Advanced 3D Logo Animation in Autodesk Maya

1. Advanced 3D Logo Animation: Welcome to Advanced 3D Logo Animation and Autodesk Maya. Hi, my name is Lucas Riley, and I'm a professional animator with almost 10 years of experience, and I'll be your instructor for this course. We're going to start by taking a 2D image in creating a 3D model out of it, we're going to take that 3D model and we're going to turn that into a Voc sliced version of itself so that we can animate all of these little boxes together, and we can add a ton of control that we can animate through color, through different ramps, and use motion trails to trigger a dynamic simulation that we'll have very fine control over, and I'll show you how to do all of that in this course. At the end of the course, you are going to be able to light and render this animation out into a movie file. This course is for any motion graphics artist who wants to start to incorporate 3D animation into their work. I also recommend that you have some experience in Maya. We'll cover a little bit of the basics at the beginning, but we'll jump into pretty advanced topics quickly. Hopefully, you have taken so my other Maya classes. But if not, hopefully, you're a quick learner and you'll pick it up with no problem. All the project files will be available for download with this course so you can follow along. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in class. 2. Maya Interface Refresh: In this first lesson, we're just going to get familiarized with Maya. So if you're an advanced user, you can just skip ahead to the next lesson. But if you're still getting familiar with Maya, let's just cover this very quickly. Hopefully, you've taken one of my other Maya classes already. So you're already familiar with Maya. But basically we need a three button mouse navigate around. We're going to hold down alt and left-click to rotate, middle mouse to pan around. Right-click to zoom in and out. If you don't like the color of your background here like mine, you're going to be and change that. I like to keep it blue just there's a gradient. You can see more contrasts there. This is a grid, and we can turn that on and off here. We can also turn on anti-aliasing. I don't know if you can see that on your screen. Let me try to zoom in a little bit here. You can hopefully see that the anti-aliasing smooths everything out a little bit. That's nice feature to turn on. Other than that, we basically have our viewport here, which is what this is called. You can ignore pretty much every menu up here. We're only going to be using a few things inside of Maya, but we're going to go deep into those couple of things we're going to use for animating texts. We're going to go into keyframes. We're going to use just maybe two of these menus up here. Don't get too bogged down with how many menus you see up here, because we're only going to use a few of them for this course. If you want a deeper understanding of Maya in general, and know what more of these buttons do. I have another course that covers all that called Maya for beginners. The other things to consider when we're looking at what we have here. Maybe yours doesn't look exactly like mine right now, but basically we haven't outliner and we can dock that wherever we want. I like to keep it over here on the left. If you don't see that you can go to Windows outliner. You can always turn that back on. If we lose that somehow, we can always open that backup. That'll help us keep track of what we're doing and what our objects are named. We're going to rename them here. Let's just create an object for quick, I'll go to the poly modeling shelf and had a sphere. Now we have a sphere, I'll add F to focus in on it. We zoom in on it. I can hit Q to select it, and click and drag and also select it with a single click. Then we have w to move things around. We have E to rotate and we have R to scale. Right now I have snapped scaling on, which is annoying. There's a bunch of little options here. If you run into anything like this, just ask me a question, and I will get back to you and help you with it. For this example, if your scale is snapping and this is the keep it at whole integers. We can change that by holding down our left clicking. Then we can see snaps scale is checked on. If we just let go of our mouse over on top of that, now we can scale without any problem. That's just one little thing. Dimension, there's a bunch of menus in here. Click on W, you get the move options here. We can move based on world space. I don't know if you noticed. If I rotate this over. Now the up axis is still up and down even though the spheres rotated over. If we want to get back to having it an object mode here, we can do that by holding down W left clicking and holding down left-click. Then when we release, it will choose that other mode. That's the same is true for rotation as well. I showed you that as well for scale, that's how we had that snap option that was turned on. We can turn that back on over here. It'll snap that. But I think that was just on by mistake. There's those types, little hidden menus. They're not that big of a deal. You can just hit w again for move, E for rotate, R for scale. On the right here, we have our attribute editor. You can see that's written right here. Then we also have our icon here that's selected, that lets us know where in the attribute editor. Then we have our channel box here. You can see channel boxes written here. These two places are really where we're going to spend the most time between attribute editor and this. Eventually, we're going to work in the mash menu here, but we'll get into that later. What this shows us is the name of the object. All of it's absolute values based on the scene here. What that means is, if I move it around, you see these values update. There's one cool thing about Maya is you can actually freeze transform. For whatever reasons, say I want this position over here now to be considered 00 for this object. I can just go to modify, freeze transformations. Now everything is nice and clean. All zeroed out. If I happen to move that over there, for some reason, I know if I select all of these value enter fields here, I can hit 0. I know it will go back to this spot because that's where I had freeze the transforms. We'll get into more details like that later on. But just wanted to show you a couple of little interesting things that Maya can do. You know what this manipulator, you can also select the constraint options here. We can go on two axes. We can also go into axes this. I'm not going back and forth and z space here like this. I can prevent that from happening by selecting this middle handle there. You can see it as I rotate around. But in this lesson we covered navigating around the viewport. We talked about how to manipulate objects. Some of the little quirks that menus that you can find. Adjust how you manipulate and move things around. The next lesson we're going to jump right in and start creating our type. Then we'll move on into animating it. Thanks for watching. 3. Importing SVG: Welcome to the first main lesson of this course, Animating a 3D Logo, which we're going to start with this one. There's a couple different ways we can bring in a scalable vector graphics. For those of you not familiar with vector graphics, that just means that if we scale in here, we take a look at this, the image never gets pixelated. That's because it's a vector image. It's just like whenever you type something and you increase the font size, the font never gets pixelated. Those are vector graphics. Same thing that we use here in Illustrator, which is unnecessary for this course because I am going to provide this file for you to get import into Maya. There's two ways that we can bring this file into Maya. If you do have Illustrator and you've made your own logo, you can use that. We can actually just copy this by hitting Command C after selecting everything and going over to Maya and clicking this svg logo under the poly modeling shelf. When I click this, we get this little temporary icon here. If I just click this paste icon here, it will actually bring in that logo for me, which is very, very helpful. But for those of you who don't have Illustrator, we can just do this the normal way and import it in. So let's click Import and navigate to our svg file and hit Open. The same thing happens, we get this file imported, and now we have a 3D object based on a 2D image, how cool is that? The first thing we want to do is clean this up just a little bit. So let's click on the geometry and go over to the svg tab here. Now we're back to where we imported it. You want to go to the geometry tab here and increase the curve resolution because you can see here that this is very faceted and it doesn't look like the nice smooth curve that we made in Illustrator. What you can do is increase this and smooth that out. You can actually type in a number here as well, even though this default max is set to 10, you can increase that. Now what we want to do, to just clean this up, is bringing this over more in the center of our scene, and then hold down d and x, to grids snap the pivot and middle mouse drag your mouse to this center grid point, the 00 grid point. One really quick thing I wanted to show you is that might be helpful. If you have a logo like this, what we can do really quickly is to clean this up just a bit. Let's click the Multi-cut tool, and basically what we're going to do is create an edge loop where these two pieces meet because we want these to be merged. If you take a look at this now, I'm just going to go to the edge mode and I select this edge. When I pull this down, you can see that these actually are connected here. So we can connect that up and it will play nicely with the tools that we're going to use later. So I'm just going click the Multi-cut tool, and I'm just going to be very inaccurate with this. It doesn't have to line up exactly, we will line this up after the fact. Then I'm going to hit Enter after I'm done making that loop. I'm using the edge loop tool because we're cutting through an end gone. This is in a four sided face and so the edge loop won't go all the way around if we use that tool. That's why we have to use the Multi-cut tool. Now I'm going to go to the vertex mode here, and I'm going to select the vertex and hold down V and middle mouse drag it to that closest neighbor and do the same thing for all four of these sides. Then, once we're done with this, we can just delete those faces that are inside, that they're sharing one on top of the other and then we can just merge these vertexes. So I'm going to zoom in here through the model and you can see it's a very zoomed in view. If you hit four, you can go to wireframe and see the face I'm talking about. It's the one that they both share, but it'll be hard to select the wireframe mode. So that's why I have to zoom in through here and then go back to five, which is this shaded mode. You can see the face they share here. If I'm going to face mode, I can select the top one and the bottom one and now it goes all the way through to the next thing. Pan around and make sure you didn't actually select a face that you didn't want to, and delete that. Make sure it's all clean. Now we can go back to vertex mode, select all eight of these that are stacked on top of each other because if you remember, this is still not connected here. So now we want to merge these. Let's select all of them that we made here and snap together and let's go to the Edit Mesh merge tool, and now they're merged together. So when we select one of these vertices and move it around, that is actually one solid piece. One last thing I want to reiterate before we close this session down is, when I save this file, I want to make sure I'm also setting the project. So let's go to File Set Project. and I'm going to go into my project directory and I'm going to set my folder to Maya. You can set yours to be whatever you'd like. But I want to make sure I create a default workspace. The next thing we want to do is create all the folder directory. So I'm going to project window and it's going to populate it with these default values and I'll hit Accept. Now when I go to File Save Scene As and I go into the scenes folder here, you can see we have all those folders that were populated for us here. If I jump up one directory, you can see them all listed here as well. When we save our scenes, we want to save them in the scenes directory. But it's just good to organize from the very beginning because we're going to have a few caches and some other things that might be useful to have this folder structure set up, and just to reiterate the importance of having a clean project directory. I'm going to save this as the first scene file here in the class and you can use this moving forward if you'd like. Thanks for watching. Bye. 4. Voxelize The Logo: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to jump right in into using Mash. A very powerful procedural animation toolkit inside of Maya directed for motion graphics artists. First thing we want to do is get up fresh piece of geometry here. Just to make sure that we don't have any existing history on what we're going to be using. I'm going to duplicate this mesh by hitting "Command D" and I'm going to use this and say, original logo. You can call it whatever makes sense to you. I'm going to hide this original SVG mesh because we don't really need that anymore. Now that I have this, I want to go over and make sure I have the mesh toolkit first loaded. You can go to Windows setting preferences, plug in manager, and scroll down to, I believe mash is its own section here it says Plugins, Mash plugins. You want to make sure those are loaded. That'll give you a menu inside the animation tool menu over here. Now we have Mash, let's click that and we have a few different options. Now, when you think about voxelising a logo, which is what we're going to start with. Voxelise this logo with a bunch of different cubes. There's a couple different ways we can work. But, we're not actually going to use this in the mesh network per say. What we're going to use is a square there we're going to fill this object with. What we need is a cube or a square. We have a cubed now. We want to use this in our mesh network. This is what we're actually going to use and create the mesh network from. Let's go to Create Mesh Network and look at the options that we have. We have geometry, type, mesh, and sensor. What I'm going to choose is mesh because of some of the other options we'll use later on with dynamics. I'm going to Apply and Close. Now you can see that we've made this mesh network and these are just the default values. This doesn't really mean anything to us here. These 10 across, that's just the default that they give you. You can change that over here on the attribute editor. This is where we are going to get to all of our different menu options here and what we can add to our mesh network later. Let's jump into the distribute area and take a look at; by default it gives us linear. This is where we're adjusting that linear distribution and how many and how far. But what we want, if you'll remember, is we want to Voxelise this logo. We need to go to distribution type and choose mesh. What it's asking down here in this warning is, please connect a mesh. We need to tell what mesh do you want to distribute this cube into? Of course it's this logo. We don't want to select it because then it will deselect the mash network that we're trying to bring it into. Let's make sure we're still on mesh and we can see this input mesh area here on the right. What we want to do is go over to the outliner, which if you don't have open, you can go to Windows outliner. What we want to do is middle mouse drag the original logo into the input mesh and let go. Now you can see it's distributed the squares inside of that mesh. It's choosing a method of scatter by default. But what we want to do is voxel. You can tell it's not really looking the way you want it to because the cube is very big. There's a couple of different ways we could address that. The easiest one would be to scale the original cube that we made and it hit it. Whenever you make a mesh network by default, it's going to hide the original object. We can just unhide it if we wanted by hitting "Shift H" after we selected the outliner and then hit R to get to the scale tool and just scale this down. We want to choose a voxel shape that is going to match the density that we want. We can play around with this after we go to the voxel settings here that we can use this little menu to drop down and decrease the voxel size. That's basically saying how big of a voxel size or we're trying to fill up here? We want to try to find something that's fairly representative of our shape and not so big that you can't tell what it is. Let's choose something like this. We're going to go back and forth between scaling the actual cube down and choosing the right voxel size. That the distribution between the shapes and basically looking at these gaps. You can choose this to be different for yourself. But I'm trying to figure out what gap do I want to have here? I don't think I want to have very much of a gap. I'm going to keep dragging this down until just about there's no gap. I can start typing in numbers here as well. I'm just going to take away that eight. That looks pretty close to what I want. I think I can get even closer and choose maybe 255. No, that's a little too low, 258. Yeah, it's getting really close in here. These could be different and values for you. It all just depends. I just want to make sure that they're not overlapping, but they're just really close to each other. That's just my personal preference. You don't have to choose that for your own logo. But that's just what I'm going with. Actually, I'm just going to back that off one little thousandths of a degree. If we zoom back here, it does represent our logo pretty well. The reveal that we're going to do when all of these get wiped away, I think will be a really cool visualization of seeing the digital version of a being voxalised down into its more clean vector, smooth edge version. Keep in mind too that the reason why I'm going about this animation in this arc directed way. This specific creative idea is that this logo is for my school called Digital Creators School. When I'm thinking about the logo, this is what you should be thinking about when the logo that you choose is, what type of animation represents this logo well and the animation will speak to what it embodies the brand. When I was thinking about this logo Digital Creators School, I thought about all types of things. What's digital? Think of like rasterization, vector graphics, voxels, all these types of different visual aids and tools that help display and visualize digital art and digital content. That's why I chose to go in this art direction of using this voxelization, of basically building up this logo with voxels and then wiping them away with dynamics, that we'll do later. But that's the idea and the thought process that I decided to go with. Just to reemphasize that, here's the original idea was. Your idea can be very simple too when you first start out and then you can finesse it more as you learn Maya better and as you work on the idea. But for this course, we're going to go; no matter what logo you're using, we're all going to learn the same version right now because this is about learning the tools. Well, we need a specific example to make this seem practical. I just don't want to go through and show you what every single button does here. Because that won't be very helpful. Let's do a very specific art directed idea. That way you can pick up a lot of the tools along the way and still make something pretty cool and usable. Hopefully you can find opportunity as I'm teaching you this, to branch off and do your own thing as well. But for this first time around, just follow along with what I'm doing. But I just wanted to take a second to explain why am I animating this way? Why am I using voxelisations? Well, it's because it fits with the brand of this logo. In the next lesson, we're going to work on adding some animation to these voxeled shapes now. I can't wait to go on in that lesson. Thanks for watching and I'll see you there. 5. Random Scale: In this lesson, we're going to start to animate these voxel that we've made, and moving forward, we don't actually need to see this original Logo mesh that we made. Let's just hide that and you can see that we still have these voxel, which is nice and we can also hide this original cube that we made the mesh network from. It's going to hide that as well. Now, we're just left with the voxelaization of the mash network. Let's select a mash waiter from the out-liner and get back to the menu here. What I would like to add is a little random rotation to each one of the voxel because it's very clean. Even though, something digital is pretty precise, when you think about animating something, you also want to think about how this is going to look rendered. The reflections, the shadows, the light, and very subtle differences as gone to help sell the believability and realism of any animation. I want to try to start to incorporate that from the very beginning. Which means I want to add some randomness to this. It's going to be very subtle. But let's go and turn mash waiter and add a random node here. You can see it right here and if I left-click it, and then it'll bring up an option to say add random node. I'll click that. Just off the screen here I have the mash editor and if you don't have that, you can go to mash editor and it's basically like an out-liner for our Mash objects. We can very quickly select them and get to each one of the tabs. By default, of course, it throws some random values in. While not that random, it's one for each one of positions. We don't want to really affect the position. At least I don't, I want to just add some very small rotations in all of the axes. I'm gone very small like, I'm going to go 0.05 here, 0.25 here, and 0.05. here, and it's very subtle. You can probably can't really tell, but take a look at the width of this gap and the width of this one. They're really different. It's these tiny changes in variations. It's going to add some realism and texture to our animations if things aren't exactly perfect. This is also the reason to leave a gap here because we don't really want, at least I don't really want the visualness of things getting smashed together here. I want to keep a gap. If you want more randomness, let's increase this. Rotate y now they're crashing into another. I'm just going to turn on the shaded wire-frame button here. We're going to see where the edges are. You can see where these are starting to smash into each other. If you want to do something that is this extreme, you go back into distribute and you can still change the volex size. We can just increase that and now you can see we have a much bigger gap. This is one of the powerful ways of using mash is a lot stuck on any certain path. Yeah, we can always go back to step one and make adjustments and we can still keep all the work we've done after that using the random node. But I like where we're at with these small changes in random rotation. The next thing we're going to do is add some offset scale. Let's go back to the mesh waiter and go to the offset node and add an offset note here, because what I want to do is create a tunnel. I need to scale all these way out so I can make a tunnel with this logo. If you take a look at this little icon down here in the bottom left of the vpod , you can see the axes here. I'm just going to hit Alt be to change the background color. You can see this a little bit better, but you can see this blue Z axis is going left her right here. If I spin around, you can see the logo is facing Z direction. That way I know which of these attributes here on the right that I want to effect, because if I want this thing to get scaled long ways like this, like a tunnel that we're going to go through the center of, I need to do it on the z-axis and that's how I know it's because I can look down here and see, okay, that's the z-axis going this way. I want to scale it on the z-axis. When you go over here, well, how do you know the z-axes? You know, because everything is ordered in Maya as X Y Z. Any of these position rotation scale, it's all x y z. We know the last column here is for Z. We can scale this up. I'm going to say like 275, something like that. Now, we have this big long tunnel and check this out. Remember those tiny little rotations we did. The random rotations. When you scale something that far, they get less small the further away they are from their pivot point. Now, there's a really smashing into each other, but I don't really care about that because we're actually going to have the camera inside of here when we animate it and that's going to be our tunnel effect. It's going to be really cool. You can feel free to animate this as well. You right-click set a key, but what we're going to do is use a different way of animating this in a very interesting way that's very powerful. I'm going to save that for the next lesson, because it's going to take a little attention because it's a slightly more advanced way of animating this attribute so that it all scales back down to the way it was before, like that. I just turn that on and off. This a fun way to preview changes. If you're doing something and you have a ton of these and you're like, well, currently tell why? What if we saw this in were like, I don't know why these are all jacked up like this? We can just go through here and just turn them off me like, that's the random rotation. Stuff like that. That's a quick way to preview these changes that we're making. In the next lesson we're going to create our first animation thing that will control this crazy scaled tunnel that we've just created that are camera's going to be zooming through. At least relatively, it's actually going to be the objects scaling, but it's going to look like our cameras rushing through this thing. In the next lesson, we will cover that slightly more advanced topic. Thanks for following along. I know it talk fast sometimes, hopefully you're not watching this like two times speed. Otherwise, I'm going to sound like a chipmunk talking crazy fast. But yeah, thanks for watching and I'll see you next lesson. 6. Animate Scale: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to cover a fairly advanced way of affecting the animation of the scale here. The first thing I want to talk about though, is just adjusting some of the attributes over here. I'm going to dial back random Strength just to add some variability to this. If you can imagine, the camera on the inside here, it'll just add a lot more visual interest once if we have these different layered cubes here scaled so it's not super even. That'll also help when they animate in, that they'll be a little more random as well. This will give us a lot more randomness and visual interest as we get going here. To animate the scale, like I said, you could animate this by setting a key here, but it would all go together. What we want to do is have a little more control over it. We want to be able to fine-tune exactly how this cascading effect of everything scaling back down occurs. How we're going to do that is with a Strength Map. If we scroll down here, we can see under Strength, what we had open as well, where we had the random strength, there's a Strength Map. If we just dial this back down, we can animate that too. When you think about a Strength Map, a map, if you're in Maya, really means a texture. That's why this is a color. It's indicative of a texture. What we could do is we could actually pipe in a texture to this because you can see this little black and white checkered box. That means that we can actually add something here. Let's first take a look here, Map Projection Axis, because this is going to really affect what we're doing next and how we're going to visualize it. But you know what? It's set to Y right now and again, same thing about it being scaled in Z. Imagine this texture we're about to project is going to get projected on the Y-axis, meaning up and down. But I don't want that. I want it to be projected through from Z straight on. Because let's say I want to do a white from left to right. I want all these to scale starting on the left and then for it to get white, and as I am scrubbing my mouse over, these will cascade and gets scaled down accordingly. If it's getting projected from the top, we could do that, I guess, as well but just for the sake of visualization I want to do it from the front since everything is happening from this Z-axis. Let's just switch that to Z right now. We can switch it back to Y later and show you the difference. When I clicked on this checker box, that opens up a Create Render Node window. I want to add a Ramp, so I'm going to click Ramp. The reason I want to add a Ramp, you can already tell. Click and drag any one of these. Check this out. Pretty quickly we have a ton of control over this thing and it's doing it based on that axis if you can remember what we just controlled. Again, if we change that to Y, I guess it does make a difference. I don't really know, honestly how it's projecting it down from Y. It doesn't make that ton of sense. But you can see it. It effects in a different way. I don't know. It doesn't really make sense on why it's behaving this way. Anyway, I think that's why I originally chose Z anyways, because this just makes more sense to me anyway. That it's affecting the voxelization or the scale of these based on this Z-axis projection. Imagine, this Ramp is being projected into this view. There's another way that we could use this and actually visualize it as well. It's using a Helper. It might be a little hard to control this. Let's say we want to animate this spinning. We actually want to leave it like this but we want it to spin around. We could maybe rotate the UVs. It's a little wonky, and you can see how it's clipping the corners as it rotates, and we can't really visualize the UV place texture thing. It's a hidden thing. Let's get a Map Helper here and apply that Ramp to this. It will help us visualize this type of an effect. Let's go back to the Offset node. You can see there's a Map Helper that is asking for a transform. What that is, is it could just be a plane. So let's create a plane. This is going to be our little Helper to help visualize this Ramp. I just scale it up, and I'm just moving it to the center here. It doesn't have to be perfect. We can always change it, move it around later. Now that's selected. I am going to go back to the Mash Offset, what we did earlier when we were doing the voxelization. I'm going to middle mouse drag this into the Map Helper and let go. Check that out. Now it has mapped that, the Ramp, onto our Map Helper, so now I want to rotate it. We don't have that weird clipping thing where I was making these on the corners pop out when we rotated it from the place 2D texture. Check this out. You can envision this Ramp right now on this texture. If we hit six, it should show textures but behind the scenes, it's doing all this stuff. It's using this plane as a Map Helper, and it's applying this texture to this plane, this Map Helper. This is our little Map Helper here, and it gives us much finer control. It's just another level of control. We have the Strength Map, which we can still control here but we also have it here on the Map Helper itself. Let's get this centered up. If we want to visualize this, we can connect it through the Hypershade. So let's just open up the Hypershade, this little wheel sphere up here. We'll get this new window. It says Hypershade. We can just add a new material to this plane. So I'm going to right-click and go to Assign the Material. I'm just going to use a Lambert, which is fine. I have the lambert2 here, which we can call it Map Helper, just so we can keep track of this stuff. So that shader is called Map Helper. Where's our Ramp texture? How do we plug our Ramp texture into that? Well, we've plug it in. We've already made it. We know it must be in here somewhere. If we go right to textures, there it is, Ramp. We can bring it in, middle mouse drag it into the Hypershade, and now we have the ramp texture. Now we just need to connect it to the color. Let's go Out Color to the In Color here, and now we have those two things connected. Now we can actually visualize it. We don't have to imagine it in our head. We can actually see it in the view port. Now we can see why the scale of the Mash network is behaving the way it is. It's pretty cool. Now, what I want to do is add some noise to the texture. Everything that we're doing, every step along the way is just adding a very slight amount of complexity to our animation. That's why we're using a more advanced Strength Map option here. It's I want this thing to animate from left to right on the scaling down, and I want it to do it in a very interesting way. I don't want it to do in a linear way, meaning it just gets wiped on or wiped off. I want it to spin. I want to use this spinning element here now that we have this Map Helper. I'm going to do two things. I'm going to animate the Ramp, and I'm going to animate the Map Helper spinning. Let's first animate the Ramp. Let's go into the Ramp, and let's bring this white value all the way back. We can see that. The other interesting bit of complexity that we can add here, and I'm just bringing this black all the way over because you can see I can keep bringing this over, and it's not doing anything. It's like starting a race and your foot's not on the starting line yet. You want to be on the starting line, so that's why I'm bringing the black all the way over to the starting line where the edge of this voxelization is happening; Now, we have that. Everything is on the starting line ready to go. We can set a key on the selected position here. I'm going to right-click and say set key. If you look down here on the timeline, we're on frame 1, so we need to go forward in time. Let's just go to frame 36, and I'm going to bring this over. I'm going to right-click and say Set Key again. You can see that we are going to need to also animate the black side here. Let's go back to frame one and let's select the black color here and keyframe its position. So let's set a key there. Now I'll go back to frame 36. Let's just drag this thing over. Now it finishes that wipe. Shouldn't bring this all the way over, I want to set a key. Now when we scrub, it should do this wipe that we want, which is pretty cool. It's very linear and I think we need more time. But how do we adjust those keyframes? We don't see it in the timeline down here. All we need to do is open up the Windows, Animation Editors, Graph Editor. When we open that up, you can see we have the key frames of the selected position. We can just drag these over and give it more time. The other thing we can do is take the selected position of the black color, which is zero, and we can offset that to be later. So that there's this great, more of a gradient happening here. Because we don't want it just to be like a hard edge of it wiping on and off. We want to be a smooth edge here. We need to delay the start of the black. We want the white one to start. It starts this gray area, and then the black catches up. So it's a much more smooth transition there. Let's keep adding complexity. The other thing that we have at our disposal is the noise of the actual ramp texture. So if we take a look at the ramp texture, I don't know if we will see it that well in the view port and we can increase noise. Take this ramp and just crank this up. Look how it affects the edge here. It's no longer just a straight edge. Now when we scrub the time line, it should be a little less clean, it should be a little more staggered. We can increase the frequency if we wanted to. We can also animate these things. We can animate the frequency. We can animate noise on and off if we wanted to. But you can see where we're introducing this noise, where it's adding some more complexity. Again, I'm always looking for interesting ways to add some complexity the animation without much effort. Because we already have the ramp hooked up, we might as well see what we can get with all the little tools built in like this noise. Let's scrub here, so you can see now it's not all going cleanly together in a straight line. You can see there's different pieces that are getting scaled differently. It's a pretty cool. Now as we scrub, we can see that randomness happening and it's all getting scaled back down. Again, what's another thing that we could do to add complexity? We could rotate the actual map helper as the ramp is getting animated. How tripy is that? Let's let this start. Maybe let's start a little bit. I'm going to hit "S." Well, S would keyframe everything. We just want to keyframe the rotations. So I'm going to hit "Shift E." The other way you could keyframe those is go to the Channel box rather and select these and right-click and say Key Selected. "Shift E" is just a quick way to do that. I'm going to scrub forward to the end. I'm going to rotate it all the way to the other side. Let's see, what is that? We have a bunch of random rotations here. Let's go back to that first keyframe and zero this out so these all makes sense. I guess these are both 90 and this one should be zero just to make it nice and clean. We scrub to the end, let's just rotate this a 180 degrees. So that should be negative 270. If we know our math every 90 degrees. Now take a look at this animation. We have the ramp getting animated, as well as the map helper getting animated. It's just adding some complexity. Let's put the camera where it's going to be just to pre-visualize this. We don't really need the map helper. There's couple of ways we can get rid of it. We could hide it, or we can make a display layer. Let's make a display layer and we'll just turn off this P. What that means is when we play back, it should disappear. Check that out. I just have loop once on over here. I'm going to turn on looping just by clicking this option a couple of times and getting this loop symbol, it should loop back. You can refine this as much as you want. Feel free to adjust this animation, but look at all the complexity we added. Imagine having to hand animate each one of those cubes would drive you insane. That would be impossible to go through each one of these little cubes and animate them this way. This is what the power of procedural animation is. You can get many things animating and make adjustments very quickly. For example, if I think we still need more time, let's go to the offset node. Let's select the "Strength map." I'll select it here and go to Windows, Animation Editors, Graph Editor. Let's just take the last two keyframes and drag them out a little bit. I just want it to have a little more time. I'm going to get over here to where it should be done. I'm going to select the map helper. I'm just going to drag the map helper animation over as well. Now we play, just turn off the Graph Editor, "Alt V" is a shortcut. You see the animation we're getting. Again, depending on how you want this to look, you could have it spin twice as much. Let's go to this keyframe and set it to 70. We're actually adding, let's see, let's just go all the way around, do some super crazy 630. Now it's really going to spin around. I'm going to hit "Alt V" to play. It looks pretty cool. We're just adding more rotation there. I think it still needs more time. Because it's going, everything's going way too fast. The other way we can change animation for the whole scene is going into the Window, Animation Editor, the Dope sheet. This feature is a lifesaver. Go to View and go to Scene Summary. Now we have this little layer here as the scene summary. We can just select all these end keyframes and "Shift" middle click and drag all these over. Now we can just really quickly, having to go through each one of these objects, we can just use the Dope Sheet and do that. I'm just going drag that off with a screen a little bit so we can see our animation. Let's play this back. That looks I think a lot better. I think the one goofy thing is, you can see it starting over here on the left. I'd rather be a cleaner start and see how it starts and stops. I think that's because of the noise we have in the ramp. We could just start that ramp a little sooner. Let's scale out here and see what's going on. This is one nice thing about hooking up this texture so I actually visualize what's happening. Let me just hit P over here on the display, so more scrubbing leaves that up. I just think this map helper is rotating too soon. Let's let the ramp get animated on. So the ramp's getting animated on. Then this thing starts spinning. I think that makes a lot more sense. Let's get our camera back in the center of this thing so we visualize how this is going to feel and look and hit Play. Let's turn off P here, so the map helper doesn't display while we're watching. That looks a lot better. I still think I would like that to finish. I think maybe we could even wait a little bit more. That way it does finish a little bit, so it's not bouncing back. But these are the little things you can have control over as you get going. But also feel free to open up this Scene file with all the downloadable project files to get a sense for what I'm doing as well. In the next lesson, we are going to continue adding more complexity to this animation. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. 7. Add Spring: In this lesson, we're going to add some spring to our animation. This is one of my most favorite Mash nodes because you get so much animation for so little effort. So we have our animation done here, or at least part of the beginning stages of it. What I want to do is add a little spring so everything softens as it resolves into the final image here. So the way we can do that as add some spring. Let's select the Mash waiter here and go over to spring, add spring. Now, this node is dependent on simulation. So if you scrub the timeline now, it won't be accurate. It won't actually show you exactly how it's going to be because the spring node needs you to play it from the beginning. It also needs you to Play Every Frame, and what that means is if we right-click on the timeline and go down to playback speed. Just going to rip off that little menu that you should find down there under playback speed. You want to make sure you're on Play Every Frame and what that means is when you Play Every Frame, it's going to have a chance to calculate the dynamic simulation because the spring is basically a dynamic simulation. So now when we play, it'll be more accurate. So I don't know if you can tell the difference, but there's a lot more going on. It's still subtle, but there's a lot more springiness happening there, right? Let's take a look from this side, and we can see it's bouncing. However the problem that we're facing here is you can see the spring is actually scaling things down, not just to zero but into negative ranges and that's how we get these black squares because it's scaling them inside out. So we need to control that in the spring node. Otherwise, we're going to get these reverse normals because we're seeing the inside out of these cubes. So we want to do that by adjusting the attributes of the spring. So let's go to spring and the spring values here are going to be based off of the scale of the world. So if we look at the original cube, I'm just going to Shift H, and we can bring it out. Let me just measure the distance here. I'm going to go to create, measure tools, distance tool and I'm going to hold down V, want to click and when I click over here, we have a quarter of one unit. So what that tells me is, I don't want the spring to affect the cube more than a quarter of a unit. If it does, it'll end up scaling it in the negative, right? If I scale this more than a quarter, it'll go negative, right? It's not doing it here, but it's not really helping my explanation, but you can see this black square here, right? That means it's inside out and we can play this back and you can see where more of them are doing that. If I can stop it on the right point, all of these are getting scaled inside out, so that's making it not great and that will really mess with your render. All those will render black no matter what color you put on there they're going to render black. So to fix that, we need to reduce what's called Maximum Translational. Right now it's set to 20 and we know we want it to be a quarter, right? Because that's what we measured the thickness of this cube. We don't want the scale of this to spring more than a quarter, otherwise it's all going to go inside out like that. All right, so I'm going to hide the original because we don't need that and now when we play this back, we shouldn't get any black squares. Look, no black squares and we got a little bit of spring. It's hard to tell but you can see when you watch this settle here, I want to zoom in on the top. See how it all settles. That's what the spring is doing. It's very small but let's turn this off and watch what it does. It's very stiff, burnt. It just stops. See how stiff that is and now let's turn spring back on and that one node, we get all this nice little subtle animation settling down. It's pretty cool. I use it at the end of most animations. I'll just throw a spring node on there and just see how it look and usually nine times out of ten, it makes everything look a little bit better. You might have to adjust the Maximum Translational value depending on the scale of the object. That's why I measured it, it's a quarter thickness. So I don't want it to affect it more than the thickness of itself. I hope that makes sense. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will continue to add little layers of complexity like this and keep polishing this animation. Thanks for watching. 8. Add Complexity And Control: Welcome back. In this lesson we're going to add a little offset to the corner here. If you look in the top left corner of this example that I originally made, you can see these cubes are falling in from the top left. I want to add that, but before we do, we need to adjust the helper plane and the ramp so that it actually only goes around one time. If we look at this reference, which I like, we can see that this reference has a much larger smoother transition. I think it's due to the. It probably has less noise and it's not going around as many times. So we can see it starts here on the top and the left side and then it goes all the way around to the back around counterclockwise. Up here. I think ours is going clockwise. Let's just adjust it to be like this reference. This is anytime you want to mimic something that's happening in a commercial, always start to analyze what is it that I like about this. Why am I trying to emulate this and what aspects do I need to copy or try to recreate. For me in this first example that I created this and just trying to recreate it for you in this class is, it goes around one time and it's a lot smoother than what we have, so let's just make that adjustment real quick and then we can do the offset. Let's go into the ramp of this. Let's open up the attribute editor, scroll all the way over to the map helper. Let's just reduce the noise. I'm going to click this little button to get over, and also I turned off the green click button. Anytime I click, it's not going to do that in green thing anymore. I just had someone give me feedback that they didn't like that. That's the only feedback I've ever received about it so if you like it and want it back in other classes, let me know. But someone said they didn't like it, so that's all I've ever heard about it so that's why I removed it, but I increase the cursor size so hopefully you can still see the cursor. I'm going to reduce the amount of noise here because I just think it's too much, and I'm going to turn off spring because when you have spring on, it is a dynamic simulation and when we're scrubbing the timeline, it's going to get kind of wonky as it's trying to calculate. The one we have now we can see it's rotating more than the example that I just showed. Let's select the plane and let's get the timeline to be the whole timeline and I want to see these in the graph editor. I'm going to go to Windows Animation Graph editor and we can see that all the animation is happening on rotate Z, so I'm going to isolate that by selecting it. I wanted to start over here on the left and I wanted to go the other direction because I don't want it to reveal this top-left corner where we're going to have the offset. I want that to maintain its scale through all the rotations we're about to do so I want to change this up. We have negative 630. Just going to move all this to start at zero and then we select this, we can just remove the negative and it will scale it, put it by going in the opposite direction, the same value. All right. So now we're just going in this other direction. It's ending in that corner. It's going a little fast. We wanted to start on the left side. Right now we're starting on the right side and it's going about 1.5 - 1.25 turns. Let's first get the left side working. Let's move this. I'm just selecting both key frames. Shift middle mouse, dragging it and I want this to start over here. So it started over there and it's going to still going too far. We want it to kind of end in that corner. Now it's turning to left. I think it's also the ramp. See how it's already starting to affect that. The plane might need to be bigger. Let's make sure we don't have keys on the scale because about the scale it up. Yeah, we only key frame the rotations. Now we scaled, we don't have to worry about it. Being an animated scale. I think it's also just has to do with the speed of the ramp. It's just kind of a lot of back and forth here. It's just making sure that the ramp animation is working with rotation animation. Let's drag that out. Let's see, the ramp animation ends around frame 128. We can see right there. This will end about there too, starting here. You just want to make sure these are synced up. I'm selecting the ramp and they're pretty close. So what we can't do it, I don't want to reveal this corner yet. I'm trying to figure out, we need to you stretch this out. I want that left corner to still see. Let's grab the helper and move it. I'm going to delete these two because it's just distracting. Let's see if we're, yeah, another thing we need to deal with is the fact that the end of it isn't ending where we wanted to, so we still need to bring this down. That's ending in the right place and then we just need to figure out what is going on at the ramp that it's revealing this side and I'm actually just going to turn off in the display because I want to see what it's doing as it's rotating. I hit a piece in the display member when we did that, so now I can actually see what it's doing as it's rotating and I'm going to isolate it. I'm going to click on this little button. Now all we're seeing is the ramp. It looks like the ramp is coming on too soon. I think that's all it is. The ramp is coming on too soon, so it's hitting this top left corner of this thing. We just need to delay the ramp animation a little bit. I want to show every step of the process like this because anytime you're working in 3D, it's not going to be super cookie cutter like you click this button and then it's all done. There's a lot of back and forth in animating in 3D and if anyone tries to teach you otherwise, then they're doing it wrong and they're doing you disservice because then you're going to get into it and realize, that's not what it's like at all and you get stuck a lot and now you don't know how to troubleshoot because they never taught you their process. This is all just a process. This isn't like, easy bake oven stuff here. If you're an American, you understand that reference maybe and old enough. Yeah. What we decided was the ramps happening too soon, so I'm selecting all the, as I was talking saying that I forgot what we were doing. We are going to delay the animation of this because the ramp's happening too soon. I'm just going to drag this over. Now we got it. It's still happening a little bit. It's now. That's pretty good. I might delay just a little bit more, so it catches, we keep more of that. This is what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. Now we just need to adjust this just a little bit. I wanted to stay in this corner. See, this is what it takes if you want to get very specific, I want this to happen like this, you have to start to get very specific with what you're doing. I think there's going to be a really sweet spot here. I'm going to go to curves, weighted tangent so now I can pull these handles out. I think there's going to be a sweet spot on the time of when the ramp starts and the rotation. I want this to start slower so that it gets more to that corner, but I still wanted to start, so I don't want to totally move the keyframes now. Yeah, it's just barely, I'll just do a couple frames. I'll say maybe two or three frames. See how it's keeping that top-left corner. That's what I want. The other thing we could do is we could animate the scale of this thing, just to have even greater control if we want it to end sooner. But we still like the noise, and if we move one curve, it's changing all the animation, because there's just two keyframes. We could add more keyframes, so it's based like mile markers, like, hey, I'm holding down "I" and mouse clicking to set a keyframe there, on that. We could get here and say, all right, just end. Go faster, but then we might have this weird transition. Maybe not. It looks pretty good. That's what I want. Now let's do the offset super-quick. We've already done it with scale, and one quick thing I also want to talk about is, the spring note for these. When we made the spring note earlier, we have it affect position, rotation and scale. We only want it to affect scale because if you remember, we have the maximum translational value to be the width of these little cubes when they're small. But, if we look at how far we want these objects to come from, maybe this far, it's probably four or five units away, if this cube is moving five units, really fast. Sorry, these terrible sound effects. It moves really fast and then it springs 0.25, that's like nothing. We want it to spring a lot more when it's coming from a further distance. So, we need to turn off the Position. We don't want this spring to affect it, we'll add another spring to affect the, I'm just going to name this scale, we're going to add another spring to affect the position. This offset, we want to rename it as _Scale as well so we can keep track of which offset, so now when we go into the Mash Waiter and click "Add Offset", we only want this to, I mean, we could turn these off, but we're only going to affect these. We want this to affect the position. Now, in this offset node, we can see y is up, positive y is up, positive x is to the right, and we want these to go in the top left. So that means we need a positive y and a negative x. When we look at this, it's x, y, z. We need a negative x, so let's say negative four and negative four so it's even, all right, sorry positive four because we're going up. You can see any direction these are pointing here in the lower left, that is positive, so four right here is positive to the right, is positive up is positive, so we know why there needs to be positive and negative x needs to be negative has gone to the left. Okay. The whole thing moved though. If we turn this on and off, we can see the whole thing moved and we only want a part of it. Let's scroll down here to the Falloff Object area, right-click and say "Create". Now we have a falloff object we can animate. How cool is that? Well, we only want it to affect this corner here. Let's do something like this, and I can also click this and make sure it's only moving in that plane and those two axes, when you click this little square. Now it's only going to move forward and up and down and not side to side. Anyway, anytime you're doing something like this, try to make sure you're not going in Z space when you don't want to be with it, then you can use these handles. Let's get it to a good start position, and then, we can animate this down. Now let's get the camera in where we want to see it, how it's affecting it. Let's move it up a little bit. I think it's affecting things too low because I don't want to really see those until we get up here. Now we can start animating it, probably in here. Let's make sure we haven't selected in the outliner because there are two different parts to a falloff node, there's the shape node and the transform node. If you select the falloff object from it's node, from the whatever node it's attached to, if I double-click it here to select it, this is its shape node, you can see it is a Shape right here. We can't animate this and the translation. If we go over to the Channel box, you can see there's no Translation tab, because it's the shape node, it's not the transform node. We want the transform node, which is what is always in the outliner over here. When you click that, now I have the translation rotation. It's just a little got you moment you might run into if you're selecting things through here and then you try to animate the translation of this, it's not going to work, and there is no translation on a shape node. It's all on Transform. We haven't selected the outliner. Let's hit "Shift W" because we're only going to be animating the translation values, and let's just pull it away and we want to pull it only as far away as the very edge of this thing so that it's a smooth, ease out affecting it. I want a greater falloff here, because it's pretty even. The way we can do that is change the inner zone to be the closer it is up here, the further away it's going to be. I like that a lot more and I want to get rid of these lines. The way we get rid of those lines, let's go back to the offset and just introduce some Random Strength here. Now that we got rid of those even lines because I want it to look a little more chaotic there. Now we just can shift, click and drag this, and then left-click the middle handles here to move it down because it's happening soon enough for me. Okay, that's happening too soon, so we're just going to have to do this back and forth until, yeah. Because I want that to be the last thing that we see and maybe even drag it out so it happens over a longer period of time, and then, once we add a spring, this will look really good. I want the inner zone of this thing to be even more, I think. I'm going to click this increase Inner Zone, because I want these to be traveling from a greater distance. I want this to happen a little slower still. Because I want that to be the little flourish at the end or these final pieces coming into place and how I'm thinking about this as far as design perspective is the fact that we have, up until now, the only animation we've had is in this direction, front to back. That's the only animation we have. What I want to introduce to make it more interesting, just think about how can I make it more interesting, and then, simplify it down. Describe what you've done, you've animated this thing front-to-back. All right, well that means you haven't done things side to side yet, or diagonal. Start to introduce those things if you want to make it more complex, and complexity is not always a good thing, that's just whether you want to do that or not. Okay. Now we have that falloff object animation done. Let's add spring back in. I'm going to go back to the Mash Waiter, add spring, and I want this to only affect position, so I'm going to turn off the other ones. and I want to go to, let's just leave it in real time, I'm going to open up the Playback Speed. I right-clicked on the "Timeline" went to Playback Speed and then tore off that menu. Let's see where it ends up. Yeah, it's pretty good, it's a little slow for my taste, so I'm going to bring this back down. Cool. I like that. The other thing we could do is add, let's go back to Offset and add a little bit of negative z, like it's coming from behind a little bit. It'll be negative two. Let's see what that does. Because what I'm thinking of, when it springs, I'd like to see it come forward just a little bit. Let's do more negative, negative four, I want to see this thing spring for, there we go, or watching this, yeah, cool. In this lesson, we learned how to adjust the ramp settings, the map helper, and separate, I'm just going to name this spring node position, separate aspects of the spring and offset at multiple offset nodes, animate a falloff object, we did a lot in this lesson, and the next one we will continue and make a whole new thing. We'll learn something totally new; motion paths and eventually add a trail to it. It's a really cool piece that we're basically going to be making, this part, and we're going to attach color stuff to it, it's going to be really cool. All right, thanks for watching. 9. Motion Paths: Welcome back. In this lesson we're going to add a motion path so that we can do something similar to the example I made, like these purple stripes in these spheres that go around the outside, they initiate the dynamic simulation and the color change. Let's create that motion path for those spheres now. I'm going to jump into Maya, I'm going to turn off the mash network because we don't need it. I'm going to unhide the original logo, the Shift H, unhide it. What I want to do is make a curve based off of these edges so that we can have a path for the spheres to go along. What I'm going to do is I'm going to double-click these. But unfortunately I think because that's not a continuous edge loop all around a quad, it will not follow. What you can do is grab the paint selection tool here and hold down B middle mouse drag that. Let's try to make this smaller. That's huge, so I try to get it way down. Now you should be able to click and drag paint your selection here, which might make this go a little faster. I just want to make sure I'm getting the front outer edge of the logo because that's where the animation is going to happen. I'll get that one later. When I go back to the selection tool, Shift, click that one and then I want to go to modify, convert and then we want to go to poly edges to curve. Now I just click that and you can all tell that's not really respecting the edges I selected. It's super wonky. Let's undo that and go into the Options here. Poly edges to curves, click this little box. What we want is actually linear because we wanted to follow exactly one-to-one the edges that we have selected. I'm going to hit Apply or Convert now. Now you can see it actually follows exactly what we have. I'm going to do that for this other edge, and I will see you in one second. Now that we have that and we've already set the settings, we can actually just click that and it should work now. Now what we have, we look at the outline we have two curves. Let's rename this to the C curve and I'm going to say MP for motion path. That's just how I like to organize it and I'll say D for curved motion path. Just to be clear, I'm calling it C and D because this is the digital creative school logo, so we have the D for digital and C for creative right here, but I makes an S for school. Anyway, that's a logo I made up and that's why I'm naming it this way. We can see that the curves themselves have their center point down here at the origin. We can change that by going to modify center pivot. Still not great. Sorry. That was for D, so actually that's perfect. I going to do the same thing here, I'm going to hit G because G is the shortcut in Maya to repeat the last command. At both of those selected I should have scale these out a little bit and I actually turn Mash back on because I want these to go on the outer edge of the pixeled area, the voxelysed area, and not the actual logo itself. We might have to adjust some of this. I think the main one is this bottom one. Well, let's just wait until we get the spheres on there and then we can adjust these curves if we need them to be more centered around a different area. Let's create a sphere and what I'd like to do is to get a platonic one. Let's increase the subdivisions. I mean, it depends because if we do a wire frame, you can pick whichever kind of object that you want. Let me get back on object mode so I can actually select the thing. Let me see if there's not a better if you right-click here. Let's get the soccer ball. I like the look of that better. Let's do the rename here, C sphere. I'm just going to duplicate that. Actually, I'm going to delete that, I'm going to scale this down first. Sorry if you hear some noises. I live in an apartment complex in Los Angeles, so there's all kinds of sirens and neighbors and road noise going on. We have that, now I'm going to duplicate it, call this D and I want to select this, select that the sphere and the curve. Then if we go to constrain motion paths attached to motion path. Now it creates the animation for the motion path based on your timeline. The key frames are just whatever your timeline is set to. It depends on how you want to do this, how big you want the spheres. I think the spheres are a little too big still. Looks like both of them and just scale them down a little bit. Because I like the distance, and whether or not you want them touching or how you want that to work. Now we have the motion path. We can see we need to just a few things. I want this to go all the way down to the edge. I'm just right-clicking and going into the vertex mode, control vertex. Now I can pull this around, make sure it's in the right spot, and go back to object mode. With curve selected, we have this output motion path and you can see there's actually key frames on this thing. If we go into the graph editor, we can see what those look like. If we look at the reference, we don't want this happening until a little later, till it's all done. We want it to overlap with this corner happening that we just created. Let's get this started, maybe right here. I want to swap the direction. Right now it has the animation starting down here. I want it to start where it ends currently. What we can do with the curve selected is go over to the modeling shelf, go to curves and then say reverse direction. Now it's going to start up here on the top where I want it to. Again, let's go over to motion path. Now we can get that in the graph editor and I just want to drag this over. Because I want this to start around in here and then we can see how fast we want it to actually play through. That's not bad for now. Let's just do that. Now we know the key frame we wanted on, so let's just do the constrain. Motion path, attach to motion path and see if it's going in the right direction. Let's adjust this. I don't want it to start inside the thing, I want it to be outside it. Let's get this right and then let's scroll through and see if it's the right distance away throughout the whole thing, or we can just adjust it like this. I think this makes the most sense for me. Looks pretty good through here. All this needs to get drugged out. Just select all of those and then pull it as far as it needs to go so that's along the outside. I mean, you know what? If we look at the reference, it depends on whatever you want to do. This is actually right on the edge of this stuff. I like that more, so let's do that. Not a big deal. Just to get this all lined up with the edges. Select these. You'd basically just go based off of what the farthest edges and you select all the curves and then you just pull everything down so that it's right on it. I should follow, I don't know why that isn't working now. Oh, I'm looking at the wrong one. Let's just change this one. Skit it all lined up. It actually looks right on that edge. Cool. Now the spheres are following along on the edge. The difference currently is that these are, if you ever get vertex face you know you're not on the curve when you're right-clicking. Cool. If you notice there's a little glitch there whenever I adjust the curve, it looks like it breaks the connection on motion path. But what I was saying was, I don't want them right on the edge. Let's pull them forward a little bit. What we can do if we want to move all this stuff is just grabbed the curves and move the curves themselves so that it's not so deep set in it in the voxel cubes. That is how you create a motion path. Adjust the motion path, adjust the animation. It looks like we need to just drag this curve down. We want it to go all the way to the edge. When I was thinking about this design was I want them to do the opposite. Kind of a yin, yin symbol. I want them to go along the outside edges just as a cool swirly motion, which is again, when you think about the motion that we've done so far it's a different type of motion this path and that it's a smooth curve stuff. It's another type of motion that's happening that we haven't seen yet. I like that. The only thing that I want to do that's remain to do is let's get both of these and then select both of their U values here in the graph editor. Select them, go to curves, weighted tangents and I just want to select the same tangent handles to the right side of both of them and then hit W to move and shift middle mouse drag those. There's a greater ease in and ease out. It starts really slow. I might even want to start slower and then we might need more time so I'm going to go to 250. Drag this out because this curve is getting too steep, which tells me it's going to go really fast. I might not want it to go that fast. We can always change this later. It looks fine, make that a little bit and drag time-out even more. It starts slow and let's also figured out based on the time of this finishing, I think already want these going by now. I'm going to select both of them just move them sooner in time. I want some of this motion to overlap so it's not just like one thing happens and then another thing happens. I want it to all kind of flow together. Then the last thing that I want to do is I want to scale these on. Let's go to shift H to keyframe the scale. Because everything else you see it's all yellow. That means it is connected to the motion path. Only thing we actually keyframe is scale right now so Shift H is that. Then I'm going to go to a few frames before and press it. Click all the scale, do 0. Now we can see where this animation isn't going to move it around. They will scale on now. Boo, boo. Let's just have it overshoot a little bit. I'm going to hit Shift H again. Just to put a keyframe little further, I'm going to drag this one above it overshoots right this an animation concept. It blurbs, and boo, flashes on it goes all the way around. Then I want to flash off there. We can just hit shift R go three frames forward, alt, greater than, less than bracket. For that keyframe shortcut, which you should be seeing up displayed on the screen anyways but then I'm just going to go to 0. They have a little overshoot before you scale down. Have it be much more can really see that right now. It's a little slow so I'm just going to drag that last frame and two frames. There we go. Okay, in this lesson we figured out the motion path, how to move it, how to manipulate it, how to effect the things on it. Every time I say that there's one more thing I want to talk about. Watch this. When we go around a corner. It's hard to see right now. Let me select a vertex. You can see what I'm talking about. Where did those vertices go? Look, they're selected and now they're gone. They're overhear somewhere like the whole thing rotated, which is weird and we probably be able to actually see it better in this curve. See that's rotating and you can see the vertices that I have have are moving all over the place. Now they're at the front so things spinning around in weird ways as it's being animated. To change that let's go over here to the motion path tab and turn off, follow, and do that for both of them. Now select whatever an edge whatever just we can keep track of the rotation. It stays at the front the whole time. It's not rotating around in weird ways. That's how you fix that. In the next lesson, we will make the trails for these spheres using mash again, thanks for watching. 10. Trails: In this lesson, we're going to make the trails that follow behind these spheres that we just made on motion path. If we take a look at the reference we're going from, we can see that the trails follow along with the spheres, so these purple trails are what we're going to make now. We can do that using MASH, but we have to do it in a roundabout way. We already have the spheres, but they're attached to the motion path, so we can't actually make a MASH network of those because they're already doing their own thing. We need to make a MASH network of a separate piece and then we'll use these spheres as an input mesh. Let's go to poly modeling and you can create a cube or a sphere, it doesn't really matter. This is just going to be a place holder so the trails know what to follow. Let's make a MASH network out of that. Go to create MASH network, and now we can go to distribute tab and go down to the mesh. We want to input the input mesh as one of these spheres. We can start with the C, and of course, if you click this, the option goes away, so you need to make sure you keep distribute selected and middle mouse drag from the outliner into the input mesh and let go. You can see it's a turn right there on the top and we want to change the method from scatter to voxel. Now we have a voxel and let's just scale down the cube that we used. I'm going to rename this as TrailDriverGEO. Just means it's driving the trail. You can name it whatever you want. With that selected, I want to scale it down so that it's smaller than the sphere because if you think about the voxel, if we're trying to voxelize this, this cube needs to fit inside this sphere. We need to scale down, so when we voxelize it, it will fit inside of it because that's where the trail will be following from. With the distribute node selected, we can open up the distribute node here and go down to voxel size, it's under voxel settings, and just reduce this down. You can watch the cube get closer and closer to the sphere. Now, if we have four it'll be easier to see. We can just isolate, select those, and click "Distribute" to go back to this. Right before we get another voxel made, we can do that. We can also just say maximum count is one right here, so it doesn't really matter how much we pull it. We basically just want this thing to sit in the middle, this center of the sphere. Now we have that, we can go back to our MASH waiter for that node and add trails, it's under the add utility. Add trails node. Don't worry too much about this warning. It says, evaluations skipped, frame change too large. That's because we're on frame 168 and this is also a simulated thing like the spring node is, so when you're on a frame and you're scrubbing, it's going to freak out. Just don't worry about that while we're working with it. We will deal with that once we play it back in real time. We made the trails, but you don't see them in the MASH Editor window here, it's a little tricky. What did happen is add this little icon here. If we click that, we can see now we can get to that node. I think that's just where they store the utility nodes. It's a little confusing. I don't know why they just don't put it in here with everything else. But they separated out here in this icon, you can tell the first system we had doesn't have that icon. You can click that to get to the trails. Let's just rewind this back to where our motion path starts. I'm just going to isolate select. You can see that we made mesh now for the trails. We can select that. I guess we can see when the sphere is starting to move. Let's isolate, select those, and that pops on. It's already starting to trail outside, so we need to fix that. Other than that, the trail is actually working. If you play it back, we can see we get this thin line, which if we look at another perspective, we can see it is like a plane of a GEO, but it's not a circular three-dimensional object. We can adjust that as well. But basically, the trails' working. Let's get to somewhere where we can see some effect that will have now while we're editing the trail. I'm just going to hit "Escape". We have some trail that we can see. I'm going to select it again through the MASH Editor. I need to create a profile curve. That's why this thing isn't three-dimensions yet, doesn't have a profile curve. I'm going to make a curve just by using the circle here. I'm going to say, TrailProfileCurve and go back to the trail node and just middle mouse drag that into the profile curve. That's saying, what is the profile of this trail going to look like? Now we have some dimension and we can scale it down. Again, we want the head of this thing to be able to fit. Either you can make it look like it's the whole sphere, but I think it makes the sphere look not as spherical if it's even with edge like that. I wanted to go a little smaller than that, but still big enough that we can see it. The trail is super long too. We can actually reduce the trail length here so that while it's playing back, it won't be as crazy long. We can also animate this to resolve the issue we saw earlier where the trail was already starting before we're ready for it. Now, the other thing you notice is it's flat and then it gets big. It's all twisted and messed up. What we need to work with now if we scroll down on the trails node is the up vector. I can just turn that off to 0, 0, 0 and see if that works. Whenever I run into this, it's going to be different for every trail. So depending on the directions traveling and what not, it might be a different dimension. But now that I have it at a spot where it's kinked and play with this. What I'm going to do is command or control middle mouse drag. This is x, y, and z, and what we're saying is, what vector should this consider up as? That'll affect the twist. If we just yank this out a little bit, in the z for this logo and this orientation that everything's in, that should work to fix some of those kinks. We can also do a little rendering trick to fix that as well. We can maybe add some more curves samples to this. The other thing we can do super quick, just so we don't have to wait too long or wait for other things to see a change while we're on the subject, we can select the geometry, go to the Arnold tab, scroll down, and get to subdivision. What we can say is, when this renders increase the subdivisions because trails doesn't give us a great amount of control to control the subdivisions in this direction, the back-and-forth. The curves we're changing were around it. But we want to add more subdivisions here. So when it gets those kinks, it's a little more smooth. We can go to subdivisions here in the Arnold tab and go type catclark. That's just the type of math that's going to use, and then just say iterations two or three should be enough. They'll add two or three subdivisions at render time. We can't see any changes now, but once we render we'll see it, make the trail look a little bit smoother. We've got that sorted out, we got the trail working. All we have to do now is to animate the trail length. We don't have this thing happen once the sphere goes away or before it appears. Let's figure out where the sphere starts. It's over here. I want to go, let's just say we don't really want it to trail to start until 117 or so. Let's go back into the trails node. Scroll back up to the trail length, add a keyframe, and then we can go forward in time a little bit, and hit another keyframe. I'm going to select this node, and we can't see the keyframes then time editor, but we can see them here in the graph editor. We see it's the trail length. Those are the keyframes We just made. We want the first one to be zero. We don't want any trail length. Because we don't want it to mess up at the beginning. Now we playback, we shouldn't have that little piece that was having coming out before we were ready for it. I do just want to take another look at this vector thing because that is a little wonky still. Let's go back. Let's see if we can't adjust this anymore. I want to go down to member up vector and we just pull this out. Let's try to pull it up, and why not just twisting it? Let's undo that. Now it's just twisting at the bottom. I think that might be as good as we can get it automatic affect area. This is the one wonky thing about it, and this wouldn't be as big of a deal if we had more knots in our curve. I want to isolate the curve. Because it's going around this really sharp bend, I'm pretty sure that's why we're having issues. What we could do is we could add some more dimension here. What I'm going to do is go to curves, go down to, and certainly not. I'm going to say, Between Selection because I have these two knots selected. What we need to keep in mind here is the difference between CVs and knots, so what we need to do is make the knots visible. Right now, we're dealing with CVs, control vertexes, but knots are different, and that's what we're trying to insert here. They're connected. But I won't go into too much detail right now, but now you can see, this is how to turn on knots and how to turn off the CVs. Now, we see this little tiny x here. Doesn't matter how much I zoom in, you won't be able to see it. We'll change the background, be purple x more. This is the difference. That's the only thing. Instead of selecting the CVs, we need to select the knots themselves. With those selected, let's see, I can't see, there we go, that one and this one and hit Apply. Now, we get one in the middle. Let's switch back, and we can pull this up, and let's do the same thing here, hit Apply. We still have that on. Let's get back to the knots and hit Apply, and now let's see if this doesn't help. Pull this close, and let's isolate this. I was going to say if we had the mesh still there, we could see it change in real time, and we click this part of the manipulator because I know I don't want to adjust it forward or back. That's when I'm around that out just a little bit and see if that's not going to help the trail. I want to isolate, select those two things together, and play. It does appear to have helped a little bit, which is cool. Some of these lessons go a little long, but I want to give you as much information because it's going to mess up because it's a simulation. I can't figure it out on the fly. But essentially, that's the issue here, is that was too hard of a turn. It's going to freak out a little bit. But if you add a knot like that, it should smooth it out a little bit, see how it's much more smooth and those were right on top of each other before, and then once we render it and that cat clark thing we did earlier in the Arnold render tab for subdivisions, it'll add subdivisions here, so it'll smooth this out a little bit, which will be nice. We could also hit three on this just to do the mesh preview, so we can see what it will be in a render or we could also render it like this. But you can also continue to add more knots if you want to that. But I'm going to leave that for you to do because I've already shown you how to do it, and so let's go back into object mode up here and isolate all this. Now, you know how to make a trail onto a curve, we've done it for this C side, and the last thing we need to do for it is to just animate the trail length again towards the end. Let's just turn off the trail length here. Let's go back up where we have the keys, set a key, and we can also pull this out. When I hit select, it should pop up. It does. Let's just go forward a few frames and we can just pull us all the way down to zero, and you can notice it doesn't actually, even though we have auto key on right here, which is in the bottom right, some of these attributes will not be picked up by that auto key options. You still need to set a key here, even though we changed it, it's not going to remember that, so make sure your right-clicking and setting a key as well. Great. Now we have learned how to make the trails using mash voxelising a cube inside of the sphere we have animated, then adjusting all the trail attributes of the profile curve of animating the trail length and changing the CVs on a curve so that we have it follow exactly how we want to do with the app vectors. We've covered all you need to know to make your own trails, and I'm going to leave this one. Go ahead and do the same thing for this side. If this is a lot to take in for one lesson, so I just highly recommend replaying this back and doing the exact same steps. But for this sphere as an input mesh instead, that's the only difference. I know some students, everyone's got a complaint from students saying I skipped the section, and I wholeheartedly stand by the fact that I already taught you this and that now it's your job to do this other side because I think most students would think it's a waste of time to repeat information, and so I stand by that teaching practice that now you have all the information you need to make your own trail, and so you should do it for this d side as well. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Animate Color: In this lesson, we are going to add color to this logo and so that we can change the color and add a little variation here as well. You can see that all of this isn't just purple and all of this isn't just teal, there's very subtle changes from each square. There's kind of random colors shift happening there. Then we have this trigger of the teal pop on with these that follows the spheres around, which also then triggers the dynamics which we'll get into a little bit later. So for this lesson, we're going to cover the color. So let's jump back into Maya and let's have our main MASH waiter selected. Remember these two are the trails and just as a little quick aside, Maya and the namespace for MASH can sometimes get a little messed up. So before I started this whole project, I had made a MASH network and then I had undone it or deleted it, I can't remember which. But somewhere inside of Maya, it still kept that namespace. Then I optimized the scene at some point, so then it deleted it so when I added that second trails network, actually named that MASH with no number. So I wouldn't encourage you to rename MASH because it can break connections between the networks. So even though this isn't ideal, you just have to keep track of, obviously, this. You can turn these on and off, the whole MASH networks, so you can identify really quickly which one it is. But just be aware, it doesn't handle name changes that well and or deleting networks that you don't use this button. If you try to undo creating a MASH network or delete it manually, Maya's not happy, so just be aware that. To add color, we need to go to the MASH waiter and go to the add color tab here, and if you don't see this or it's grayed out that's because you're in the wrong version of geometry, colors are only available to the mesh type of MASH network. So to switch it, you'd have to go to switch MASH geometry type. But if you've made it this far in the lesson, you definitely have it as geometry. You should be able to see this, but just in case you try to recreate this with instances, it's not going to work. We got color, but it's pretty easy just add color and we got it. We're going to make it a little more complicated because we want to reveal a color with the spheres, so we have purple is the base color and then we have the teal get revealed by the spheres. So let's add that. So first let's get the purple color here. I'm going to jump over to Photoshop just so I can color pick this, this isn't the same purple I choose in the example I chose, I think a darker purple maybe. Anyway, like to color pick this in Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop you can use Krita, which is a free software. What I'm looking for are these RGB values right here and that's what we're going to put inside of Maya. Whenever I'm doing this, you have to switch the color space over in Maya. So let me show you that real quick, so change color just click on the actual color box here and we get HSV, that's not what we want. We want RGB, so we just go to strap down menu we get RGB, and we want the 0 to 255 because that's what at least my Photoshop is giving me the values as. So we have 146 and as I start entering this in, it won't be right. I'm going to show you the not right way and then how to fix it real quick 146, 113, 246. That purple does not look like this purple, look how much darker that one is compared to this one you can compare them now, one-to-one. The reason for that is we did not switch over to display space because we're looking at this on a monitor, we're pulling this from SRGB 8-bit, and rendering is going to be in 16 north to 32-bit. It's just a color thing where if you're bringing colors from Maya and trying to copy, you need to change this over to display space. Now you can see it actually changes the numbers even though we had them in correctly. We had typed them in the proper way. When I say in correctly, it sounds like I'm saying that as one word, I'm saying it as two words. We typed it in, correctly. Anyway, oh my gosh. So 146, 114. I just changed that over and then 246. I'm just toggling back and forth so I can see the actual number. So now we have it in correctly, I did it again. We did it correctly. Sorry, I'm starting to lose my mind here. I just always want to be careful how I'm speaking cause some people aren't native English speakers who are watching this and they might misunderstand what I'm saying. There's so much to consider when you're teaching stuff, it's gets exhausting. But okay, let's keep moving forward. We have our purple color which is going to be the base color, now let's grab the teal color and we can add another color layer on top of that. So let's add the top color. Let's just go back to the MASH waiter add another color node and let's do the same thing we were just doing in Photoshop. So we've color pick this 95, 226 and now we know the trick we can just go ahead and change this over to display space and 95, 226 and what was the other one, 194, cool. Now we have that and we just need to reveal it based on the position of the sphere. Just turn that trail back on that was kind of annoying. We want the color to change based on the position these spheres. What that tells us already if we kind of start to connect the dots of how MASH works, need to fall off node. Remember all the falloff nodes we've been using, the MASH helper, there's all kinds of ways to manipulate this so we know there's a way to do it, let's figure this out. So let's jump into color and we want the one that's going to come on second to be on top. We want that one to be on top. So let's scroll down here to falloff object and just right-click and say Create and now I have a falloff object that is this and by default it gives us this sphere as a falloff object which we could attach somehow to the geometry and use it that way. But what I want to do is use the sphere itself cause we already have it, it's already there, it's already animated correctly. I want to go through all these other steps to attach this falloff thing somehow. So what we can do is go to shape and choose mesh and go down to connections. Middle mouse drag the C sphere to shape in and it works. How cool is that? So now you can see we have this piece of geometry driving the color change, which is really cool. How do we get the bottom one down here as well? Let's go back to the color node, add another falloff object and let's do the same thing for that one. Let's jump into it, choose, nope, we're on the wrong one. Let's go back to that. Choose the right one, no. So now we're in MASH2 color two. So we know it's the right one cause it's named color two is how we know which falloff object we're looking at. You can see color one, color two and we want color two and we can tell this is the one to use because it's still on sphere. Let's just choose mesh and choose the D sphere this time it'll mouse dragging and dropping it right there and boom, now we have this color shift, which is really cool. You're probably already asking yourself, how do we control this distance though? It's just kind of at this set distance away from the sphere. You can do that in the additional settings by choosing a custom shape radius. Check this out, which is pretty cool. So we can adjust this to be the width of the letters themselves cause we want it to cover the whole thing. So let's just choose something like 1.5 and I'll go back to the other falloff object and do what did we just say? 5.5? 1.5. Now, that color, when I'm looking at this, I want to cover the whole distance of the width of that or the height of these letters as it goes around. If we look at our reference here, we can see that it's remaining. That color change is remaining on. How did we get that to remain on? There's another setting in here that we can go to Mode and say Add to the falloff object. Let's go back to the other one and make it as a Mode Add and as we play this, again, this is going to be, as it's added it's a simulated thing so you wanted to play it from the beginning. If you try to scrub it, it might not work as well as you see. As you scrub it, it doesn't work because, again, keeping in mind anything that's simulated or time-based, you can't scrub the timeline. You won't be able to see the changes so just be aware that you have to actually play it back and let it run through to see these changes happen. That's pretty cool. We have a color change. We've chose two different colors. We have control over what they are. We can control how they reveal each other and we can also adjust. If you notice on this example, all of these colors fade on and if you watch where they just started like look at the top part here. You can see where this one starts. Watch it at the end. It actually starts to turn back to purple here. You might want to have that happen. I don't know, but I can show you how to do it. What you actually do is use this Add Mode Fade value. It's actually going to fade out the adding that it was doing over a certain amount of time based on that number. Let's play it back and you can see the purple coming back. That's up to you creatively if you want to do that or not. I might just turn that off and for this version I might just leave it all as teal color. The other thing that we can do to break up the solid color of this and how it looks all perfect is to go in. Let's actually do this one first. We're going to add a random hue. We're going to add a random saturation, all this randomness to this color. As I introduce it, you can see it gets pretty crazy and you're going to animate this as well if you want it. You could right click, say Set Key and then move forward in time and animate it as it's going from purple to teal, you could also start to animate this. There's just so many options, so many things you could do with this. It's endless, what options you have available to you. What I'm going to do is just introduce a little bit of randomness because I don't want it to look super perfect. Anytime you're doing CG work, one thing that makes it look a little more believable is anytime there's a little bit of variation so I'd like to try to introduce that even in very subtle ways. Let's go back to when it's purple and do that. Let's say like 0.05. That's way too much. Scale it back to point, yeah something in there. Just want a little variation so it's not super normal. The other thing that we need to do is animate the custom shape that we have for the falloff objects. Let's go back to the top one that has both of our falloff objects to start with the first one. What we have is this Custom Shape Radius and that's what we know. We eventually want it to be as, but we don't want it to start that way. Let's animate that attribute over time with this size of that sphere. I'm going to hit a key here and I'm going to move forward. It's going to select this. Unfortunately, again this is another node. You can't see these keys in the timeline so we'll have to open up the Graph Editor if you want to visualize this. Now, I have the Graph Editor open and we have the custom shape radius here. Might be calling it something different, yeah, Search Radius. Of course, Maya doesn't want to make it that easy for you so its not named the same thing. That says "Custom Shape Radius " and this is "Search Radius". Even though they're the same thing, you can see a change here if I move in the Graph Editor. Anyway, its another little fun, quirky thing about Maya. What I'm looking at right now is where the sphere scale is on. I want this color change to match that. I'm going to set another key here and then I'm just going to select the first one and turn that to zero. Let's scroll back and we may need to, now it looks good. What I was going to say is we may need to say, "Exclude Interior." Just in case it has a hole. If you have a little one cube even though it's set to zero, it might be because it's thinking that's inside the object so it's going to include it. You can just click this to exclude the interior just to be safe. Cool, so we have that one. Now, we just need to go back to this one. K left click in the Graph Editor to get back to the right time and then see if we can go back now. You got to go to the Mesh later it's the quickest. Click on the second one and then we can set a key here and just go back in time until the sphere is zeroed out there and just drag that to zero. Set a key. For some reason, I don't know why that's not going all the way to zero. I typed it in there, but if I graph in the graph editor it will let me go to zero. I can just force that to happen and I going to say Exclude Interior as well just to be safe. Now, it's animating on and let's hit Play. Now, we have this color change. We've chosen two colors. We've got variation in them. We've added the Add Mode and if you want to, you can animate the fade in that so it fades off. There's so much control in this one lesson over color. It's super helpful to have this amount of control and be able to change on the fly so quickly. The other thing we could do, if this is annoying you, this little piece here, you could animate the Custom Shape Radius even more so it's smaller at the beginning so it doesn't overlap so much with this letter. If you really wanted to have it not overlap at all, you would have to separate these letters out and do them separately, which I do not recommend. I would much rather go over animating these. I would do that over, starting over and separating the letters out. Another trick you could do, if you know compositing well, is you could just do a separate render pass of purple by itself without this top color on. You could just turn that off, do a render paths of just this and then you could do a roto shape around that and mask it out on top of these renders. There's all options to do. I just want to discuss because a lot of times in tutorials, people just paint by numbers. Click this button, click that button, but they don't really give you much more information to go on if you want to do different variation of what they're teaching. Anyway, so that is how you add color to your mesh network and your logo. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson where we will add dynamics. Thanks for watching. 12. Dynamics Motion Path: In this lesson, we're going to prepare our scene to get ready for the dynamics that we're going to create. The first consideration we need to make is the fact that any time that the dynamic node starts on a mash network, it's going to stop any simulation that's happening. Meaning, if you notice the reference we're looking at, we have, if you remember this has spring on it, remember when we did this on this offset node. So this is all springing back into place, and that has to finish before we begin the dynamics simulation. So you can see here that the bricks don't start falling until after that's completed. So we want to make sure the timing works with that in what we currently have. We may need to adjust the timing of the animation so that the bricks fall down when we want them to start. The other thing we need to take into account is how we're going to trigger the dynamic simulation to begin. So we need to create another motion path animation that will drive the dynamic simulation, because we can't use these spheres to do it because that timing is different. You can see that these are doing their own thing and the bricks are falling over here. So it can't really use this thing to drive a simulation to start over here, it's because it's over there, just physically cannot because it's too far away. So we need to create another motion path with an object that can initiate and trigger the dynamic simulation to start. So let's get started with that. So in Maya, let's take a look and just play back what we have to see if the timing of everything, pretty much works with what the reference we have. So the Spring of this top-left is done, so now we can get ready for the dynamic simulation to start around frame 150. See if I can stop right at 150, it looks like this spring is pretty much done. So let's say we're going to start the animation, the dynamic simulation on 150. That means we need to trigger thing to hit the first piece of geometry here. So how are we going to do that is to create a motion path and add a new object to it and drive the simulation with that collision, with that object. What we need to do is duplicate. We already have these curves created, so we can just use those. So let's duplicate these two curves and we'll call them Dynamics. So we can differentiate between the other ones. We want to create a cone. I'm choosing a cone because I want a wedge shaped to drive this. We're going to use this as another fall off objects. What I want to have happen is this kind of wedge action, because I don't want it to happen in a straight line. So I wanted to go out from the center here, so it'll be a little more controlled in that sense. So let's adjust the aspects of this cone to work with how we want to affect this. So let's start up here just to get an idea of where it's going to get positioned eventually. Go to polyCone and choose a cone radius. Maybe something a little wider, and we need to stretch it out, so let's do a height of six. Then for this to go and follow the motion path, we need to add geometry here, so we need to add more subdivisions to the height, so let's do something like 20. So now when we do the motion path flow motion, it'll actually be able to distort and deform rather this cone. So let's grab these two curves first and select them so you can see them by themselves. What we want to do is we can just delete these first two ones, actually, these first few. We need to drag this. Start where the cone is going to start from. We need to drag it way out here, because if we look at the size of the cone and it's centered up on this, we don't want it to be in a starting position that would already be intersecting that. We want it to start further away from it, so it doesn't intersect at all with the piece of geometry. Again, sorry, I live in Santa Monica, California and it's like four blocks away from the Santa Monica Pier and there I don't know if you've heard that helicopter and sirens and anyway, there's always stuff happening around here. Now that we have this curve, let's go back to the curves and adjust them properly. Normally, when I'm recording these classes, I tried to do it at like one in the morning when things are super active, but that's not super healthy for me to stay up that late, and I already have other things I'm doing. Anyway, I don't want to get into all that, but it's a lot. So apologize for the background noise if you can hear that, I honestly can't tell until after I'm done recording. So I appreciate your understanding for all of that. So what I want to do is drag these all out so that there's no situation here where it's going to try to get distorted basically. I want the radius of this thing, if you think about what we're doing, I want the radius of this thing so big that the very last end piece definitely comes in contact with what we're seeing with the [inaudible] here, so that makes sense as far as the size is concerned. Let's move forward and attach this to this path. So I'll select the cone and then select this. Actually, I'm going to duplicate this cone out because we're going to need another one down here before I attach it. So let's select the cone, select the motion path, and go to Constrain, Motion Paths, Attached to Motion Path. Now, you can see this isn't doing what we want it to do necessarily. Let's go into the Motion Path and let's open up the Graph Editor, so we can see what it's doing. We're going to do a similar thing that we did before. We've already done this, but we're going to add one new thing to it that I want to make sure you see, let's just make sure this is going in the right direction. So it is starting, the curve doesn't need to get reverse because it is going in the right direction. We need to change the timing of it, we also need to change how it's oriented. So let's go into the [inaudible] editor here and go to Motion Path, and choose the motion path to be the y-axis. Let's see, y-axis, front and z. It depends on the shape of your object, but this is the front axis and this is the up axis. So now it's pointed in the way we want it to go. Now, we just seem to fare the timing, so that on frame 150, it is intersecting with the front of the logo. So basically, I have my keyframe. What I'm doing is I'm on frame 150. Then even though I'm adjusting a keyframe is not on frame 150, That doesn't matter because it's wherever this lines curve intersects with where I am in time, that's what we're watching and that's all we really care about. So we just need to move this around in time and value until it can hits that on frame 150. So we have the timing setup properly, but now when we play this through, we can see this doesn't really do the wedge-shape thing we wanted to do, because it's doing this rotation here. We want this point to gets stuck on the curve. The way around that is to add something from the Constrain menu here. Same area we attached to the Motion Path, but let's choose Flow Path Object. So open up the options here, and that is fine, let's set flow. Now we see we have this lattice shape around the object. When we play it forward, it should follow much closer to the curve that we had created. So it does do that in fact, and it is twisting a little bit. It spouses out right here. How we can fix this as actually by going to the Motion Path and say, the world up type should be normal. So now when we scrub through, we see it's nice and smooth and we weren't getting that twisting that was happening here. I believe it was under Vector. See now it's twisting. So under the Motion Path attribute, we can just change that to be normal, and it should fix that little twist. Now we have this really nice trigger to go around the object. So that is going to be very helpful for triggering the animation, and I will leave you to do the next one. Basically, attach this to the motion path. I guess we could just do it super quick. Constrained Motion Path, Attach to Motion Path, and then we need to fix the vectors stuff here, go Normal, and then do Y and Z, and then do change the animation. So on frame 150, it is right at the tip there, and then we need to add the flow motion. So let's go to Constrain, Motion Paths, flow motion, boom. We can also increase the lattice shape divisions here, I guess it's this one. So we can increase that and it'll get a little smoother. So we can just bump those up, so it'll follow around those curves a little better. So now we have this awesome trigger for our dynamic simulation. So I'm going to see you in the next lesson where we will continue on with the dynamics and actually add it and then finesse how these interact with dynamic simulation to trigger it to start. Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Dynamics Simulation: In this lesson, we're going to continue creating the dynamics part of this animation. Now that we have the triggers we're going to use for it, we need to just make one final adjustment. You can see that the tips of these catch up with the spheres too quickly as they go around because the curve is much longer here. We extended those out so we would have that straight line here. So we just need to change the timing. Let's select both of these pieces of geometry here and then we can just take these last two key-frames of both of them and just slide them back so they're not catching up too quickly with this fierce. So we need to to skill now in vacuum and more. So I'm just trying to make sure they're the same distance away from the spheres. So now when we play them back, they should finish because we've got the start working pretty good, but we didn't do the finish yet. So now they look like, yeah, the backend of the both of those are hitting the spheres about the same time. So that works pretty well. But keep in mind, we have this 150 idea that these were going to start them with 150, so when we move the end, it adjusted the beginning as well. Because we don't have a key-frame on this beginning one, we're just going to hit I here and middle mouse click in the graph editor just to make sure on frame 150 that that key frame no longer moves. It's going to start right there no matter what we do to the N frame. So I want to do that to this one as well. I'll select the curve, hold down I and middle mouse-click on the curve, and then pull that up so it's just about touching. Just make sure that doesn't affect the end too much, which it did. Again for the same reason, we need key-frames where we want it to definitely end, which is about where the spheres end. So let's set a key-frame here because all this is being timed based off of where the spheres are. That one was pretty close, this one is way off. So let's get that. Select the curve, hold down I, middle mouse click, and then bring it back. Cool. So now it should start at 150 and it should end when the spheres are done. The tail end of this thing should hit go through when the spheres are done. So let's go to the mash editor, the main mash waiter that we're working on. Let's choose Dynamics, add dynamics node. Now the fun begins in the more complicated sectional. A lot of this is complicated, but dynamics can be a little bit, so we'll try to simplify it. Basically, we need to select the BulletSolver, which is solving for the simulation. We need to make sure that start frame is where we want it. Remember we said 150, so we'll enter 150. I'm going to increase the collision iterations just so it has more to work with, and I'm going to increase the internal frame rate just so it has more frames to work with to calculate the simulation. So those are the two things or really three things I'm going to adjust start frame and then those two, which will affect the quality. Now, the next thing we need to do is to go to the Per Point Adjustment on the dynamics node here, so I'm going to select it from the mash editor. I'm going to scroll down until I see the Per Points Adjustment, and I'm going to right-click, and click "Create", and then I'm going to double-click on that. The channel name that we want to affect is active. Because we want these things to trigger when each of these cubes become active for the dynamics to begin. Basically, before these cones come in to interact with them, they will not be active. So we need to attach this fall off object to this same thing that we did before. We're going to have two fall off objects, instead of affecting the color, now we're affecting when the simulation becomes active on a per object basis. It's not the whole thing it's each one of these cubes, are we going to come affected? It's in the name Per Point Adjustment. If you think about it logically, this is what's happening, we're making Per point Adjustments because when you do a rigid-body simulation, it's just figuring out where the center point is of the object in putting a point there, and then it creates its own hole around that end based on the collision shape you choose. Right now, it's automatic. We can say box because we know for sure they're all boxes, but if it was a different shape of an object, you might want to choose mash. It's more time-intensive to calculate, but there's just more going on to a mash that has all these different shapes. But luckily, we've simplified it. We just have boxes. So based on a point's location with a collision shape of a box, it is going to simulate it. So we want to have Per Point Adjustments of each one of those box locations that comprise this fossilized logo. So now we have the Per Point Adjustment attribute assigned. We've assigned it the channel name active, meaning when does it activate the simulation? It's going to be based off of the fall of object that we're going to sign as a mash. We're going to put in the cone, the first one. We're going to go back to that and add another one, same thing we did before. So on channel shape random two, choose mash. I'm going to choose the second cone for the shape in. So same idea, we have a custom shape radius, which we can effect, but let's just play this back and see what we have right the second. So it looks like it's working. You can see all of these are starting to fall down based on the position of this cone. I'm going to turn off the formers so I don't have to look at those lattice, the lattice shapes there. So we have the simulation starting, but basically it's working. The only thing that I would say that we need to adjust now is the randomness. If we look at this and go ahead and pause here, you can see this is happening in a very straight line effect. So we need to adjust the random strength in the Per Point adjustment that we created. So let's click into that. We need to adjust the random strength. So let's do something like 0.4 to start with. Let's just play that back and see what we get. So see how it's dark, it's not a straight line now. The only other problem now is that, it's too random and it's not actually picking up all the cubes that we want it to, and that's why I'm saying we need to animate this thing, to be a higher value or we can just, let's just start with a higher value and see if we can capture some more of those cubes, yeah, that looks a lot better. Another thing we can do, is add these, to the playback display layer here, so I just have those selected and I'm adding the selected objects, I'm going to turn off p, so now when I play back, we won't see those. So we can get a better idea of how this is actually working, that's working a lot better, than the previous random strength iteration, but you can see that it is now starting to not make sense because these are getting stuck behind. So that's why I say we need to animate this random strength value over time, so that after it initially starts, it looks random, but then it's just a free fall off, it's all coming down. I'm going to select dynamics, to get to the PowerPoint adjustment that we made and at 150, I'm going to have the random strength be, let's just have an even number of 0.7, I'm going to set a key frame, I'm going to go maybe, let's see, maybe 30 frames. I'm going to have this to be one, and I'm going to set a key just to make sure, but we can see the two key frames here, that's for sure. Did it, set those key frames? I'm going play this back, spring ends there, like we talked about another lesson. Randomization of that initiation now, it all starts to really go as it gets closer to this one value. So the only problem here, I keep forgetting about this is the add, we need to do the add value here, on the add mode, because we wanted to continue to be active. If you think about it, we don't want it to just only be active, when the cone is around it, which you could do if that's your own creative decision, but for our purposes, we want this to add, as it goes along, it needs to keep adding. Anytime it activates a cube, it needs to stay activated. We want the fall off mode to be add, on the fall off objects. So now in playback, they should continue to fall, as it gets closer to one, so the only thing I'm seeing right now, is the fact that it picked up this lower. Let me hide our original one, it's getting in the way now. Grab the lower edge of this, let's play this back and see. I'm going try to pause it, so we can see, I don't want this lower one going yet. This lower row, that's all fine, right here, stop. So it looks like the problem is, it's going to be the custom shape of this fall off object. So what I can do, is go into dynamics, get to this fall off object, I can't remember if this is, which one is this number 2, so we can go into the number 2 fall off, and we can see p cone-shaped two, so we know it is this cone shape, and we just can reduce the custom shape radius to maybe 0.7, and play this back and see if it doesn't avoid picking up this bottom row of the c letter here, that's what I'm trying to avoid, it's nice random breakup here and then it all starts going. It's still grabbing that lower row, not as bad, but we need to reduce this number even more, to 0.5 and play this back. So far so good. Yeah, that's pretty good, it doesn't pick up that bottom row, it's leaving a few behind here, but not to worry about that, because it starts to get super crazy in here, and you have all this amazing animation happening. How cool is that? In this lesson, pretty quickly, even though it's a little bit complicated, it's actually one of the shorter lessons we've done. We have, the dynamics simulation happening and it's all working pretty well. So in the next lessons, we're going to start to finalize this, and start looking at rendering it and adjusting a few of those attributes and shaders and a look that we want to give it. But yeah, that is the dynamics, how to do dynamics with Mash and have a lot of control over it, really quickly, we built up using motion paths, we already knew that, now we're using them in different ways, as fall off objects, now we're using them as, power point adjustment on a dynamic simulation, it's pretty advanced stuff and it doesn't really get how much more advanced, to be honest, as far as Mash goes, there's a lot of different other tools you can jump into, but as far as taking the fall off object as far as it goes or dynamics that's pretty far along. There's different constraints and there's a tone more, you can have about 20 more massive courses on, just mash, but I wanted to show you on a project basis, how does this work and also the creative decisions that I'm making why am I choosing to Vox lies this, why am I choosing to add this secondary off set up here, to add another dimension of motion in it. So I just want to walk you through, not just where to press the buttons, but what am I thinking? Why am I doing, What am I doing? Questions you should ask yourself and the decisions that you need to make, when you're making your own 3D logo animation. With Mash, there's just so many options. Any point along this course, you could have veered off and done your own thing or did, just something different, I encourage you to do that. At start experimenting, adding your own flavor into this, that's the whole point. If you just copy exactly what I'm doing, you're not going to learn, you need to do what I'm doing. Follow along, then make mistakes, do different things, figure out, why is it not working this way? Dig deep on this stuff. It's an advanced topic and to really master it, you got to take ownership over it and add your own flair to it, and not just follow me. Paint-by-numbers thing, or any tutorial, I don't encourage you to do that. This is purely suit to expose you to the tools and the different possibilities to use them creatively. But then, it's up to you, to take this information and run with it and make it your own. In the next few lessons again, we'll start to cover, finishing this up and rendering it and I will see you there. Thanks for watching. 14. Add New Shader: Welcome to this lesson on rendering, where we will actually light and render this so we can see it as a movie like this is. Let's jump into Maya. We need to also create a camera for ourselves, but for right now, let's just go ahead and get the render and the shaders started so then we can see what we're dealing with and then get the camera going. First off, we need to assign a new shader to this. The first thing we need to do though, is we need to make sure that it's going to export the vertex colors. What that means is, the Mash network is coloring this based on vertex colors, and for an Arnold shader to pick that up, we need to make sure that it is exporting that. If I go click on the Mash, the Repro Mash here of the actual geometry in question here and I go down to the Arnold tab here, you can find export vertex colors. You turn that on. Now we can assign a new material. Let me just do that little higher so you can see. Assign new material and let go and then you can go down to the Arnold shader. If you can't see Arnold, you need to go to windows settings preferences, Plug-in manager, and turn on MtoA which is down here and in bottom, MtoA. It's loaded, so we have it as an option. Make sure that's loaded and then do an AI standard surface. Now it turns white and we need to pipe in the vertex colors that mash is exporting for us. I do that by labeling it as a color set. I don't mean to dock that. I do that by leaving that as a color set. I have the geometry selected. I want to access the shader that we just assigned to it in the hyper shade here. I click this little button and it maps what we have selected, the shader associated with the selection. Then I'm going to type in UserData. I don't know why this is so scrunched up there and why it can't pull that over. Here we go. UserData color is the one we want. AIUserData color. If we click that one time, it'll put it in here. We can just put that right into the base color and then in this node it pops up an attribute and we can just type in color set. That's just some tricky behind the scenes stuff that Maya is doing. When we render this, we need some lights first before we can see what we're doing. But we've set up the shader initially here. Let's introduce some lights. The first one I want to introduce is with a dome light or a sky dome light. You can go to Arnold. If you can't see the Arnold tab, you should be able to see it in everything again. You want to make sure you plug-in manager, it's loaded in. Go to lights, sky dome light. Now we have the sky dome light attributes. For color, let's map in a image. What a sky dome light is doing is if we scale way back here, you can see there's a new sphere there. What it's going to do is say light from every direction, basically with a color of light. But we want to pipe in an image or a high dynamic range image HDRI into the color attributes. It mimics real-world physics and lighting and reflections. The best way to find HDRI for free is a website called HDRIHAVEN. Just click on HDRI and click one of these, whichever one you like. They have examples with spheres here with different types of materials assigned to them. Just click them and download them. I think I'm choosing approaching storm for mine. Just click one of these, download it. Now when you click the little checker box here and we choose file to pipe into that. We have now the File tab open in the actual editor. Now we can map with this folder button to the HDRI, which I put in the source images folder here of the project. Remember way back when we set on the project, we can keep all of the files in here together. It makes it really easy to find stuff. Now we have that and we can see it behind us and all around. It's the easiest way to be able to rotate this around to be in the right direction, facing the right direction. All I want to make sure is the brightest spot is coming off at a three-quarter angle. It looks like it's straight on. But anyway, that's enough to go off of right now. The other thing I want to do in the sky dome light settings, it's turn on camera to zero from one. One's the default meaning. One is visible in the render and zero is not going to be. 15. Trail Shaders: In this lesson, we're going to continue to refine this render and make it look better. Let's close this down and close the Hypershade and let's get rid of these cones. How we can to do that is go up here to Arnold tab of this object's shape and turn off everything basically. We're not using it for any render purposes, so we can just turn off all of these things so they don't render and we can do the same thing for the plane. Now when we render, we should be able to see it without those things in the render. I'll hit "Play" on the Arnold Render View. Let me just move the camera so you can see this a little bit better. I also just want to rotate around the image to see how the reflections are looking. You can see they're popping off pretty good right here. I'd like to see a little more reflections on the front and that'll depend on the camera that we create as well. We'll save that for a little bit later, let's keep adding some shaders here and refining the material that we're using. I'm going to go back a little bit in time and I'm going to hit "Play". I'm going to turn off the, I don't want that constantly rendering. Why I'm going back in time and hitting play is because I want to be able to see the trails that are created. Let me just get a little bit of a length to one here, I will hit "Escape". With these objects, we don't actually need to do anything special with the data use and color stuff. This can just be its own new shader. I'm going to select both of the trails because I want them to have the same shader assigned to them and go over to Arnold and say "ai Standard Surface." For right now, let's choose that purple. Then for the spheres, I want to choose a wireframe. Let's go to Assign a Material and go over to Shader and there is a ai Wireframe. We want to use polygons, let's open up the render views so we can see what's happening. I'll play here. Now we can see we're actually getting a wireframe of the geometry itself, which is cool and we have these attributes over here on the right to affect it. What I want to do with the fill color is I want to have that be the teal and I think I want the line color to be a white so that it stands out a little bit. I want to increase the line width of it. Let's scale back to where the camera's going to be to the see if that's a little too much because the line width might be too heavy there when we actually scale back and see it. Let's scale that back a little bit. I'm just looking at the line width of these spheres and let me dial it back a little bit more, looks pretty good. You can also see, at render time, if you remember correctly, I don't think we did it to this trail because that was the one I left up to you to do. But if we get on to Arnold Subdivision, we can turn on Catclark, turn out to two to help smooth out that transition. When we zoom into this thing, we can see it's nicely smoothed and it's not faceted like this can appear to be close up. Let's do a super close up so you can see what I'm talking about. At render time, it is adding more subdivisions, that's what that Catclark thing does. Great, now we have shaders assigned to everything. We can continue to refine them in the coming lessons and the first thing I want to do is add a mission to the trails. I want these to not be as reflective and shinny I think. Let me zoom out a little bit, let me get a picture of the whole thing here. I want these to be a little more glowy, in the same vein of the spheres. With the Mash Trails geo selected, I'm going to go over to its surface shader here, or sorry, it's a standard surface shader. I'm going to call this trails just so I can see it a little bit better. I want to scroll down to emission. Emission will add a little color to this. I choose that same color that we've already assigned to it. But in an emission, we can see it kind of brightens it up. It also kind of projects light onto things around it. It makes it feel like it's kind of glowing a little bit. We can just crank that up. We still have the reflection. We can turn off reflections under Specular. We could just pull the weight of that down to zero. Now we got rid of that reflection that was kind of highlighting here on that edge. Feel free to keep that if you want. I'm just going to turn it off for now. I might bring that back. But that works pretty well so far. We can continue to refine this in the next lessons where we will refine the shaders and we will add a camera and tweak some reflection stuff on the main piece here. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Camera Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to create a camera that we can animate now and start to refine the Shaders little bit more based off of that camera angle. Let's go to Create, Cameras, and I'll just type in "Camera" or type in. I'll just click "Camera," and I'll choose the Camera here. Now, we're looking through that. I'm just going to back it out a little bit, and I want to get it centered up in the center of this object of our logo. I want to zero out the X translation because I want it to be totally centered. I want to back it out a little bit and maybe choose a different focal length, something like 50. Then let's turn on the film gate so we can see what kind of framing we're going to have. Let's just scrub the timeline a little bit to see the framing that we're going to achieve from the beginning. Now, we have the initial framing done here. We can start to animate this camera backwards. Let's set the start initial start position. Let's go a little bit more forward, so we have more room to go backward and set a keyframe there. I'm going go to the camera and then Shift W and E. Now, we have that first keyframe. I'm going to scrub until all that kind of scaling is done and get to a position that makes sense for the frame that we want to achieve. Let me turn on the grid as well so that I can see if we're actually centered up. You can see that we're not. If we look at the number here, it starts at 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5. We can see this five line is on the back edge of the sea, and then you see the five is here. It's way more shifted to the right. We actually need to pull this to the left, and then we can compare these numbers with the grid to really line it up in the center. We can also do that from top to bottom. We can see 10, 10 that looks kind of good. But now, we can see it's actually centered up. I'm going to delete the keyframe that was done on the Translate X here. I'm going to delete "Selected," and I'm going to re-key it just so that we didn't have that shift because it would have shifted over from here to the new position here. We want to keep it in the center throughout the whole thing. Now, we can see it is centered, and we get back to the end. Reveal position here, which looks pretty good. We might want to extend that out. I'm just going to hit "Play" so we can watch it. The other thing that I'm noticing is the trail here. It looks like it starts before we're ready for it. We need to fix that, the MASH_Trails_Mesh and go to Attribute Editor. Let's go over to the Trails selected. Open up the Graph Editor, and now we can just move this over a frame or two. One, two, three, and play that back and make sure we don't see that little tail handle. I think we weren't seeing it maybe before because it was not purple and visible as it could be. Cool. Now, we have the Trail working, we have the Camera working. I think the camera stops a little too abruptly, and I'm just clicking this button. Is the quickest way to select the camera view that you're viewing, or you can select in the outliner here. I'm also going to rename it renderCam, just so we can see it clearly. Once we start rendering and the Render Settings, we know exactly which camera we're going to render and turn off the grid so we can see a little bit better. Now, I'm going to open up the Graph Editor back up, and with the camera selected, we can kind of see the motion is doing. It's only on Translate Z. I'm going to isolate that. Go to Curves, Weighted Tangents. Now, I can have this handle that I can adjust. I want to give it more time so that it can end more slowly. We need to give it more time. I'm going to end more slowly. With that, I'm going to play this back out of the way. I like the timing of how we're revealing it, just as it's kind of completing its own transformation, and the sphere start and then this starts. It kind of keeps everything active. One thing I'm thinking is, you could maybe keep the color moving a little bit. But I like it. I love the chaos of all that stuff falling after it's done everything so nicely, and it's put into place, and then it all just goes crumbling down. The last thing we need to keep in mind is, we're actually revealing a Logo here. It crumbles to reveal the Logo, which is a main thing I maybe haven't emphasized enough. We hit it earlier just so we could see the simulation, but we actually want to reveal a nice clean Logo. Now, that we have the camera animated, we can finish that up, and I like where it's at right now. Now, we have the camera animated. We can make sure that it's using it in the Render Setting. Under the Render Settings here, go to Common, scroll down and make sure the Renderable Camera is set to renderCam. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will add a Shader and add back in the original Logo and finish up. This adds some more details now that we have a camera to base off our renders off of. Thanks for watching. 17. Rendering - Part 1: Now we have our camera animation complete, let's go ahead and lock that just so we don't accidentally screw it up. You can lock attributes by selecting the object you want and going and selecting the attributes, right-clicking on them after selecting them and going lock selected. Now if I try to move the view here, I can't, and that's what I want. I don't want to accidentally think I'm am perspective camera and I start moving around and realize I totally screwed up the camera animation. Let's play this forward a little bit. We have a frame to work of off, with the camera animation, and all the trails and everything works nicely. I'm going to hit escape here. Now let the curves and things fall apart a little bit. What I want to look at is the reflections were getting on the lighting that we're doing on the main logo. I'm going to open up the Arnold render view and I'm going to hit "Play". It is using the renderer camera shape, which is good. We also might need to back the camera up a little bit, that framing doesn't seem to match, there we go. It didn't update the camera, even though it's set to render cam shape, those weird, it didn't update I had to actually toggle off and on it. Just notice because the distance from here to here, wasn't the same just a minute ago. Anyway, now we got the right camera, we're looking through the right one. What I want to start to affect is the position of the skydome light, the reflections are kicking off this thing the way I want them to. I basically select the rotate y, which is rotating around, and then I can middle mouse drag the viewport and watch it update in the render view. You can see this is the darker side of the image of the skydome light. I will just want to zoom that are around, rotate it around until we get it. Some interesting reflection happening off of the front a little bit. The other thing you can do, we could animate or change the random rotation. If you remember way back when and the Mash network. This is one of the nice things of procedural animation is making changes on the fly. If we wanted to adjust some of the random rotations that starting with, let's open up the Mash editor and we can go down to random. Even though we did this way back when, we can make these adjustments on the fly now and it's still affects everything and it has all of the, actually what we'll have to replay because it's doing a simulation, actually I have to replay for them to see these changes. Let's jump back here. Now you can see it's all jacked up because the values are so high. Let's undo those. The one thing I do want to do instead of taking that route, what I want to do is change this, the roughness of the shader. I'm going to scroll over to that, I do call this pixel, we know which one it is. Am going to reduce the amount of reflection and see this highlight here should change. We going to click this square and draw a square here so it updates just the region we're interested in faster. Let's actually leave that weight all the way up and then introduce some more roughness. I want to make this a little less smooth there and a little more rough of a reflection. The main thing I want to do is add another light to give this a little bit more of a directional shadow. I'm going to go to Arnold, lights and you can see that there is no directional light. You actually have to get to that from the rendering tab or create lights. Arnold will understand this light, but it's not under the Arnold Renderer lights. You have to do it from these other menus. I'm recording this class so long I'm starting to lose the ability to talk. Let's turn off the render region button there, and let's grab the directional light here. It doesn't matter where it's placed, it only matters how it's rotated. I'm just going to move it there for convenience sake, now I can rotate it and see the changes update in real time on the logo. I want to give this a direction so that, let me just pump up the light. I'm going to stop and reset it just so to make sure it's actually rendering correctly. One groovy thing you can already tell that's happening, is this really big shadow that the trail is casting. We can fix that if we like the direction of this light and hit play real quick. We get back to the and I just cranked up the value because I want to see in an extreme circumstance how this reacts to light and shadow. I think what I want to do is turn down the light of the skydome light. The intensity is way too high, let's take that down to like 0.7. I want to be able to see the directional light a little bit better, don't want it being overpowered by the skydome light. Let's select the directional light again and start rotating that around so you see its effect a little greater now, and the skydome light has lost some of its influence. Let's see, let's put it in this direction. I like that because I want it to have some darker edges on the inset of this, we can see that it is definitely three-dimensional. The other thing I want to do is turn off the shadow casting on these objects, what we can do is go into their Arnold tab under the shape and turn off cast shadows, you can see it updates and we lose that shadow now. Let me do that for this as well, I don't want to cast any shadows. Then let's do the same thing for this trail. Turn off cast shadows. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. The last thing I want to do is add a little more complexity to the shader. Let's open up the hypershade again, I'm going to turn on the render region here, clicking and dragging. I just want to see like a section of this. I don't want to see the whole thing. What I'm going to do is pipe in the user color into the emission. But I want to do it with a color correction. Let's just pipe it in first under Emission color, and then let's go to the shader itself and go down to a mission and actually turn that on. You can see it brightens up the logo, which is nice, we need to add an adjustment layer here or color correction. I'm going to hit "Tab" and do color, correct. Then instead of going straight into Emission color, I'm going to input it here and then I'll put it there. Now we have this one little area that we can start to adjust the color that we're piping in. I'm going to adjust the gamma, the hue shift, which is cool, at the end of the day, if you don't like that, this is a quick way to make some changes to the logo itself or the color. At least on the emission, you could do the same thing for piping it into the base colors well. I want to increase the contrast. Let's see exposure. I'll leave this up to you to find out, how do you want to use these attributes. It all depends on the colors you want to do, but I just want to show you how you could add a little more control over as well, I'm not going to fiddle with this too much now just for time sake. But just know that's an option that you have another layer of control there in the hypershade, in how to pipe in the data color into other attributes of the shader. Just use crank up the mission to see on and off. Definitely you like it on a little bit, we just going to leave it there. In this lesson, we have so far learned a turnoff the Render preview region. How to adjust a lot of different attributes, and the last piece of the puzzle that we need to add is the original logo backend. 18. Rendering - Part 2: The last piece of the puzzle that we need to add is the original logo back in. I'm going to select and hit "Shift H". I want to add a new shader to that. I'm going to play forward, so we can get to part of the reveal of it, we can see it beneath. I want to also animate on the transparency of it so that we're not seeing it the whole time because there is a little bit of distance between each of these cubes. I don't want us to be able to see it behind it, so we'll animate the transparency on. First, we need to add a new shader. Let's go to assign new material, and then do surface shader, standard surface. Then let's choose that same teal color that we've been using, and let's turn up the transmission. I want to turn on that color as well for that. What that does, we can see in the render, it will give it like a frosted glass look. Turn that up, and so on to check the alpha channel here. We can't see through it, which is a thing to keep in mind right now. Let's go to opaque. Let's make this opaque by selecting it, and choosing the unchecking opaque. I think that doesn't help the alpha channel. I think that's part of the transparency, not the emission. Just keep that in mind, even though it looks transparent, the alpha doesn't respect that meaning, if you bring that into the After Effects or something, it's not actually going to look transparent. Let's go back over to the shader of this. Let's go down to the geometry tab, and you can adjust the opacity here. Like I said, we want to animate this. Now if I go to the alpha channel, you can start to see through it here. It's not totally white, and we can just crank that down even further. It's going to turn that back to RGB, and what I want to do, is also turn on emission with that color. Cool. Let's turn off the specular. I don't want any specular on this. One of the last things we need to do is animate the transparency of the shader, we don't want to see it here, right? We need to animate the transparency of it. Let's animate it on surround. It should be on by Frame 170. Let's go down to the opacity under geometry, and let's just set a key here. Then let's go forward maybe 20 frames, and set a key for it to be black. Let's preview that. Because what we don't want to have happen is this, see the geometry through these little gaps of the cubes until we're ready for it. I'm just going to scrub for it even though it's probably going to space out. See now you can start to see that teal pop through the edges here. It's very subtle, but by the time all of this starts falling, it will be ready to be revealed. Which is cool, and you know what? One thing I might do is I do think I want to turn on, because what I'm reacting to right now is the fact that it's easier to see the teal through the purple then it is like teal on teal. I like that the teal triggers the reveal. But what I'm reacting to is I don't want this teal to take up the whole thing, so I just want to turn on ad fade mode to five on that. 0.05, let's do that, and to 0.05 here. Just for time's sake, I'm going to decrease the render resolution here to like 10 percent, some tiny. I want to see a fiddle playback at all. That's a crazy color. Well, that's not what the color is. Let me turn the test resolution backup. Yeah, I don't like that at all. What's going on there? I think this is the fun part of rendering why 3D can get really time consuming. It's the emission right here is probably too high. If we crank the emission down of the pixels, now, let's just totally black. Just barely leave that on. If you click all the way up, it's just too much. I'm going to delete this color correct. Just pipe it into itself, because I just like the accuracy that color a little bit more. Then we can just dial down the amount of emission that's going on. I just want to be able to see a little bit inside of here, but not all the way. Anyway. That was just a little D2 are there for a second. Let's get the resolution back down at 10 percent, and let's play this, see if I want update it. Easy enough. Again, what I just did is I reduced it to 10 percent because I want to play this back. Because now that's the only way that we can see these color changes when I adjusted it so that instead of being permanently added, the teal, as it goes around, it will fade off. I need to see it actually render now because we've set up all the shaders and stuff. I want to see the rate at which it is probably super tiny on your screens, going to zoom in here then. It's already fading out at a pretty good rate. Because what I want to see is, I want to see purple on teal for this reveal of the logo. Because I don't want to keep some purple here. I don't want it to get like all teal then you can't really see what's happening. Cool. These will just go through the object and we hit escape real quick, and we should be able to see this. Let me bump up the resolution back to a 100. We should be able to see these pieces inside of the logo a little bit. What I'm going to do in After Effects is just fade this to the solid color of a 2D image of the logo. But it's a cool. You can see these are inside of it. Now that we have our render in a good spot, let's render this thing out. I will show you how to bring this into After Effects as well very quickly. But I think for the most part it's working. The only thing I'm worried about now is this big of a highlight. It's going to really paying as it's falling down and rotating. I don't want that to be that big of a highlight. I want to reduce the specularity of this real quick. So one, crack that down is just too much going on. Maybe crank up roughness just a little bit more. I guess I just don't want that super bright white area that we see as cubes are falling and tumbling in. 19. After Effects Export: So now I just want to quickly end the lesson, in this course showing you how to bring it in After Effects to render out a movie file. Because what we are rendering out of Maya is an image sequence. To play that back, you'll have to have some type of application. If you want to share it, you really need a dot movie, or some movie file. To do that, we need to open up aftereffects and we need to import the image files. Let's go over to project and I already started one there. Let me just delete those so we can see it actually happen. I want to go to right-click in here and go to Import File. Then we need to route to whatever folder that we have the image is located in. Currently it's still rendering this is going to take, I think my renders going to take maybe a 30-35 hours to finish. Be prepared for that. Depending on the machine you have that could take quite a while and the settings that you have. But we clicked one image but it will bring in the entire sequence so we can see 36 to 66. I recommend waiting until you have all the images in that you need. But I want to go ahead and show you this, so I can get this course published. I don't have to wait till two days from now. Now that we have this image, we can scrub the timeline to see it playback as we would expect it to. What we really want to do is export it out of here. The other thing to consider is the frame rate we can see it's 24 frames per second. If it doesn't come in as 24 frames a second, you can go to interpret footage main, and then change that frame rate to 24. That's how we animated it in Maya, it should be reading it as 24 here as well. That's how I should be exporting it. Let's go to composition and add to render queue. Now we can set the settings as we see fit. What I recommend on a Mac, I like the progress 42 LT. As a Kodak, you can choose whichever Kodak you like, H.264 is a common one as well and hit okay. Then I like quick time format, I choose that. This has no audio, but it'll export it any way. You could say audio output off, click okay, and then name the file and say wherever you want to save it, hit Save and then click this render button over here.I guess I need to actually have a name for it. I'll say save. Now you get the render button and click this, and it'll start rendering your image sequence as a movie file for you to share, upload to YouTube. It's a lot easier to use it in, Premiere editing software. I'd surely want to thank you for joining me on this course. I hope you enjoyed it as well. Definitely give me some feedback, let me know if you liked it or not and what I can do to improve. I do my best to try to do things that I don't see shown online. This is a pretty comprehensive topic that I haven't seen it really shown on a project basis anywhere else online, which is kind of mind-boggling. I want to do it myself with the digital creator school logo and encourage you to make your own and show me what you make. I want to see what you make off of this course and all the different kind of creations you can make. So I just want to say thanks for joining me in this course. It's been quite a whirlwind of information. I encourage you to re-watch it. If anything was too confusing, it should all be there. But you just might need to watch it not on two times speed and just watch on onetime speed a few times to catch everything that's happening. It's a fine balance between having a course. It's 20 million hours long, which no one is ever going to watch and having one, it's too fast. So hopefully I had the switch spot there and you are able to follow along and make something really cool. I want to see what you make. Please share it and share it around, especially now that you know how to export as a movie file and upload it to YouTube, vimeo, or wherever you want to. I will see you in the next course. Keep creating. Thanks for watching.