Transcripts
1. 3D Type Promo: Welcome to my course, Animate 3D Type. In this course, I'm going to give you all the tools you need, to animate appealing 3D type and Autodesk Maya. This is the animation we're going to create by the end of the course, I'm going to give you all the tools you need and how to overcome many pitfalls you'll encounter when trying to animate 3D type. We're going to start by creating the type. Then we're going to move into how can we modify the type, add bevels, extrusions. Then we're going to move into a very simple way to create really appealing animation with just a few key frames with a built-in Maya type tools. After that, we're going to explore one of the most advanced ways to animate type inside of Maya. But first, we'll have to overcome an obstacle that I've written a custom Python script and I give that to you in the course project files so that with one button you can overcome this obstacle. This will allow us to explore mash, which is been introduced in Autodesk Maya in the last few years. It is incredibly powerful procedural animation tool that with just a few key frames, we can create compelling animation like this. I will show you all the ins and outs that you need to know how to make this for yourself. Lastly, we are going to cover lighting and rendering so that we can export our animation into after effects to do the final color grading and export as a movie file. This course is for any motion graphics artist who wants to start to introduce 3D animation into their work. You don't have to have previous experience in Autodesk Maya, I'll take you from A to Z, everything you need to know to create this animation. This course will also be helpful for people who've taken my other Maya classes, but they've not yet done type-specific animation. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the course.
2. Download Maya Free Trial: Really quickly, I wanted to show you where you can get a free trial of Maya. It's totally free and you can have it free for one month or what I highly, highly recommend if you are a student right now, you can get the software free for three years. This is huge. This is so huge. Even if you aren't going to finish this course right now, whatever, take advantage of this, definitely, definitely do this. It's a full version of Maya. It'll just say every time you open up this scene file, it'll say, this is a student version and that's it. But it's a full version of Maya. Definitely, do this if you're a student somewhere, I think you might have to have a dot edu e-mail address or something to prove you're a student or surname your student ID but do that if you're a student at a university or a school somewhere, otherwise you can get it for one month for free. Then you can move into a subscription basis and just pay each month that you actually use it instead of one big payment. They might move the URL around, but I'll include this in the about section of the course. You can just click the link or Google free trial of Maya. It should take you to Autodesk's website and you can download that there. Now let's get started in the next lesson.
3. Maya Interface Refresh: In this first lesson, we're just going to get re-familiarized with Maya. 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 and right-click to zoom in and out. If you don't like the color of your background here like mine, you going to all b and change that. I like to keep it blue, just so there's a gradient and you see more contrasts there. This is our 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 kind of nice that the 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 key frames and we're going to use just maybe two of these menus up here. So 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, and maybe yours doesn't look exactly like mine right now, but basically we have an 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 and you can always turn that back on. So 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, and we're going to rename them here, and let's just create an object real quick. I'll go to the poly modeling shelf and hit a sphere. Now we have a sphere, I'll hit F to focus in on it, so 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 snap scaling on, which is annoying. There's a bunch of little options here, so 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 to keep it at whole integers, we can change that by holding down R, left clicking and then we can see snaps scale is checked on, and so 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 and dimension, there's a bunch of menus in here. Click on W, you get the move options here, so we can move based on world space. I don't know if you noticed, if I rotate this over and now the up axis is still up and down even though the spheres rotated over. If we want to get back to having an object mode here, we can do that by holding down W, left clicking and holding down left-click, and then when we release, it will choose that other mode. The same is true for rotation as well and 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 and it'll snap that, but I think that was just on by mistake. There's those types little hidden menu's there. 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 we're on the attribute editor, and then we have our channel box here. You can see channel boxes written here, and 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 and all of its absolute values based on the scene here. What that means is, if I move it around, you'll see these values update. There's one cool thing about Maya is you can actually freeze transform, so for whatever reason say I want this position over here now to be considered 00 for this object, I can just go to modify, freeze transformations, and now everything is nice and clean and all zeroed out. If I happen to move that over there for some reason, I know if I select all of these value, enter the fields here, I can hit zero, 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. With this manipulator, you can also select the constraint options here, so we can go on two axes, we can also go on two axes this way. I'm not going back and forth in these space here like this, and I can prevent that from happening by selecting this middle handle there. You can see it as I rotate around. In this lesson we covered on navigating around the viewport. We talked about how to manipulate objects and some of the little quirks, and menus that you can find, and adjust how you manipulate and move things around. In the next lesson, we're going to jump right in and start creating our type, and then we'll move on into animating it. Thanks for watching.
4. Create Text: In this lesson, we're going to create the type that we're going to use to animate later on in the course. First I just wanted to show you the texts that inspired the course. It was for a blog post I wrote for digital creator school called GET HIRED STAY HIRED and I wanted a little animation to go along with that title. I created this and what I realized was, there's a ton of little got you moments and little pitfalls that you want to avoid when working with text in Maya and I think it constitutes an entire course because it can be frustrating if you're not familiar with it and even if you are, it can still be frustrating. I wanted to make this course so that you can avoid those frustrations when you're creating the text and type animation. We're first going to start with creating the text then we're going to animate it in a simple basic way using the built-in type animation tools. Then we're going to animate it in a very advanced way and we'll get deeper into Maya and you'll have a lot more control over it but first, let's just get started by creating the type. The first thing we want to do is open up a new scene in Maya and we want to set our projects. Let's go to file, set project and mine is going to be called, basically you're just trying to find a folder, so my folder is 3D text animation and I'm just going to make this Maya folder, the project folder. I'm going to hit set, now it's going to ask me, do I want to make this default workspace thing? This just is basically holds like what Windows you had open, so when it reopens it and all that stuff, it'll be in the same place. Create default workspace is fine. Now the next thing we want to do is make sure that type bundle is loaded. What that means is if we go on into the poly modeling shelf here, that this button will work or not. We want to go to Windows settings preferences could have plug-in manager and then scroll all the way down to type bundle and you can see they're both checked on and all you have to do is check both of those and then X out. You might have to restart Maya if you do that and it still doesn't work, just restart Maya and then now when you click t here under a poly modeling shelf, you should have 3D type and so bingo. You can also see it show up in our outliner here called tight mesh and the attribute editor should pop up if it doesn't, you can just scroll over to the attribute editor here and if you don't see the type displayed here, you can just click the tab there, or you can go to focus and type the type tab. If you don't see that, maybe for some reason if you accidentally click on these little arrows to scroll between all the tabs and there's a lot of them. You can always go to focus and go to type, so that'll bring you back, cool. You can click in here in this field and just start typing. For me, I'm going to use the phrase keep creating, which is something I tell my students at Digital Creator School. It will respect when you hit enter. We can have a lot of different paragraphs here and you do want to make sure that your cursor is selected here otherwise, when you start typing, it might think you're doing things in the viewport and freak out like this. Just select the geometry again here and that liner, and then you can get back to the tab here on the attribute editor, cool, so now I can just keep typing if we want. But that's the phrase I'm going to use, and I'm going to use a different font. You can use whatever font that you would like for the phrase that you have and if you're familiar with Photoshop and really anything that has character adjustments, you can pretty quickly recognize all of these controls. We can center it, you can change the font size, which really isn't that important, we can just move the camera closer later. It doesn't really matter what size it is, because since this is the only thing in the scene, doesn't really matter what size we have it at. Then of course, tracking can spread out the characters and then I have no kerning, so doesn't matter but yes, so there's pretty basic controls here and again, you have your other font, specific controls and these drop-down menus but what I want to talk about is also how can we start framing this up, how do I know that I want to get this centered if I don't know what my camera is yet. Well, we're not going to deal with exactly where the camera's going to be just yet but I wanted to show you how to get a rough idea of how you want to use the camera and that's with the resolution gate. If you go up here and let me see if I can zoom in and there's this little button in the viewport menu here and it's called resolution gate, if you click that now you can see it has the square box around the viewport, maybe we don't want to have it have this aspect. You can see it says 960 by 540 here up here it says 960 by 540 and it tells us we're using the perspective camera down here. But maybe we want this for Instagram, that's what I made this for, I made this square for Instagram or other social media platforms. Let's say we want to make this square instead. All we have to do is go over here to the render settings up here, which is the clapper Board and this little gear wheel.. When I click that, it'll open up this new menu and all we have to do is scroll down to the image size and we have presets here that we can choose from, we could choose HD-1080, which a basic format or we're going to type our own in and like the example I showed, which is a square format, we can choose that by typing in something that's the same width and height. You notice that the resolution gate changed in the background here when I did that and it's frustrating because now we can't see the top of this thing because it's so square. Well, one way to get around that is by using the 2D pan and zoom tool. What that means is instead of moving the camera around and we can actually move the view of this and the view port around. If you look at your keyboard, and on most keyboards it's above the return or enter key on the right-hand side, and it's the backslash button. If we press that and then use the same camera manipulation tools we've been using, we can actually pan and zoom out of this view. Now we can see the entire resolution gate. We can also see it says 1080 by 1080 up here. But so now we can see the whole frame and it will gives a better idea of how we want to frame this up maybe we do want to have it in left aligned, something like that. If we're going to have it square, who knows. That's just a rough way to get an idea of how to set the resolution of the camera and get to see the entire resolution gate. Again, we can turn that on and off by just clicking that button up here and we're back to our normal view but you can see down here it says 2D pan and zoom, so I know that's still on. If I just tap that button on my keyboard and that backslash button, so if I just tap that little toggle that mode, you'll also see this little button over here gets highlighted. You can tell whether that's on or not. When we're in this mode, we have to be holding down that button on the keyboard, the backslash for that to actually initiate, if we don't, we're just going to be moving around and we're holding down all. We're just going to be moving around the viewport as normal but that only will ever really matters if we actually want to see the whole resolution gate. I'm holding down the backslash button and I'm using my middle mouse and right-clicking to get around and then I'm switching back over by holding down Alt to do normal camera moves. I'm going to leave that off for now and turn off the resolution gate but that's just a quick way to start to frame up and understand how do you want to organize this text. I am going to put an exclamation point there and I think that's good. In the next lesson, we're going to cover some more specifics on how to adjust the text a little bit. Bevels and extrusions and all kinds of things. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will cover some more specifics about how to adjust the text. Thanks for watching.
5. Modify Text: In this lesson, we're going to quickly cover the other attributes that we can control to adjust the text. If we go over here to the type tab again, we can see there's geometry tab. Let's click that. Let's Zoom in on one of these little curves here. Let's say this E here. You can see how faceted this is it's pretty stepped here where it's not super smooth of a curve. The quickest way to fix that is with the curve resolution. If I just crank that up, you can see it smooths out that curve really well. I'm going to also turn on anti-aliasing here just so we can see a little better in the viewport. It doesn't affect anything in the render. It's just for our own purposes while we're working. It helps us see a little better. Now we have the curve figured out. Again, maybe I wanted that more blocky. I can totally change that as well. Change the feel of the text or the font. But so now we have smoother edges. Let's keep scrolling down here. The next thing that we can look at is deformable type. We're going to use this as a way to get around a bug and Maya, when you use it with Mash network for animating motion graphics, which is this little button up here. Let's go to the animation tab. There's this Mash menu we're going to use later on. This is the advanced way to animate things procedurally in Maya. We're going to cover this in more detail. But basically I want to address this now because we need to add more geometry to this type at this stage of the game so that it'll correct a problem later on and will prevent a problem later on. That problem is if you don't check deformable type. So we check that, you can see we get a lot more geometry here on the faces of everything. If we don't do this and when you use Mash later on, you're going to have holes all in your geometry. You're going to have faces trying to connect from one vertices to another over here doing crazy stuff like this. It's a nightmare. You don't want to forget this is very, very, very important. Otherwise you're going to be very frustrated later on when you have holes all in your text and it doesn't look good. This is intended as a way if you were actually going to deform the text somehow. Let's say I'm going to right-click here, go to vertex mode and then just select some of these vertices and I have soft selection on which is B. If I hit B it toggles it, and then if I hold down B and middle mouse drag it, it affects the soft selection. Let's just say I want to rotate some of these around or something weird like that. We have a lot of geometry here to support that. Cool, It looks okay. It doesn't look great, but for our example, it's fine. Let me just undo this little bit. We have the deformable type off. Now let me try to do the same thing. Go in here, select some vertices, have the same soft selection on. Have B selected and says soft mode is on. I tried to do that. I can't rotate this because there's no geometry there. There's no geometry on the faces. I can't deform it. That's what that checkbox was for deformable geometry. With that off, you can't really deform the geometry that well. The reason for that is because we don't have any information, we don't have any geometry, we don't have any scaffolding to hold up that deformation. That's the intention behind that checkbox. But we're using it for different purpose. We want to make sure that we don't have holes in our text later on just because of a bug in Maya and maybe in future versions they'll fix this. But I want to talk about that now just so you're aware of it and we can adjust the density and one of these settings as well, if we go Zoom in here and say max edge divisions, we can increase that or decrease it. We can also reduce the threshold at which a considers where to put the geometry. But for the most part, the default settings are fine for what we're going to use it for. So I'm going to close that down. Then we can look at this is bugging me. I'm just going to turn off the grid here. It's just annoying since we just have to keep creating on here. The next thing is extrusion and that's just means how thick the letters are. I'm going to increase mine a little bit just to give it some more depth. Let's just say six. Now we can see that it's thickened letters up and we can just adjust that however we want. We can also adjust the profile of it right now it's really linear, but you can have a different profile if you want. Let's say for example we want the extrusion part to be a little thicker. Let's get this back to six. We can't really tell that much of a difference because the offset isn't on. Actually you just need to crank up the offset. Now you can see the extrusion is mimicking this type of a profile here, it's rounded. Problem is we don't have a ton of information there. What we need to do is increase the divisions. It has more geometry there to describe that area. Cool, that looks a lot better. I can also dial that back if I want the faces to be a little more prevalent, which works pretty well. Let me just unselect that and see. I actually like that a little bit. You can see where there might be a problem here though in the geometry. Let's just scale this back. Sorry, not the divisions let's scale offset back and see where it's starting to intersect. It appears that the deformable geometry is maybe becoming a problem because there's too many edges here or something like that. Let's see. If I crank this up, it looks like the culprit is this edge right here. If we go back up, we can maybe say, I don't know if this is associate with the curve resolution sorry, it's to deformable type. If we crank that down, we can actually get rid of that edge. Now that's not a problem and we can adjust. Let's see what's the sweet spot. It looks like it turns on and off between eight and nine. We'll leave it on eight then. Then I'm going to continue with this offset. Now the offset is fixed. We can go as far as we want really. You're going to adjust these on the fly. You don't have to delete this and start all over every time you have a problem. That's really, really useful. Let me just deselect that again. I'm just selecting anywhere in the viewport to deselect it. I like that to be honest, I wasn't expecting to do that, but I like it. That's pretty cool. Then the next thing we're going to do is bevel and it probably don't work that well with this type of an effect. I'm just going to turn the offset off for now. Then let's go scroll down to the bevel and we need to enable it. As we enable, you can see the letters get fatter. Let me just turn on and off and see the get fatter. That's because we're using the outer bevel style. If we use inner bevel and we turn that on and off, you can see that the letters don't get bigger. If you need to make your letters stay consistent and stay the size they are, choose the inner bevel option here. Similarly to the profile that we made for the extrusion, you can make a different profile for the bevel. If you look at this edge here, it's just rounded right now. Let me try to look at it in a profile view on this curve, you can see where this is rounded off. To see how this rounds off, I turn off the bevel, you can see it goes from a straight edge to a rounded edge. That edge is controlled similarly to all the extrusion stuff. It's the same idea. We can make our own points in here if we want to make our own custom bevels, you can set update automatically and we can increase the divisions here to help it smooth that out. But yeah, you can control the bevel profile as well through here. Again, I think I'm going to just use the extrusion method. I don't like the bevel combining these two for what I'm doing. But feel free to use that experiment with it. I'm going to turn back on the offset for the extrusion. This gets rounded off again. Maybe crank it up a little bit so the faces are smaller. Yeah, it's looking pretty good. Those are the biggest effects we can do with a built-in type tools. In the next lesson, we're going to create some animation in a very basic way for this text. Later on in the course, we're going to cover very advanced animation. But I just want to show you what's possible right now with the tools that we have with the type function before we get into the mash network which is the menu up here. We're going to cover in depth later on in the course, but in the next lesson we're going to cover the animation tab. Thanks for watching.
6. Animate Text: In this lesson, we're going to animate the text now in a very basic way but very effective. It's a built-in way within the type tool that we've already created here. We can go over to the animation tab and enable Animate here by clicking the checkbox. Now we have a ton of options available to us and what we're going to do is, animate the characters. If you have multiple lines or multiple words here, you could choose word, but because my phrase is short, I'm going to choose Character. The first thing I want to do is, I want to have all of the letters spin around themselves. What we can do is, go over to rotate and we can set a key by right-clicking in this box and say set key. I'm choosing this one because I know that is rotate y. How do I know that's rotate y? Well, that's something in Maya that's true for every field that you can type a value into. If there's three of them, it's going to be x, y and z. If we look at the little pivot box over here, we know that y is straight up and down. If I want them to pivot around that pole here, which is straight up and down, I need to choose the y one. The other way you can test that is by holding down Command or Control and a middle mouse dragging in this value field and you can see that I can rotate the letters around that pivot I was referring to. That's pretty cool. That's how I know I want to set a key on this one. I can also just choose Set Keys and it'll set a key for everything. Let's just set a key because we rotate y is what we want. I can right-click in this area and say Set Key. Now on the timeline all I have do is left click and drag and go over, let's maybe say it takes two seconds. This is set to 24 frames a second. We can see that over here and so I know that 48 means it's two seconds, so the animation is going to be two seconds long. If I click in this field now and I type in 360 because I want it to spin all the way around, you can see something weird happens. Not everything has turned around. Why is that? If we look down here, we have delay and delay frames is 50. It's actually delaying it longer than our entire animation. That's the default for delaying frame. If we type in zero here, it's not going to delay it at all. Now everything is rotated all the way back around. Let's click over here and go to the beginning. We can hit Play or we can hit Alt V as the shortcut to play back. I'm going to click that. You can see everything rotates around itself one time. It's pretty cool. I'm also going to reduce the timeline since we're only using a smaller portion of it. But what if we actually did want to delay frame? It's this cascading effect. I can actually just turn this back on and slide this around and see what we get. I'm going to go back to the first frame by clicking the back arrow here or you can just click and drag this to frame 1. Now I'm going to set this to some random number here and see how that affects it. Now you can see everything's not happening at the same time. It's a lot more appealing and interesting than have it all happen at the same time. I think that's why they choose a default value for you here just because they know you probably not going to want to have these all animate together at the same time. You'll find that Maya a lot where they'll just input default values for you. That they're just taking a wild guess at what you might want. But do your own thing. Don't follow that and also you can randomize it because right now, you can see that it's happening in this cascading way with the first letter, then the second letter. But if you check, Randomize, who knows which one it will start with and cascade toward so it's random. If that's something that you want, you can choose that. You can also maybe we don't want the A to start here for whatever reason. We can just choose a different random seed. We can just slide this slider until we can see that the a letter is not rotating here on this frame. For whatever reason we don't want it to rotate the other or we want to rotate before the others. We can choose a random seed for that randomized delay here. Now we have them all moving at different times randomly. We can turn that off. I'll just uncheck Randomized Delay and we're back to doing the cascading animation. Of course, this works with all the other types of attributes here. Let's say we want this to bounce up and down just a little bit, in the middle of this animation. I'm going to go to the first frame. I'm going to set a key on translate y. Again, we know y is up and down and that's the middle one because again it's x, y, z as how they ordered these across so x, y, and z. We want y. Let's go to the first frame here and we're going to set a key on zero, right-clicking in here and saying Set Key. Then we're going to go to this frame 48 and we're going to set another key so that's back at zero again. Now we can go right into the middle, which we know is 24 because half of 48 is 24 and we can give this a little bit of a value. Again, I'm going to hit Command and hold down Command on the keyboard and middle mouse drag in the field here. Sometimes it won't update until you let go. Once I let go and it might also be because we have randomized on. Sorry, not randomized but delay frame. Let's turn off delay frame so we can see how high we are actually making this go. When I reduce this back down and then let go, you can see it updates. That's just a little quirky thing. Even if I'm changing this, it's not actually updating until I let go. I just wanted to go up like maybe 0.1. Then I'll turn the delay frames back on now that I can see it's going the distance that I want it to. Now 0.1 is definitely not high enough. I can go back to frame 24 and let's just say one. Yeah, that's looks better. Then yeah, we can see it goes up and down. Let's just really do this. Five, yeah, that's a lot better. See, you can update this stuff really quickly, type in new values and now we have this interesting animation. It's not all happening at once. We haven't had to make a key frame for each of these letters. If we wanted to do this without the type, this would be way more tedious to animate each one of these individual pieces of geometry and delay them ourselves. Then if we're like, ''What now, I don't like that long of a delay.'' It will be a nightmare and very time consuming to then re-change all of these offsets for each one of these letters. But, in here we can just say, "You know what, delay it less and we're done." We just have one control that will affect all of the characters together. That's why this is incredibly powerful and easy to use in Maya. It's a really simple way to get interesting animation very quickly. That leaves me and the next little section and we are going to get way more advanced, okay? If you're a beginner, maybe this is where you bow out and come back when you're feeling more comfortable or if you're an intermediate user and you've waiting for something more advanced then this is your chance here in the next lessons. But I wanted to explain a little bit about what we're going to do. We are going to use MASH, right? I've mentioned this a few times in the course here in the next lesson to use it to animate. In MASH or sorry, in the type tab you can actually see it says Connect to MASH here so the reason we're not going to use this is because of how Maya deals with pivots using MASH. Okay, if we were to use this little, I mean, it's convenient Connect to MASH. Connect to MASH. If we click this, it would make a MASH Waiter and do all that stuff for us. The problem is and why we're not going to use this is, how MASH does pivots. That's going to be a big part of this course is overcoming that. I've written a script so you can just click one button. It's going to fix this for you. But I want to talk you through it in case you want to change the pivot. I want to show you exactly what's going on behind the scenes in the next lessons of how MASH deals with pivots and why we're not going to use this. Because if we click this, we will not be able to do this type of animation where it's pivoting around its center here, right? Each letter is doing its own thing with MASH, right? If we use MASH and we try to do something like this, it will pivot the entire phrase. We won't even be able to separate the words here. That's a huge limitation of using this convenient method here of connecting MASH to it. I just wanted to give a little backstory. If this sounds confusing just ignore what I just said and just follow along in the next lesson. I just want to give me context and help you understand why it is what we're doing, right? I can show you all the buttons in the world, but if you don't understand why we're clicking the buttons then you're not going to learn as much so that's why I'm trying to explain why I'm not using this. Because the pivots are in the wrong place and we want to have absolute control over everything when we're using MASH. We're going to use a different method and we're going to get a little down and dirty with this thing and break it apart and do it exactly how we want to do it. Instead of using this cut and paste in paint-by-numbers method here, because it doesn't give us as much control when we're using MASH. In the next lesson, we're going to discuss pivots. We're going to talk about how to overcome that. I'm going to show you why all this is important and hopefully explain everything I just said. I will see you the next lesson and thanks for watching.
7. Fix Pivot Script: In this lesson, I want to prepare the text for animating with Mash. I'm also going to demonstrate the script that I wrote and how to use it. First, we have this animation that we've already created in the previous lessons. Now we just need to get rid of that, and clean up the scene so we can animate this in a different way now. For us to do that, there's a couple of different ways we can delete keyframes. We can Shift, click, and drag, to select multiple keyframes in the timeline, and right-click and go down to Delete. I'll just undo that, the other thing we can do is go to wherever the attributes are, and we don't even have to be on the keyframe, though we can see this is red, we can right-click there and say, "Break Connection". Then we can just do this to the other, and we'll break connection here. The only problem when you do this not on a zero, is it'll leave the last value here. Everything is a little bit screwed up, so we can just type in zero to get that back to the default values. We've gotten rid of the animation we've already created. Now, we want to separate the geometry out from this type, and create our own geometry from it. Basically, we're going to duplicate this. There's a couple different ways to duplicate it, but basically Command D is the quickest way, so let's hit Command D or Control D with the Type selected, and now we have typeMesh2 in the Outliner. You can see we have a second one. If you hit "W" and move this around, you can see we do have a second one there. I don't want to delete this first one. I just want to hide it, so I'm going to hit "Control H" to hide it. Now when we move this around, we can see it is the only one that we can visibly see now. The reason why I want to keep this first one is just in case, for safety. If I want to go back and adjust the text, even though it will mean a lot, maybe more work to recreate everything we're about to do, from here forward, it'll at least give me the option to go back in and tweak some values if I wanted to change the font or the text for some reason. Now that we have this type mesh, we need to separate it out. It's all one piece right now, and we want each letter to be its own thing. You can have each word be its own thing, but for this example we're going to use, we're going to do it for each letter. I'm going to go to the Modelling tab up here on the top left. I'm going to go to Mesh, and Separate. That's going to separate each piece of geometry. That worked really well. The only thing is you can see the pivot is left at what is considered zero zero world space. I'm going to turn the grid back on just so you can see that. That's something we'll deal with with the script. But everything worked fine except for this exclamation point. Because that's two pieces, and when you click "Separate", it doesn't really know the difference between one piece of geometry and the other as far as text is concerned, so it's going to separate everything. If you have a certain font that has different pieces separate from another, you're going to want to recombine this after you separate it. Select those pieces that need to be recombined to be one-piece, and go to Mesh, and Combine. It's right above Separate, what we just did. Now we have that. You can see where it brought this piece outside of the group it created when we did the separation, and now we have all these little weird groups that we didn't make. At no point that I make this. Maya tries to keep a history of things, and so it starts adding up all this garbage that we don't really need. We need to select all of the geometry. I'm just going to turn off the grid so we can see what we're doing. To clean up this garbage here, that these random little empty groups, we can go to Edit, Delete by Type, and we can go to History. We don't want to do all, because I'll do everything in the scene. We just want to do Delete by Type, that means what we have selected. Let's go Delete by Type History, and now you can see that that garbage is gone. Let me just put this back in this group here. I was just middle- mouse dragging that. That's how you can move things around. I could also Command click the group and hit P to parent it, but I just like doing middle mouse dragging something and dropping it in. We'll do the same thing. Now we have the text that's ready to go, and I'm not going to spend any time in this video discussing the reason why I created the script or what the script is doing, I'm going to do that in a separate video after this one. I encourage any advanced users or someone starting out, who's curious behind the why of what we're doing, to take a look at that video. But if you're a beginner and you don't want to get too confused or bogged down in the details, just skip the next video, because you don't really need to understand it to have this effect done. But I want to offer that explanation for people who wants it. Just keep that in mind for the next video. You can skip that, if you're interested in that detailed minutiae stuff, or if you're in an advanced user, I'm going to walk you through what the problem is, and how I overcame it, and the reason why I wrote the script. Anyway, I'm going to show you how to use the script right now, and it should be as a text file in the project files that you're provided, so I'm going to go over to the Text Editor. We have this script, and it's a Python script, which is a coding language. All you have to do is select everything, Command A, and then Command C to copy it. Then we can paste it in Maya in two different places. There's this mini script editor down here, and we can toggle between a MEL, which is the Mule Expression Language or the Python language. This is a Python script, so we want to make sure this is set to Python. What I'd like to do is use this script editor. It's over here on the bottom right. It will open up a new window when you click that, or it should. We'll let the little spinny wheel do its magic. Now we have this new window called the Script Editor, and it will actually give us a history of everything that we've done, which can be very useful, especially when you're writing scripts. But so you can see if we select something, it'll record that here in a history. Any operation we, do will be recorded here. But it's also where we can paste the script and that we've created. If you don't have an empty Python tab yet, you can hit this plus button, and it'll ask you if you want this new tab to be MEL or Python. Let's choose Python, and then now we can hit Command V or Control V, to paste in that script that we just copied from the Text Editor over here. I'm going to go into the script in more detail in the next lesson, so I'm going to leave that for now. Basically, all you need to do is select all the geometry and then hit "Run". But the other little thing that might be useful to know, is you can actually save scripts into a custom shelf. Let's go to our Custom shelf here, and I'm going to hit Command A to select everything. I'm going to middle mouse drag that up into the shelf. I'm holding down middle mouse button. I'm going to let go over the shelf, and it's going to make this new button here. If I right-click it, I can edit it, and I can see what it is, and it's the exact same thing that we just had in the Script Editor. It's pretty cool. If we go to the Shelves tab, we can actually give this button a name, under Icon Label. We can say, text script, and when I hit "Enter", you can see it pop up here. I've actually already made this button a couple times. I've recorded and rerecord this just because I'm trying to figure out how best to organize this, because I don't want to confuse beginners. Anyway, this is the third time I've recorded this video. Because I just want to keep this very simple for beginners in this video and more advanced in the next lesson. Now we have our script, saved our shelf. We could also still run it from here. We just don't want anything selected when we run it, and to run a script from the Script Editor, we can just hit this play button down here. Again, we don't want anything selected or highlighted down here. First, I want to make sure that everything is selected. I can Shift, select it from the Outliner or I can click and drag, select it here. I can use the button up here. I can just click that, or I can run it from the script editor, which I'll do here. I'll just hit play. We have all of these new groups in our Outliner. Basically, what it did, was create an offset for these individual letters. That will be incredibly useful to us when we're using Mash, and allow us to have the pivot point be exactly where it is here instead of at zero zero. That's incredibly important, and this is also why you don't want to use the Mash little option that I mentioned in the previous video down here. This will not allow you to have a pivot point on each one of the letters. That's why we need to duplicate the mesh, separate the letters out, recombine any that we need to, and then select all of them, and then go to Edit, Delete by Type History, and then select all of them and run the script. That's pretty much all the steps we did in this lesson. Thanks for watching. If you're a beginner and you don't want to get too confused, do not watch the next lesson. If you're a beginner and you're curious or you're an advanced user, you want to understand what the problem is here and why this script is necessary, then go ahead and watch the next lesson where I will describe the problem that this script overcomes for you. Thanks for watching, and I will see you next lesson or the one after that, depending on what you choose to do. Thanks for watching.
8. Fix Pivot Explanation: Welcome to this lesson where I'm going to do a little deep dive here and explain what the pivot problem actually is and why we need to solve it in the previous lesson with that script. If you're a beginner and you don't want to get confused again, skip this video. This lesson is really only going to be for you to watch. You don't have to follow along with anything that I'm doing, just watch what I'm doing and listen to the explanation to understand. You're free to try this stuff yourself, but I'm not going to go through and explain exactly what I'm doing to create the conditions to show the problem because I'll have to explain MASH and we're not ready to learn MASH just yet. I'm not going to be explaining MASH in this lesson, I'm just going to be explaining the problem. This is only just for your greater understanding and broader understanding of 3D and how MASH works basically in this one specific instance of pivots. We have our texts that we have already made. I'm going to go and hide that and I'm going to make just a little cube for our use here just so we can see what's going on. I'll turn the grid back on. Let's say, and again, I'm not going to explain MASH right now, so don't worry about the buttons I'm pressing. Just totally ignore the buttons I'm pressing, just watch the results. Don't try to follow along and do the exact same thing I'm doing, just listen in this lesson. I'm going to create the conditions so we can see what the pivot problem actually is. Let's say I want to pivot around the base of this. I want this to rotate around the bottom. If I choose that correct axis, you can see that it's actually rotating around the center. It's rotating around the center of the cube. That's not what we want. How do we get the pivot to be where it needs to be? Well, we can try a couple different things. We're just going to undo this MASH network. The first thing we could do is we can bring this up to maybe the floor and then move the pivot down, so I'm holding down D and V to snap the pivot down. Now, let's try it. Let's try to do the same thing we were doing. I'm going to leave this open so I can quickly create these MASH networks. No big deal. I'll put it back down to 00, but let me try that rotate X again. Again, even though we move the pivot, we move the pivot in the geometry. You saw me do that. We moved to the bottom, it's still does the exact same thing as before. Now, what's the problem? Problem is we did not freeze the transformations. It still has these transforms here because we had to translate it up to get it to the floor. We could also just leave it where it's at and do D and V and bring that down. Actually, I accidentally hit S there. You can see the red tick marks. I'm just going to undo the key frame. Now, the object is still at 00, and we've moved the pivot, and everything is zeroed out. That's different than what we just did. We had the transforms earlier. Now, let's see what happens. Create this MASH network, looks the same. Go and try to rotate this around the base again. Again, no go. It's doing the exact same thing. Why is that? It's because MASH takes the pivot off of 000 because there's three axes. We're working in 3D, so X, Y, Z 000, which is this point in world space. We're on the right track just a minute ago when I move the object up. Holding down X, I'm going to snap it to the grid at 000. Now, the pivot is at 000. The object is at 000 according to its pivot. The problem now is the fact that we have this translation. We don't want that because we're going to end up with the same problem. We've already tried this before and it didn't work. The other thing we have left is let's do the freeze transformations. We have the object selected. We'll modify freeze transformations. Now, it zeroed down. Everything is zeroed down and the pivots at 000. Cool. Now, watch what happens. I'm going to go create that MASH network, I'm going to rotate, and you guessed it, it does work. You can see that it is pivoting from the bottom where we put the pivot. That's where it's pivoting. It's no longer pivoting from the center. That's the basic explanation for what is going on and why you have to control the pivot before you create the MASH network. You want to have an understanding of how you want to animate these objects before you create the MASH networks. I'm just going to undo all of this. I'm going to duplicate this out, so we have another copy here. For our purposes with text, if we do the same thing we did in the last lesson, so I'll go to Modeling, MASH, Separate, and then I'll just combine these two. Make sure we have those combined. When I combine, it actually move the pivot. Now, you can see the pivot. This is centered on these two objects, but everything else, the pivot is still at 000. I'm just going to delete this for clarity sake. It's just going to confuse things. Each letter is now its own piece of geometry, but its pivots at 000. What's going to happen when we create a MASH network of this? Again, just ignore what I'm doing here just to get everything back to where it needs to be so we can have a one-to-one example here of our text to our geometry here. I'm just having to do a couple little things in MASH. I'll explain later. We will go through all this in the next lesson. We have our MASH network, we have our object in the MASH network. All the letters are there. You can see 12 here. That means there's 12 things, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2. That's one for each of the letters. Now, let's go back over here. Let's create a way that we can rotate this guy. Now when I rotate this, look where it's rotating, it's rotating from 000, because that's where all of these pivots were, and Mash is going to pick up where the pivot is for each one of these. If I go in and I center the pivot of all these, go Modify Center Pivot. Now each one of the letters has its own pivot in the center of its mass. If I go back through the same process, give Maya a second to think. Again, just ignore what I'm doing for now. I'll explain everything later, what I'm doing. If we try to do the same thing now, it's still rotating the dang thing from 000, even though we set the pivot there, and even though all of these pieces of geometry were zeroed out. Now again, why is that? I'm going to drive this point home. The reason is because Maya does not care where the pivot is. It does not care where this piece of geometry is. It is always going to base everything off of this point, this 000 point right here. This is 000. Every letter is going to have to be at that point. Now if we do that, it's not going to look like the word that we typed out. To get the right pivot, everything is going to be bunched up there at 000. That does not look like the word keep. How we overcome that, is we have to create an offset with groups, and that's what is scripted. That's why there's all those groups in the Outliner, because that is holding the offset. That's why I named it offset, because we are creating this offset within this hierarchy so that it thinks that this piece of geometry is at 000, so that when you use Mash, it will actually rotate around itself here. It's hidden right now, but it will actually rotate around itself when we use Mash, because we have these offsets built in and that's what the script did, that I created for your ease of use. I'm just undoing all this so we can get back to have our example set up. I want to show you how to do this for yourself because you might enter a scenario where, for example, like this K, I don't really like where it thinks the center of this is, as you know I centered the pivot, so it does all its math and it figures out, all right, where's the absolute center of this K? Well, where it figures out where the absolute center is for the K when I hit Center Pivot, when I use that Modify, Center Pivot tool, that might not be where I want it to be. I might want this pivot to be more where the junction of this part of the K meets the vertical part, or maybe where these two meet. Maybe I want to change the pivot. In that case, you'll have to do this by hand and the script won't work, because the script will center the pivot of all your letters. If you want to have a custom pivot for your letters or whatever object that you eventually use with Mash, you need to know how to do this by hand. We're going do that now. I'm just going to go ahead and hide everything else, because we're only going to deal with the K right now. What we need to figure out is, what is the difference between this position and 000? How far away is this thing from 000? Because right now it has everything zeroed out, so we can't tell what's the absolute distance here between 000 and this object, because it has zeroed out transforms. A quick way to do that would be to look a little deeper into the Attribute editor, because even though this is showing that it's zeroed out for its transformations, Maya actually stores this absolute value of where it is in space down here in the pivots. We can see World Space, this is an absolute value. Now we have the values we need, and of course it goes X, Y, and then Z. What we need to do is we need to offset this by the inverse of this value, because if we do positive 22, it'll get back closer to the center. If we do negative five, it'll put it down on the floor here, and basically we need to get this pivot back to 000. The key to that are these numbers. If I copy this, and I go back over here, or I can even just do it up here to stay in the same window, I paste that in, but I do the inverse so I remove the negative. Basically I'm timesing all of it by negative one in my head. So five whatever becomes negative five whatever, I'm saying whatever meaning 0.8826. We want to do that for Z as well. You can see as I'm doing this, it's getting closer and closer to 000, because I'm inverting this. Now I've inverted it. Well, what good does that do us when you look at everything else? It screws up our word. We need to get keep back over here now. How do we do that? We put it in a group. Now I'm going to group this. I can hit Command-G. Now the K is in group, I'm just call this K letter offset, you can name this whatever you want. Now, I'm going to put back in these numbers and I'm going to do the inverse of them into the group. I have the letter selected. Let me just tie it all these other letters so we can see what we're doing. I'm going to select the letter, I'm going to copy this value, and I'm going to go into the group, I'm going to do the inverse of this again, so I'm going to go negative. Now it's going back to where it used to be. I'm going to take this from the letter, I'm going to put it into the group and I'm going to times it by negative one in my head. I'm going to paste this in, a negative times a negative makes it positive. Now, I can remember this from memory, that was three. Let me double-check. Yeah, negative three, so that's right. The group should be positive three. Now when we look at all the letters, Shift-H to unhide it, we can see we have that offset built-in into the group, and this letter is where it should be relative to the other letters to create this word. This is what the script does. Everything that we just did is what the script does for you in one split second, which I think is just so cool about scripting. When you come across something like this, it's going to be a repetitive task. That took me five minutes to explain. Once you get it down, it'll take 30 seconds to a minute to do for each letter. But if you have 16 letters, or say you're doing this over and over again, that could be hours of work to create these offsets. But I'm giving you this script to do it in an instant. I'm super excited to give you that script because it's going save you hours of work. You don't have to do this, just use the script. Well, I hope this made sense, if it didn't re-watch this video, understand the pivot means the object has to be at 000. But we're animating text and words, we can't do that, we need these pieces of geometry and these letters to be exactly where we want them to be, to create these words, so we have to create these offsets to trick Mash to think it's at 000 so the pivot is in the correct place that we want it to be. I hope that makes sense, and if it doesn't again, re-watch that, use the script, it'll help you a lot. But if you want to make your own custom pivot points, re-watch this and do what I just did, follow those steps, and you'll have your geometry or your text, or your words already to use in Mash, which we're going to jump into in the next lesson. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there.
9. MASH Setup: In this lesson, I want to introduce you to MASH. MASH is the motion graphics tool set, that Maya introduced a couple of years ago into Maya and it's incredibly useful. We access it in the animation tab over here and then we can see this menu. If you don't see this menu, go to Window settings Preferences, go to the Plug-in Manager and then MASH is its own little section down here by itself it says mashed up bundle. You want to make sure those are checked on. That'll give you access to this new menu and so when we start to create MASH we basically can go into Create MASH Network. But you want to be careful because again, the reason why we created these pivot points offsets in these groups, is so that we can use those in MASH. If we select the geometry, we're not using those. We actually need to select these groups when we want to create a MASH network. Now, there's two different types of MASH networks. Let me open up the menu and show you what I'm talking about. I'm just going to select one of these. Let's see, let's find the K. I'm going to select one of these groups and what we're going to start with that one letter and we going to add more in later. I'm going to show you what I'm talking about. Let's go to MASH and let's open up this little option box. We have these couple of options. Let me walk you through what this is. There's two different types of geometry in Maya in general. This isn't specific, just a MASH. This is for Maya in general so an instance of a piece of geometry means it's a placeholder like there's a point in space and it's holding the place for the piece of geometry that it's copying. It's not a direct duplicate. It's an instance. It's a very specific use of that word instance, that's specific to Maya in general. You can create instances when you go to duplicate special, any piece of geometry. This doesn't have to do with MASH but MASH leverages instances because they are much lighter and reduce memory in Maya. If you have a big crowd of things or a tall grass or trees however, you're going to use MASH and there's maybe 1,000 instances. It's better to use instances instead of geometry or Mesh is the other option, right? Mesh means it's own piece of deformable geometry that's unique. To Maya that's more memory heavy, but each one has their own advantages and disadvantages specific to MASH. Again, each one of these attributes is really independent of MASH. It applies to all of Maya, right? But they give you these options because typically when you're using MASH, you're going to be creating and animating things that are almost like a particle system. You can think of each one of these letters as a particle or something or imagine if each one of these letters was a blade of grass so I'm going to populate a whole plane. You could do that in MASH but you wouldn't want to do it with mesh. You'd want to do with an instance because it's lighter, right? That's good. Just counting the big takeaway is instances are lighter, meshes are a little heavier but you get more options than MASH, all right? I'm going to show you what I'm talking about here in a second. The other thing to take into account, there is this distribution type. It doesn't really matter, the distribution type can be changed after you create it. This is just for convenience. It doesn't really mean anything. Let's choose MASH and we have our group selected. We don't want the geometry selected. We want the group over here from the outliner. I'm going to hit 'Apply and close. We're going to get this MASH Waiter here. That's what it's called and you can see there's a bunch of keys all bunched up here in the middle. Why is that? Well, like a lot of things in Maya, it just takes its best guess at what you want to do. It has to give you default values of some kind. If we look over here, we have the MASH Waiter which we can tell is this thing because it's highlighted. This is going to be your menu if you're at a restaurant and I want to order different features, all right? All you have to do is left click and then say add it on any of these. There's a lot of great documentation online on Maya's documentation. You can do more research about each one of these. We're only going to use a couple of them. In this course would be 20 hours long if we went through each one and every little feature of it. I just want to show you the power of it and set you on your way to explore this on your own later. But what we're going to do is use maybe three or four of these to understand how MASH works in general and then you can pick and choose each one of these later on and have a lot of fun with it. I said, MASH had to figure out just guess some default value. You are going see that, it says ''Mash ReproMESH." That means that we chose the MASH option and let's say for example, we change our mind and we want it to be an instance we actually have got utilities and say, ''Switch mash geometry type." It wants us to select the MASH Waiter which means this little guy so with that selected now we can switch the geometry type and look at it. Now it says MASH 1 Instancer whereas before it said reproMESH and it has a different icon here. Now we know this is instances and not MASH rather so what we can do is go back. We want to make sure that we're in MASH for our purposes. I'm going to switch it back so we can see it has the normal geometry icon here and outliner and says MASH ReproMASH. Cool, so what is specific in this one is this Repro area here which we don't have in instancing. This is an example where MASH gives you a little more options than instancing but it will reduce how quick your machine can run because it's actually reading each one of these pieces as a geometry instead of instances. We can see the name here, offset-polysurface1_grp. We can see that is what we had selected and now it's hidden,and so by default when you create a MASH network, Maya is going to hide that original piece of geometry. It's still there, we can unhide that and see it's still where we left it. But just to see how to clean view-port, to see everything MASH goes ahead and hides that when you create a MASH network. Let's click the MASH Waiter and get back to the menu. We can see we have three different tabs here. We have a menu where we can select and add notes and then it gives us two by default. Again, this Repro tab will not be there if you're using instances which we don't want to be doing. We have this ReproMASH we're going to use here in a second. Let me talk about the distribute tab. This is what I was talking about, you can change after the fact. Right now it's linear, we choose radial, we can choose spherical. Those are all the options we saw in that little option box up here. We can just change that all now on our own. We don't need that and it only give you a couple options. There's actually more options here now that we have it created when you just change that on the fly. It gives you 10 pieces by default. Maya just has to choose 20 for distance. These are all just random default values that you can change and totally adjust to exactly what you need it to do. For us you can see the power of this thing really quickly. I could make 20 copies of this thing and even though this goes to 60, I can actually type in, maybe 200. Let's see, maybe more 500 and now we have at any case, actually looks like a cool pattern. But yeah. You can animate this really quickly. Like I get to set keys on this. All I'll have to do like we were doing before the animation tab for the type, just the same thing you do here. You right-click, you say "Set key", and then you move somewhere else in the timeline and you set another key and change this value. But we're not going to use that, because this doesn't really mean anything for our text and our phrase here, KEEP CREATING. We want to get that k back to where it's supposed to be. Linear is not going to be what we want. We want to use initial state. When we do that, it's going to pop it right back to where it's supposed to be. This is the beauty of doing the offset for the groups that we did. It's going to put it and know right where to put it. We're also going to have the pivot in the right place for when we rotate it around later. So how do we get all of these other letters into this same mash network? Well, we can do that over here in the repro tab. We can see we only have one object, but we want to add each one of these groups of the letters into this repro tab here. Let's scroll this down a little bit and I'm just going to start bringing these in. It doesn't really matter what order you do it in. It looks like it numbered it correctly. There's 1,2,3,4 and it's just out of order a little bit. I believe we can display organized by sort order, alphabetical within type. Now it'll be a little more organized for, so we'll be able to see each letter in succession based on this number that's associated with it. Let's get back to the mash repro tab here. That's the tricky thing with this. When we want to middle mouse drag and click these in. If we actually just click this now it changes the attribute editor. We can't actually click and drag these in. What we need to do is middle mouse drag, holding down middle mouse and I'm dragging and dropping it in now. When I hide this and we go back to the mash network, you can see nothing's happened. It's still not there, even though it's in the repro tab here. What's happening? Well, it's going to distribute tab, our number of points is only one, so actually you need to increase that. Now we have it as two, and it says K because we have not created an ID for this. So each one of these is going to be unique value relative to this repro mash. All we have to do is just go add an ID note, fixes that. We've fixed that. We've got our E in here. I'm just going to hide all of these, so we can see it happen as we're adding them. We've got 1,2, so now I'm going to add 3. Let me just turn up the number here. We don't have to do this individually. We can just crank these up, forget how many letters are in this, but I'll just say 19 or whatever. Then we can just start adding them. Again, I'm middle mouse dragging, as I do it, we should see this update, four, let's grab five, let's grab six. Let's see, it's not updating now, it needs a refresh. It looks like. All right. Okay, cool. So now what's happening, we have KEK, we need another E here. What's happening to all of these other ones? They're all KE. Well, the mash ID, we need to make that number be as many letters as we have. So actually I need to increase this to be, we can actually look over here and just see it's 13. So let's crank this up to 13 and we should be good to go now. Because each one of these needs its own unique ID for to know, what it is. Now that we have that we can keep adding them in. So we have six, now we have seven, now we have eight and you can see it update as we're doing it. Now it gets a little tricky here. This is one of the finicky things with this tab, is you can't actually scroll down more. So we're going to actually have to place it right in this little sliver here. Otherwise, if we click and drag it over on top of one of these, it's going to replace it. So we need to make sure that we're doing it beneath that, right in this little sweet spot. Now we have nine, let's grab 10 and again I'm scrolling down to make sure I haven't been replacing one by accident. So we have 9,10,11, let's do 12 and I think it's just not updating because we need to refresh it in the distribute tab. So after we get all these in, we can go over and just update that and it's going to pop up and it's going to have our phrase all ready to go. So I'm going to go over here, I'm just crank that up. Now you can see that we have all of our letters as we need them and we have all of the points and the exclamation point, cool. So what to do? Who cares. This looks the exact same way that we just had before. Why did we go through all this trouble? Again, we're getting there. This takes a little setup. It takes a bit of setup, but it's totally worth it. Let me just show you super quick, if I add an offset. Now I can offset all of these and rotate them around. This looks exactly the same as what we did before, but look at how much more control we have now, we can randomize strength, we can do reorder points. There's all these types of different controls now that we have and one of my favorite is fall off objects. Let me just show you this real quick. Let's rotate everything like this. Let me right-click, I'm going to say Create. So it's going to create a fall off object and those are super cool. We can just rotate, translate those around and as we move them through, it's going to create that animation. So we can actually animate this thing and have way more control over how it's rotating each one of these. This is just scratching the surface. We're going to get more in-depth on this, here momentarily. So in this lesson, we learned how to set up mash and we learned the little quirks of it, of setting it up. What the difference is between having a mash and an instance mash network and again we need that, because we need this little repro tab. Because we have so many pieces that we need to add in, because we need to add each letter in. So that's why we needed to use the mash option. Then we needed to make sure the number of points was as many letters as we had. Same thing with the ID. We need to make sure there's as many IDs as we have letters. So it knows each one of these have a unique ID that corresponds with this. It might seem a little complicated right now, but the fun is about to start when we really get into all these different mash waiters. One of my favorite is spring. So stay tuned for that because it's going to add a ton of dynamics for you for free and it's great. I'll see you next lesson where we will dive deeper into creating the animation with this mash network. Thanks for watching.
10. MASH Animation Intro: Great, you've made it this far. Now in this lesson, let's get to the fun part. Let's get to animating and using MASH to create some really interesting animations that we can change dynamically on the fly. It's going to be really cool. We have the setup we created from the last lesson. In that I showed you the example of creating the offset where we could rotate each letter around. I wanted to show you a couple more things with this one before I moved on. We're going to use this one quite a bit. I really liked the offset again, to get back to the menu here you can see all the different types here and we chose offset earlier. We can just add offset. We actually keep adding them. We could add another offset if we wanted to. We could separate out one offset from another and have it be one controls position, one controls rotation or something like that. It gets a little hard to see these tabs. That's why mash gives you the option. This is actually new for, I think 2018 even. Might be in 2017, but it's a fairly new thing to have the "MASH Editor". If you go to "MASH", click "MASH Editor", we have our own little outliner just for MASH. Now, it can be buggy at time, so be careful with this. There's sometimes when you hit undo and it won't undo all the way. Make sure that you're saving frequently enough and versioning up. You want to say like, whatever file name that you have _version one or _version 01. It gives you room to go to ten and beyond. You want two digits there. Anyway, just good file organization so you can keep saving in case there's some goofy thing that happens. That's not just with MASH. That's anytime you're working in 3D, you never know what's going to happen. This is just really quickly off the bat like, how cool this is that we can stack effects on top of each other. Whereas before we stuck with like three different things we could do. The type tab here, we just have this treasure trove of things that we can do in MASH. We can see that in the menu here. I'm just going to delete this one or by right-clicking on it, and say "Yes", confirm. That's how you delete things. It's still easier to navigate around using this instead of the tabs over here. Let's get to the fun stuff. So we could animate any one of these objects by setting key frames in here. Also, like I showed you in the previous one, we could add fall off objects. We'll get into more of that in a minute. But one thing I'll also wanted to show you is just how crazy powerful this is. Let's just do an example. Where these spins around 180 degrees. Let's say maybe it moves down. Well, that's not super interesting. But once we start animating it, we could animate the strength, 0-1 value. Pretty straight forward. We're animating two different attributes with one slider. That's pretty cool. The other thing that we can do is with the "Strength Map". It might look like it's doing the exact same thing, but if you notice I'm changing the color down here. It's going from black to white, which means 0-1. Maya thinks about color in numbers. You can think about this being the exact same thing as strength 0-1. Same idea. We haven't turned off, so the strength dial didn't do anything. You need both of these on to for the other to affect, or the other one on for it to affect the other. If we have one-off, it's not going to do anything. What's cool about this slider, as opposed to using the strength slider, is we'd actually map in a map, a "Strength Map", a texture. Most of the MASH nodes here have this option. It's not just with the offset feature that we can do this. If we click this little checker box, it'll ask us to create a "Render Node". For this example, I want to create a "Ramp". I'm going to click "Ramp". Now you can see what's happening. We have this new ramp that we could actually animate this value going from 0-1. We could animate selected color, we could animate the position, which is this. You insist update, we could set keys there, and we could animate the position of this thing over time. It's like wiping on a gradient of value here. We can also animate the color. We could turn this on and off. It starts with this gradient and then goes up. Very, very quickly, it gets pretty in depth on what we could actually do and how much control we have over this. I mean, just in one little feature like this, it gives you a lot of control. I'm not going to hop on that too much, I just wanted to show you this one little thing. I'm going to right-click and break connection, so it gets rid of that. I'm going to go back up here and hit 0 and 0. As I showed you before, if I wanted to start over, I can just right click and hit delete and confirm that. We can get right back to Mash. Back to where we are and get an idea of what we want to do. I want to show you this signal. Signal is super cool; add signal node. It gives you some default values, like I said in all of Maya and especially in MASH. It just has to pick some values for you. It's picking some distance that it's going to move it off the origin. It's not just going to move it, but it's going to animate it. If we hit play, actually animating now this little jitter, this little noise. We can change all of these options hear and even add rotation, and we can watch it update on the fly. As it's playing back, we can see what is going on. Again, you can just immediately see how much more control this gives you then using the type functionality. It was a lot of setup to get to this point, but now we can have a ton of fun in dialing everything in. This is procedural animation. I'm not keyframing anything yet. This is what procedural animation is and why it's so powerful. You can make these little updates really quickly. Then we could slow it down with the timescale. Start to explore all of these. There's so many settings in here, I'm not going to go over all of them, but they are self-explanatory. But if you want some documentation, again, Maya help, which you'd get to from up here. You can go to Auto-desk my help. It'll open up a webpage where you can look at all the MASH menus and search for each one of these things to know what it's doing. But what I would recommend is getting in here and just messing around, and seeing what each one does. In like two seconds, now I have this automatic animation. Think how many key frames this would be if I actually wanted to keyframe each one of these things, it would take probably a couple of hours maybe. Even to offset each one of these, have it rotate nicely, ease in and ease out. That that would take a while. We did it in a couple slides now. I just want to show you how powerful this is and how useful it is, especially a signal at the end of the day, if you just want to add just a little bit of noise to keep your animation alive or keep your text alive. Just dial everything down super small, dial down the timescale. It's a really subtle effect. It's cool. It keeps it alive, makes it look 3D. I just want to show you the signal note. We might add this on at the end, but I just want to show you how quickly you can add something and get going and have it animated with MASH Cool. In the next lesson, I want to actually approach what the final product is going to be, and what we're actually going to render out and take through, even through to after effects. I'll show you how to render and all that good stuff in the following lessons. The next one, we're going to start creating from scratch. The actual animation we're going to use for our renders. Thanks for watching and hope you get excited now that you see what the point of setting all these MASH nonsense up was so that we can very quickly start animating our text, and we have the right pivot points. You notice we used the signal node. Everything's pivoting from the center of the letter. If we didn't do that, the whole phrase would be pivoting from the center of the world. That's why we did that. That's why that script is so useful and I hope you get some use out of that and appreciate that. All right, I'll see you the next lesson where we are going to start creating the final animation for our render. Thanks for watching. Bye.
11. MASH Offset Translation: In this lesson, we're going to actually create the final animation that we're going to use in the render. I'm going to show you kind of the idea. It's something like this. But what I want to do for ours is have the letters punch out more, come at the camera, come into z-axis basically. But I also want to have that rotation happen as well. We can see that we have this nice rotation happening and wiggles. We have this overshoot and it settles down really nice and slow. But I wanted to like jump out first. I wanted to punch out more. What we need to do is create an offset for us. Let's go in the Mash Waiter and we'll do that first. We'll add an offset, and then so for it to come forward, we actually need to push it back to start with. Let's put the position for z because we know it's x, y, and z, and we can see down here in the lower left, if I change my background color here. You can see that little blue axis right here. Let me zoom in, so you can hopefully see that a little bit. The z-axis is forward and backward, so we know that we need to adjust that for the offset. I'm hitting "Command" on the keyboard and middle mouse dragging. After I click middle mouse drag in this little box that allows me to push this forward and backwards. I'm just clicking and holding down the middle mouse button and dragging. But I have to make sure that I hold down "Command" or "Control" for our Windows machine, and I need to middle mouse click in this box before I start dragging. I'm going to push this back quite a ways and we can always adjust this later. Now we have that, and how do we get it to come forward? Well, let's use a falloff object. I'll go down here to falloff objects, and again run the offset tab, right-click and say "Create". I mentioned falloff objects very quickly in a previous lesson. I don't want to delve a little deeper into the fall of objects. They are very powerful and I usually end up almost always animating them whenever I use Mash, I always end up animating some falloff objects. Let's click it in the outliner. We could also offset tab here. We can just double-click it here and get into that same attribute. The one little goofy thing you want to make sure you're careful about when you're animating falloffs is if you look in the channel box right now, we don't see any transform options. Like if we move this around, no number is changing here. There's no translate xyz rotate xyz. We want to make sure we're careful about that, and you can also tell that we're not where we need to be to animate this thing because this isn't highlighted in the outliner. We actually click that. Now, we have a translate xyz stuff. It's almost going to zero that out right now. Let's go back into the attribute editor so you can see the options that we have with this. We can invert the falloff so that it has the opposite effect. But the big catch here is you cannot have to falloff objects that are inverted, so you can only have one. I'll show you a way to get around that here in a little bit, but for the time being, let's just start with this and get it to animate and bring the letters forward. The sphere isn't the most ideal shape for us. You can see that it's not really doing what I wanted to do and has this weird falloff. The better option is to go under shape and you can actually choose what you want to do, and the main two that are most communist is sphere and cube. You can do a lot with both of those. But if you wanted to do more advanced work with falloff shapes, you can actually choose a nerves curve particles or a Mash, and to use those, you need to add that in the Connections tab down here. That's a little advanced for this lesson, we're not going to get into that, and a cube is going to be just enough for us to deal with. Let's look at this. If we take a look at the inner zone here, it's this dashed line, the one that's inside the cube, and that's controlled by the inner zone tab here. We can see if we increase, it actually gets all the way to the end position where we need it to be. Let's get this falloff object centered around where the final position is. Now, if we move this away, it's actually going to interact quite a bit with it. The one attribute that we need to take under consideration is this falloff range. If we take a look at this, even maybe from the side, we can see this distance from the dashed line to the solid line is where it's going to blend on. If it's a shallow area, it's going to happen very quickly. We might want to increase this distance from the dashed line to the solid line. We do that in a couple of ways that we could scale it this way, or we can also just reduce the inner zone. It allows to more slowly get to the final position because there's a greater falloff area happening here. You can just play with that, and that will help you. The other thing you do is just animate the fall of object really slowly and/or you can affect the falloff range here, so that works pretty well. But I don't want the whole word to come on at the same time, I wanted to come on letter by letter. I want the K to come on and then the E and then P. I want them to have a little more individual time. I'm actually going to reduce the falloff area for this so the K finishes before the E gets there. You can see that now that I've scaled this down, It's actually letting the objects go away from each other. I could deal with the falloff, and get it just right so that it's the whole width of the word, so that when I animated on it'll actually contain the entire word. Or what I can do is just leave it like this, and to solve this problem because I want to keep or the word keep all the way to it's in position, I can actually just change the mode to add. Now, what should happen when I scroll across, it's actually going to keep those letters, and it's basically adding them so the falloff object only has to go through it one time for it to work. That's pretty cool. To reset that, we can just go back to frame one. I just hit this little back button down here on the bottom right, and we get back to frame one and resets that, so now it'll start over again and now it'll get it back to where it needs to be. If I reset that, I can just scroll around, and it'll update that and get it back to where it needs to be to reset it. Let's add some spring here. I'm going to go over to the Mash Waiter by selecting it in the Mash Editor, I'm going to add a spring node, so watch what happens now with this spring node. I'm going to animate this offset on, so I'm going to keyframe this. I know I haven't selected now and if I look in the channel box of ITS, now we have translate so we can key that, no big deal. Now, I'm going to scrub somewhere, maybe 48 seconds in, and then animate that on wiping on. I'm going to go back to frame one, and then when I play this watch what happens? The letters won't just come to a stop right here, they will actually jiggle. Check that out. That is an overshoot, what we call an overshoot and animation, and I didn't have to animate that. That's actually happening dynamically in the spring setting here and the spring attribute that we added. Let me just pause this for a second, so we can update our attribute editor and we can adjust this on the flier like we've done before, and we can add more spring or reduce the spring, and we don't have to change the two keyframes. We only set two keyframes, but yet watch with procedural animation, how much control we have over this thing. I'll animate our turn on the playback, and now I can increase the maximum translation. That means what's the maximum amount it's going to actually going to spring? If I increase that, we should see a bigger spring, and if I increase it even more or let's do like 100 something bigger, we're reaching the maximum that we can do with the distance it's covering. If we wanted to have this be a bigger spring would actually reduce the dampening as well. It's going to overshoot even more now. I like to keep stiffness at 0.2 because when we turn that off. Imagine a spring having no stiffness, it's not going to bounce, that's what that means. We actually want to have some stiffness in here if we want to have that bouncing effect. If I reduce the maximum down, you can see it's not going to spring that much. But if I crank it up, it's going to do as much as it possibly can based on the distance it's traveling. Now, if we max out on the maximum translation, but we want it to bounce even more, that just means that we need to move the actual offset further back so that we can go in the offset tab, and let's just middle mouse, drag this back even further. Let's go like maybe twice as much. Now, when we play this back, you can see it's this huge distance, and now let me just escape out of this real quick so we can get to the spring attributes that we can control and let's reduce this down because that's just a crazy amount. Now, that we've gone a greater distance, we will be able to see that the maximum translation will actually have a greater effect now. There we go. It looks like it's something under like 40 is where it'll start taking effect. It makes sense, these are actually my units, I think, so for it to be 200 and affected, it actually needs to be like way the heck over here off the screen. It makes sense that it's not really taking effect until we get under like maybe 30 or 40. That's looking pretty good, and for me, for my money, let me get into a camera here that we can see it. It's happening a little fast. We could actually just extend this animation out or we could just go back and reduce this offset back down so it's not traveling as far, so it won't be as fast of emotion. Now, it doesn't have as far to travel, so it's not as fast. It's a little more policing. That's pretty cool. In the next lesson, we're going to continue to add more offset animation to this to make it more of a complex animation. Thanks for watching.
12. MASH Offset Stacking: In this lesson, we're going to continue to add more complexity to our animation. Let's get started. The next thing I want to add is actually, I want to introduce scaling because I want these letters to appear from nothing. I want it go into the offset tab here. I want to scale everything down by negative one. It doesn't update completely here. We need to scrub the timeline and now it'll update. We're in offset tab, we've scaled everything down to zero, now watch what happens in our animation. It'll actually just appear out of thin air, and I like that a lot more than what we were doing before. Now you might notice the spring itself is having an effect on scale and the position. But if we didn't want the spring to happen on scale, all we have to do is go into the spring options here and just uncheck scale. Now, when it animates on, it's just going to spring the position and not the scale. If we turn that back on, you'll be able to see it's scaling at the same time. Now, here's the really cool part. We can actually add multiple springs if we want to have independent control over how springy each one of these attributes are, so we can separate out the springiness of the translation. We could separate out the springiness of the scale. Let's do that very quickly just to show you that's possible. I'll go back in the mash, I'm going to add another spring, and I'm going to go to the first one and make sure that scale is off. I'm going to go into the second one and all I want is scale for this one. If you look at this first one, we have, let's just set the attributes. I mean, they're pretty close, but I think what I was noticing before is just the fact for spring on the scale, it seems like it's a little too much, so now we can actually just have independent control of the scale. I'm going to reduce the dampening a little bit. Sorry, I'm going to Increase the dampening. Yeah. Now the scale, it's still happens, but we actually have independent control over that attribute. It looks really cool. Now we have the spring, we can call this scale, we can actually update the names of each of these. We actually keep track of them and call this translate. We have the offset that's going to be our global one. We get actually do the same thing that we're separating the scale and the translate of the spring, we get actually separate the same thing for the offsets. If we wanted to have a different falloff object and maybe offset the spring from the translate with the falloff object. We could do that. We have multiple offsets here that only do one of these attributes at a time. But for simplicity sake, and you're just starting out, I think it's easier to just keep these altogether. I'm going to turn off enable scale just so we can see the objects again, while we're working on rotation. Because what I want to do is, I want this to rotate about a 180 degrees, so that when it comes through on this spring, we have rotation enabled for the translate. Let's see if we need to separate out the spring for rotation as well. We have offset, we've introduced this new attribute of rotation. Let's enable scale again. Now, let's scrub here to update the mash network, and now we go back to frame one and playback. We should see it rotate forward and it's not doing it that much since it's all happening at the same time, you can see where the rotation gets lost. We need to separate out the rotation, I think. Let's go over to offset and let's turn off enable rotation. Let's make a new offset. We'll go over to the mash network, and I'm going to go to add offset, I'm going to call this rotation. I'm going to do this after this falloff object has gone through, I'm going to add this rotation in later. We can actually see it take place here. I'm going to do the 180 degrees here. Now it's upside down. I want to introduce a falloff object. What I want to do, I can make one that's similar to this one. I can actually clone it, so if I go back to this original offset, I can right-click and say clone. Then, I can actually break the connection, but it will leave it here in the outliner. Now I have a second falloff object that's exact same size, so we have some consistency here and it just saves us time from having to scale everything and settle as attributes. If we go back into our rotation offset, I can just middle mouse drag this new falloff object right in the here, and now it affects it. How cool is that? It is on the add mode, if you remember, we double-click that. It is on the add mode so it's not going to update as I'm scrubbing it back and forth, we actually need to update the tab here. I want this falloff object of the rotation to come in after this one. If we can see the translation one, it has keyframes between one and 48. I'm going to set a keyframe on one, I'm going to hit S and go to frame 48. I'm actually just going to line these up and match it, and then I'm going to offset it in time. Watch this, I'm going to move this forward, and if your auto keyframe is on, which is this little red button down here, as soon as you hit one key frame on an object, it'll update and automatically kit for you. If you scrub in the timeline and I move this again, you can see it keeps making new keys for me. That's the Auto key. Now that we have this, It looks the exact same. But now what we can do with this second falloff objects selected, shift select the keys in the timeline, and just shift them down a little bit. It's happening afterward. Now when we go back to the frame 1, let's play this and we can start to see the rotation happen a little more. It's happening really fast though. We might want to slow that down a little bit and we need to put this offset below the springs, so that the spring will actually affect this rotation. Let me just make sure that the spring does have rotation enabled. cool. Let's play this back. Now we have springiness and the rotation happening, which is what I want. It looks like it's happening way too late as well, so all we have to do is just take that second falloff object and move it back in time, maybe down here. The other thing we could do is adjust the amount that it's rotating, which is what I think we're going to need to do. It's actually rotating the wrong way, so no big deal can go on offset rotation and let's add a negative here. Now it's rotating in the other direction. That's pretty cool. I think it's moving over to great of a distance. Let's say maybe negative 90, let's cut that in half and see if that helps the speed. I think that really helps you can actually see the rotation now, it's not happening so quickly. You can actually see it. It's happening after the scale and the translate, so it offsets all this animation and it looks really appealing. We get all this free animation. It's jiggling back and forth. It looks really good. You could just keep doing this. If you wanted to have a different axis rotate, you could add another offset. You could add as many offset ones as you need to separate, so each one is happening in a different time, or you could do them all on the same offset tab, it's up to you. But I get mesmerized by this automation because to do this with keyframes, if we just made this geometry and want to select it and then do this by hand, what we just did, we would have way more than two keyframes, let me just tell you that. It would be so much more work to do this. I really like where this is out right now. I'm going to stop this lesson, and then we're going to do this for the next word in the phrase. We'll continue from there and talk a little bit more about mash. Thanks for watching.
13. MASH Duplicate Network: Now we're in the thick of things. We have a greater understanding of how to use mash, and how powerful just a couple of nodes are. Here we have, just an offset node, and spring node is the only two things we're using, and look how much animation we've gotten out of those two things. Now in this lesson, I want to animate the next word. But as I'm animating this, I'm like, you know what? This would be more interesting if each word did something a little different. This first word is coming from the back forward, what if the next word came from the bottom up? Because it's at the bottom, it actually has a lot of room that we could play with, and have the letters come up from the bottom. Well, how do we do that now? We've already gotten way into the widths on this, we've already made this thing. If we go to the Offset tab here, that has the scale involved, we turn off scale for a second. We already have it here, how do we get rid of this? Because we've already used it, and we have all this animation, everything happening. Well, how did we now animate the second word here? What we can do is really simple. We can duplicate this mash network. Then we can remove the word that we're not using off of that mash network. What I mean is, this mash network, is now going to be just for the word keep. That's all we're going to use it for. We need to get rid of the creating word, and we need to duplicate this mash network. Because I like what we've done here, adding these springs, and all this stuff. But, what I want to do, is to duplicate this mash network. If I Right-click, you actually just duplicate the network, it's pretty easy. Now you can see we have a duplicate of each one of these. When we play it back, there's right on top of each other, so it's hard to tell the difference. But, if we go into the mash waiter of this second one, and we go over to the repro. Let me just go over here, and let me just Isolate Select this one so, we can see now we have two repro mashes because we have two mash networks. The only one I'm interested on, is the second one, the one we just created. Let me Isolate Select that by clicking this little button here above the viewport. Now we know we're only looking at the second one that we just duplicated. This one down here. What we need to do is go over to the repro tab. I'm just scrolling over. Of course you can go to focus and you can get to it here as well. Let's see repro mesh one. Here we are. We know that the groups are named with a number here. We know k is one, keep is two, sorry e is 2 this e is three and this is 4. All we have to do is go over here in the repro tab and scroll up to each one of these. All we have to do is just delete it. As we do that, we'll see this update. It's trying to fill this in because if you remember, we have all these IDs for every letter. Let me just get this to where we can see everything a little bit better. Now as trying to say the word creating in all these other ideas that we have. We don't need that. We don't need those IDs. Let's go over to the ID tab and let's think we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. We only need nine now. Let's bring that down to nine. Then let's go to distribute and let's bring distributed down to nine. Now we have the word creating and hopefully if we update this by scrubbing the timeline, it updates. You can see now we have in the second mash network, we only have the word creating. We just need to do that for this one as well. Let's nicely, select the repro mash, and I'll just undo that and then redo it. Now we know what I mean is I'm clicking the isolates select on this repro mesh. Now we're only looking at the first mesh, the first mash network. Now we only need four because we have KEEP. So now we only need four. Let's go and do that. Fix that up as well. Let's go to ID count and we'll say 4. Let's go redistribute will say 4. We really don't need to delete those because they're the first ones. It's automatically going to do start from the first one in this repro tab. But we could go through here and delete each one. But I'm just going to leave them there and there for now. We're just clean that up through the ID tag and the distribute tag that we just looked at right here. Now that we have that, we can see that we have KEEP by itself and we have creating by itself down here. We just need to move these fall off objects for this second mesh network, for this to work on the creating word. Before we get too far, don't forget that we also disabled the scale on this first mesh networks. I'm just going to re-enable that so we don't lose track of the fact that we did that. I'll go to this first offset tab where that was done and I'll re-enable scale. Now when we scrub, it'll update. Let's focus in on the second network here. I can even disable this first one if that helps us visually. I'm going to disable that. I'm going to go over to the second network. I'm going to click on the mash offset, the first one. Let's just deal with the first one. In this offset feature of the second mesh network, we can see that it named the fall of object mash three shape. We can see we have fall off. We can see we have mash 3 here. It says mash 3 here. We know that's the right one. All we need to do is actually just move this down. If we go over to the channel box, we can see everything was key framed even though the only attribute that's actually being used right now is translate x. We can actually just break the Translate Y keyframe here because it's not actually being animated. I'll just delete selected. Then now we can update this and get it where it needs to be. Now the other thing you might remember is, of course, keep as a shorter word. If we go to the last keyframe here, might not get all the way to the end of this word. We might need to just pull this over a little bit. We can actually just leave this here too on the last letter. Let's go back and then we also need to start it further away. I'll move it all the way to the edge of that letter. The first solid lines should be not touching it. Now when I scrub, it'll put that back and I'll hit play. Now it works. We have the translation happening. We can get everything else happening now. We just need to move this other fall off object down as well. Let me go to the next offset where we have the other falloff object. We can see it's named falloff mash 1 offset 3 shape. We can see falloff mash one-off offset three. So that's this one. Let's go back to this first fall off. Where we've already said we want it to be at negative 14. Let's just copy this and then we'll click this fall of object. Do the same thing we did before. We will delete this key frame, paste in what we need here. Then we just need to set up this key frame to be the same thing as the first. We've seen to get this all the way over here. It looks about right, and then we need to pull it all the way over here as well. Now we have fixed R2 offset fall off objects to work for this second word. Now, What's the point if we use the same animation? There was no point doing this if we're going to just use the same animation. We need to change this animation a little bit. How can we do that really, really easily. This is going to be the easiest part of the whole thing. Let's go to the offset, and I'll just click that to get it selected. Instead of using offset position in z, which is going to zero that out. I'm going to scrub the timeline so it'll update a little bit and get it back to where it should be. Instead of going in z, let's go up and down. Like I said, let's go, let's drive this thing down, maybe down here. Now we have it coming from a totally different direction. We've done that just by separating out, duplicating the mesh network. Now we have control over each of the words. But we didn't have to recreate the whole thing. We did it for one word and we duplicated it and then we just tweak a few things to get it to work for the second word that we're creating here. We also need to keep in mind, let's just turn on the second mash, the first mesh network rather. We need to keep in mind that we don't want this second word to be bumping in to the first one. If we look here, we can see that already these letters are starting to crash into each other. What we need to do is to adjust the spring of the Translate. If you remember, we had the dampening be pretty low. It's increased the dampening back, I think the default is 0.2, so we'll just start there. Let's replay this. You already see, let me just hit Play. Pause rather. You already see now it's not crashing in as much. But I still think it's a little too much. I'm just going to reduce the maximum translation way down and then play it back. Now we can see we have these not bumping into each other. They're coming from different directions. If I want each of these to come on after the other. I want KEEP to come on first and then I want creating to come on. All I have to do is select both of these fall off objects now. Shifts like them in the timeline and then just drag them over. Let's let KEEP get all the way on before we have creating to starts coming on. Now we have KEEP comes on and then CREATIN, KEEP, CREATING, keep creating. They both have their own unique animation. Again, we can control this in any different way that we want to. I think the speed of creating is a little high. We control that by going into the offset of that translation, and I haven't named that, let me just name that, and just reduce this. It's not having to travel such a far distance. That speed will be softer, and we can all have to do now is enabled scale, and they will both come out of nowhere. How cool is that? It's cool we can see the scale coming on. It's happening a little fast. Again, we could separate this out into indifferent offset tab. If we wanted different offset tab. I keep saying the word tab. These are just words I'm making up to help describe this stuff. The offset, we can make a new offset node, just for scale if we wanted. But I'm not bothered by that, that much. It's cool. I think we might need to offset how it's happening. I'm just going to select the falloff objects again and Shift select them and move them over a little bit more. I want us to be able to see the word key before creating starts. Keep creating, and it also looks like because creating is a longer word, we might need more keyframes. Because the falloff object is trying to cover a larger distance in the same number of frames, that means it has to move faster. But I wanted to keep it at, around the same speed. I'm going to increase the timeline here. I'm just going to grab these last two keyframes of both of these falloff objects. I'm just going to move them down. Now we have more keyframes, and these falloff objects are going to move much slower. Keep creating. Now they have a similar pace, but they're doing different things. One's coming from behind and the others coming up. They're both rotating. But again, if we wanted to change the rotation whichever way that creating is being rotated from. Let me just turn off the scale so we can see the edits that were making. Instead of them being rotated down like that, let's go to offset rotation. Let's set that to zero, and let's have it rotate from this way. Let's do like 90 degrees. Now we have independent control and they're definitely all doing their own thing. I'm just going to select anywhere in the timeline to deselect those. Just annoying to see that red. Now when I playback, each one is rotating on a different axis as it gets introduced. That's pretty cool. Again, the limitations of this is only your imagination. We could do all different stuff. For example, let's say we want to make the word creating seem a little different than keep creating is a unique words, a cool word means has a lot of weight to that word. Creating seems more erratic to me. Let's add a signal note on top of all this stuff, I'm going to add a signal note, and I'm going to increase the timeline to see what kind of effect the signals having after everything gets animated on, and I think that's super cool. I think it's moving a little fast, but the idea of it, that keep is stationary and creating is actually moving around really gives greater meaning to the animation. Keep, it sounds more stationary to me. Keep, stay. It shouldn't be moving. Creating is more erratic creativity, free association, whatever is happening. Think about this with whatever phrase you're doing. Try to make the animation work for those words. Make it unique and make it work for the words that you're using. For me, this has a lot more meaning and it takes working and doing this stuff. Before I started this course, I didn't know I was going to do this. This wasn't planned as I'm working I'm getting these ideas, I'm testing things and that's what so cool about using mash is that you can do this quickly if you're, you know what, I don't like that. I don't have to go through and delete all these crazy keyframes that are stuck in with all these other keyframes to get it translating up and rotating in, and then jiggling around. I could just turn that off. I could even just temporarily disable it by clicking this little switch right here. Now we have it with no jiggle. How cool is that? To me that just, as someone who animates and deals with keyframes all day with characters. To be able to animate with motion graphics and not have to have a million keyframes. When you want to make an edit, you have to dig through the weeds of all these crazy keyframes and curves and all this crazy stuff where it's here, it's super, this might seem complicated now, but once you do this once or twice, you'll get the hang of this. You just need to do this for yourself, make one of these, and then, you'll get the hang of it after you do it the second time. But I want to turn on the scale. Let's go where what I've scale unable, it's on, not that one. It's on this one. Let's see for this one, I might, just for my own sake, separate this scale-out into a different offset node. But you should know how to do that by now or re-watch that lesson where I explain why I'm doing that, but just enable scale for now. Let's turn signal back on. Select that. I'm going to start messing with these things. I think I want a low rotation and all of these to. Let's play this back. I like that. I like the jitteriness of that. Let me play with noise scale. That adds a little more texture to it, it's not. You can see they slow down and they speed up. That's the noise scale. It's actually introducing noise, it'll go fast and then slow when it's jittering, might be hard to see at this level limit. Let me crank it up. Well, that's maybe too much, but you get the idea. It adds a little more texture there so it can jitters, and then it's slower then it jitters. That's just some noise in there, just going to reduce the timescale. Just touch. Just love being able to mess with this stuff with just sliders. I can't emphasize how nice that is. In this lesson, we covered a lot. This is a long lesson, but by this stage of the game, you should have a good understanding of how to use mesh and animate these letters and these words and phrases and an interesting way and have very, very specific control over everything. Whereas before, let's take a look at where we've come from. Let's just click this tight mesh and just look at that tab one more time. Look at where we came from. We had this one little animation tab, and we can only do a couple of things here. That's it. But now look at what we have at our disposal. We have all of these different things we could do, and even just one thing has so many options. Just using the offset tab, we've separated out, we stacked them on top of each other. We have separate controlled just for scale, just for position, and just for rotation, and the same thing for the springiness. I would say, when I'm watching this, you might want to introduce more springiness in the rotation on the creating. I'm not getting that rotation effect on the reveal. I could just increase the amount it's rotating by. Let's do a whole 180 degrees and see what that does. Yeah, it's way more obvious, but it's a lot. It's still too snappy to me. I might keep this back down. Because when you go, you do a greater distance, but that animation is having occur over the same number of frames. It's going to look faster because it's having to travel a further distance in the rotation. In the next lesson, we're going to cover how to add shaders to this, add color to the letters, and add lights to our scene and render that out. Then next, after that, we will take the rendered image files and after effects, and then we'll combine them together and do a little color correction and add a background and all kinds of stuff like that. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate you getting this far in the class. Pat yourself on the back. This can be confusing at times, but when you get to a stage like this and you've made something like this and have so much control over it. It's super rewarding and I hope you feel the same way. All right, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson.
14. MASH Tweaking Animation: In this lesson, I'm going to make a few more tweaks to the animation, and in the previous lesson I mentioned I might do that in between the lessons, but I know some students even though what I'm about to do is the exact same thing we've been doing. I know some people feel loss if they don't see every single step. I wanted to include this, even though there's going to be really nothing new in this video, you can see me work. I just want to record that regardless. If you think you've got it handled down, you can skip this video and keep working on your own. But if you want to see the little tweaks that I make and I'm not really going to show you anything new in this lesson. I just wanted to record it just in case people want to see every single step that I take and every move I make as stinks has it anyway. I mentioned in the last video that I think the bottom word, it's scaling in a weird way. If I can pause it here, let me see if I can pause it where it's mid. I feel like these are too small of dots here. I want this to be bigger by the time it's at this point in its translation. I want the letter to be a little bit bigger. To do that, I need to separate out the scale, and is in a different offset node. Might click on "The Translate", because that's where we have scale enabled. I'm just going to turn that off for now. When I go back, everything will be scaled up, as its normal size. I'm going to the, "Mash Waiter", and add another offset. It's going to put it at the top and want to put it underneath the springs to make sure everything is ordered correctly. I'm going to name the scale. Now that we have the separated out and I want to make sure that I do is have the falloff object of this new offset scale that we just created right here. I want that to start affecting the letters before everything else. If you noticed in the other falloff objects, they are being placed at the end position and that's how they're affecting the letters. But with scale, we need to have the falloff object be bigger and influence the start position as well, so I need to scale up the falloff object of these offsets node here. But we don't have one yet. I can create one from scratch, but like we did in the last lesson or one before last, I just want to duplicate one of the ones I already have, just because I like the settings that it already has got the falloff and all that stuff. Work smarter, not harder is the phrase people use. I'll go to one of these. I'll just say, "Clone it", and then you can see we have a new one up here, I had actually named it. Now that I've named this offset before, we made the falloff object, actually name that. That'll help us. What I want to do is help us identify it rather. What I want to do is break the connection that's going to leave it in the outliner. Now I just have to go to the scale and drag that in to this now. Now I have this new fall if object here. As you can tell, it's not affecting the scale at all. We haven't done anything at this offset node, you actually need to affect it. We can turn these two off. Even though those values are worth 0, they're not going to do anything anyway, it's just cleaned to see it quickly and know what that node is doing by having those unchecked, and instead of having to look at a bunch of zeros and decipher what's happening we just see it with one checkmark. Now we recreated what we had except for this fall off object nominees be animated. Like I said, this fall off object, is only going to affect when the letters are now entering into that fall off area. Like I said, if we want this fall off object to begin to affect the letters before they get translated, we need to scale this get the way up. Now you can see the encompass. Let me just scrub the tie line to help it refresh. You can see it's now holding the letters at their starting position. If we move this back to here, actually I need to go back further and then scrum the timeline a little bit to have it update. Let's just hit a key here so I'm going to hit s. You want to make sure that you have the actual offset control selected the outliner as well. If you select it from here, again, I just want remind you if you double-click this, that's not the same thing. Now you can see it's not highlighted, so you actually want to have it selected here. I'm going to hit s, and it's going to key everything. The other shortcut you could do is shift W, and now only key translations, since that's the only thing we're going to key is translate right now. Again, it shifts W for that, and of course it's W because W is the move tool, so it makes sense. Shift W would have something to do with move. That's setting the key. I'm just move on translation. All right, we have the first one. Let's just go somewhere over here. We can always change the key frames afterward, but just to block at interval quick to see what's happening. Yeah. That's a general idea. Make sure that this fall off you had set to add. Let me explain what's happening here. These are staying small because they're never entering in the main area of this falloff object before it passes. It's already passed by the time it would be in that area so it's not going to get any bigger than it already is down here. That makes sense. We need for the letters to at least translate into this main area of the fall of object before it passes by. Or we just need to extend the size of this thing out, like this, and it will hopefully grab it. The letters will enter in this fall if object before it passes through. We just need to move it back again because since we scale it up now the start position was already have those letters at the beginning. It looks like we still need to scale it up or slow it down or change the timing of the key-frames. Let's look at where these are starting to pass through and move this key-frame closer to that. I'm just Shift selecting and then moving by holding down the left mouse button on these two arrows here. Let's take a look at what we have now. That looks a little bit better. You can see letters. It's barely starting scale on we move the seat back more because I really want to see now how the scale is the first one to hit these letters. That's what I want. It's just messing around and trying to figure that out. Like I said before, you could barely see this. Let me see if I can pause it again so we can compare. If you remember what I talked about last time, it was like when the letter was in this position of its trajectory going upward, it used to be like this size, so it's really hard to see. Now we've actually made a good effect. The effect that I was going for, I wanted the letter to be bigger by the time it was at this point in its trajectory going upward. Right? I want it to be bigger. That's what we've achieved. Goal accomplished there. Let's just play it back. It reminds me of water boiling almost like the timing of aloes Papa. The other thing that we can mess with is the spring scale. We haven't touched this since we duplicated the network. It's the same as before. Let me just go in here and really I want to just turn off dampening and crank up the maximum threshold. It means it's not going to try to dampen it at all, and it's going to do as much as it can as far as it's affecting it. They really pop there more and scale. Sorry, I like to do sound effects when I'm animating. Sometimes it helps with timing to make sound effects out loud. The other thing that I want to effect, that I don't like as much right now, is how little of a spring we haven't the rotation of the word key. When I go back into that one and I might need to, yeah, it looks like I'm going to need to make a new spring for that one. I'm going to just have a new spring down here, and sorry at the top. I call this rotation. I'm just double clicking it and hitting Enter to rename it. Turn off rotation there, and let's just turn off dampening and leave that 22nd and do more than 20 or so. Yeah. Now it's really, oh, sorry, that has everything. That's why I'm scaling so big. Let's turn off everything else on that one but rotation, try it again. Yeah. Now it's wobbling a lot more. If we wanted it to do even more of a rotational spring wobble here, we would need to start to affect the offset other rotation. Like it should be coming from, starting with a greater rotation value. Let's go over to rotations at negative 90, still like 120 and see if it will help it come and do a little more. Yes, it gets better, but I'm just going to try 180 again. Now we keep going back to 180 and it's too much. I think it's just this speed on it. It's the fact that, do we have offset rotation? Yes. This is the only thing that's working. Let me go to this fall off. Now let me see, FallOff_Mash1_Offset_2shape. Its always good to name these. I got lazy in this lesson, I didn't name I fall off objects so it easy to lose track. We can see it FallOff_Mash1_Offset_2shape, so should be this one. I want this to be more delayed. It doesn't look like I mean, it is just delayed. Maybe it is this spring. Maybe we can do something more of the spring or to slow this down. Let me see if I can just stretch out these key frames a little bit to have it move a little slower. Maybe a little bit. That's way too much. At least we can start to isolate the rotation value to see what needs the affected to get this thing to spring a little more. When we crank this all the way up, the happenings is down. Turn down stiffness just a little bit. I mean, it's definitely better than what we had before. I'm going to go even more. Let's just go with 360. Sometimes I like to go super exaggerated. I like to go super exaggerated with the effect and then dial it back. I think the deal with this one is we maybe, it's the same idea of the scale that we need to scale this out because it's not affecting the rotation until that letter enters in the fall of object, and they're starting back here so it's not starting to spin until it gets really close to its imposition. So I want that to maybe start sooner, somewhat scaled, that offset node up a little bit. You know what? I hit "S". That's the danger of hitting S as a shortcut for key frames because key frame is everything. I don't want to key frame this scale because you can see it goes back to zero here. I want to delete the selected. So now it will stay that width. So yeah, again, I don't think it's the fact that we need to spin it more. That doesn't seem to be affecting it. So I just want to go into the rotation here and just bring this back, maybe even do 45; that's two-half of what we were doing before, which is negative 90. Yeah. That's not as appealing. Yeah. I think we just need to deal with the timing. I think I like how much it is wobbling now. It's wobbling a lot more. It's just the timing is a little messed up now. So just getting in tune with what's going on in a little more. Fall off objects and select it. There we go. Yeah. It needs to be happening sooner here. Bringing it back in time to have it happened a little sooner. Yeah. That looks way better to me. If you're just starting out, you are not used to animating, your eye might not be as developed or whatever. I'm not trying to say, my eye is super developed. I'm just saying, you might not be able to tell these tiny differences yet. But you will. My eyes always getting developed. I'm always trying to train it. But I feel like sometimes when I make these changes, you might be thinking like, I don't see a difference, but there's definitely a difference here to me on how much it's jiggling and that's spring rotation. That's a lambda. The other thing I'd like to do, I'm going to just go to show and say 9 and then show polygons because I don't want to see the fall off objects. This is a really good way to evaluate where we actually created. So I'd just like to watch. Yeah. That rotation keep looks way better. Yeah. Now I'm just trying to think in my head, I'm trying to talk out loud about what I'm thinking. I'm just trying to figure out if there is anything more we can do or there is stuff we need to take away at this stage of the game when you're creating an animation. You also want to start to think about things that could be removed. Because you just want to add, add, add and think, this too much now and I want to cut away, what's not needed. But for the most part, I like where it said, I think it gets across the idea that we are working. I'm just trying to think if there's anything else I want to show you that might help in this example, but using offset fall off objects will get you so far thermal squaring and signal in there. I mean, you can do so much with that stuff. Again, I will try to link to the documentation that goes through each one of these. Honestly, I rarely use like half of these, I like never use. You can just get away with so much with just using offset and signal and spring. So I'm just want to show one more thing before we move on. One of the advantages of having a repro mesh, is you can actually add the formers to this as well. So let's say this animation happens. Because keeps, stays still here. Maybe I want to have something happened to that word. Let's go to form, go down to lattice. This will basically make a little scaffold around our geometry. Let's see, we need to say show all now because we want to see everything again, so we see that the former. We click on this lattice. We have these options over here for divisions. So I just want to change 5 to 2 so it gets rid of those lines because I don't really need them. I just want to scale this thing like that. Let me play it back. I'm going to hit a key frame on this and I am going to hit "Shift R" to only key the scale. I am going to move forward. I'm going to scale this up. So for whatever reason, just to show you that this is still deformable, even though it's a part of a mash network we can add to formers to it. So back this up and then play it back. So it's not super interesting by itself. Let's go into Windows, Animation Editors, Graph Editor. If you've watched my other Maya series, I go a little bit more into the Graph Editor, but I'll just do a weighted tangents here, which means I can now change the handles little bit. So I want to stretch those out so that it eases in and eases out little more. It goes faster in the middle. Scales goes faster than the middle. Not by much. So let's crank that down. I'm moving the key frame by holding it and then holding Shift then mouse dragging it. Play again. That should go a lot faster in the middle. So anyway, it looks better than that. But I'm going to delete back to former. I just wanted to show you that that is an option that you can add to formers after the fact. Lets just turn it off again and only looks polygons. So yeah. I think I don't like it because it emphasizes the word we've already read in our mind. So it's like keep creating and then we see keep again, it doesn't make a ton of sense. So I just want to show you an example of needing to take stuff away. So I added something that I knew I was going to delete, but also wanted to show you that you can't add to formers. So anyway, those are updates I was going to apply in between the lessons that I wanted to show you and not leave out for anyone that was curious what I was going to be up, tweaking this stuff a little bit. Hopefully that helped you out. In the next lesson, let's get into actually rendering this thing. Thanks for watching.
15. Create Alembic Cache: All right. In this lesson we're going to continue with finishing out this animation. We're going to move from animation now into lighting and rendering. So if you've noticed in this lesson, if you start to scrub the timeline, nothing's working correctly. Why is that? That's because Maya is evaluating each of these nodes based on the previous frame. So if you're just skipping frames round here and scrubbing, it does not show how to evaluate each frame because it's dependent on the last one. So let's lock that animation in by creating Alembic Cache so that we can scrub timeline if we want to. That it'll just make everything run a little faster, and ensure that what we are actually seeing the view-port is exactly what we're going to get in the render. The other advantage of having the Repro Meshes is the fact that we can do Alembic Caches, which means, it's basically going to save out the vertice information and do all this crazy stuff behind the scenes, but essentially we'll have this cache that we can't change. So again, from here on out, this is like a path diverging. We're not going to be able to change this without updating the cache. So we're going to put the animation aspect of this to bed and we're going to cache out this mesh. So that this first mesh selected, I'm going to Alembic Cache. Again, if you don't see that menu, go to Settings preferences, Plug-in manager, and hopefully you could see a pattern here. If you don't have some menu thing, I'm going to make sure that it is checked on over here. ABC means Alembic. So we have Alembic Export and Import loaded in here. That is what we need to see this menu. We have Alembic Cache. I'm just going to turn that off by clicking the top part of this menu. I want to export, I mean, I could say all, let's go and say all. Export all to Alembic because we only have these two. Now I don't want to say all because then it would grab all this other stuff that we don't want. Let's just do selected and we'll do each word by itself. I'll say Export selection to Alembic and it'll open up a new Window. On the right we have all these other options and by default it should be fine. You just want to make sure you have UV Write and World Space on. It's just a nice habit I like to get into and then just name it. If you set your project, all this stuff will be in the correct place. If you remember at the beginning of this entire course, hopefully you didn't skip that section, and you don't know I'm talking about right now, or rather you actually do know what I'm talking about. Remember when we set the project here, right? We set project to this folder. So now when we do anything like making Alembic Cache, it already knows where we want to save it. It's already created this Alembic folder for us and the Cache folder for that matter. So it's Cache, Alembic, and we're in the right folder that we need to be in. I'm just going to call it Keep and export the selection and it's going to run through the entire animation and cache it out. So by default it's going to go based on the timeline here. So it didn't matter for Keep, because Keep just became static at the end. But for creating, if you wanted this to actually jiggle for a lot longer and do the signal noise thing for a lot longer than these, maybe 50 or a 100 frames. You want to extend this out, and you can do so by just typing in a new number here, we could say like 250. Even though we did keep at 200 frames, it's not going to disappear after 200 frames. It's still going to be there, it just won't be moving or anything. So same thing if we cache up creating now. So let's click Creating. Do the same thing, Alembic Cache, Export, Selection to Alembic, and the default is time slider here. You can see that option is selected or you are going to specify exact range. I'm just going to leave it at that. Let me call this Creating, Export selection. It's going to run through the whole timeline, and bake all this out to that file. Now, we need to import the Alembic Cache. If you can see nothing has really changed because we don't have the Alembic Caches imported yet. So we need to import those from the same menu, import Alembics. So Cache, Alembic Cache, Import Alembic. I just torn off so I have it a little more convenient right there. Again, it knows what folder to go to because we're importing Alembics, that goes to the Alembic folder because our project is set. How nice is that? We import that and then let's go Import, Creating, and should have these meshes here. Let's just turn these off for now. You can see we can scrub and it actually works. You can scrub the timeline. So I just turned off these mesh networks so it's not trying to evaluate the background. Which I'm going to close that Window now. I'm going to hide all of these by Shift-Clicking them and hitting Control H. So we're not looking at the fall-offs anymore. Now all we have are these Alembic Caches. This is the joy of hitting S on the keyframe visibility. When you hit Control H, it only hides it for that keyframe. So when you delete selected on visibility if we actually want to hide those. I'm just going through Delete selected. Now, when we hit Control H, those would be gone for good. All right. In this lesson we've learned about Alembic Caches, how to cache out our animation and how to import it back in. Now we're ready to add shaders and lighting to this. Put animation behind us now, and now we're going to move forth lighting and rendering this thing. Now that we have the Alembic Cache is done and we can scrub timeline and all looks nice and neat. Although one thing I was going to show you is just, if you move to frame, let's say 300, the animation will just stop. These things won't disappear, right? Even though we cached the frame 250, I'll just stop because that's all the information it has for those vertices. So we'll just keep them there. Cool. All right. I will see you in the next lesson where we will add some shading, lighting, and rendering. All right. Thanks for watching.
16. Lighting: In this lesson, we're going to add some shaders and start lighting. Let's select our limit caches, and add a shader to both of these. We are going to click both of them and right-click while I'm over top of them to get this menu, and I'm still holding down right-click when I go down to assign new material. If you don't see this Arnold option, once again, you got to go to Window settings preferences, plugin manager and make sure the M to A bundle, that means Maya to Arnold is loaded here. That's how you get the shader options here. I want to choose the AI standard surface. This is going to be one you use 99.5 percent of the time when you're using Arnold. So we have that selected. I'm just going to hide those repro meshes so I don't get confused in the outlier there. For the most part, I can actually delete all of this stuff and just have them on the caches end. But just for safety sake, for whatever reason, if I wanted to adjust the animation once we start lighting on, we might see some weird reflections or something we want to change. We might want to keep the animation in there, so I'm just going to leave that in there for now. So what we just did is applied material. So if we select either one of these, it's going to affect the same material because we applied a one material to both of them, and we can see it here, AI standard surface. If we just click this, it should update. We can see it's a gray shaded thing now and we can update this and look at it once we have some lights. So we can't really see this if we hit the render preview button up here. Let's go to Arnold, open Arnold render view. We can hit play, and we won't see anything because we don't have any lights in our scene. So let's close that and add some lights. The other way to do render previews is you can turn this on, but and that's new in 2018 and it's buggy. So [inaudible] they fix that in 2019 or 2020. But I like sticking with the Arnold separate Window here. Open Window view. We need to add some lights. When we're thinking about lights, we also need to think about reflections. So if we just go add a directional light or spotlight, it's not going to give us very interesting reflections that we would get from a photograph Q hdrihaven.com. This is where you can get free HDRIs and you can scroll and you can see these it's like a glass ball, a Lambert shader maybe, and a Chrome ball and a colored ball. You can see what the reflections are like and how they're different between each one. They have a massive library. I forget which one I already downloaded that was this one. We're going to use the aerodynamics workshop. That's just like softer lighting. But you can see here we're going to get some reflections from those windows. I think that'll look pretty good because this is going to be closer to what our text is going to look like. It's going to have color. It's not going to be a Chrome. I mean, you could do whatever you want really, but the example I'm going to show is going to be like a colored reflected shader there. I'm going to choose aerodynamics workshop. I already have it downloaded. I'll show you where you need to put that now. So let's just going to Arnold lights and I'll just turn it off for one second, and let's use the skydome light. You're free to play with all of these different lights, but I'm only going to cover two of them in this course. It's two of the most common you're going to use a lot. So let's go over to color and we going to map in a file here. By clicking that checker box, this window will open, click file. Now it takes us to the file area where it's asking for an image name. We can map that file into the image name, and I think mine is just under downloads, aerodynamics_workshop.hdr. There we go. You can see it in the background. It's cool. Now we know we have the right reflections and it's actually going to light the scene a little bit so we can test to see what that looks like already. Let's go ahead and play. Now we actually see something. If we don't want to see this actual image in the background of our render. We can scroll down to the skydome light settings and just turn camera to zero. Then they'll update. There you go. We have our letters. You can see the reflection happening already at the tops of these letters. See that nice little streak of reflection we have here and on the E? Another thing that we could enable in the render preview is 3D manipulation. Excuse me. We can actually zoom in within this window and manipulate the perspective camera. You can see that it'll update in here too. See how it's mirroring that. So we don't have to do it in here alone. Now that this has taken up a whole view, we can actually use that. It will try to update as quickly as it can and do its best. So it's looking pretty good. Let's keep moving forward and add some more interest to this by coloring the shader. Right now our shader is just white. So I'm going to pop this down below and I'm just going to drag this up so we can still see it in view. Select any of these, and then scroll over to our shader, aIStandardSurface, and of course you'll get to it from here as well, aIStandardSurface. That actually takes us to the group. We want the shader itself. That's some hidden behind the scenes Maya stuff that you don't really have to worry about. But it'll be pretty obvious. You want to see all these options here, the weight, color, and where we want to change the color, is obviously color. We click that, we get this little picker menu, and we can effect this. We can see it update in real time. Now, I want to use colors from digital creators school on my brand colors here. Close this window. Oh gosh, sorry. This is the beauty of having mini-projects going on at the same time. So I want to use Photoshop here to pick the right colors that I want. I want similar colors to this. So I hit I and then I click the picker, and then I can open up the color picker box here, and we get values that we can just type right into Maya 93, 230, 208. Cancel that. So let's see this. We want to change to RGB. RGB, zero to 255, because that's what we are seeing. Oh gosh, how good is my memory now that I did all that, 230, 203, it's pretty close, I think. Switch back. Make sure 93, 230, 208. What I say 93. That's where it gets those mixed up. The other thing I'd like to do, because the sky dome light is going to affect how this is seen in the color, because the color of the light is now being reflected off of these letters. We're not actually seeing the true color that we just input. What I'd like to do is just mash this visually, cancel that. I'm going to zoom in here. Then when I move mature off three manipulation. I can then can move this over. I'm just going to do this side-by-side comparison and have to scale down this my window a little bit. You can see this. Now I can see the colors. It's got to be hard with I have a bigger monitor and then what you can see. I'm having to try to fit all of a sense that you can see it. That's one fun thing that can happen. I thought I wanted to dock this, so I'll put it here. You see it says all on you. All you have to do is click and drag it and pull it out. Then try to give it back where we can see this and the color here. I'm going to open this back up. Plus wishes back to H, S, and V, increase the saturation. Basically just trying to match the color I'm seeing over here, which I think that's a little bit closer. It's pretty darn close media increase the saturation just a little bit. I think that's pretty good. The other thing that I want to do is in After Effects, we're going to add a background. But it's really hard to evaluate this color if we don't see it with the background color. Even though we're going to use After Effects to add the background color we can add different color in black, even though this is just a preview. Let's go to Window Display Settings. Now we get this background color. That will be definitely a one-to-one. Maybe I can move this over so we can actually see it while I'm typing it. Move the color picker down here. I'm just dragging it up. We haven't actually the hex color and this one, so we can just copy the hex color here from Photoshop and paste it into Maya or so I thought it will not. Let me do that. Let's just type it. Now cash wise that window now and staying open. All the beauties of going between programs, 87 to deviate. We have color management on, so we can just turn that off. That just means that things, I don't want to get into that. It's like 8-bit, 16-bit raw SRGB. That's too complicated for this. But anyway, this checkbox will fix that. Now we can actually evaluate the color of the letters with the background. We're going to eventually add, instead of After Effects released that I'm going to have, you feel free to make whatever colors you want. I look forward to seeing wherever you guys create. Now I think I need to add a little more lights possibly, because right now it's just so evenly lit. I don't get many shadows. Want to add a directional light in, so we get a little more shadows. Let's go over to the rendering tab in Maya. We just going to save this real quick as well. One good practice is to save often, especially when you get into rendering, Maya can definitely crash on you. We'll call this white. What was I doing? I was going to add a directional light. We're on the rendering tab. I'm going to click this little icon here, which is the directional light. We have this directional light on the scale. It up in the scale means nothing for what the light is actually doing. Its just so we can see it in the view-port. I want to give it a direction I hit me and I'm rotating it around. It'll actually haven't directional effect so that the shadows will cast here to the left. It's not doing much right now, so I needed to crank up the intensity, so let me just crank that up. Now we can start to see that a little bit. You know what I think it is too, is the orientation of our sky dome light. Let me get this back to default value here and then I want to rotate this guy. Don't let you actually. Next just click on it in the background and rotate this as well. We should be able to see this update pretty quickly in the view-port. What I'm looking to get is some shadows here on the left side, which is what already have. That's good. Let me undo this and see where we started. This is very flat. There's really no shadows. If I rotate this guy around, now we can get a little bit of shadows and you see how the reflection changes as well. Now the front edge of this letter is super reflected. As I rotate this, it's still changing the reflections. I want to find a nice happy medium between casting shadows and creating reflections in the letters. I might go a little bit road here and rotate this thing other directions to see if we can't get something interesting. This is 3D. Everything's not cookie cutter clean here. We're messing around. We're trying to figure this out as we go on. This is what it takes if you're looking for something that's cookie cutter and paint by numbers like don't get into 3D. Because you'll get frustrated that this is part of the creative process. It's just figuring this out. I like this. We can see that the front edges are illuminated a little bit more than the sides here. Now if I go to the directional light, I can see the effect a little more here. See. I wanted to have a three-quarter here. I want to crank up the values a little bit. Now like where this is headed right now, we back out the camera. Can see this from a distance. The other thing to keep in mind about reflections is all the reflections are dependent on the camera. That's why you want to keep your camera loose as well. Until we lock it down for the final render. Because you could find different ways that the sky dome reflects from a certain angle. Liking that, I feel like you're still something we can get out of this guy down light here. Just leave it there for now. The other thing I want to do is add another directional lights. When I hit Command D to duplicate it, rotate it in the opposite direction of this other one is a casting light. I'm just going to reduce this way down. I'm going to add maybe a little bit of a blue cast to this slide just to give a little color contrast of what's going on. It's a very subtle thing, but it's something I like to do. Some of my renders. Like where this is at right now, in the next lesson, we're going to lock down the camera. We're going to run through what it takes to actually render the whole animation up. I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks for watching.
17. Rendering: In this lesson, I want to cover the render settings, and rendering this thing out and locking down the camera. Before we get started, we need to figure out what the actual camera angle is going to be for our render. You can animate a camera if you want. Let's go over to "Create" and "Cameras". We can say there's three different types of cameras. They get increasingly more complicated to work with as you go down. I'm going to keep it simple and just use a normal camera. Now we have our new camera. I want to rename this, renderCam so it's going to be easy to see later on. I'm going to just drag this back out. Now we're not working in Photoshop. I want to make two panels here. I want to go to "Panels", "Layouts" and do two panes side by side. For this right one, I want the perspective camera, for this left one, I want the renderCam. We have the renderCam selected. Now, watch what should happen in the left frame. We have what we're going to see in our render. Let me frame this up. I'm going to hold down the Backspace here and right-click as we learned much earlier on. I just want back to sound start framing this up. Maybe you can also do it in here because we are manipulating this camera still with our view. That could be easier way to set this up. I think that one challenge if I had to do this over again, is to possibly separate out these letters more because if you go at any angle that's not straight on, they start to get all bunched up. That's just part of working in 3D. If you have this plan earlier on, to have something like three quarter, you would have wanted to probably separate the letters out, space them out a little bit more. But for now, I think this is going to be just fine. Then one thing I like to do to frame this up is to turn on these grid settings. I'm going to I hit "Spacebar" and just focus up on only this camera. It's a little hard to see with this Skydome light so I'm just going to hide that for now. Then change the background by hitting Alt B. Now we can see the gray a little bit better. I want to turn off show lights in this view. We can get this centered up. We can see where the center is right here. If we want that to get centered we can do that. With something as long as this one, I'm going to go back to the Render Settings and I'm going to change this to HD, a normal preset setting. Let's go over to HD_1080. I'm going to scale this up since my freeze is little bit longer, this format makes more sense. The other trick we can do is change the focal length of the camera, which I highly recommend. Every camera you make in Maya, the default focal length is going to be 35 millimeters. That's right here. I want something that feels a little more asymmetric so I'm going to do something maybe like 200. That means I'm going to use the back camera quite a bit. But now, look how much more separation we have between the letters just by changing the focal length. That just goes to show you how much control you have. You can adjust just by changing up the camera focal length just a little bit. We get this over to the side a little bit. Now, I'm going to to back into the Render Settings, and make sure that we're choosing the right camera for our renderable camera. Renderable camera, I'm going to choose renderCam, so we named it that, so it's easy to find. Now the next thing we need to do in the Render Settings is we need to change the Frame/ Animation extension, ext, to be name dot number dot extension. Extension means, right here, the image format. What is the extension? What are we going to save this as? For me I like to use EXR just because we'll get the most information bang for our buck. The file size will be much larger than if we were to do, JPEG or PNG. But it also has much more information for color correcting later on. Let's get back to the frame dot number dot extension. You can see right here in parentheses, it says Single frame, which tells us it's only going to render out a single frame if we leave it like this. I'm going to change that. We want name dot number dot extension. That number means frame number. It will add whatever frame number it is for that frame that is rendering so when we render this, we'll have individual pictures basically for each frame and then we'll compile that in After Effects later. We want name dot number dot extension. This tells you how many padding numbers there are so you can see this update right here. What it's actually going to do for the file name. Let me just zoom in a little bit so you can see that. As I change that frame padding, you can see that update. Then I want to update this to 250. We have our dimensions, and we have our frame range. Now all we need is a name so I'll just name it exactly what the text says. Then the next thing we didn't do, is start to effect the samples in the Arnold Renderer view. But first, we need to see what we're doing here in the Arnold Renderer view preview window to see how much we actually need to adjust this. I'll zoom out. Right now, we can see that it's not actually rendering the camera that we need. Let's move to a frame where we actually see the entire animation is on. The other thing we have going for us here is the fact that we turned off the SkyDomeLight. We can see this. We need to unhide that again so I'll hit "Shift H" so now it brightens up the letters again. I want to go to Render and choose the render shape, which is odd. That is not updating, renderCamShape. Let's switch back and forth. There we go. That was some weird bug. It wasn't updating. Of course, so now we have where final animation it's basically going to look like in the Render. What I'd like to do is do a little Render preview especially if there's somewhere that as shadows in it because that's where the most noise is going to be. I'd like to click and drag that. We can see, let me pull this up, when the rendering is done, it's going to give you a time. I took one second to render that little area. Well, I don't know if you can also see this. There's also a lot of noise here. Let's save a snapshot by clicking this little "Camera" button down here in the bottom right. Now it gives us this whole window. We save this view. I want to to pull this down and I'll bring the Render Settings back. Again, the Render Settings are accessed through this little button. I'm going to increase the camera samples to maybe five and the diffuse to maybe three. Then I'm going to compare those settings with what we just did earlier. When I hit the "Snapshot" button again. I'm going to set it, so you can see that. I hit that another time so now, I'll save another one. Now I can toggle back and forth. Hopefully, you can see how much difference the noise has changed now that we improved the sampling. It's gotten a lot better. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. The other thing that we can change is the samples in our lights. If we select the light we can increase the samples in our light. Let's increase that by maybe three to that. The Arnold tab for the directional lights as well, increase the samples. Now let's take another look at this. I'll hit this little swatch in the bottom right, and now we'll certainly update again. Now you can see it's going a lot slower. Let me just refresh this. It seems like it wasn't updating at all. I just had to close and then reopen the Arnold Renderer view here because it wasn't updating after I changed those settings. You might just have to toggle, close this down and open it back up. Now let's take another screen grab. Now that we've increase the samples on our lights, we can see an even greater improvement here. We went from this noise, to this noise, to now, this little noise, or lack thereof. It's looking pretty good. We've zoomed in here by 447 percent. You can see down here in the bottom-left. It took two seconds so it doubled our render time for that little bit of a squared area. But this is how you want to test your renders before you get started, and to help to eliminate the noise that you might have in your render. Because we do not want noise in our render so when I de-select the little preview square here, it looks like it might be freaking out again so I'm going to close this down. Actually, it wasn't freaking out. I just had the preview on. I was looking at this one. I just need to click the little "I" button down here. Let's hit "Play" to see the whole thing. Now we've let it render the whole thing out. We can see it took two minutes. If you want to reduce your render time, you can reduce the resolution so we could go down to 720p. We can also decrease the sample, so that'll help decrease the render time as well but this is the best-case scenario we get the highest quality render, is to do a full 1080p, and then crank the samples up a little bit so we get that all the noise out. There's two ways to kick off this render. Now that we have all the settings down that we like, we have all of this set correctly. What we need to do now is just double-check everything, renderCam is selected. There's two ways to render in Maya. Let's go over to the Rendering tab and then let's go over to Render now. Let's turn this off and just talk about this for one second. We have Batch Render and we have Render Sequence. These are just two different ways to render. Batch Render will render in the background and you'll see it update frame by frame down here in the Script editor and you can still work. Render Sequence will open up that Render preview window and it'll render from that frame after frame. It'd be hard to work inside of Maya. You'll want to make sure that the correct camera selected here. Just in case. It shouldn't take the Render Settings but I've had it bugged out sometimes and choose some other camera. Just double make sure you want that selected as well if you choose to do Render Sequence. But I want to choose Batch Render so what I'll have to do is just click that button. It's going to take all the settings that we've already created in the Render Settings over here. It's going to use this to kickoff the render. Now all we have to do is sit back and wait for this guy to finish. We can see it's already cranking away. Typically when you do Batch Render, it goes quite a bit faster than the Render preview. Just in my experience, it's not always the case. But of course these first frames are going to go much, much quicker because remember, there was nothing in the frame for maybe, the first 15 frames. These first 15-20 frames before all that text pop on should go by pretty quickly. The other thing that I will say is if you decided to choose JPEG, you will not have an Alpha Channel. We need an Alpha Channel. You need to choose EXR or PNG. TIF should work too but I don't like TIF. I don't know anyone who uses that. Use PNG or EXR. JPEG will not give us an Alpha Channel. Meaning, we won't have this transparent background so that we can add our own inside of After Effects here in a minute. Those are the two file formats you want make sure you do before you kick off your render. I will see you next lesson after all these are done rendering. Thanks for watching.
18. After Effects: Welcome to this lesson, where we will bring our rendered images into After Effects. Now this course isn't about After Effects, and I teach other courses about After Effects. If you want to learn more about this program, go check that out. Right now I'm using Adobe After Effects CC 2017. But everything we're going to do pretty much has been in every version of After Effects since it's been After Effects. So no worries about what version you're using. Let's go over here, and click right under the little project window here. Now hit Import file, and then we just need to navigate to the images folder, which I'm already in right now, and it says keep creating and I want to make sure sometimes After Effects glitches out if you select one and the ones in the middle. Let's grab the first one and it should bring it in as an image sequence, but if not, hit the top screen a little bit. On a Mac they have this little options thing I can toggle up. I want to make sure that openEXR sequence is on, and I've got the first one selected so I open. Depending on your preferences that have been set. It should come in as 24 frames per second. If it doesn't, you can right-click, go to Interpret Footage Main and then we can change the number of frame rate right here. But we animated 24 frames a second Maya, so this works for us. We want 24 frames a second. What I have to do is click and drag this sequence of rendered images down to this new composition button, and let go. That'll create a new composition. We can see our rendered images, pretty cool. We need a background because this is black and you might see a checkerboard on here. You can toggle whether it black or checkerboard here. But so let's create a new solid, we can have a background. I'm just go ahead and copied the hex value that we put in the background in Maya. I'm just going to rename this BG for background, and then drag it to the bottom. Let's hit play. I'm just hitting spacebar on my keyboard, and we can see this start to play, it looks pretty good. There's no crazy render artifacts that are happening. Everything looks as I would expect it to, based on what we had set up, Maya to be. The next thing that we could do, is to add a little shadow behind this for the background. What I'd like to do is to duplicate this layer and then go into effects panel here, and if you don't see that, you can get to all these windows here, if they're not checked on, you can check them on. This is the Effects Controls right here, and before that we were in the project tab. In case you ever lose any of those, you can get back to them there. I'm going to right-click in the Effect Controls, and go down to Generate Fill, and then the default is red, so let's just change that to black. I'll hit Okay, and then I'll add another effect under Blur. I'll go to Blur. Gaussian Blur or Gaussian. I think it's how you supposed to pronounce it. Let's drag the shadow, you can this shadow, and you could do this of course in Maya. You could add a plane behind your text and then have the light cast shadows on it. But this is more stylized, so I like to have control over it in After Effects. Now that we have the shadow there, it's hidden behind the actual texts. As soon as we start to ramp up the blurriness of this effect. Let me just zoom in here so you can see this. I'm turning on Repeat Edge Pixels as well. As soon as a start to crank up this value, I'm just left clicking and dragging. It should start to blur it out a little bit. Well you to go pretty big with it, but you can see it updating their in the viewport. Let's do something like that. It just depends on the look you're going for, or how much you want to do, and then we need to move it because it looks like it's directly on the background right now if we don't move it. I'm just going to hold down Shift and then use my arrows on my keyboard to move this in whatever direction that I want to, and then just how far you move it, obviously makes it look like the text is further off of the wall or the background here. I don't want to cut off the C, if you look over here on the left and I want to cut that off. I'm trying to figure out where exactly should I place this. The other thing we could do is, if we're meeting at the edge of this. Let's just move over as far as you can, and then we're going to just move the text itself. It'd be the same difference, and then we have a little room to play. We can always scale both of these down. That's probably the reason why I frame this so tight. Is that it's easier to scale down then scale up. If we were to scale us up, you can start to see it get pixelated. It gets fuzzy. But if we scaled down, it's not going to do that. It's nice to have that range later in After Effects to be able to play with that. I liked that, I think the shadow is way too strong, so I'll hit T on my keyboard with this layer selected that brings up the opacity. Now, I'll just click and drag this down. Until it's something that I like. I'm just going to scrub through and see how that works. It might look a little weird with this, let's how that. Yeah, it's not bad. I was saying because they keep comes in Z-space, it comes up the camera. So I really like these reflections, they glint off of the front of these letters. Really makes this feel 3D for sure. I think we went maybe too to the left with this, it seems like it's just off-centered too much. I'm going bring this back, I'm going to hit P to bring up position. I'm actually going to click and drag that back to the right, and then we can also see where if it's centered or not by turning on the tittle action save right here, and that'll have little crosshairs here in the middle. So we know whether or not this is centered or not. We can visually look from here to this edge and from here, this agile, it looks centered again. But now that we scale it down, we have a little more room to play with the shadow without cutting off the C letter on this edge. I turn off, until action save, so we can see this more clearly. Yeah, this is pretty much it. We could add a little bit of adjustment. Let's add an adjustment layer, I'm going to right-click and go New, it's off the screen, let me New Adjustment Layer. This will be in Color correction for everything and go to Curves. I'm just doing the same thing, Effects controls again and right-clicking and adding effects. For this one is going to be curves. One thing I'd like to do too, to see what contrast I'm dealing with is add a black solid here. Add a black solid and check this out. I'm going to change the, color mode. It's all the way down here at the bottom it says color. It's better than doing hue and saturation or dropping the saturation. This is the best way to see contrast. When I'm doing curves and I'm making an s- curve and this curves adjustment, I can see the contrast happening a little bit better. I just want the "keep" to be brighter than the background, of course. I want to do that in a luminance value, I want to see the black and white. I don't want to be distracted by color when I'm doing that. That looks crazy terrible because things get oversaturated when you do the s- curve. I'm just going to add, it's off screen here, let me do it again. Color correction and hue and saturation, then just drop the saturation a little bit. See if we can get it back into a good range. Again, if just for argument's sake, check this out. See what a big difference doing the black in color mode, versus dropping the saturation, they're two totally different things. It's good to do that. Anyway, I went way too far that saturation. Let's see somewhere in here. I really want to the teal to pop more. I can go to cyans and then crank up the saturation of that a little bit. I like to go more just to see if I'm actually affecting it, and even change the range of the color it's affecting here. I can make it affect a greater range to make sure it's getting all the highlights and everything, and then bring that back down. I just want to boost that a little bit and then toggle this on and off and see the difference. I'm going to toggle that icon, and I'm going to toggle the adjustment layer as well, this whole, I switch here. I think I went too far with reducing the overall saturation. Let me go back to master here, and then I'm going to bring this back. Then when I go back to the curves maybe toggle back this. I will just attach. We're starting to lose some of that details on the highlights. I will do that and then toggle that on and off, and it just brings a little clarity to the whole thing that might be hard to see on your screen. Then the other thing that I'd like to do is add a little vignette. We got a new adjustment layer. Then one fun thing with masks, is if I'm going to click and hold this so I can choose a different mask shape. If I just double-click this, it will actually just fill the entire composition window. Now, if I add a curves adjustment here, color curves, and then just drop the whole thing down. I just need to invert the mask. Here we have masks. If you don't see mask, just type mm on your keyboard and it will open up the masks. I want to say subtract, because I want the inverse of what it was giving me. Then I just use mask further to make this look prettier. Then let's turn off toggle the paths there, so we can actually see what we're doing. I really like that, it has that whole like Looney Tunes, retro a cartoon field when you do a stronger vignette. I think it works with this text. The other thing that we could add is little 2D animations inside of after effects, which would be a different course. This is not an after effects course, and this is about 3D animation and Maya with text. But just throwing out some ideas if you want to explore stuff, I do explain. I'll do that in my logo animation course and my explainer video course, both in after effects, and this looks pretty good to me. The last thing we had to do is just render this out of after effects. The shortcut that I use is "Command Shift question mark", and that will automatically put it in there. If you don't want to do that, let's just, delete this by hitting the delete key on your keyboard. We can go to composition, I never do this from here, it's always hard. Add to render queue this right here, and then we need to click lossless, choose the format we want to save this out as far as a codec, like Apple ProRes LT. Then, I will use HandBrake to make the file size smaller, I'd like to render it as big as possible to start and then I can re-compress it using HandBrake. Let me just pop this open. This is a really cool program, it's free, let me run this super quick. It wouldn't just run through this whole thing among this lesson is getting a little long. We'll save this here for now and hit render, this will take a moment. Now, that's rendered out, I'm going to switch over to HandBrake. All you have to do is just click and drag it in here, and then tell it where you want to save it, and hit save. What I find is most of the default settings here are pretty solid as far as re-compressing it. It maintains the quality of the video incredibly well. Let's just hit that start button, and then we can see it's already populated here. The original was 64 megabytes and HandBrake got it down to 1.8, which is crazy. We're going to preview it here, this is the original, and then this is HandBrake, which it might be hard to tell on your screen. But I can tell a little bit of banding and the vignette between these two. Then this one has a little bit too but it looks pretty solid as far as compression goes. One last thing I want to mention in Maya, is we did not turn on the motion blur, and that's just a setting in the Render Settings if you choose, to have that on your own. It's going to increase render times quite a bit. But if you want to do it, just go to the Render Settings, Arnold tab, click enable, and you've got motion blur. Well, thank you for watching this course on how to create 3D text animation. If you're interested in learning more about Maya, I have an entire 26 hour long course which covers everything from A-Z. We make our own character, we animate it, we rig it , we do effects, smoke and destruction, and cloth, and we texture it, we light it, we render it. We do all this really cool stuff, so you'll learn the entire pipeline from A-Z on how to create your own character, animate them. I hope you'll decide to join me in that class if you decide to continue to learn Maya. I will continue to keep creating new, and as my text says, I'll keep creating new and hopefully exciting courses for you in the digital space. Let's keep creating guys. Thank you for watching.
Lucas Ridley, Professional Animator
