp edges here, towards the ends of the tubes of the chromosomes. They're very, very sharp and it's like that on every single one. You can see it down here, and we could go in and change the original cylinder, but that might be a little more work. Let's actually do it from the repro mesh that we made and where we apply the material. If we choose Arnold here, we can scroll down and we get subdivision options, let's click that, and I'll choose type to be, actually I had this crash over here earlier, so I'm going to save this real quick and turn off the IPR render, because I think it crashes when the IPR render is on, and it's trying to add subdivisions. Let's save, and I'll turn this off while I'm doing this work, it's always just safer to do that. I'll say Cat Clark in the subdivision option here, and let's go to something like two, and what this is saying is, at render time, not in the view-port but at render time, it will subdivide the geometry two more times. If my math is right that'll make four times as much geometry, because it's splitting the faces down the middle and to the sides and all that like I thing so. It will smooth out these edges by adding more geometry there. If we go back to the Arnold render preview now that we've made those changes and hit the Play button, we should be able to zoom in here and see that indeed those ends of the tubes and the chromosomes are much smoother, and that's what I was looking to do. That's something we can do at render time. You can see this one's very smooth, so that's perfect. Great. Let's close that out. Let's go to the Render Settings, which is the clapper board we'll figure at will, right next to the hyper shade, and we need to give a name to our images, and EXR is fine. You could choose JPEG or something else, and we want a sequence, we want to render frame 1-200, and it's all grayed out. To make this not grayed out, we need to choose a named.number.extension, because you can see it says single frame right here by default, and we want multiple frames. Now we can change this to 200, and we want to choose the correct camera, and let's close this out and rename this properly to render cam. We'll open up the Render Settings again, and now when we go down to the random roll camera, render cam is an option, and let's render something like 720, and in AOVs, which are essentially render layers, we want to add Z depth pass, because we may want to use it as something like a fog like we had in the render view-port recently. We can also have to fake that with a depth pass. You could also use it to blur. The depth here of the ones in the back would be more blurry than the ones in the front I think. To add that, we need to go to the built-in AOV groups and choose the Z layer here from the available AOVs, and put it over in the act of AOVs. Now you can see it made one over here, and it put in all the defaults that we needed to be, and that works. We'll have one extra layer of the deaf pass. I think our sampling settings are fine. Basically, this top one affects everything beneath it, and I think the default was fine. We were looking through the Arnold render preview earlier, I didn't see a lot of noise or anything like that, and we'll go up to the rendering settings by going to the drop-down and choosing rendering, go to render and the render sequence tab here. I'm just going to make sure that everything is as we want it to be, and I typically like to choose the alternate directory just so that it is the one that I'm picking, sometimes it doesn't pick it up from the render settings, and when we hit render sequence and close, you can see it will open up the render view, and it'll start rendering each frame from the render view, and I would click and drag it over here, but now it gets stuck. Once you start, you could stop it and then just pick back up whatever frame you left off on by putting that in the render settings, but you just want to make sure when you start you're ready to let it go, because it's just going to start rendering from the first frame and go. It looks like it's going pretty fast, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we will composite these layers together. Thanks a lot. 17. Chromosome 6/6 - After Effects Composite: In this lesson we will composite the chromosome images we just rendered. After Effects, I will right click in here and go to Import File. I'll then navigate to the folder where I saved my images. If you chose to do the Z depth pass, there will be a beauty and a Z folder. The beauty just means everything together, lights, reflections, colors. So we'll choose that one and we need to right-click and go to interpret footage main, because we can see up here it's saying it's 30 frames a second when we know it's 24. We can assume this frame rate of 24 and hit okay. You will also see that in Maya, in this bottom right corner, it says 24 frames per second. You can change that with this drop-down menu. Back in After Effects, we can click and drag this into a new composition. Let's also bring in the Z depth layer. I'll click and drag this on top, and you can see it's totally white, but if we click and drag this little exposure adjustment, you can see we actually do have information here, this's just very bright. The only reason we can see this is because we're working in 32 bits. If you alt click this area, you can change between 18, 16, and 32. As soon as we go to eight, you can see we no longer have that information here. For it to work, we need to work in 32 bits,and that's why we also render any XORs because those are 32-bits. This only affects the view point here, and After Effects, it doesn't actually affect the layer. First we also need to interpret this right-click "Main" to footage 24. Now we can drag this out, and essentially, we need to apply this exposure effect to the layer itself. So zero that out, we go to effects of the Z layer, which I can just rename to Z and go down to color correction exposure. Just like we did with the view, we can just drag this down till we see all of the chromosomes, something [inaudible] like their works. If we apply the camera lens blur filter to this beauty pass and choose this layer, it will not respect the exposure filter. For that to work, we need to pre-compose this layer so it'll assume and respect this exposure layer as well. So we'll go to layer, pre-compose and move all attributes and then okay. Now we choose the camera lens blur option, it will blur everything because the blur map has nothing chosen. If we choose that, we can go to Z count and you can see everything in the foreground starts to be in focus and we can change the distance here and we can go further back. We can also invert the blur map if we want everything in the front of the camera to be blurry, and let's choose something in the middle. We can also increase the blur radius, we want to make things more blurry. But you can see the effect then starts to break down. Unfortunately, this is something After Effects does not do very well. What I suggest is consider keeping this blur radius fairly low, so this effect doesn't get too out of hand and have a ton of RFX. The other thing you can do is purchase a plug-in. It's called, I don't even know how to pronounce it, fresh left.com possibly. They make a really nice plug-in that I will show you how it works here in a second, but it is not cheap. You also might just want to ignore this effect, but if you're interested in this, then continue watching or just skip ahead a little bit. I'll turn this camera lens blur effect off. I'll right-click and go down to the first left depth of field, and we'll do the same thing. We need to choose a depth layer. I'll go to Z comp and nothing happens because the radius is default set at zero.Let me just start to crank this up, and you can see it's choosing the front, and so there's a couple different ways you can choose the blurred depth. You can choose it with this little picker. Let's do something back here or we can adjust the focal point here, maybe something a little closer to the camera. It just does the effect a little bit better, it's not perfect. To be honest Nuke does this effect even better than both of these things. Let's look back here, you can see the edges aren't great, but especially back in here, you can see these odd edges with the default camera lens blur filter. If we use the Fresh left version, all of those weird edges are gone, but we still have some in the foreground unfortunately. But it doesn't get us approximately pretty close to what this effect is all about. Let's just scrub forward and make sure everything's working okay and everything appears to be looking pretty good. One other thing we can try to do is actually use the blur pass as a fog layer. For us to do this, let's duplicate this layer and I'll turn it on, and let's invert it and I'll go over here and type in invert, click and drag this to this layer. Then we can set the blend mode to multiply, and you can see it adds a little bit of fog to this. The other thing that we could do is actually use this as a luma matte for a solid, if we wanted to give color to this fog, so we're going to go right-click "New Solid". Let's make it slightly blue, we turn up the brightness just a little bit. We can always adjust this stuff later as well. I'll hit okay and I'm going to drag this below the depth pass here. I'm going to choose this to be normal again, and for the dark solid, I'll choose a luma inverted matte. Now you can see that this solid is being managed by the luma values here and we can adjust that effect by lowering the capacity of this layer or increasing it and the same with this one. We can bring more of the background forward or we can knock it out more. That's a nice effect because there are so many chromosomes if we want to keep the attention in the foreground to use this type of an effect to almost cheat this fog effect with the ZDF pass is really a nice compositing trick. Now we have the chromosomes and we have our animation. We can also animate the focal length if we wanted to or the focus area rather from this effect by hitting the stopwatch and controlling the radius or the focal point. We might just crank up this radius a little bit to see how far we can push this and it looks pretty good. The only thing is you'll notice that the dark solid that we put on top now is affecting the blur that we're seeing. It's cutting out the blur because if you think about what we're doing, this is like a stencil of the hard edges of the chromosomes, but then we're blurring it underneath it, so we need to blur or both of these. We can take this depth of field layer and which save real quick. We can cut that out and we can put it on an adjustment layer, so we've got a new adjustment layer. I'll put this towards the top and I'll rename it and then paste this in here. It should affect all the layers now. That works much better, and we can reduce the blur amount now. Now we have a pretty cool effect of the chromosomes passing by camera with some depth of field and we cheated the Z depth pass to use to our advantage to create some more fog in the scene are fluid. We learned about different blur techniques and the importance of having the blur on top. The last thing I'll do is just add a another adjustment layer, and I'll call this VG for vignette and I'll throw a color correction curves. I'll just drop this way down and that doesn't actually look too bad for the whole thing, but what I'm going to do is go up here and hold down, click and go to the loop c tool, and then double-click it. Then I'm going to go down to the mask that I just made by double-clicking and go to subtract further. I'll have made a little bit of a vignette effect here. l'm just keep blurring out those edges until something that I like. It gives a nice little microscopic effect as well. To publish this as a movie, we need to go to composition, add to render queue and we can scroll down here and see we have a couple options. We can click lossless and get the codec options, which I'm just going to choose apple progress for 22 and hit okay. You can choose whatever format you want, H264 works pretty good. This has no audio, so I'm turned that off. Then we can save this wherever we want. I'm just going to choose chromosomes and hit Save. I'll hit the render button and I'll see you in the next class. Thanks for watching. 18. DNA - Intro To DNA Series: Thanks for joining me in this next series where we will discuss how to create a DNA structure. I've divided this series out into two different sections. One is more for the beginner user of Maya, and one is more for the advanced users. The reason for that is there are basically two different ways to visualize DNA. This is the more simple way where the twists that we see here are more symmetrical, they're even all the way down. The more accurate view of the DNA is actually having a major and minor groove here on the bottom left, you can see. There's a symmetry, but they're still pattern. Once you introduce this, say a symmetry, it becomes a lot more complicated to rig and to model that, so that's why I created a more advanced section where we can also randomize the base pairs and do that kind of thing. Jump ahead to whichever one is more appropriate for you or follow both of them. We'll be covering different kinds of topics and each, but thanks for joining me, I look forward to making these with you. Bye. 19. DNA - Beginner DNA: Welcome to the first class for the beginner version of creating DNA. I've started a new scene here, so I'm going to set the project, and I'll create a new folder, and I'm going to go in here and make a beginner folder, and for later, I'll go ahead and make an advance folder. Let's set the project to beginner and we'll create the default workspace, and I'll go to the "Project Window" and hit "Accept", and create all those folders. Let's jump right in and create some ladder pieces here, basically the edges of the ladder. We can scale this up. We can also use the attributes from the inputs here, the poly cylinder, we click on that and we get some more attributes. We can increase the height, and let's just do something easy for now, 10, and we'll choose a radius of maybe 0.25. We need a little more subdivisions because we're going to end up twisting this around. We need to increase the subdivision height as well. We can just crank that up and then we can move this over two units. Let's hold down the X button on the keyboard, so we snap to the grid and move over two units. Then let's duplicate this by hitting Command D and hold down X and move the duplicate over two units. Depending on how wide you want it, you could go one or two or whatever, but let's just use this for now. Then we will create another piece of the ladder here, and we'll rotate this down 90 degrees. We'll go to the poly cylinder options here and just reduce the radius to maybe 0.1, something like that. Let's move the pivot over to one edge here. I'm going to hold down D and V, and then I'm just going to drag this over and is going to vertex snap to the end here, then hold down X to snap it to the middle. Now we have it right in the middle, and then I'll duplicate this and rotate it around, and we can just do 180 here. I'll select this one, and we can group these and call these base pairs just to keep it nice and tidy. Let's jump into the front view, hold down space bar, click and then drag, and let go over the front view, and I'm just going to drag this down withholding X to the bottom around here. I might just extend these edges out a little bit so that we aren't seeing the base pair fall off the end of the stem of this. I'm going to drag this out, maybe 1.1. I'm going to select the two base pairs and go to edit duplicate special. I want to reset the setting so I'm on the same page as you guys. Copy is fine, parent is fine, and then we want to create maybe one copy per unit up, so we did a 10 unit tall cylinder if you remember. There's going to be 10 grid lines here that we can duplicate up. We can say X, Y, and Z, we want to go up in the Y, which is this middle one, so we can type a one in here. Then let's enter in a 10 here because we want 10 more, and we can hit apply, and you can see that we have this even distribution of the base pairs. We can close this out and I'll go back into the perspective mode. Now you can see basically I have a ladder. I'm going to turn off the grid for right now, and I'll turn on the anti-aliasing as well to help smooth out those edges. That's a pretty good start. Let's select these base pairs and create the shaders for them. I'm going to right-click and go to "Assign New Material", and I'm going to create a lambert, and I'm going to go over that lambert and I'm going to name these based on the nitrogenous bases. Adenine and thymine go together, so call this adenine. Let's just make this red of some kind for right now. There's one little bug in Maya 2018 where you have to open up a hypershade to get textures or not even textures, to get the color to update. That's just some weird thing. If you get that, that's the reason why you want to go in there and make sure that's happening. Then the pair for adenine is thymine. I could be saying these wrong, so excuse me if I am, but go to assign material by right-clicking on the geometry of that, then I'll create another lambert, and I'll call this thymine, and we can make a yellow color. Again, we might have to click on the shaders down here to get it's update, and now it's updated. Then let's make these shaders, right-click "New material", "Lambert", and we can call this guanine and the next one cytosine. I'm just going to go ahead and make that one as well and rename it cytosine. Let's make this a green and this one blue. We'll click on the shaders from the hypershade and try to update the viewport here. Cool. Now we have those shaders and we can go through and decide what shaders that we want to have because these are supposed to be random. We can go in and right-click and say assign existing material and go down to cytosine. Or if we want to flip it around, we can do the next one, guanine and then cytosine. But we want to make sure that of course, these nitrogenous base pairs are together at least. I'm going to just going to go through and right-click and say assign existing material for the rest of these. I'll see you in a second. Great. Now that these are added, we can always go in and adjust the material attributes and it'll update for all of them. If we don't like that blue, we can go into the guanine shader here, the lambert shader, and choose something different. We can go with a different hue. Again, the hypershade might need to be open for the materials here to refresh, which is slightly annoying. But so we make that one change to the color and then they all update. That's something that we can go through and do. Maybe the red is a little too vibrant or saturated, we can drop the saturation and change the hue a little bit. We can go through and click on these and get that update. Cool. I like how that looks and I'll close this out, and then we can select all of these pieces of geometry and go to the, "Modeling" tab here, and go over to "Deform", and choose "Nonlinear". I'm just going to turn this off by clicking this here because we want this again here in a minute. I'm going to choose the "Twist deformer". You can see it twisted the wrong way, so we can just rotate this vertically here and we go over to the "Channel Editor", and zero that out. If we go down to the twist inputs here, we see twist one, and we have a start and end angle, and we can now twist this into a DNA structure. We could also animate this twist. We can go in here on the first frame and right-click on "Start angle", and go to "Key Selected", and then move forward in time to maybe frame 90. Then we can middle mouse drag in the viewport and increase the twist to whatever we like. Maybe something like that, maybe 360. We know it goes around one time. We can Alt V to play. We can see it animating on. We've created our first DNA structure. I'm going to go to the "Show" tab and turn off the deformers, so we won't see the twist angle and the viewport. This is one way to go about it and we could continue to adjust this if we wanted to. We can add color to the ladders here. If we right-click and say assign new material and we'll choose another lambert, and we'll go over to it. We can maybe make it a little brighter, so it's white. That's a quick and dirty way on how to make DNA. We can play blast this by right-clicking and going down to playblast. We can choose our options of formats and encoding, and we can choose a location from the browse menu and hit "Save", and then hit the" Playblast" button and it will play this view and the render settings. We can get to those up here. It'll go from the presets that we have here, the image size. If you want it to be 1080 or 720, you can do that and then you can render out a movie of this animation pretty quickly. That's how you make a DNA structure in Maya. If you're prepared for something a little more advanced, follow me in the next advanced lesson and we will cover the more advanced techniques to rig and model the DNA structure in a way that we have a little more control over, and to create the major and minor grooves of the spiral. Thanks for watching. 20. DNA 1/14 - Intro To Advanced DNA: Welcome to this class on introducing the advanced DNA structure modeling. I want to do this video quickly so that you understand why this is more difficult and how we're going to approach building it. Because it took several nights of me attacking this issue from a couple different ways. The way Maya deals with certain things make that not possible. There's a very specific path we're going to take. I'm going to, in the next series of lessons, they'll probably be times where I'll say, if you don't want to know why we're doing it this way, just skip ahead, and I'm going to try to list how far in the video to skip ahead to in text at the lower third. But I feel like there's no point in you following along in this series unless I'm explaining why we're doing it the way we're doing it, and why we're not doing it all these other ways that don't work. I'll explain why they don't work, and I hope I show some of that. But I don't want to get too in the weeds with it, but I'll I'll let you know if I'm about to go down that path, you can skip ahead. This is a more complicated DNA structure we're going to try to do than what we did in the beginner class, which is what we're looking at on screen right now. This is the symmetry. This section is going to look the same as this section. Whereas the one that we're going to want to do has the major and minor grooves. They are almost parallel in a certain way. There's the minor groove here and a major groove here. This empty space here is different, whereas this empty space here is the same. It's the same distance here, from here to here, whereas this is a symmetrical. As soon as you introduce that asymmetry, it creates a lot of problems. It's not as clean and quick and easy to model it. That's why I'm separating these classes. There's a couple of things we need to do as we painting on a different layer so I'm not messing that one out. There's a couple different things we need to do. We need to be able to create this asymmetry, this pattern here, where we have the major and minor grooves here and here. We need to do this in a way that we can procedurally make the base pairs random in two different ways. One is in their color orientation. That means if we're doing red and yellow, and red and yellow, and red and yellow, the whole way down, that's not accurate. The base pairs, like you see here, we had to make this manually where the red and the yellow flipped. We had to go in here and physically click "Assign a new Shader" and do all that. That took a little bit of time. We're just doing this one little piece. A DNA is have very long strand, and there's those facts you can like go to the moon and back on your DNA strands. They're super long. We want to build this model in a way that we can do that, and have it be very, very long, but still have control over each one of these individual strands over the whole model. We have to build this in a way so that the color orientation, one, is controllable, but we control that. Number 2 is to control when this type of a pair, the green and blue, whichever we want to call this, the cytosine and guanine, or the other two, or this color. We don't want just alternating colors, they need to be like we had to hand do again, we had to hand do this beginner one where we were like, "We want two here, and the same to here, but their colors are different." We have to physically touch each one of these things. We need to randomize the random pairs. That's the second thing we need to do for the base pairs is make them random and control that randomness. That's other thing we're going to build in. Then we're going to do this in a way so that we can, like I said earlier, make it very, very long. Then we're building all this in a certain way too, so that we can unwind it like we did the other model. The issue that was so easy with the beginner model here, was that when you look down on this beginner model, and I'll try to draw this as best I can, but basically, if you look down on the base pairs are crossing this center axis on this one. Let's see, on this one, the one we're going to be making, it's more like this. They're over here, then they are over there, then they are over here. Everything's not down the center, because you have this asymmetry. To get these points to follow the stems, basically, this part, to get them to follow it as it unwinds, we're going to have to rig up our own very custom rig so that when it unwinds, those base pairs will follow, and then turn into a ladder shape when they're unwound like this. Then go into this asymmetrical pattern. That's why it's more advanced, that's why we're going to do the things in the order that we're going to do them. I'll try to explain, as we go, when there's moments where you can skip ahead if you don't care about this stuff, and you just want to know how to make the thing and what buttons to click. But I think you'll get more out of it if you stick around in watch video and hear me out on, you could do it this way, but this is where that's going to prevent you to do these other things in the future. There won't be a time like that. But I'm going to try to call it out because I think that's important to understand the thought process and problem-solving. Because all 3DS, is just understanding the tools well enough so that you can get any idea whether it's a asymmetrical, major, minor groove DNA, or whatever it is, you can get any idea, and other tools well enough and think, "Okay. This is the process that I have to do this first and this and this. That's what all of learning this is about." That's why I'm trying to make an effort to include that in these videos. Thanks for watching and let's jump into the next lesson where we'll get started in making the advanced DNA structure. Thanks for watching. 21. DNA 2/14 - Creating First DNA Strands: Welcome to the first class, where we will actually start the creation of the Advanced DNA structure. I'm going to go ahead and start to set the project here, file set project. I'm going to click the "Advanced" folder here and I'll just hit "Set", create a default workspace. I'm going to go to the Project Window option here and accept everything so that if I go to the little Current Project options over here and I select on the "Scenes", it'll go to the correct area for the Advanced scenes, so I'll just say, "01." Now that our project is set, I want to explain why we're making it the way we are. If you want to skip this and just start making it, then go ahead to the time indicated in the lower third of the screen. If you're sticking around to watch this, let's flip back to the image that we had here of the beginner lesson and what we're going to change from this. If you look at these strands here, look at how thick this strand is right here. Then if you go up here, let's just copy this and we'll paste it so we can measure, this side is the same thickness if we're looking horizontally. But as soon as we rotate this in the direction that we are indicating the tube is going in, it is quite a bit off, right? Look at this gap right here. There's a gap right here. This whole thing, right? This. We're trying to avoid this, because it's getting skinny right here, and then it's thick here. We want to create something that has the same thickness all the way down the tube, and that's why we're not using this method for the advanced lesson.You can go back and watch that to see what that method actually is. I won't recreate it here, but also wanted to just show you that there's a new option in [inaudible] where you create a helix, right-clicking on this option in the "Poly modeling shelf", and it actually does the exact same thing where it distorts. What the sorry, I'm just getting this to something where we can actually see it. We're basically looking at a doughnut that was cut in half and then stretched out. Because of that, if we look straight down, everything looks correct because we're looking at this flat surface of the doughnut. But as soon as we look at it from the side, it's skinnier, right here, where these faces are selected. This is skinnier than this area because here we're looking actually at the top of the doughnut, and here we're looking at the interior of the doughnut. That's what we're going to do here and make the strands in a different method. I'm going to delete this and get started with that. When we're making strands, we're actually going to make two sets of strands. We're going to make one that solves the problem I just talked about of not having this difference in thickness, so that'll be one strand, so it'll solve that problem. With this strand actually creates another problem, in that when we create this strand, that will solve this problem here, this thickness problem, this strand will not have a consistent edge loop. That will be the interior. The strand, let's say here, that the base pairs are connecting to, it goes through here, it's actually going to wrap around the model. If we were to connect the base pairs to that edge or those faces, then they'd be poking out this way as they go up. We want to make sure we have a consistent face loop that stays on the inside here, down the whole way. When we're creating the strands that solve this thickness problem, they create a new problem of the fact that this face is not consistent on the inside edge of the DNA structure, so we have to create a second set that will be a consistent face all the way up the spiral. That'll make sense once we get started and I'll show you what I'm talking about. We'll start the first set of the two sets we're going to create, I'm going to "Curves" and select the "EP Curve" tool, and we go to the front view holding down "Space bar" and letting go there. I'm going to hold down "X" and select at the "World Center" here I'm going up to 10 units, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and hold down "X". Make sure to snap on the grid and I'll hit "Enter", and I made the curve this way because I'm going to go into the Curves and just rebuild it. Because if we look at the "Control Vertices" by right-clicking on this, we can see as soon as it starts twisting, there's not a ton of resolution here, so we want more points, so there's more resolution. But instead of having to select each point, we will just rebuild the curve. Also to get in and out of the component mode, there's these two buttons up here. Sometimes it's just easier than trying to right-click on this thing, go to "Object Mode", so I use that sometimes as well. Let's go to "Curves" and we'll jump down here to "Rebuild", and we can open up this "Option box" and we can see they'll be 40 new points. That's fine. Now if we right-click on this and go to the "Control Vertex", you can see there's all these points. Let's say if we "Self-select" these, and pull this out, you can see it's a much smoother distortion here instead of that jagged edge. Okay, so we have that. Now, let's turn off the "Self-select" and go in and out of Component mode. Now we need to extrude a circle along this path, so let's create a circle on the top left here. Let's pull this over in the position that we wanted to in, which is going to be two units to the right. I'm going to hold down "X" and go over two units. Now I can select the "Circle" and select the "Curve", and go to "Surfaces" and go down to "Extrude", and choose this option. I'll reset the setting so you can see what we're going to do. The two ones that are important are the Component and At path. Basically what that is going to do is when this is spiraling around, it will face the ends in the correct direction. You'll see what I'm talking about here in a second, but basically make sure these two are selected. We have to have the Curve selected here as well, so I'll hit "Apply", and you can see this is also the subdivisions here are based of how many Control Vertices were on this curve at the center here. That also indicates this is going to be a smooth curve once it's twisted around. We can change the radius of the tube itself by just adjusting the circle that was extruded, that'll change everything here. Let's do something specific like 0.25. Okay, now we have our first tube and we're creating these separately as well. Because when we create the twists, we don't want to create twists on the whole thing. In this version, we made a twist over this whole object and went down the whole thing from side to side here. What we want to do in this lesson in the advanced series, is we're going to create the two sides, and we're going to create their own twists that will go down the length of them here. What we're going to do is then move them to the center so that they both rotate around this center axis, and I'll show you that here in a second. But that's what we're also doing differently. We have this side complete as far as the model is concerned. Let's throw in that twist to form real quick, and we actually want to twist to form the curve because the curve is what's controlling this whole setup. If we go into the "Control Vertex" mode and start dragging stuff around, this tube is going to follow that. We need to place the Twist a form on that curve, so we'll go to the "Form" and we'll get on to "Non-linear twist". Now if we twist this here it's just going down around itself, and we want it to go around the center. Let's hold down "X" and then drag the "Twist a form" handle to the center axis. That way when we start twisting it, it will go around the center. Let's do a start angle of 360, so we have one complete circle if we're looking down at the top of it, because we want this to start and end at the same place when we make multiple copies of this vertically, the lineup. This is what I was talking about earlier, those options we selected for the extrusion of this circle along the path, it already set this up so that this curve didn't have to be exactly facing and rotated in that way, so that's super helpful. I'm going to speed up the video here and create the other side very quickly, and group this so we can try to keep this organized since we're going to have a couple layers here to deal with. This is the right side done. I'll speed up the video and create the left side. See you in a second. Great, so now we have the left side done, let's go over to the "Twist Handles", I'm going to select both of them and move them together now. We can type in "360" here and have what we started with from the beginner video. But we have a lot more control now that we've created separate twist handles for them. We also have a consistent volume now through these tubes they're not thicker here and thinner over here. They're the same thickness all the way through. We've solved two problems and set ourselves up for better options in the future here in the next lessons. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will create the second set of strands for the DNA, and I'll explain why we'll be doing that. Thanks for watching. 22. DNA 3/14 - Creating Second DNA Strands: In this lesson, we're going to create the second layer of these strands here. I'm going to explain why that is, why we're creating another pair just to be right on top in the same space as this. If we convert one of these to a polygon so we can look at it a little better. We'll go to modify, convert nerves to polygons, hop on the option box, make sure we're in quads, choose to control points just to make this happen quickly. I'll isolate this with this little button up here on the top middle. But basically what I want us to look at is the fact that, if we imagine that the base pairs are going to start to attach to the strand here in the center, and need to go up the center of the whole way. This is the inside loop here, and if we select that, which we did, this little red line. We can follow it up the strand and see that this strand actually twists largely, but also twist on itself. You can see that by the fact that if we look around and we look at the top, these ends at the outside edge. We started on the inside edge, but the top ends on the outside edge. If base pairs were sticking off of this edge down here, and pointing inwards, that would work for this piece of the strand. But as we go up, they'll slowly start to point away from the center. There going to be pointing to the outside of the strand. While this method solve the issue of volume, it created the issue of twist in the polygon itself. We're also going to have to address that in another way later on. But for us to be able to have a consistent edge face, that is always along the center and the inner portion of this kind of ring, if we're looking down on it, this is really, a ring. We want to have the same edge loop all the way around the faces. You can see it's twisting here as it goes up. You solve one problem in 3D and then another one pops up and then you have to solve that. That's what we're going to be doing and why we're creating a whole other set. Because we need the base pairs connected to something else. Because these are going to be identical strands, in the sense that the space they'll be occupying, we want the twister formers to control both of the strands we're going be making. We can delete these twists to form our handles that we made in the last lesson, because we're going to need to remake them when we have this next pair up. It's really easy to make this pair. We're basically just going to use boxes and we're going to create a polycube here. We're going to choose a height of 10 to match the height of 10 here that we chose when we created the curve and counted out 10 units. For the subdivision height, this is going to dictate how dense the base pairs are going to be. If we choose a height of 30, which is what I've just figured out in my own experimentation. We're going to eventually pick every other face here and a base pair is going to be sticking off of that. We're going to have this equal amount of gap here between each base pair. If you want yours to be not as dense, then choose a smaller number here, or if you want it to be more dense, choose a higher number. But this is probably as dense as you might want it. Now that we have that, let's get the pivot point down to the bottom. I'm going to hold "D" and "V" and drag it down to snap to the vertices down here, then I'll hold "x" and then I'll mouse drag to the same space as the circle or as the tube here. I can just reduce the size of this thing because it's much bigger than the tube here. If we look in the far view, we can see it's totally encompassing it. We like our height the way it is, and we will hit "R" to get scale up. We don't want a scale in the vertical axis, let's hold down control and hit the vertical axis and then every side but the vertical axis will collapse down. Let's get this somewhere, on the inside of this and let's go back to five and we can see that we've entirely encompassed that. Let's duplicate this out and then we'll drag this over to the other side. Now we have our two sets and we'll eventually hide these. But we need them again for the base pairs to connect to, and they can be the same way. Let me just hide this and do a twist to form it real quick. If I do that, actually I'll just choose one because this is how we're going to be doing it in a minute. I hold on "X" and bringing this in and let's do 360. We can see that this edge loop or this face rather, does stay on the inside the whole way up. That's the advantage of using polygons here. If we look down, we can see that there's no twisting, we're always looking at the same face down. We know the inside face is also not twisting. Cool. We can delete this twist to former. They'll snap back and solo that. Now we have our two systems, we want them each to follow the same twist to former. Let's put these in the right groups. Let me get to the front here, this is actually the left side and this is the right side. I'm just middle mouse dragging into the correct groups. And if you remember, the curve is what controls the main tube here. We just need to select the curve and this new cube that we created. Let's create a twist to former and we can put this in the group as well. Now let's hit "X" and snap it to the center. Let's do the same thing over here, hit the curve and the group, hit the twist, put that in its group, and then hold down "X" and bring this in. Cool. Now if we select both the twist handles and we twist them, we have the outside tubes holding the volume, and then we have these inside cubes that we'll be using for the base pair. They have the same face all the way on the inside to connect to. Thanks for watching this lesson. In the next one, we're going to go deeper into building the base pairs. I'll see you there. Thanks. 23. DNA 4/14 - Major And Minor Grooves: In this lesson, we will start to approach how we're going to build the base pairs. So we have the DNA looking very similar to what we did in the beginner tutorial, except for the fact that volume of the strands are now totally intact the entire length of the strand. That's really nice. We now need to approach how we're going to build the base pairs. First thing we need to understand is the fact that we need to create the asymmetry first of the major and minor grooves, because if we don't make the asymmetry first, then these base pairs will not be horizontally flat along the DNA strand. Let's select the curve, and we'll select the cube, and we also need to grab the twist handle, because the twist handle is going to move the entire thing. If we just selected the cube or the curve, and we moved it, the tube is just going to go along the twist deformer and it ends right here you can see the top of the twist deformer is done right there. So we need to move twist deformer with it, so let's select the curve, the cube, and the twist handle. We want to go up by two units. The twist deformer has a different pivot point. It thinks, let's just go back to where it started. it's starting at five, so if we type two here, it's going to go down, and if we select the curve, it's at zero, so if we hit two, that's going to go up. They're not going to move together if we type in a number up here. There's a little trick that I can show you. If we select all three of these again, everything that we want to move, we can go to the translate y and we can type in plus equals two. It's going to add a two to everything that's selected in here. So everything's gonna go up by two. Cool. Now you can see we already have this major and minor groove setup. The only thing we're dealing with now is the fact that these ends don't meet anymore. But at least we have it where if we start drawing the base pairs, they're going to be horizontal in this asymmetry of the major and minor grooves. We need to do that before we start the base pairs so that they're always horizontal. This is going to be maybe a little counter-intuitive, but let me explain what we're about to do or how I got here. Essentially, right now we're creating the offset by changing the height of one side. There's another way that we could create this offset, and that's by positioning this in another axis. So it's hard to know exactly where the other position needs to be, but now that we have it in this orientation, we can actually apply another twist deformer to everything and untwist this. Then see where each of the tubes line up, and then based off of those new positions, we know where to put the tube and then twist everything again. So let's just start that and I think you'll get as we get going. But this is one of the things that hung me up for a while trying to figure this out on how to resolve this issue of the different heights now. Same thing like we solved a problem, we got this asymmetry, but now we create another one now that ends don't line up, so we have to solve that. Let's select everything that we did to get to this point. I'll select the curves and the cube here, and we're going to create a new twist deformer. I'm going to go back to the non-linear deformers, and I'm going to create a twist. Now it's going to control everything, and we know that we were twisting by 360 degrees, so I can put that in here, a negative 360 degrees and untwist everything. Now the only difference now is the fact that we have two more units essentially because we raised it up. This is calculating a distance here, like this is an angle, you can see they're not straight yet. Essentially, we had ten units high, 360 degrees, but now we have 12 units high, and doing 360 degrees isn't going to cut it. We need to go around if ten units is each 36 degrees, that equals 360, and we add two more, that means we add two more 36 degrees onto this, which is 72. We need to add 72 of this, we can do the same thing we did earlier, say plus 72, or actually we're subtracting because we're going negative, let's say negative 72, and now they're straight. That's pretty cool. When we started this process, you can see we went two units over this way and two units over this way, then we twisted everything. We offset it vertically to get the major and minor grooves. Then we untwisted everything again to figure out where can we actually place this thing and not have to do it vertically? So we just got our answer, it's over here. Where is over there? We need to figure that out, because when we're selecting the geometry, it has all these deformations happening with all these twists, so the actual location of it is not represented here accurately. This was the position before we did all these twists on it. So now this isn't actually the position it's in. For us to find that out, let's select the cube of that side. Let me go to the cube of that side, and I can actually center the pivot there. When we select the cube, we can see that the pivot point is still back over here. If we go to modify center pivot, it's going to snap over here, and what that gives us is still not the correct values. The values haven't changed, just the pivot point did. Let's create a locator. We're going to create locator, and we're going to snap this to that position. Because it'll snap over there, you can see these numbers will update and that'll give us the correct position for this. Cool. So let's do a constraint. To do a constraint, we need to select the parent first, and that is for us this cube. Now we can select the locator, then let's go to the animation menu, go to constrain, and we'll open up the option box for parent constrain. We can actually just do a point constrain, but the habit of usually doing a parent constrain anyways, we want to make sure that maintain offset is not checked. Because that would mean if maintain offset is on, this locator would follow this cube based on its current position. We want it to do a snap to that current position, so we don't want an offset, we want it to snap there, we want to match it and be the same. So hit apply, and you'll see that it'll snap there and we get these values on this side. So what we care about, of course, is not the five, we care about these two because we don't want to have any vertical difference between these two. Cool. Let's write this down and remember it. We'll open up the text header and get rid of this from the earlier lessons. I'll copy this and paste it here. We need to remember this is x, and this is y. Now we can undo all this stuff, now that we have that information, that's all we were trying to get from doing all these crazy things. So I can delete this twist handle, it'll go back that way, then I can drop these back down to the correct height, so I'll grab this. I'm just going in reverse now, going minus equals two, so I'm bringing it back down to where it is, then I'm going to get these twist handles to go back the way they were. Go to zero, and now what we can do is move all of the stuff where we had figured out where it needs to be. So that we don't have to have a y. That y can stay at zero, so that all the base pairs can stay horizontal and they match evenly, and there's nothing missing from this side, when we're trying to attach both sides. Cool. Let's move this over to 0.618, that's a negative, we'll just copy this actually negative 0.618. So let's actually create a locator to store this information to make sure that we're snapping to that location. Just type this in. So we have a point of reference here to make sure we're snapping everything to this new location. So since it's on this side, we know it's in this one, it's this right side, we're not trying to like cross all the way over. That's not what happened when we deconstructed it earlier. We can see we actually have a problem here. The curve is centered on the rolled axis here, actually needs to be centered on itself over here. We can solve that problem pretty easily by doing the same thing we did earlier, modify center pivot. Now with the center pivot of the curve here, I wanted actually have it be on the floor. So I'm just going to hit d and v and drag this down to the floor. Now when we hold down v and middle mouse snap that to v, looks like we're having a little problem for finding the locator. Let's hold down v again and middle mouse, and we can see that we snapped it to that location. We went through the same thing with the polygon here. You can see the center pivot of that is over here. Let's center that out under itself again. So we'll do center pivot and we'll just bring this down to the floor like the other one. That way we can just snap directly to this locator by holding down v and middle mouse dragging over to it. Now it seems to think that we want to be in the pivot mode, so somehow we got into that mode, I'm just hitting d to get out of that. Then we'll hold down v and middle mouse drag, so now these are in the correct location. Now, if we take both twist deformers and do a 360, now we have the major and minor grooves and the top and bottom match. That's a huge thing that we did and figured out that we built something the way that we think we should do it. Then we ran into a problem, we deconstructed it, we found the location it should be at, and then we snapped it to that location so that we can build in this major-minor groove and maintain the same vertical horizon here for the top and bottom so that the base pairs can go directly across in horizontal fashion and have something to connect to. That's pretty huge. In the next lesson, we will actually start to build the rigs for the base pairs so that they can attach to these points along the cube part of the strands. Thanks for watching. 24. DNA 5/14 - Create Base Pair Attachment Points: In this lesson, we're going to create the rig for the base pairs to attach to the strands. To get started, I want to explain why we're doing it the way we're doing it. If you don't want to follow along with that, you can skip ahead to the time indicated in the lower third and just start in creating the rig. But for those interested to have a better understanding of why we're doing it, let's start by looking at the MASH network. Because what we're going to do is use MASH, which is a motion graphics tool set to populate the center strands, the base pairs. To populate the base pairs in the center, it needs something to attach to. We're basically going to create a landing pad for the base pairs first, and then we'll create the base pairs of the MASH network. But the reason why we're going to make the landing pad for the base pairs first, is because it needs to all be one piece of geometry. Let me just unwind these to explain it a little bit better. Let's just to show you a landing pad real quick that we're going to make. I'll do a width of maybe four and I'm just going to snap this to holding down d and x. Snap this over here so that I can just rotate it into place so it's close to the end here. Then I can just scale it in. What we're looking for is for them both to be in the center axis. For now this is close enough, but I basically just want to show you what we're going to do repeatedly. Why we're doing it this way? We're going to essentially create a bunch of these little ladders here. When we create a MASH network let's just throw in this and this is going to be the base pair, a representation of that. We want to get this base pair on each one of these ladders. The way MASH works, if we create a MASH network, we're going to create MASH network. You can see it just made a big string of these. If we go into MASH, it just has this default distribution. There's 10 points and they're all at 20 distance from each other. That's not what we want. We want something a little different. We want to apply this cylinder to this MASH. Let's go down here to the MASH network and choose distribution type to be MASH. We look at this, it's looking for an input MASH and there's one slot. But we have multiple rungs of this. We want to put base pairs all along this thing but it's asking just for one input MASH. We have to combine these. But if we combine these, how will the combined MASH follow the different axis that we're going to get in this twist? Because if you look at symmetry that it's creating, there are distances here that are closer and shorter together. It's a complicated setup that there's really no good way to do this except for creating one MASH here between these. We need to create a system where these will pin to each strand, but they're going to be one MASH. To do that, we needed to create joints, and then we will create one MASH out of all of these rungs, we'll combine all of them, and then we'll select all of the joints which are going to live in the same space as these rungs. We're going to bind this one MASH to all of those joints that are going to go up and down. Those joints are going to follow the strands. That way with this combined MASH, after we create a MASH network, we will have one MASH to drag and drop in here. That's why we're going to be doing what we're doing. I'm going to delete all this stuff and we can get started on that. First thing we need to do is to rotate these cubes to face each other. Because right now they are not doing that. If we're looking top-down, we essentially need a flat face facing each other. Let's rotate this around and point it in that direction. Let's see what we have here. Maybe something like 40 degrees. I'll do the same thing on this side, 40 degrees. It appears that they're going in the same direction, and one little cheat is actually in the top view if we plus the manipulator by hitting Plus, we can go off base of this rotation axis of the zee. You can see this blue line. It starts in the center, but it ends not even touching this one. We know that we're not oriented in the correct way. We can just rotate this and when it's as big as this, it'll go a lot slower. But let's get this blue line to go through the center of the cube. We need to do the same thing for this cube. Let's go to the Rotate Tool and with it being very large now we have this blue guide and we just need to shoot it through the center of this thing. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it does need to be pretty close in the neighborhood. Now they're facing the right way. Let's go back into perspective and I'm going to isolate this cube now. I'm just going to reduce the size of my manipulator by hitting the Minus. I want to select every other face on this side that was facing the other strand. Because this is where the base pairs are going to be sticking out of. I'm just holding down Shift and then selecting each face. To get into this mode, I right-clicked and held down Face and let go. Now we have all the faces selected that we need that are facing the correct way and just double-check they are by unsettling that. We can say the are facing the same the right way. Why did we select these? We selected these because we're going to actually apply a hair system to this. The reason why we're applying a hair system is there's a piece of hair system that we're going to use and we'll delete everything else. That piece is called a follicle. A follicle is where hair attaches to geometry. But we don't need it for hair, we need it for the base pair landing pad. We're going to create this hair system, we'll go into nHair under the FX menu over here. We're going to nHair, Create Hair and we're going to open up the option box. I'll just reset the settings so I'm on the same page here. The output, we don't want paint effects and we don't want paint effects and NURBS curves. We showed the NURBS curves. The paint effects is more about the hair and again, we don't want hair. We can choose NURBS curves instead of grid. We have faces selected, we want them just on those faces. So we'll say At Selected Surface Points or Faces. Then we can hit Apply. You can see that if we solo this stuff out, that we got a single hair or single curve and follicle on each one of the faces we have selected. That's pretty cool. We got all this other stuff that we don't need though, like a nucleus for the dynamic, solve and all that. We can just delete that or we're going to keep the hair system and the output curves for now. Because we're going to need that to help line up the base pairs. We have this side done, let's do the other side. I'll un-solo this and then I'm going to pick the cube up here, and I'll solo that one. Then I just need to make sure I'm starting and ending on the same faces. I'm right-clicking to get into face mode and shift-selecting each one of these. Now if they're selected and go back into the nHair menu, which I still have open over here and just hit Create Hairs. When we un-solo that, we can see that we also made another set here and it put those in the same hair system. All the follicles are the same. Let's actually go into component mode and group those out so we can separate them. I'll just start here and select somewhere over here and see where that leaves us. Crazily enough, I think I actually selected the exact number. That never happens. I just liked them and they happen to be, what I'm looking at is these little white dots means they're selected. I selected all of these on this side and not on this side. I know I can group this Command g and have this be the follicles on the right side. Let me swing around here because I think that's actually the left side. What I'm looking at to know if I'm on the right or left is this indicator down the bottom left, positive zee should be pointing forward, so we know now are in the front. With all of those selected, let's see what side, that's actually the left side. We know all these are the right side. Command g. Cool. Now we have the follicles. You can see that we got pretty close to pointing in the same direction because the hairs are actually going in and out of almost the exact same entry point for the follicles. That's pretty cool. Well, so just going to hit this Anti-aliasing button. If I zoom in here, you can probably see this happen. It's just going to smooth this stuff a little bit. This is with it and without it. Cool. I'll go back into shaded mode. Now we have our follicles. In the next lesson, we're going to make the landing pads and place them all along here so that there is a landing pad for the base pairs. When I say landing pad, basically, that's just me making up that term. Best description I have. It's essentially going to be a single face because the MASH network is going to look for a face center. If we had multiple subdivisions on that face, it wouldn't know where to pick and so we just want one face. We'll get into that in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 25. DNA 6/14 - Create Joints And Parent: In this lesson, we're going to continue to make the base pairs for the strands. We have the attachment points here, on the hair system. Let's just go into Show and turn off NURBS Surfaces right now. Let me get rid of the tubes so we can actually see only the polygons and the follicles and the curves and all that stuff. Cool, so let's go over here and we're going to create the first landing pad. I'm going to hit a plane up here in the poly modeling tool set. As I mentioned earlier, the mesh network in the future is going to be looking for a face center. To make that easy and clear for it, I want to have no subdivisions here. I'm going to go over the polyPlane and choose one. It's going to have one division for each side. Now all we need to do is to get this in place and go across this span. We can do that in several different ways. I'm basically going to snap this to the curve here. There's an easy way to navigate to this area, but before I do that, I want to make sure that the pivot point is on one end. It will make this go a little easier. I'll hold down D and V, and drag over to this edge. Now I'm going to hold down C, which is for curve and middle mouse drag onto one of these two curves. It looks like the end of this one is over here. I'm just going to drag it to the end and let go. Then now I can rotate this round into the correct orientation, I'll have to zoom in so I can rotate around this. We can see just by looking at this, how flat it needs to be up against this edge. You rotate it there. I'm going to hold down or I'll hit R to get the scaling options and scale this in. Then I'll scale this over to the other side. You want to make sure it's the same. This edge is going to be not over here. It needs to be at the same edge, the inner edge. Let's do that, and now that we're close and the manipulator is off the screen because we want to look up here really close, we can actually just select the scale x and middle mouse drag and it's going a little fast. Let's go up here to the little speed dial and tag that a couple times till where it's the lowest setting. It's the lowest speed, and we can get this as close as we can. Maybe dial that back just a little bit while. It's like a very small amounts. We can maybe go two here, maybe three here. We just want to make sure it's right up against the edge because again, the mesh network is going to take the face center. If this edge was way over here, the center is not going to be in the center of these two strands. It's going to be off-center. Now that we have the first landing pad done, we need to duplicate it and move it up. Let's hit command D, and we can hold down C and middle mouse drag to this curve. It jumped off of their, so hold down C again, middle mouse drag and let go. Duplicate, hold on C, middle mouse drag and let go. We'll just keep doing that all along these rungs. This is why we kept the curves as long as we did, because we want to use those as reference points and snapping points because you can't snap the follicles. These follicles are in the center of faces and you can't snap two center of faces. We want these curves, so it just makes this process go a lot smoother. The fact that we can just hold down C and we can get to the center of these curves. We did the right number of planes because we have 15 of them and we had a subdivisions of 30 and we went every other one. That math makes sense that would behalf the number of subdivisions because we went every other one. It's 15, that's correct. We know there's no hidden duplicates in here somewhere that we accidentally made or duplicate and didn't move. Now we have those. The next thing we need to build is something for these to follow. Remember, in the previous lesson I mentioned we're eventually going to combine all of these into one mesh so that we can bind them to joints. Now we need to create the joints. Let's go to the rigging tab and we'll select this joint icon here. I'm going to left-click while holding down C onto this curve. I didn't hit it, so I'm going to retry, hold down C, click right on the curve, and then you can see when you drag down to the end. That's what we want to do. I'm going to do that again. I've created the endpoint of the joint, but I want it to be over here somewhere, doesn't have to be as exact as everything else. But now I've got that and I'm going to hit "Enter" to finish creating that joint. Now that we have that joint, we can actually just hit command D, and then drag this down and hold down C and middle mouse drag. We're going to do the same thing. Middle mouse drag, Command D, middle mouse drag. Now we have all the joints, we have all of the landing pads, and let's just hide the hair system for now. I'm going to hit Control H, to get rid of the curves because all we want to see are these joints and the landing pads. We've built the joints, but they're not following anything. If we went back to the twist handles and twisted this stuff, none of what we just built would follow. Let's just show that, if we twist this, see if I'm going to mouse drag here in the viewport to increase, this is going super slow because we still have this little speed thing on. I'm just going to increase that. You can see none of these things that we just built follow any of this stuff. That's why we made the follicles. You can see the red follicles are actually following this and they're following all along the inside faces that we wanted and why we created this entire second set-up to begin with. This is really encouraging to see the red follicles are actually working. Now we just need to attach the joints to those follicles. I'm going to go back to zero on a twist deformers. You can see the joints themselves are actually all out of whack when looking at them in this direction. That's not super clean. I don't think it would affect anything, but just to clean that up super quick, I'm going to turn back on the curves, [inaudible] Shift H to unhide them. Then I'm going to go down to the joints, I'm going to select all the joints by Shift selecting them. I'm going to command click an outliner and select the curves and isolate those. I'm going to undo that because all we want, are actually this side curves. We just want one side that we ended the joints on. I'm going to go through and command click all the joints, and then so all of those. Now I'm just going to hit C and middle mouse drag those again to get them in the right place. Because if you remember, we had another layer, we had two sets of curves acting on this. We had the ones coming in this direction, the ones going from the other direction. When we're holding down C and duplicating these, there's no guarantee of which curve we're actually making these on. We want to make sure that we isolate one side and make sure it's consistent in that way. Now if we look, now they should all line up perfectly. Cool. I'll [inaudible] those and we can re-hide the curves. It's always good to keep those around in case we need them again. Now we need to get these joints to follow along with these follicles. This side is the parent side. You can see if we select this one and move it around, this other side follows. If we select this one and move it around it, this other side doesn't follow us. We know this side is the parent side. We want to select the skip back into our orientation, looking down on the lower left, we can see that we are on the left side follicles. Now what we can do is parent the joints to the follicles. Let's pop down the left side and let's select the first follicle here. We can see it is the bottom one. That corresponds with the bottom joint. Let's group these planes for now just to create some more room so we can actually see the joints and follicles together and outliner. Again, the outliner is from Windows outliner. If you haven't gotten that by now, I apologize for that would be difficult to follow along, but hopefully you've been watching the other series and it makes sense by now of the outliners over here. Let's select the first follicle. We can see it's on bottom and corresponds with this bottom joint. We're going to middle mouse drag this and let go of it over here. We're going to do that all the way up. We're going to do the third one. Now, the fourth one, C 1, 2, 3, 4. Great. Now we have all of the joints parented to the follicles. If we turn this twist back on, the joints are actually following this side. That's pretty cool. Now we just need to get them to point in the right direction to its corresponding side over here. Let's undo the twist and I will see you in the next lesson where we will aim constraint the joints to the other side. Thanks for watching. 26. DNA 7/14 - Aim Joints: In this lesson, we'll continue creating the joints for the base pairs. So in the previous lesson, we saw if we twisted this stuff, that the joints are following, at least on this one side. So now we need to get them to stay aiming at this other side, this right side. I don't know why I keep turning to the face of this other way. We need to get them to point this right side where the joint children are over here. They need to stay pointed at this side. So to do that, we are going to create an aim constraint. An aim constraint sounds just like that. It's going to stay constrained, aiming at something. So we just need to pick what it's going to aim at, which is this right side follicle. If we select this follicle, we can see is at the bottom. The order we're going to do this in, is the parent is going to be selected first, which is the follicle. Then will select the joint, and we'll aim constraint it. I'm going to open up the constraint menu by going to animation constraint, and we have this aim constraint here. We can do maintain offset, or we can just leave it. It doesn't really matter that much because we haven't bound the geometry to these joints yet. We have the maintain offset off. When we do this constraint, this is going to snap, and point directly at it. It's already basically pointing right at it. I don't think it'll change anything. But we can just leave that off or on. That doesn't really affect anything. So we have the follicle selected, then we're going to select the joint and apply. So you can see it did shift over a little bit to point directly at that follicle. With the joint selected, now you can see there's these blue little dots in the channel box, and that means there's constraint on those channels. Now I'm just going to go through, and do the same thing for all the follicles and the joints. We're going to do this, and I will speed up the video, and see you in a few seconds. Now we made all the aim constraints. Let's close this box, and let's twist the strands, and see if the joints follow. I'll go to the twist, and we can just use mouse drag here to click that up, and look at that. All of the joints are following the strands. That is pretty cool. You can see, like I said in the one of the first lessons talking about how this is so much different. In the beginning lesson, these strands would have gone through the center here. Because of that major, minor groove they're going more along the outside. You can see that in the top view, it's pretty interesting. Cool. We've tested it, we see it works. Now let's bind all these landing pads to the corresponding joints. I'm going to undo this to untwist it. Now, I'm going to select all of the mesh here, and I'm going to combine it so that it's one mesh. We'll go to the modeling menu, mesh and combine. Now you can see we have all these empty groups over here, and it's all crazy because it has created this history for each piece. To get rid of all this stuff, we need to go to edit, delete by type, and history. Do not choose delete all by type because that means the entire scene. We just want to leave by type. So that means what we have selected. Now you can see it got rid of all those groups. We can call this landing pad. You can see it's all one piece now. But they are all in the same space as a corresponding joint. Now we're going to bind this polygon because it's one piece now. We're going to skin it to this joint. When I'm using these terms like joints and skinning, this is how people make characters in Maya. We are using all those types of tools, but we're using it in a creative way to do what we want to do. This is what I talked about in the first lesson, creative problem-solving. Knowing the tools well enough to creatively figure out how to get this done. This took me a couple days to figure it out how they should get set up. I had to know the tool's pretty well. To be honest, I'm recording this for myself as much as you guys because it's a lot to remember each step of the way. So hope you use these videos as references as much as I'm going to, if I need to do this again. Let's bind this mesh to these joints. By default Maya , if you just start selecting something, it's going to default to the joints. So we can use that to our advantage, and just click, and select everything because in the out-liner, these are all hidden as children of this follicle. It's difficult to get to all of them, and select them from that liner. Let's just take the advantage of the fact that if we try to select everything, it's only going to select the joints. So let's select all the joints, and then let's command click the landing pads. We have the joints, and the landing pads selected. Let's go to the rigging menu. Let's go to skin, we'll open up the options for bind the skin. When I say skin, it thinks the landing pads are skin, and the joints are bones if this was a character. But it's a [inaudible] But anyway, that's the name of stuff here. I'm going to reset this so it looks the same. The one thing that's important here is the max influences, and this means the maximum number of influences that any one vertices can have. This top plane has four vertices at each corner. This is going to say that five joints can affect those maximum based on closest distance, and all these other things up here. But we know that we only want this plane to be affected by this one joint. We don't want this other one, this joint down here to be effecting this plane. So we need it to turn this down to one. To make sure it's only one influence per vertices, and because these vertices are right on top of these joints. We know they're going to only be bound to the joints that run on top of them and nothing else. So let's hit Apply. Now we can close this. Let's go to show. We can just hide the joints from this menu down here, and uncheck that. Now we'll do the twist. Select the twists here, go to start angle. Now check that out. The landing pads, are following the joints, and they are making a perfect opportunity to use the mesh network to fill these with our own base pairs. Then to use the power of mesh, which is procedural animation, randomization. All of those things then we can take advantage of to-oh, it looks like we missed one down here. I'm going off on a rant, and we missed one. Let's fix this super-quick. That looks like it's a joint that didn't get an aim constraint. So we'll turn back on the joints, we'll select this. Actually let's twist this backup so we can see which one it is. This is part of troubleshooting, and why you test this stuff, to make sure everything's working the way it should be working. So yeah, it looks like I missed an aim constraint on this one because it's connected here, but it's pointing down. We know we didn't want it pointing at this one. Let's see what follicle that is. It's the right side, it's this one. Let's untwist this stuff. It's the third one down. So untwist it. The third follicle down. Select this joint, and go to constraint in constrain. Now we should be good to go. Twist that, test everything, now that one works, cool. Every step of the way, as soon as you do a step, you want to test it to make sure. It's a lot of repetitive things, it's easy to miss one of these. So that's why you always make something, and then you make sure it's working the way you expect it to. In the next lesson, we're going to create the actual base pairs that will be the visualization of this stuff. We will start to use mesh to fill this randomly, and rotate them around randomly to create the type of randomization you'd actually see in a DNA structure. Awesome, thanks for watching. See you in next lesson. 27. DNA 8/14 - MASH The Strands: Now we have the Landing Pads and everything set up and it's all working with a twist to former. We need one more step before we can start actually creating the base pairs. That step is duplicating all of this stuff out in a mash network. That's important because if we start making the base pairs now and assigned it to the Landing Pads, as is the plan. But if we did it at this stage of the game, and we did all the randomization that we wanted. They would only apply to these Landing Pads and what we want to do is create a massively long DNA strand that goes way off into the distance. So to do that, we need to create a mash network of everything that we have set up now. Then later we're going to create the base pairs and then we're going to choose the crazy long version of the Landing Pads that are all duplicated out as the input mash for the mash network. Now if we didn't want a huge long DNA strand, we could make the base pairs right now and then assign them as a mash network and assign the Landing Pads as the input mash network. If you only want this strand, you can skip ahead to those lessons where we're building the base pairs and creating a mash network of those, but if you're interested in creating a very long strand of DNA, we need to do this step before we create the base pairs. It's good to do anyways because at least you have the option now. But if you don't do it now it's going to be more difficult and you have to kind of start over from this point. We've been looking at the kind of secondary strands here. These are the squares that we were actually going to visualize this in the DNA. We need to look at the nerves curves. So let's open those backup and we hit those by the Show tab up here nerve surfaces. We check that on, now we can see the tubes. The one thing with mash before we can create it, these tubes are nurbs surfaces. Those things to be converted into polygons because mash doesn't understand nurbs. We need to go and create a conversion of this, let's choose one at a time and go to modify, convert. I'll tear this off and nurbs polygons. Let's check out the options. I want quads, control points are fine and let's hit "Apply". Cool. Now we have that done. Let's do the other side. Select the "Tube", hit "Tessellate". I'll close this out. Now let's double-check everything, every step along the way. We want to make sure everything's working the way we want it to. So yeah, these new nurbs to poly pieces, the polygons are following because they are kind of constrained in history to the nurbs curves. Let's put those in there correct groups. Let's get to the front again and we can see this right side over here. This is on the right side. We can Middle mouse drag it to the right side, then we can Middle mouse drag this to the left side, cool. We can hide all these for now because we won't be adjusting those. We actually hide the cubes as well, because we're kind of done with those. Instead of hitting "Control H", we can actually make a display layer, let's do that instead. We'll go to the bottom-right here and hit this far-right button, we'll add a display layer with everything that we already have selected. Hit that and you can see it hid everything. I'm also going to put the joints on their own display layer. I'm going to select all the joints and I'll choose a display layer and hide those as well. Now that we have multiple ones if we want to name them. Now we can create the mash network that we have for the polygons to use. Let's select the Polygons and the main thing is we just want to make sure that the middle Landing Pads are their own network, and these two can be their own as well. Let's go to Mash, Create mash network and let's make sure we're choosing the mesh option and again, just I explained why are we doing this. We're choosing the mesh option because if later, once we have the huge long strand of DNA, we wanted to untwist it as a whole, because if you think about it, these are just controlling a little section. If we duplicate this section, it's going to control each little section and it's going to look like these sections aren't connected and I can show you that later. But basically for us to use it a former later on these big long duplicated strands, we need it to be a mesh because Maya uses mesh for base for the deformers. That's why we're using mesh in our instance here. We need to make sure we have the geometry selected and then we'll go to Applying close. It disappeared a little bit and it came back. So let's go to the mash network and I'm just going to call this strands. We only have one side so let's investigate why that is, and let's change it, we'll go to the attribute editor and in mash, you can see there's a couple of different things we get by default. We get this first tab, which is basically a menu of all the nodes that we can add. Then we get the distributed node, which is just the default way of distributing things. It gives you a certain number of points and the end point, which is an important distinction between the distributed node. I will go back to the menu, the replicator node, those appear to do the same thing. But the biggest difference is the fact that the replicator node starts from the origin and spits all of these out and the default distribute node, you can see as I create more points, it's going to go from the middle almost. You're going to be picking like an endpoint and then it's distributing in the middle whereas the replicator is going to start from origin and shoot them out in a direction. We also have a distribution type. If we look in the Repro tab, which is the third time, we'll get by default. When we're using the mesh setting, we do have both of those nurbs poly, the two sides here, but we're only seeing this one and that's because we need a mash ID node, because this has an ID of zero and this one has an ID of one. Mash doesn't know that there's more than one. That's what the ID node does and so we can add that here. Now you can see we have both sets. Let's go to the mash distribute node. For distribution type, we want to choose the initial state and that means when we created the mash network, what was the state they're in? The we're in this state, they're in these locations. That's what that means. We can turn Number of points down now as an initial state, that doesn't matter as much because it's going to only do as many as there are points for which were two and the initial state, there's only two objects. When I was mentioning the replicator note earlier, it's important to remember that because that's what we're actually going to use to make the mash network go way off into the distance. We'll use the replicator node, will click on it and go to Add replicator node. It's going to give us this new tab for the replicator and we can just crank up the replicators or the replicants. It's kind of like Blade Runner reference, I guess. The default is it's going off in the Z space, we don't want that, so we'll zero that out. We want to go up in 10 because remember these units, the size of this stuff, remember we're making 10, so it's easy to remember that stuff when it's even numbers like that. We can just say 10 here, now can you know, it's all going to be connected, check that out. It says and we can just add more replicants and it'll just go as far as we want it to go, so it's pretty cool. Now that we have that we could also turn on the twist just to see that working and how that's going to work and why we needed this to be MASH and we're going to create another twist to former later. Because if we were to use these to animate, we can use these to get this into the correct position to start with, but not to animate because watch this. You can see that they are separated. Let me choose both twist handles and go to the Attribute editor, drop this down so we can control them together, you can see how each section is controlled like it's own little section. We can use this twister flower to get this into the correct orientation, so it's 360. Now it's looking correct. Then later we can apply a twist to former to this whole long strand, so there's one twist to former for this whole long strand and then we're going to unwind it with that one twist to former. We got everything in a good spot. There's one little catch and it's all these trade offs and 3D, like we did the extrusion of the curve so that we maintain the volume of these strands all the way down, they're the same volume and doesn't get skinnier and fatter. The trade-off unfortunately is it doesn't exactly match up the ends, and that's a very frustrating part of this. The way to fix this is to manually do it essentially and to be very, very careful. How are we going to do that is we're going to open up the nurbsToPoly of each of these. Remember when you create a MASH network, it hides the original. If we select this, this is the Repro node, we can see it down here, ReproMesh. This isn't the original, so if we started to edit this, it's not going to populate down the strand, so we'd only affect this intersection. We want to affect every single intersection by just controlling one, so to do that, we need to go to the original MASH, which is hidden over here, you can see nurbsToPoly, let's unhide that. It's this side right to frame up. We can adjust either this end or the bottom end, and for my money, I want to change this in because I can see them both at the same time. If we go on here, sorry, just in the bottom, then we'd have to go up and see if it connects, then adjust to it again and then go back up here. Let's effect this area, so nurbsToPoly is selected, we definitely want to make sure this is what we're actually working on. We don't want to work on the ReproMesh. I'm going to go to Edge mode and I'm going to double-click on this edge. I double-click on it, it goes all the way around. I'm going to hit four so I can see what's happening here. I'm going to hit B, so it's a soft selection, so it's not just like this weird kink where the self-selection it's going to gradually fall off and affect everything behind it. I'm going to hold down B and middle mouse drag to limit that range where it's going to fade off and affect things. With that selected, I need to go in here and just really eyeball this as close as I can get it. I'm going to frame this up and swing around and see where the pink and the yellow lines don't match and rotate that in. I can increase the size of the manipulator to help go at smaller speeds here. Now you can see where the pink and yellow start to touch. I'm just going to spin the camera around and see if that's working. I'm going to go on a shaded mode, see if that's working better. That seems to be working pretty good actually. We can go up this strand and we can see that that changed on all of this side at least. We still have this other side we need to fix, you can see it right here but that error should be right over here on this side and we fix that just by doing this one. That's because we worked on the original again, we're going to make sure we're working on the original. I’m going to hide that one, I'm going to go to this other one and unhide it Shift H and do the same exact thing. Go to Edge mode, double-click this edge, and let's take a look at this and wire-frame, it gets super close. Turn on rotation and rotate this to match this edge. I'm going to move the camera and you can see there's a gap here. I'm going to adjust that and get the camera to a view where I can see, it's hard to see the purple and the yellow line here because in wire-frame we're looking through it so you can go to shaded mode and see that as well a little easier. Just go super slow on this stuff, and just make small motions, increase the manipulator, make a small adjustment, then rotate around, make sure you didn't offset something else somewhere else. That appears to be working pretty good. We can see there's a little gap here, it was hard to see earlier. Go back into Edge mode, double-click, it, get super close on this, hit E to get the rotation up and so small. You know what the issue is, I'm touching the ReproMesh right now because you can see the soft selection is going across both spans. We want to make sure the nurbsToPoly is selected. This is just, again, you have to be super careful. Yeah, we're right-clicking and going into edge mode for the Repro Mash, not the one that we want. Let's isolate this so that we can make sure we are only selecting the original. Then we can turn isolate back off, and then zoom in here and make sure we're editing it correctly, so that was the issue. It appears this is fixed now. We can go back into the originals later and continue to tweak that if we need to. But, again, unfortunately that's just part of 3D and when you solve one problem, usually another one pops up, so you're constantly troubleshooting this stuff and trying to figure it out. We made those two adjustments and now that'll populate down the entire strand, so we got that fixed and we can no longer see those types of little gaps in the strands. Cool. Now that we have the strands, let's make a MASH network of the LandingPads. Well, I need to first drop my manipulator down because