Comprehensive 3D Animation Course in Autodesk Maya

1. Course Trailer, Introduction, and Course Overview: Do you want to start a career in animation or fizzle of fats? Do you want to create something from your imagination that looks very real? Do you want to build all those great things that you watch in movies? Hello everyone. I'm and welcome to my, I'm a through artist and a motion designer working in the animation industry for the past 11 years. In this course, you will learn how to create realistic looking through the objects, through the scenes, the animation, title animation, and a whole lot of other things. During this course, we will be using Autodsmya, which is the industry standard software for through animation used in all the major Hollywood films today. This is a complete course for beginners where we will go through the entire process of creating through the animation right from modeling to rendering to create our final shots. Now the better part of this course is in addition to the course lessons, it also has separate step by step practical projects, not only in videos but also PDF. I have also provided notes for every chapter, along with a cheat sheet, project files, and a lot of other resources for learning and practice. And you can follow this course in all the latest versions of Autodesk Maya, right, from 2020 or even 2018. To take this course, you just need a computer or a laptop, and a basic knowledge of how to use it. That's all you need. This course is perfect for students who want to get started with through animation or visual effects and be professionally trained. Or who want to simply upgrade or brush up their existing knowledge in his skills to become even better. If you're in shortage of time, then let me tell you that this course can be completed in just 30 days. Don't wait any longer. This is your moment to add something creative to your skills. Something that you can always use to reflect your creativity and imagination. And yes, make sure he was the trailer of this course. And also download the fact sheet which contains the answers to most of your questions regarding this course and through the animation. Just enroll in this course today and let's get started. Thank you. Hello everyone. In this video, I'm going to give you a brief overview of this course about what you're going to learn. Okay, First, I begin with the basics in a very steady manner so that it is easy for you to understand the most essential fundamentals which will enable you to handle day to day operations in Maya. Then I move on to Modeling Objects, where I'm going to explain the modeling tools and show you how you can model objects in a variety of ways. You will also learn creating the text for animation. And then in the same way I move on to lighting, shedding, texturing, animation, and so on. There is also a bonus lesson covering an additional topic and a step by step practical lessons on modeling and title animation. You can also go through the study notes as you complete the lessons and practice as many times as you want using our downloadable project files. Okay, one of the main objectives of this course is to make you version independent. Meaning that you will be able to work in any version of Maya no matter how latest or older it is, like the older Maya 2018 or the latest Maya 2024. But the best version to begin from would be Maya 2020. All right, once you have understood the very fundamentals of everything in this course, you can do even bigger projects because you will know from where to begin and how to complete something. This course starts right from the ground level where you know nothing as you begin. Tried my best to keep this course as simple as possible for you to understand and practice. The most important thing is to be able to do it. What do you learn in this course? Because if you're not able to do it, then there is no point of this course. There is no point. Why am I even teaching? Or why would you even enroll in this course? That is the reason why I have kept everything so simple and yet fascinating so that you can do it like you have wanted to. Go ahead enroll in this course and do your best. If you have any questions, download the FC sheet. Thank you. 2. How to Follow this Course and use its Resources: Hello and welcome back. First of all, thank you for enrolling in this course. Now, before we begin, I want you to know how to follow this course and use all its resources. All right? Following this course is very simple. You have to start from the beginning lesson to understand each topic properly. You have to watch every video twice. Initially, I teach in a very steady manner so that you learn the fundamentals properly, which I increase my speed. And that is the reason if you don't understand something, watch it again. As this course covers multiple versions of Maya. First I explain the topic in Maya 2020. Then in a following video, I explain the same concept in newer versions of Maya such as Maya 2,023.2024 I do it only if there is a change. Within these versions, you need to watch all the videos that are related to a single topic before moving on to practicing it on your computer. Okay, there are study notes that you can download for chapter and study them as you complete a particular topic. There are also exercise files and projects that you can download and use them for practicing and learning the concepts. Practically, the exercise files have been created in Maya 2020 so that you can open them in all the latest versions of Maya. As you open them, you might see a message that it was created in a student version. You just have to click on Ok to open the file. Other than that, there is also a cheat shade, which is actually a list of all the keyboard shortcuts used in this course. You will find them handy as you practice. Okay, you can visit our channel on Youtube to learn how to download and install Maya on your computer. If you have any doubts, you can either download the CU sheet, which contains a lot of answers or you can ask on Youtube. All right, let us begin with our first lesson. 3. An Introduction to Maya's Interface: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to give you an overview of the interface of Maya. All right, now here on the top we have the title bar, and below the title bar, we have a menu bar which contains menus. All right, below the menu bar, we have a little drop down here which is called a menu set. This contains categories of menus that we can change once we change it here, the menu bar will update with new set of menu. All right, this is the function of the menuet. And this has been categorized according to the work we do in Meyer such as modeling, rigging, animation effects, rendering, and so on. All right, beside that, we have a lot of options for creating and saving files, snapping options, and rendering options. These are all together. This entire line is called the status line. Right below the status line, we have the stabbed sections which are called shelves. The selves have been categorized according to the work that we do in myer, such as polymodeling, sculpting, wigging, animation, and so on. Each of these selves contain tools and options that we use in that particular field. Right on the left, we have a toolbox which contains the set of tools that we use to manipulate objects, such as the selection tools, the move tool, the rotate tool, and the scale tool. Right on the right side here, we have a channel box or layer editor. This is the channel box and this is the layer editor. The function of the channel box is that whenever we select an object, it is going to display the parameters of an object. Such as the transformation parameters, the visibility parameter, and all of those. All right, the function of the layerator is similar to that of Photoshop and Illustrator. It mainly helps us to organize the objects in our scene. Below all of these we have an attribute editor. This is called the attributator. If you select an object, it is going to display all of the attributes or all of the parameters for an object, even the parameters of its materials. The attribute edtor displays all of the possible parameters for any selected object. All right. I can collapse that by clicking on it again. Now this entire area at the center is called the Viewport. Here we create all the objects in our scene. This is the three D space. The viewport also has its own custom menu bar and a tool bar. All right, below the viewport, we have a time slider. This is called the time slider. We can scrub through the time to preview our animation. Beside that, we have animation controls, which are called the playback controls. This helps us preview our animation by playing it forward or backward. Or we can jump through key frames to key frame. Or we can play frame by frame. Or we can jump to first frame or the last frame. All right, below the time slider, we have range slider. The range slider determines how much of time is displayed on the time slider at any given moment. I can change that by dragging in this time slider to maximum, but you can also set it or you can also change it to a higher value. This number determines the number of frames. All right. Look. Now a time slider has 1,000 frames displayed all at once. All right. This is the function of the rain slider. Now below the rain slider, we have these two text boxes. This is called the command line section or the panel. Here we have the liberty to type in lines of commands, a lines of codes in Emil or in Python. All right. Emil stands for Maya Embedded Language. We can manipulate objects. We can create objects. We can do anything using lines of code. All right. Now beside that, we also have a script editor. If you click on this little icon, this is going to bring up the script editor. On the script editor, you can type in lines of code. You can write an entire program and execute it all at once. While in the command line, you have to type in one line at a time and execute it one by one. The script editor also has the two tabbed sections. One is Python, another one is Emil. You can type in an entire program here and click on Execute to execute the entire program. Or you can also run a program line by line. You don't have to run it all at once. That is the liberty you get within this script editor. All right, let me close it now. Below all of that, we have got help line. This last section or panel is called the help line. What this does is it displays short help tips for tools and selections. Yes, it does. If you hover your mouse over anything, over any icon, any tool, it is going to display a tool tape about how it works or what you can do with that tool or the option. All right. This is it. This was a quick overview of the interface of Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 4. Interface of Maya 2022, 2023, and 2024: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you the interface of all the versions of Maya covered in this course. Okay, this is the interface of Maya 2022, This is of 2023, this is of 2024. You won't notice much of any difference. May 2000, 22,022 are almost identical. Meaning you can follow this course in May 2022 the same way as in Maya 2020. However, the later versions such as Maya 2,023.2024 have few changes that have been covered in additional chapters, like this home button and the home screen. You can escape to the main interface by clicking here on Go to Maya. Maya 2023 still looks similar to its previous versions in Maya 2024, the interface has been little improved. The time slider and the rain slider look little different than their previous versions. There are also a lot of shelves. Also the help line has become a little taller in height to display the tool tips more prominently. All right, these are the updates on the interface of Maya 2,023.2024 Okay, see in the next video. 5. Setting up your Project: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a new project or set up your very first project in Maya. All right, to do that, you have to go to the File Menu and click on Project Window option. Now here you have to click on this new button to name your project. While naming your project, you have to take a note that you cannot use a space in between the words. We have to use an underscore. All right. I'm going to name my project as my first project. All right. Now, once you're done naming your project, you can choose the location where you want Maya to create that project folder, All right? I'm going to choose the location by clicking on this folder icon here. You have to go to my computer, go to Drive, and select Maya Projects. You don't have to select it. I'm selecting it because I have created a folder here where I store all my Maya projects. All right, You can create a similar one and don't store it in C drive, rather save it in some other drives. All right, now once you're done selecting this folder, you can hit and select to select that location for your project folder. All right, now once you're done naming your project and choosing its location, you can click on Accept to create the project folder. All right, the project folder has been created. Now all you have to do is go back to File menu again. Go to Set Project option, and then select that project folder. Click on Set to Set Your Project. Now you're ready to go. All you have to do is go to File Menu, Create New Scene, and click on to discard the previous scene. And now you can create any object by default and creating a cube. Go to File menu, click Save Scene. As to save the scene file, you have to type in a name. All right, make sure you save it in Maya Ask format, Not Maya binary format. Because if anything happens to the file, it can be fixed better in the Ask format and not in the binary format where everything is written in zeros and ones. Make sure you are saving in Maya ask format, all right. Now when you're saving the scene, you can see the location where Maya is going to save the scene file. It is inside my project folder and within the subdirectory scenes. Here Maya is going to save your scene file. Click on Save Us to save the scene file. All right, here you can see where Maya has saved the scene file. Now we can go and take a look at our project folder. What it looks like here is our project folder. My first project, Here are other projects too, that I had created a long ago. Now, within our project folder, we are going to have these subdirectories. Within the subdirectories, Maya stores all the files such as images, texture files, rendered images and animations, videos and everything that goes in and out of the scene file or is linked with the scene file. Everything is stored within these subdirectories. In this way, Maya makes it easier for us to move our project folders without losing any of our linked files. All right, So that when you open your project files, you don't see a message displaying a missing file. That's the reason why we create a project folder and why Maya creates so many subdirectories within the project folder. This helps keep everything organized within one folder. All right, let me show you an example of a project folder that I've been working on recently, such as Display Ball here within the images folder, you are going to find the rendered images. These things have been created in Maya. If we go back within the scene folder, we are going to find the scene file or the project file. If we go back within the source images, we are going to find all the texture files. All right, these texture files have been imported into a scene file. That's the reason why they are within the source images folder. That when we open our scene file in Maya, Maya will know where to locate the textures or which folder to look in for the textures, right? This is it. This is how you can create a new project or set up your project in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 6. Home Screen of Maya 2023 and 2024: Hello and welcome back. As you open Maya 2023 and Maya 2024, you will see a new home screen. If I go to the main interface, you will find that there is now a home button before the file menu, which opens the home screen. On the home screen, we can set our project folder, as well as create a new scene or open an existing one. You can see a list of recently opened project files here. You can open any of them by clicking on its name. You can directly click here and go to Maya. Switch back to the interface, then click here on the Home button to open the Home screen again, you can also uncheck this box to skip this home screen when you start Maya. All right, now if I switch back to the interface and go to the Windows Menu, Settings and Preferences, and click on Preferences, you will see that there is an option to remove this Home button so that you don't click on it by mistake while opening the file menu. Can keep it or remove it as you need. Make sure you have this interface option selected to find these options. All right. You can also disable the entire home screen by unchecking this box if you don't need it. This is for disabling the home screen. This is for disabling the home button, okay? Once done, you can click on Save to save the preferences, okay? This is a major update in May 2000, 23.2024 All right, save in the next video. 7. Navigating in Maya: Hello and welcome back. In this video I'm going to show you how to navigate within the three D space or within the three D pod in Maya. All right, So basically you are going to need a three button mouse and a keyboard to navigate within the scene, all right? All you have to do is press and hold down the Alt key or Al button on your keyboard. Okay? Always remember that you have to press and hold down the Alt key on your keyboard. And then use your three mouse buttons to click and drag to navigate within the scene. All right. Now as you press and hold down the Alt button on your keyboard, you have to click and drag with your left mouse button to orbit around an object or to orbit around a scene. All right, this is called orbiting. You're going around an object in any direction. Now if you click and drag with your middle mouse button while holding down the Alt button on your keyboard. You are going to pan through the scene like this, left or right, up or down any direction as you wish. All right. Now if you click and drag with your right mouse button while holding down the Alt button on your keyboard, you are going to dolly in and dolly out of the scene, All right? This is called Dolly in. This is called Dolly out. All you have to do is click and with your right mouse button while holding down the Alt key on your keyboard. All right. You can call it zoom or zoom out. But technically this is not zoom in, zoom out, because in this the camera is actually moving and not its lenses. Okay. When you dolly in, that means the camera is moving towards the object. When you dolly out, that means the camera is moving away from the object. So technically this is called dolly in and dolly out and not zoom in or zoom out. Okay, So this is how you can navigate within the three D space in Maya. All right. All you have to do is use your three button mouse, or the three buttons on your mouse, to navigate within the scene by holding down the Alt button on your keyboard. Now if you're using a Macintos opening system, you have to use your option key on your keyboard. You have to press and hold down the option key in place of Alt key. Use your three button mouse to navigate within the three D space. All right, The left click is for orbiting around the scene or an object. The middle click is for panning through the scene. Okay. The right click is for dolly in and dolly out of the scene. All right. This is how you can navigate within the three space or within the three D report in Maya see in the next video. 8. Display Modes in Maya: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to switch through the various display modes in Maya. All right, well, there are a range of keyboard shortcuts assigned with each of these display modes. Such as if you select an object and press number one on a keyboard, what's going to activate is the rough display mode, which is actually the default display mode for polygonal objects in Maya. All right, you can see that the surface of this object has become a little jaggy due to these little polygons being flat and not curved as was before. While if you press number three, it will activate the smooth display mode for objects where the surface will appear smooth and rounded. All right, if you press number two, it will activate the intermediate mode between the rough and the smooth display mode. It is more like activating both the rough and the smooth display modes simultaneously. It allows us to understand the change in volume of objects when switching from the rough to the smooth display mode. All right, if you press number four, it will activate the wireframe mode. This helps us see through the objects and also it makes easier for us to manipulate them, especially when we are dealing with a large number of objects or a complex object. All right, if you press number five on a keyboard, it will activate the shaded mode where you can see all the colors of the objects. This is the default display mode for objects in Maya. All right, if you press number six, it will activate the shaded mode with textures. Without shedders, textures cannot be displayed on the surface of an object. That is the reason why the texture mode always comes along with the shaded mode. If you don't know what a texture is, then the images that we import into Maya to add on the surfaces of objects are called the texture files. All this text on the ball and the tiles on the floor are the result of textures. It acts like a wrapper around a surface. All right, now if you press number seven on your keyboard, it will activate all the lights in your scene. Perhaps you can call it an illumination mode, where all the objects are illuminated with lights that you have used in your scene. All right, other than these, there are few extra display modes available on the tool bar of the viewport or the view panel such as the x ray mode where you can see through the objects wireframe, unshaded the combination of wireframe and the shaded mode, the shadows and the ambient occlusion. All right, lastly, if you press the space bar on your keyboard, you'll be able to switch from this perspective view to any of the orthographic views given here. The orthographic views are the two dimensional views such as the top view, the front view, and the side view. All right, this helps us in working with our objects more accurately than what is possible in the perspective view, which is the three space. There are more orthographic views available under the panels menu. Within orthographic, you can select any of these to switch to a different orthographic view. All right. Now one very important shortcut that can help you maximize your work area if you are on a smaller screen size, that is control plus space bar. If you hit control plus spacebar on your keyboard, this is going to maximize your viewport. All right, which is your work area. This helps us go into full screen mode. In this way, you can have a lot of work area even when you're working on a small monitor. All right, this is it. This was all about the various display modes in Maya and how to activate them by simply using a range of keyboard shortcuts. All right, see you in the next video. 9. Create and Manipulate Objects: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create and manipulate primitive objects in Maya. All right, now what are primitive objects? Primitive objects are those formed of basic shapes such as the sphere cube cylinder, cone, Taurus pipe, et cetera. Every model begins to take its form from one of these primitive objects. We merge one or more of these primitive objects together to make a more complex object. All right, there are many primitive objects available in Maya. You can either create them from the poly modeling shelf or by going to the create menu and then polygon primitives, and then selecting any of the primitive objects from this list. One important thing that you should take note of is this interactive creation mode. When this option is checked, you can click and drag on the grad and set the dimensions of the object to how much you want right during the creation process. Whereas if you keep that option unchecked, you will always create an object with the default size such as of one unit by one unit by one unit. However, you will always be able to change its dimensions right after you have created the object. Right now to create a sphere, you have to click on the sphere icon and then click and drag on the grid to set its radius to how bigger or smaller you want the sphere to be. To create a cube, you have to click on the cube icon, Then click and start dragging on the grid to create the base. And then drag up to pull the height. Whereas if you would like to create a pipe, you have to go to the Create menu, then Polygon primitives, and then select Pipe. Now you'd have to click and drag on the grid to first create its base, and then drag up to set its height. Then drag again left or right to set its thickness. All right, you have to follow the similar process for creating all of the primitive objects in your scene right. Now, if we go towards the toolbox panel, we'll find here a few tools using which we can manipulate the objects in three D scene. The first three are the selection tools using which select the objects in different ways. Such as the selection tool is used to click on objects to select them, and also drag a rectangular marker to select multiple objects together. Below the selection tool, we have this lasso tool, which is used to select multiple objects by dragging an irregular marker around them, like this. Right below that we have the paint selection tool, using which we can actually select the components of any three object by painting with it like a brush, like this. Right. Now, below all of these selection tools, we have a move tool using which we can move objects anywhere in the three D space. When the move tool is active, if you select an object, you will find these handles pointing towards x, y, and z direction. You can select and drag these handles along the axis. Chop them is pointing to the handles are color coded in which the red one points towards the x axis, the green one points towards the y axis, and the blue one points towards the z axis. There are also little square handles in between these primary handles. Using these, you can move objects on a particular plane, such as the xy plane, the zx plane, and the yz plane. There is one last handle at the center of the manipulator in the form of a little blue square. Using this, you can move the object anywhere in the three d space without constraining to any particular axis. All right, below the move tool, we have this rotate tool using which we can rotate objects. We have handles similar to that of the move tool, but in the form of circles with same colors denoting the different axis. You can rotate an object along any axis as you wish by selecting and dragging these rotation handles. There is also another handle that is used to rotate an object perpendicular to the point of view, right from where we are looking at the object. That is this yellow handle present outside of all the other handles. Now below the rotate tool, we have this scale tool using which we can scale up or down any selected object. This tool has similar handles, like the move tool, you can scale up or down in any particular direction or along any particular plane. Or you can do it from the center to scale up or down proportionally or uniformly in all the directions. All right, This is it. This is how we can create and manipulate primitive objects in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 10. Manipulate the Pivot of Objects: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to manipulate the pivot of an object in Maya. All right, the pivot of any object usually lies within its geometric center. It forms the point around which an object rotates. In Maya, the pivot of an object can be manipulated by activating the pivot editing mode, while the pivot editing mode can be activated in many ways. First let us create a cube, then scale it up. Now select the move tool to activate it, Then double click on it to open the tool settings. Here you will notice that there is an option with the name edit pot. There are four check boxes below that option out of which the first two are the important options that will be needing during the manipulation of pot. If you select an object, you'll normally find the manipulator for the move tool using which you can move the object as usual. But within the tool settings, you click on this edit pivot option. You will have the manipulator for editing the pivot of the object. Using this, you will be able to move the pivot of an object to any position wherever you want, even outside of the object. All right, in case you want to go back and set the pivot of the object to where it was initially, then you just have to click on this reset option to reset the pivot. This will set the pivot back to where it was by default. All right, now when I activate the pivot editing mode by clicking on this Edit Pivot option. If I hover around the edge corner or surface of the object, you will notice an align option around the cursor. What this does is if we click on the edge or surface or corner, it allows us to align the pivert to the position and orientation of the selected edge or the surface. Generally, we don't require to change the orientation of pot, but we do require changing the position of the pivertl. Hence, we can uncheck this checkbox for orientation if we don't need to change it. All right, in this way we can change the pivot of an object to the position we want. This Align feature simply helps us to align the pivot to the position of the selected component, such as an edge, corner, or surface. For that, we have to first select the direction where we want the pivot to move by selecting one of these three handles. And then select any of the corner points, edge, or a surface to which we want the pivot to align with. Once we are done, we can exit the pivot editing mode by clicking back on this edit pivot option. Now as I said, there are many ways in which you can activate the pivot editing mode in Maya. The first option was by going into the tool settings as you saw. The other way to do it is by pressing and holding down the key on your keyboard. This will temporarily activate the pivot editing mode for objects. As soon as you are done with manipulating the pivot, you can exit the editing mode by leaving the key. You don't have to hold it down anymore. Another way is to press the insert button on your keyboard. You don't have to hold it down, just press it once to activate the pivot editing mode. Once you are done manipulating the pivot, you can exit the mode by pressing the insert button again. All right. There is yet another option which is used to set the pivot of an object to its geometric center. That is this center pivot option under the Modify menu. If you select an object and go to Modify menu and click on Center Pivot option, the pivot of the object will be shifted to its geometric center. One more thing that I would like to show you is that we can change the orientation of the axis of an object from world to object by clicking on this drop down and selecting from world to object. Let me show you an example how this works. Here is a cube. If I activate the move tool, we'll find here three handles towards x, y, and z direction. If I relate those directions with the cube, you will notice that all the handles are coming out from the sides of this cube. These are actually tied up with the global direction. Now if I simply rotate the cube using the rotate tool to somewhat around 45 degrees, then activate the move tool Again, you'll notice that the handles are still pointing towards the same global directions, despite the fact that the cube has been rotated. And the handles are now coming out from the corners instead of sides as was before. In such a case, we can change the orientation of the axis from world to object. This will change the direction of these handles to align with the object and not the world. You can now move the cube along its own x axis and not along the global x axis. All right, once you are done, you can change it back to global by selecting here the world option again. All right, this is how we can manipulate the pivot of an object and also change the orientation of the axis of an object in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 11. Height Baseline in Maya 2023 and 2024: Hello and welcome back. In Maya 2,023.2024 a new attribute has been added within the create node for objects called the height baseline. Using this, we can change the position of the pivert to top or bottom of the primitive object or push the object below or above its pot. The location of this manipulator shows the location of the piot. By setting this value to one, we can move the object below its pivert. By setting it to negative one, we can move the object above its piot. This can be useful in many ways, especially when we want the object to sit on top of the grade and not below it. Also in many other cases. Okay, see in the next video. 12. Channel Box and Attribute Editor: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the channel box and the attribute editor in Maya, right? First, let me create a cube by clicking on this que icon. And then click and start dragging on the grade to create the base. And then drag up to set the height. Now keep this object selected. We'll find here within the channel box, few of its attributes or parameters related to its properties. We can change these attributes to make changes to the object, such as, we can rename the object by clicking here and typing a name and pressing the Enter button to confirm. We can change the position of the object in the three D space by changing its xyz coordinates, We can change the orientation of the object by changing these xyz rotation values. We can also change the size of the object by changing these scale values. Here the scale of one is the default size of objects. Values greater than one will make an object bigger, and values lesser than one will make the object smaller. All right. It is just that whatever we can do with the move tool, rotate tool and the scale tool, we can do it using the channel box and that too in exact numbers. There is yet another option here which is visibility. Using this, you can show or hide objects. In Maya, I can type in here zero to hide the object, and then type again one to show or reveal the object. Now if you scroll down the channel box, we'll find here the creation node for objects. If you click on this name, Polycube One, you will expand the set of attributes that is used to change the dimensions of the object, such as the width, height, and depth, as well as its subdivisions. If you wish to change all these values, then do it before you start using the modeling tools. All right, if we create a sphere and go to its creation node by scrolling down within the channel box, we'll find here the option to change its radius. You will find all the relative options as you create other primitive objects in your scene. Right now, coming to the attribute editor, it is much like the expanded version of channel box, where you see all the possible attributes or parameters of an object. You can modify everything the same way you can do within the channel box. Like you can rename the object, change its position, rotation, or scale values, or even values for shear, and change the rotate order, and so on. You can change the dimensions of the object by clicking on the creation node. Not only this, you can also change the color of the object by going to its shedder node, displayed within the attribute editor. You have to just click on this box and select the desired color for your object. All right, I'm not going to go into detail of all of these properties right now because I'll explain those in the upcoming videos for now. This is how you can use the channel box and the attribute editor in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 13. Outliner and Layer Editor: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the Outliner and the Layer Editor in Maya. All right, now first let me create a few objects like a cube, sphere, a cylinder. There are at least two ways to open the Outliner. The first method is by going to the Windows menu and clicking on the Outliner option. This is the Outliner. The second method is by clicking on this little icon located below other view panel layouts. This will toggle the Outliner as you click on it. Now the Outliner is used to display all the objects in your scene as a list. The Outliner allows us to rename objects and deselect objects, group or ungroup objects, change their hierarchy, toggle their visibility, and most importantly, show us every object that is within the project file. Now to rename an object, you have to simply double click on its name and then type in the desired name. And press Enter on your keyboard. To select multiple objects together, you have to press and hold down the shift key on your keyboard. As you select objects to subtract from selection, you have to press and hold down the control key as you click. All right, group objects together, we have to select multiple objects and press control plus g, G on your keyboard. While to ungroup objects, you can select the group and go to Edit Menu and click on Ungroup. Or you can remove a particular object from a group without ungrouping all the objects. That can be done by expanding this list by clicking on this plus mark, then selecting the object that you want to ungroup from the rest. And then simply drag it out of this hierarchy using your middle mouse button. Now the object will behave as a separate object and not as a part of group. All right, lastly, to toggle the visibility of objects, you have to press control plus H on your keyboard to hide these selected objects. And press ship plus H to reveal them back. Right. Now if you come to the layer editor, it is used to organize the objects in your scene. You can create new layers to categorize different set of objects within your scene. You can also toggle the visibility of layers, just like we can do in Photoshop, right? Create a new layer, you just have to click on this icon with the plus mark shortly the layer will be created. Now to rename a layer, you have to double click on its name and just type in here a new name. Click Save to confirm. To assign an object to this layer, you have to first select the object, then right click on the layer and click Add Selected Objects. This will add the selected object to that layer. Now to check whether or not it has been added to that layer, we can toggle the visibility switch for that layer. This will confirm that the object has been successfully added to the layer of our choice. In the same way, you can also remove selected objects from a layer. If there are multiple layers, you can move a layer up or down the queue within the layer editor panel, right? This is it. This is how we can use the outliner and the layer editor in Maya, right? See you in the next video. 14. Parenting Objects and Hierarchy Mode: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to parent objects and use the hierarchy mode in Maya. All right, what is parenting? Parenting is the process in which we establish a parent, child relationship between two or more objects. This, anything you do to the parent object will affect the child object as well. But anything you do to the child object is not going to affect its parent. The effect always travels down the hierarchy from parent to child to grandchild, and so on, and not vice versa. There are many ways to parent objects in May, but the most common way to parent objects can be done using the Outliner. Within the Outliner, you can drag and drop one object over the other to build the parent child relationship between them. Let me show you how to do that. These three objects are currently independent and not connected to each other. I can move any of them without affecting the other. All right, But within the outliner, if I select the cup and drag and drop it over the plate using the middle mouse button, you will see that the cup just disappeared from the outliner, but it hasn't. If we expand this section, we'll find that the cup is now showing under the plate. What this means is that the plate is now the parent cup. If I move the parent object, which is the plate, the cup will move along with it. If I move the cup, it will move independently of anything without affecting the other objects in the scene. This just doesn't apply to movement, but also rotation, scaling, and visibility as well. Now if I drag and drop the spoon over the cup using the middle mouse button, the spoon has now become the child of cup and a grandchild of the plate. If I now move the plate, all its children are going to be affected. If I move the cup, then only the spoon is going to be affected because it is the child of cup. But if I move the spoon, no other object is going to be affected. This hierarchy structure can go up to any level and is very useful in animation, as well as organizing the models. If you want to unparent an object, you can simply select it and then drag it out of the hierarchy using the middle mouse button. All right, now there are three selection modes available here on the status line. The component mode, the object mode, and the hierarchy mode. The object mode is the default mode for selection in Maya. The component mode is used for selecting the components of an object, while the hierarchy mode is used to select an entire hierarchy of objects. Let me show you how that helps. Like if there is a hierarchy of objects in the scene and you select a child object, then you will not be able to know whether or not it even has a parent unless you open the outliner to take a look. In such a case, you can use this hierarchy selection mode to select objects connected to one another in a hierarchy. If you select any child object, its parent will become selected as well. This way you don't have to every time locate the parent of an object within the outliner. You can do it comfortably by using this selection mode. But in the object selection mode, which is the default mode in Maya, selecting a child object will not select its parent, but selecting a parent object will definitely select all its children. This is, this is how we can parent objects and use the hierarchy mode in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 15. Working in Component Mode: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to work in the Component Mode in Maya. All right, what is Component Mode? Well, Component Mode in Maya lets you select and work with the components of an object. To switch to the Component mode in Maya, you can either click on this icon on the status line, you can write, click on the viewport and hold it down to bring up the marking menu, where you can select any of these components you want to work with. You have to write, click and hold down to bring up this menu, otherwise it will disappear if you leave your mouse button. All right, I'm going to write, click and hold down to bring up the marking menu and select the multi component mode. For now, what are the components of an object in three D? There are mainly three components of a polygonal object. The vertex, the edge, and the face. A vertex is a point or coordinate in a three D space. It is like an x, y, z codinate, whereas an H is a connecting line between two vertices. A phase is a polygon or surface formed of three or more vertices or edges connected together in a loop. In general, you can say that all points are vertices, all the lines are Gs, and all the little surfaces formed in between these connecting lines are pass. All right, now if we take a look on the status line with the component mode active, You get these three components to select from. This is the vertex selection mode, this is the edge selection mode, and the last one is the phase selection mode. As you enable one of these modes, you'll only be able to select the kind of component that you have enabled here on the status line. Like if I enable the vertex mode, I'll only be able to select vertices. If I enable the edge mode, I'll only be able to select edges. If I enable the phase mode, I'll only be able to select phases. All right, the same thing can be done using the marking menu. This really helps when you are in full screen mode with no status line. If you write, click and hold down within the Viewport area. This marking menu will pop up where you can switch through the various component modes. This is the Vertex mode where you can select vertices. This is the Edge mode where you can select edges. This is the phase mode where you can select phases. There is also a Multi mode where you can select all of the components like vertices, edges, and faces. All right. Now one thing I would like to tell you is that before you begin modifying the components of an object, make sure you have set its dimension and subdivision values to whatever you want. Because once you start modifying the components, those options will be gone and you will not be able to change it later. However, Meyer records the history of objects from beginning to end. You can find the option to change those values later, but that will bring inappropriate results. Make sure you have set the dimension and the subdivision values before you begin working in the component mode. Right? Okay. Let me set the subdivisions of the cube to three from all the sides and then switch to the component mode. And I'm going to enable the vertex mode so that I can work with the vertices. Now if I grab the move tool, I can select any of these vertices and move it wherever I want. I can even select a group of vertices and move them together in and out of the cube. Not only I can move them, but also rotate them using the rotate tool and scale them as well. Right now, if I switch to the edge mode, I can select and move edges as well. I can also rotate them and scale them as needed. The same thing can be done with phases. If I switch to the phase mode, I can select and move phases. I can rotate them, I can scale them like we can do with rest of the components. Now one thing that you will note here is that when we move an edge, we technically move the vertices that make up the edge. Same thing goes for a phase. We move a phase, we technically move the edges, or more appropriately, the vertices that make up the phase. Right? In the upcoming lessons, we'll be doing more manipulations of these components than just moving, rotating, or scaling them. That is when we'll begin with modeling. For now, this is how we can work in the component mode in Maya. All right, see in the next video. 16. Snapping and Aligning Objects and Components: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to snap and align objects and their components in May. All right, now that we know how to manipulate objects and their components in the three D space, here we'll take a look at how to manipulate them precisely without spending a lot of time in manual adjustments. Basically, what is snapping? In simple terms, snapping is the process of changing the location of an object from one place to another instantly at the click of a button. It is more like jumping from one place to another instead of gradual movement. Now, how do we snap objects in May? Well, there are many ways to do that. Maya has many types of snapping methods out of which the two most frequently used are the grid snap and the point snap. Practically, you will hardly ever need to go with any other method than these two. To use the grid snap method, you have to click on the icon on the status line to activate it, then activate the move tool. Using this, you can move objects exactly on the grid lines in any direction. It will not move in fraction, but in whole number units like 123 and so on. One thing that you should note here is that the object is positioned on the grid using its pivot. If its pivot is located within its center, the object will always snap with its center a line to the grid. If I move the pivot of the object from its center to its corner by pressing and holding down the key, then if I snap the object on the grid, you will notice that the object now moves differently than before. Now it moves with its border align to the grid lines. As we snap it along the grid, an object is snapped using its pevert. How an object will snap depends on the location of its pevert. Hence, the objects movement will always be relative to where its pevert is located. Now coming to the point snap, we have to click on this icon on the status line to activate it. Then if I select an object and start moving it, it will jump from one location to another based on where the vertices or points are located on the other object. All right, this is how we can snap objects to a particular location using the grid snap and the point snap methods. Now we'll take a look at how to snap the components of an object. To snap the components of an object, first we have to switch to a particular component mode, such as the vertex mode, then activate the grid snap option. Using the move tool, you can snap the vertices the same way you can do with the objects. This is mostly useful when we want to resize the object to a particular dimension based on the grid values or we want to align it properly with other objects within the scene. All right, now if we activate the point snap option, we'd be able to snap the vertices to the nearest points or other vertices. This is useful when you want to align the vertices on top of each other so that we can merge them together to form a single vertex. All right, lastly, both of these grid snap and point snap can be activated using the X key and V key respectively on a keyboard. When needed, the X key will activate the grid snap option, while the V key will activate the point snap option. But you need to press and hold it down like always. Otherwise it will return to the normal mode instead of the snapping mode. All right. Now let me show you an example of how you can align an object using the snapping methods. Okay, I have to put these wheels on the axle of the skateboard. First, let me switch to the orthographic view so that I can look at it from the side. And then select the wheel and activate the grid snap option using the X key on your keyboard. Then we start moving the wheel until it snaps to the grid intersection where the axle is lying. The other wheel can be aligned in the same way. In this way, the center of the wheels will always be aligned to the center of the axle without requiring us to manually adjust their position. These snapping functions will be useful throughout the entire course as we move along from modeling to animation. Okay, this is how we can snap and align objects and their components in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 17. Combining and Separating Objects: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to combine and separate objects in Maya. All right, now, before you decide to combine objects, make sure that you don't need to move them independently of each other in any respect. Because once they are combined, they will become one object and you won't be able to move them separately as before. Let me show you what I mean by that. Here are two separate objects that should behave like one object. Hence, we are going to combine them by first selecting them and then going to Mesh menu and clicking on Combine. This will combine both of these objects into one object, and they can't be moved individually anymore. If I move them, they will move together because they have become one object. Hence, it has a single manipulator as we select it. All right, now let me undo the combination. Then select these objects again. And this time you just remember that I'm selecting this handle at last, it is highlighted in green. Then I'm going to go to Mesh menu and click on this box icon for combine, which will bring up its options. Here you can see you can choose to set the position of the pivot for the combined object. The first option is center. If I select this and click on Apply to combine the objects, it's pivot will be set to center with respect to the geometry of the final object. I'm going to undo it again. This time I'm going to select Last Object here and click on Apply. This will keep the Pivert to the same location as was of the last selected object, which in our case was the handle. All right, let me undo this as well. Now if I select World Origin and click on Apply, this will set its pivert to World origin which lies within the center of the grid or the three D scene. There is, however, one thing to remember, that this is a temporary combination of objects. Hence, they can be separated back using the separate command under the Mesh menu. Look, I can now select and move the objects independently of each other. But there is also another fact that if we make a permanent combination where the components, like the vertices between them, will be combined as well, the objects cannot be separated anymore using the separate command. So make sure you don't merge their vertices if you later want to separate them using the separate command. All right, this is how we can combine and separate objects in Maya. See in the next video. 18. Extrude, Bridge, and Bevel: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to extrude bridge and bevel objects in Maya. All right, what is extrude? Extruding is the process in which new polygons are created from the selected polygons or edges. In order to extrude objects, you can either select their components, like the edges or the faces, or you can select an entire object to extrude all its faces together. Let me show you how to do that. Here is a cube. I can switch to the component mode and select two of its faces, then go to Edit Mesh, and click on Extrude. This will bring up the manipulator as well as a floating window with parameters. Now what has happened here is this, that new polygons or faces have already been created, right at the moment when I clicked on extrude. All we can do is pull out those faces using this manipulator. We can also scale them up or down. The same thing can be done using these parameters on the floating window. One thing you remember that in case this floating window disappears, you can find all those parameters right within the channel box under the poly extrude option. Right. Now let us see how these parameters affect the way new polygons are manipulated. The first attribute is thickness. Using this, you can set the depth of the extrusion. Local translate Z works the same way as depth, except for the fact that it follows a single perpendicular direction for all of the selected phases. Because of which, it might lead to unequal depth across surfaces. Offset will help you expand or collapse the edges of the extrusion. It is much like scaling the phases in a particular direction. Divisions will let you set the number of divisions that you want along the length of extrusion. Key phases together. We'll let you extrude the selected phases either as a single group or it will let you extrude along their own Z direction, which is actually perpendicular to the selected phases. All right, there is yet another simple way to extrude phases and edges if you are in the component mode. That is, if you select these phases, hold down the Shift button on your keyboard and then click and drag the handles of the move manipulator. It will extrude the selected faces. The same thing can be done with edges. This is extremely useful when you want to extrude certain parts as quickly as possible without moving into advanced options. All right, this was all about extruding. Now let us take a look at how we can bridge objects. Bridging is the process in which new polygons are created to connect and fill the gap between two rings of edges to bridge between objects. First, we have to combine the objects using the combined option. Then go to phase selection mode and delete the phases from the sides we want to bridge. Then go to edge selection mode and double click on the edge to select the entire loop. Hold on the shift key and double click on this edge to select its loop as well. Then go to Edit Mesh and click on Bridge. One thing to note here is that bridge operation will not be successful if the number of edges on both the sides are not equal. If there are four edges on one side, then there have to be four edges on the other side as well. Now here you'll get the same floating window with parameters for bridge. The first attribute is divisions. What this does is it sets the number of divisions that you want between the bridged components. Using taper, you can change the shape of the bridge, whether it will be straight or bulged in, or bulged out. Using twist, you can rotate the bridge, Hence, it is called twisting. Both of these direction attributes help in changing the direction of the bridge from positive to negative side of the selected edges and vice versa. You can use the bridge offset the same way as twist, except for the fact that it uses a different approach than that of twist. The last attribute that matters here is curve type. You can choose between blend, linear, or curve. This actually sets the profile of the curve, whether the bridge will be blended with nice curvature along its length. Or it will be straight geometry between the selected edges. All right, this was all about bridging objects. Now let us move on to beveling objects. Beveling is the process in which new polygons are created in place of the selected edges on the object. We bevel objects to create smooth corners. You have to understand one thing here, that selecting a phase also means technically you're selecting all its edges. All right, to bevel objects first we have to select the object if we want to bevel all its corners, then go to Edit Mesh, and click on Vel. Here within the floating window, you can set the parameters for veal, such as the fraction. Using this, we can set the width of the vivel using segments. We can set the number of divisions across the vel. Using depth, we can round the vel edges inwards or outwards depending on how we want them to be. Using hamper, we can actually create a sloping veal if we keep this on. Otherwise it will simply create edges around the corners with no rounding or anything. But that is useful when you are going to use smoothing like pressing number three. This will definitely produce the result of vel. You can clearly observe the rounded corners here. This roundness can be controlled using the fraction attribute in vel. All right, this is how we can extrude bridge and vel objects in May. See you in the next video. 19. Fixing the Green Polygons in Maya 2023 and 2024: Hello and welcome back. In May 2000, 23.2024 when bridging between objects, the newly created polygons may appear green, which means they're missing the default shading or the default material. To fix that, we just have to select the object. Then right click and hold go to assign existing material. And select either the Lambert one here in May 2023 or the Standard Surface one from here in May 2024. Can do that to specific phases instead of the entire object if necessary. All right, so this is something you need to take care of in Maya 2,023.2024 when you see green polygons appearing in any case like bridging. Okay, see you in the next video. 20. Insert Edge Loop, Offset Edge Loop, and Slide Edge Tool: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the insert edge loop, offset edge loop, and slide edge tool in Maya. All right, now as you know that we can manipulate the components of an object to transform a simple object into a complex one. Also we saw how we can create new polygons from the existing ones to create more sophisticated objects. Here we'll take a look at few such other tools using which we can add more details to the surfaces of objects. All right, the first tool is the insert edge loop tool under the mesh tools. Using this, we can insert edge loops in between other edge loops on the surface. Or you can say that we can split the faces using this tool, like subdividing the surface into smaller sections. However, there is one criteria for these edge loop tools to work if you really want to add closed edge loops and not open edge loops like it may happen many times when dealing with different types of polygons. That is, you need to have polygons that are quadrilaterals and not triangles or engons. Quadrilaterals are polygons with four sides or corners. Triangles are polygons with three sides or corners. And engons are polygons with more than four sides or corners, such as pentagons, hexagons, and so on. You can only split a loop up quadrilateral faces using the tools. If you try to split a serrge of triangles, it just won't work as intended. In many cases where there are both quadrilaterals and triangles, the loop will continue only until the last quadrilateral that it can find on its path. After which, the loop will just have open ends. Hence, it will not be a closed loop as required. When modeling objects, we prefer to use faces that are quadrilaterals, that every component, such as the edges or the faces, are always in loops. This helps in subdividing the surfaces uniformly as many times as we want quite easily when needed. Now, there are many options when using the Insert Edge Loop tool. Those can be accessed by going to Mesh Tools and clicking on this box icon for Insert Edge Loop. Here you will find mainly three options regarding how we can position the edges. The first option is the default one where you can simply click and drag on the edges to insert an edge loop wherever you want and leave the mouse pattern to confirm its position. All right, in this relative distance means that the edge loop will be positioned relative to the spacing of the surrounding edges. You can simply say that it is calculated in percentages rather than in exact numbers. Hence, the edge loop will always divide the space proportionally between two adjacent edges, no matter how bigger or smaller the spacing between them is. The next option is equal distance from edge. Using this option, you can insert an edge loop which is evenly spaced from the nearest edge. You can say that this one works more like in numbers. Like if the distance from the closest edge is three units, then it will be same across the entire length of the loop, irrespective of the spacing between the two adjacent loops. Right, The third option is multiple loops, where you can enter the number of loops that you want to insert all at once and evenly spaced from one another between two adjacent edge loops. You can use this option to equally divide a surface into as many sections as you want. Right now, coming to the offset edge loop tool, you can go to Mesh Tools and click on offset edge loop to activate it. Using this, you can click and drag on edges to create edge loops on either side of the edge. You can change the spacing by going to its options. Here you can select between relative and equal spacing, like the Insert Edge loop tool. If you select relative, the edge loops will be inserted based on the distances between the adjacent edge loops. Just remember that relative means proportional division of space based on percentages rather than exact values. Whereas if you select this equal option, then the edge loops will be inserted evenly spaced from the edge on which we are clicking and dragging. The distance of the central edge loop will be same from the edge loops on its either side right. Now, the last tool that I would like to show you is the slide edge tool. Using this, you can slide an edge or an edge loop on a surface to reposition it while also maintaining the flow of the surface. You just have to select an edge or edge loop and click and drag with your middle mouse button within the viewport to slide the edge loop to either side on the surface. All right. You might think that why not? We can do the same thing using the move tool. Yes, definitely we can. But that is not going to maintain the flow of the surface. Sliding means slide an edge on a surface without affecting the overall flow of the surface. You can use this tool to adjust the spacing between edges or different edge loops. All right, this is how we can use the insert edge loop, offset edge loop, and slide edge tool in Maya. See you in the next video. 21. Multi-cut Tool and Merge Vertices: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the Multicar Tool and merge vertices in Maya. All right, the Multicar Tool in Maya is used to cut, slice, and insert edges on polygons. The best feature of this tool is that you can cut polygons in any manner you want. You just have to keep clicking on edges or vertices to cut the polygons and press the Enter button. When you're done, you can also press the back button to go back step by step. If there is a mistake, then resume the process from there. Cut will not be confirmed unless you press the Enter button on your keyboard. All right, now you can also hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and then click and start dragging on the edges to confine to specific percentages while cutting the polygons. There is yet another feature of the tool, and that is can hold down the control button on your keyboard to insert edge loops. You just have to click on an edge to insert the loop exactly on the place as displayed in the preview. You can even confine that loop to specific percentages by holding down the shift key as well like 102030 and so on. To insert an edge loop at a particular location, this percentage can be set by going into the options for multicut, you can set this snap step percentage to anything like 510 or 20, and it will divide the edges in multiples of this number. All right, now coming to merging the vertices, you can switch to the vertex mode and select two or more vertices and go to Edit Mesh, and click on Merge or Merge to Center to merge the vertices. This will create a single vertex in place of multiple ones, Right, This distance threshold value controls how close the vertices should be in order to become merged. This is especially useful when we are trying to merge all the overlapping vertices together across the entire object. In this way, only the overlapping vertices become merged while the vertices that are far away from one another remain as they are. That is the time when we use point snap function a lot to snap the vertices over one another so that we can merge them together by selecting all of them at once and clicking on merge. This is how we can use the multicut tool and merge vertices in Maya. All right, see you in the next video. 22. Extract, Detach, Append to Polygon, and Fill Hole: Hello and welcome back. In this video I'm going to show you how to use extract, detach appenopolygon and fill hole in Maya. All right, now there will be times when you may need to separate certain parts of an object from the rest of it that you model so that you can model them separately to add more detail without affecting the base model. And there you will find the need for such options like extract and detach. Let's take a look at how it works. First, we need to switch to the component mode, such as the face mode, and then select the faces or polygons that we want to separate from rest up the object, and then go to Edit Mesh, and click on Extract. This will separate those polygons from rest, stub, the object. Now they will behave completely as separate objects. You can select both of them separately as different objects. Now with their own manipulators, right now, the detach option does the same thing as extract, except for the fact that if we use detach, it will definitely separate these polygons from the rest, but the separated polygons will still remain part of the same object. When we switch to the object mode, this is useful when we want to model certain parts of objects separately, but we still want them to be a single object. All right, coming to the append to polygon tool, it is used to insert phases in between other phases. It needs at least two edges to create a phase in between. Let us take a look at how it works Here I have this object with gaps in between that I need to fill up with phases. I can switch to the Component Mode and select the Edge mode. Now go to Mesh Tools and click on Pinto Polygon. With this tool active, you can click on two opposite edges, one by one, and press the Enter button to insert a phase. You need at least two edges to create a quadrilateral phase In between, these edges must belong to two different lines of edges. They shouldn't lie within the same line, otherwise this tool is not going to work. Always keep in mind that whenever a tool is not working properly as intended, it means that we are certainly missing the criteria in which that tool can work as it should. All right, now what if we had to fill up a gap with more than two edges or sides like this one with eight edges in a loop, cannot be properly filled up with a Pento polygon tool, even if we try to do with it because of the way it works. In such a case we can use fill hole option. But first we have to select the edge loop by double clicking on any of these edges. Then going to Mesh and click on Fill Hole. This will fill the gap with an Engon, which is a polygon with more than four sides and represents the number of sides such as 567 and so on. Later this engone can be splitted up into quadrilaterals using the multicut tool. Somewhat like this. All right, so this is how we can use extract, detach, append to polygon and fill hole in Maya, see in the next video. 23. Step-by-Step 3D Modeling Practical: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to guide you through a modeling process in which I'm going to show you some practical application of the tools that you learned in the previous lessons. It will help you understand how these tools really help in our workflow. Before that, let me show you how to maximize your work space. First, hit Control plus space bar for full screen mode, and then go to the Windows menu Y elements. Click on this checkbox for tool box. This will display the toolbox panel. Then again go to the Windows menu Y Elements and select the command line. Then again the Self. Lastly, you can click here on the channel box to expand its spanel. That's it. It should give you enough area to work on three D models, especially if you have a smaller screen. Okay, what really is three D modeling? It is the process of creating three dimensional representations of an object or a surface. It is the very first step in a three day workflow where we begin creating the objects that we either see in real life or just imagine in our minds. All right, in this practical, I'm going to model mainly three objects here, which is the cup, the plate and the spoon. First I'm going to model the cup as this is going to be your very first modeling practical. I'd suggest you to observe everything very carefully as I proceed. You have to pay attention to all my steps, what I'm doing, how I am doing it, okay? You must know how to begin so that you don't always have to depend on step by step tutorials to make your own three objects. All right? You might also think, why am I not beginning with something bigger and more complex, like an excavator or a robot, or something that looks fascinating like a spaceship? Why am I beginning with such a simple model in a stead? Well, as a beginner, you should always start with something that you can finish early. This will help you build up your confidence and prevent confusions. Model these simple items properly. You will be able to model all the complex objects that you would like to using just your fundamental knowledge. Before you begin modeling an object, you have to learn how to break it down into simpler shapes like cubes, cones, cylinders, spheres, and other shapes. If it is a simple object like this cup, plate or spoon, you have to look at its major portion. Which shape does it resemble to? Like you can say that this cup is cylindrical in shape. The plate is circular in shape and the spoon somewhat oval in shape. With a rectangular handle, You always have to find a starting point from where you can begin creating the rest. Once you understand the profile or shape of the object, you can select the primitive object that should be best to begin with. Eventually, you would be able to transform that primitive object into whatever you're trying to create. As this cup is cylindrical in shape, I'm going to start with a cylinder and keep modifying it unless it becomes a cup. All right, let me first hide these objects, then create a cylinder. It can be of any size as you create. Then I'm going to enter some values for the radius, height, and subdivisions that you get the same result as mine. Okay, now I can bring it to the center of the grade by entering zero for translate x and z, and 2.5 for y, which is half the height of the cylinder. Then if we dolly in, you will observe that we have triangles at the center. I'm going to switch to the edge mode and quickly select every other edge from this section by holding down the shift key as I select. Once they're selected, I can hit Control plus delete on my keyboard to delete those edges and make the triangles into quadrilaterals. I'm going to do the same thing on the bottom side to select the edges, either the art or the even ones. And hit Control plus delete to delete them. Now I'm going to go to the mesh tools and click on the Insert Edge Loop options. Select this Multiple Edge loops option. And enter one, and click on any of the edges on this last loop of faces to insert an edge loop exactly at the center. Okay, I inserted this loop. To divide this surface, I have to create the hollow portion of the cup. For that, I'm going to select this entire area on top till here, and extrude it down to create the hollow space. I'm going to select all of these faces on top, except for the last loop. To select these phase loops, first you have to select a phase, hold down the shift key, and then double click on the adjacent face to select the loop in that particular direction. The second selection determines the direction in which the loop has to be selected. In the same way, I can select the other loops too by selecting a phase and then double clicking on the second phase. Then go to the top view and select this entire section of faces at the center by dragging a rectangular markey over them. Then go back to the perspective view and switch to the wire frame mode. And de select these faces on the bottom part by holding down the control button and dragging a markey over that region. The control button is for removing anything from the current selection, while the shaped key is for adding to the selection. All right, I can switch back to the shaded mode now with the faces selected, go to Edit Mesh and click on Extrude. Push it down in negative y. Go to the front view and try to match the depth of the bottom to that of the sides. This is sufficient. And enter this value for local translate Z, so that you get the same result as the model years. Now on the negative z axis, I'm going to select a phase, make sure the phases are perpendicular to this axis. That is the very reason why I had used a value of 26 for the subdivisions of the axis. What I have to do is, with that phase selected, go to Edit Mesh, and click on Extrude, move it outward, and enter this value. This is going to be the handle of the car. Okay, I'm going to switch to the side view and select the Insert edge loop options. Set it to relative distance. And use it to insert an edge loop in such a way that it almost forms a square. Then I can switch back to the perspective view and select this face, and this one here. And hit the delete button on the keyboard. Deleted them so that I can bridge this part and the body to complete the handle. In order to bridge, I have to double click on the edge to select the loop. And then do the same thing here, holding down the shift key. Once they are selected, go to Edit Mesh, and click on Bridge, Increase the divisions to give the handle a smooth curvature. All right, now if we look at the top, you will notice that the corners are sharp. Real life objects do not have extreme sharp corners except for tools and weapons. So we can add some bevel, at least to this corner, the one on the inner side. Double click on the edge. To select this entire loop, go to Edit Mesh, and click on Bevel and leave it to default values. Okay, now it might appear as complete and you may be thinking, why did I model everything like it is built of some rectangular blocks? Well, initially we build our models this way with one thing in mind that later we're going to make it surface smooth, either by pressing three on keyboard or by practically adding subdivisions using the smooth option. Okay, I'm going to press three. Now you can see as I pressed three on my keyboard, we're looking at the smoother version of our model at some places. Around the corners, it is smoothing more than it is required. This is not what a real cup looks like, right? In order to hold the corners from smoothing too much, we have to add resolution to the mesh. Which means adding more edge loops in between these existing loops. You don't have to add it everywhere, but mainly around the corners. I can use the Insert Edge loop or the offset edge loop tool. For that, let me select the Insert edge loop by clicking on the square icon for options. Always keep an eye on the options I select. I can enter one edge loop at the top and one around it so that they both hold this corner from smoothing too much. Then I can place five edge loops on the interior faces to hold the surface from being pulled in too much due to smoothing. I'm going to switch to the side view and place a few edge loops around the handle to where we have corners that we want to preserve. Insert to equal edge loops here to subdivide this top section just like the rest. Now I'm going to use the offset edge loop tool. Make sure you have this equal option checked within its options. And place two edge loops equally from either side of this corner, around this corner on the inside. The closer you place the loops, the tighter and sharper the corners will be. All right, now we can simply press three on our keyboard to see the final result. Okay, this is good. You can always take a look around the corners to see if they're smoothing correctly. All right, we have successfully modeled our cup. We can hide this object for now by creating a new layer, entering a name, then adding this object to that layer. By selecting it and right clicking on the layer and add selected objects. One added, we can toggle the visibility of the layer using this switch means visible, empty means invisible. All right, I'm going to keep the cup hidden for now so that we can clear this area for modeling other objects. Okay, as we have finished modeling our cup, let us move on to modeling the plate. As you know, the plate is circular in shape. There are many possibilities of choosing your desired primitive object. You can choose anything that is circular in shape and keep modifying it unless it looks like a plate. I'm going to use a sphere, which for now, might feel a little odd to you, but you will understand once I show you how it was a good choice. For this purpose, let me create a sphere and set its radius so that you get a similar result as mine. Then I'm going to switch to the face mode and select more than half of this sphere. Up to this portion, you can use the front or side views to be accurate. Once perfectly selected, hit the delete button to delete all those phases. Now what you see is just the remaining portion which appears to be black from the inside. Because a face has two sides, a front and a back on the front side has all the shedding and the backside doesn't, due to which it appears black. And the backside of faces generally lie on the inside of objects. Okay, now if we look at the bottom, we're going to find the triangles again, we have to turn into four sided polygons by deleting every other edge from this section. Once done, go to the object mode, and while it is selected, go to the Modify menu and click on Center Pevert. Set its translate x and z values to zero, then switch to the scale tool and scale it down from top to make it somewhat more flat. You can also enter a value directly for the scale y attribute. All right, now keeping it selected, go to Edit Mesh. Click on Extrude. And push the Z handle down and enter this value here. Then switch to the face mode and select all the faces on the top inner portion here up to the second edge loop. Go to Edit Mesh, and click on Extrude. Select the move Toll, switch to the side view and wireframe mode and push it down and keep it just above this first slanting edge here. Okay, I can switch back to the perspective view now I can create its circular base, extruding a portion from the bottom side. For that first, I'm going to insert two edge loops on the bottom side between these first two inner edge loops, which will create a loop of phases that I can extrude to create the base. Let me go to the mesh tools, select the Insert Edge loop options and make sure this relative distance is selected. Then just click and drag here on the edges to insert the loop right here, and another one here. All right, now we have got this loop of phases which we have to select. Once selected, go to Edit, Mesh, and click on Extrude. And using the move tool, just push it down vertically, switch to the side view and keep it closer to this bottom curvature of the plate. Okay, these faces are currently slanted. I can straighten all these bottom faces using the scale tool. Just activate it. Hold on the J key on the keyboard and click and drag this green handle down. This is going to straighten all the faces at an instant. Let me switch to the perspective view. Now we just have to insert an edge loop closer to the stop extrusion right here. To prevent this corner from being stretched due to smoothing, go to the mesh tools. Select the Insert Edge Loop tool, and click and drag here to insert the loop. Then go to the options for Insert Edge Loop, and select this Multiple Edge Loops and set it to one. Just click here on the edges on the side of the plate to insert an edge loop at the center. Okay, it is done. We can press three to smooth and check whether or not our model is looking correct. All right, with this, our plate is complete. We can hide this object by adding it to this layer. Make sure the object is selected. Right click on the layer and select Add selected Objects. Well, the object disappeared because the visibility is currently off for that layer. We can always bring them back by clicking here on this switch. Okay, the plate is currently below the cup. We have to bring it up using the move tool. You have to place it very carefully using all the orthographic views and make sure the cup sits right on the surface and not inside the surface of this plate. Okay, it is done. Let me turn this layer off. Now let us create our final object, which is the spoon. The first section of the spoon is oval in shape, while its handle is more like a rounded rectangle. We have to begin from some point. I'm going to begin from this circular section. First create a sphere and enter this radius so that you get a similar result. Then delete all the pass from this fourth edge loop, leaving these three phase loops behind along with their triangles. Go to the Object mode and go to Modify menu. And click on Center Pivot. And just bring it above the grade. It's x and z value to zero. Now we have to make it oval in shape. We can use the scale told for that you can just squeeze it from the top, also from this side and stretch a little from this side. Just keep an eye on the axis. You can just enter these values here to be accurate. All right, we also have to create the handle for that. We can switch to the edge mode, select these two edges, then switch to the top view. Go to Edit Mesh, and click on Extrude, and use the move tool to move them ten units on the negative Z axis. Switch back to the perspective view now we can simply delete these edges to make these triangles into four sided polygons. Select every other edge from this section and then hit Control plus Dilate on the keyboard. Now go to the object mode and keep the object selected. Then go to Edit Mesh, and click on Extrude. If you look a little closer, you will see a little I can hear it enables us to switch these handles from local axis to global axis. Okay, we have to click on it to switch to the global direction. Then we can push this y handle down to add some depth to the spoon. You can also directly enter this y value here to do the same as mine. All right, now go to the Mesh tools and click on the Insert Edge Loop options. And make sure this multiple option is selected. We have to just click on this edge here here to insert two edge loops. Now the problem is that if we apply smoothing to the mesh, we will notice certain deformations on the surface due to these edges present on the circular region. It will be more visible as we're going to add materials to it. In a later lesson. What I'm going to do is switch to the top view. Enable the wireframe mode and double click on an edge to select this entire loop on the shift key. And double click here on this to select this loop. And then hold on the control button on the keyboard and drag a marquee around this section to deselect these edges and these edges here. And hit Control plus delete on the keyboard. This will delete all those selected edges along with their vertices. Okay, now we have to insert an edge loop here. By selecting the Insert Edge lope options and make sure the relative distance is selected. Click here to insert a loop. Now switch to the face mode and select these four phases on top and go to Edit Mesh. Click on Extrude, switch to Global Handles, then pull it up and enter this value here for translate Y. Then we can switch to the vertex mode and go to the top view using the move to select and pull these vertices up and down to add a little curvature to this end. Now if we press three on keyboard, you will notice that the corners are getting too soft. We need to make them a little tighter by adding edge loops around this corner on these areas as well. Just select the Edge Loop tool and insert an edge loop here. Then go to the edge loop options and select this Multiple edge loops. And enter 15 here. And click here on this handle. This will add 15 edge loops on the handle to hold the surface tight, right press three again to observe. Now the handle is blending too much within the circular region due to smoothing to hold it and make it appear a little prominent. We have to add an edge loop within the last phase loop, both on top and on the bottom. Okay, Go to the Insert Edge Loop options and enter one here. And then click here to add the first loop. And click here to add an edge loop here as well. We have to do the same thing on the bottom side too. Now simply press three and it looks great. All right, we can toggle this layer to bring back our cup and plate here. We simply have to put this spoon inside this cup. Okay, let me first rotate it along the Y axis. Then along X, you can simply enter these values, then switch to the front view and use the move tool to place it within the cup. By moving it on X and Y. We can also isolate the spoon and the cup by selecting them and pressing control plus one. This will isolate both the objects. Now make sure you make the spoon touch the bottom corner of the cup and its top surface. Then press control plus one to exit from the isolation mode and switch back to the perspective view. Here we are, the set is complete. In order to model anything, you have to first study its topography or its anatomy, understand the different parts and flow up their surfaces. Then you have to break it down into simpler shapes. You have to look at the major portion from where you can begin creating the rest. Then you can simply choose the primitive object that should be best to begin with. And keep modifying it unless you transform it into that object. In case of complex models, you may need to use more than one primitive object and later merge them together as one object. Okay, with the simple steps in mind, you can model anything you want. All right, with this, let us move on to our next lesson. See in the next video. 25. Boolean: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do Boolean between objects in Maya. All right, what is Boolean? Boolean is actually a process in which we create a new object by doing difference or intersection between the shapes of two objects. In Maya, there are mainly three ways to do a Boolean operation, and all of them can be found under the Mesh menu inside a Boolean option. The first way is union, the second is difference, the third is intersection. Now we need at least two objects to do a bullion between the two. First, I'm going to create a sphere and set its radius to four and position it at the center of the grid. Then create a cylinder and set its radius and height to two units and subdivisions, caps to two as well. Then I'm going to snap the cylinder to the center of the sphere and keep it just a little higher from the surface of the sphere. All right, the first operation in Boolean is union. In this, two objects are not only just combined together, but also their shapes are united to create a single object. First, let me select both of these. Then go to Mesh Boolean and click on Union. You can take a look. If I switch to the wireframe view, you will see that the part of the cylinder that was inside the sphere has been removed. Instead, only the part that was outside the sphere has been added to the sphere to create this final object. In union matters is what you see from the outside is what will be used to create the final shape of the object. Anything that is overlapping in between these objects will be cut off or removed. Not just this, the vertices have been merged as well. This is the difference between union and combine that we did in earlier lesson. Now coming to difference, it is actually a subtraction process in which we use the shape of one object to cut through the other. In this, what matters the most is the order of the selection. Meaning which one did we select at first and which one at last. Because it is this order of selection that will determine which object will be used to cut from the other. If I select this sphere at first and then select the cylinder and then go to Mesh bullion and click on Difference. The cylinder that was selected at last will be used to cut through the sphere that was selected at first. All right, In this only the overlapping portion of the cylinder has been used to cut through the sphere. Now coming to intersection, it doesn't matter in which order we select the objects, because in this only the overlapping parts of the objects remain. The rest of them is removed to create the final object. If we select these objects and go to Mesh bullion and click on an intersection, this will only keep the overlapping parts and remove the rest of them to create this final object. All right, this is how we can do bullion between objects in Maya. See you in the next video. 26. New Booleans in Maya 2023 and 2024: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you a few more bullion options that have been added in May 2000, 23.2024 All right. There are a total of five bullion operations that have been added in May 2000, 23.2024 What's more interesting here is that now you can see a live preview of the bullion operation and also change its order. Let me show you what I mean. The first improvement in bullion is this difference a minus B and difference minus A. What this does is no matter what is your order of selection, you can do the difference in both ways. If I select these objects, go to mesh bulls and select difference a minus B. You can see how one object is used to cut from the other. This is a life preview showing the second selected object in wireframe mode. To let you understand how everything is working here, let me undo that. Go to mesh booleans and select difference B minus a. It is the opposite of the previous operation. Okay, you can see in the live preview which object was used to cut from the other. One more interesting feature is this bullion stack, where we can change the order of objects by dragging them up or down like layers. Due to this feature, it doesn't matter anymore. In which order we select the objects, we can always change the effect from here. Now to apply this effect and make this change permanent, have to keep the object selected and delete its history by going to the edit menu. Delete by type and clicking on History. The Delete History button is right here on the shelf. Here is the Boolean option. You have to right click on it to access all the bullion operations. All right, now if we apply our next bullion, which is slice, it uses one object to cut the overlapping portion of another object keeping the rest of the surface as it is, and hence it is called slicing an object. To take the slice out, we have to switch to the face mode and then double click on a face and pull it out using the move tool. Okay, they still behave as one object. We can use extract to separate them. The next bullion is hole punch. It uses one object to create a hole on the surface of another object. You can see how it has created an opening on the surface. We can also reverse the order. Okay, the next bullion is cut out. It is the opposite of hole punch. It uses one object to cut the surface of another object, keeping only the overlapping surface and deleting the rest. We can always change the order to see different results. All right, the last bullion is split edges. It uses one object to split the edges or faces on another object and delete the object that was used to split the edges. You can take a look in both ways. All right, once you're satisfied with the result, you can delete its history. Okay, these were all the bullion options that have been added in Maya 2,023.2024 All right, see in the next video. 27. Duplicate and Mirror: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to duplicate and mirror objects in Maya. All right, now there are at least three ways to duplicate objects in Maya. The easiest way is to select an object and press control plus D on your keyboard. Once the object has been duplicated, you can move it out of the source object in case you don't remember the shortcut, you can go to Edit Menu and find all the options for duplicate here. All right, Next way to duplicate is to duplicate objects along with some of transformation. If you select an object and press Control plus D to duplicate it, then move it out in a certain direction, then press Shift plus D. This will duplicate the object along with the transformation that we just did. As soon as we duplicated the object for the first time, we use this duplicating method to create repeating objects in our scene. We just have to press Shift plus D over and over again to keep duplicating the object, along with the transformation added on top of the previous transformation. Right, the last way to duplicate objects in Maya is a very special one. Hence, it has the name duplicate special. There are many ways to use this method of duplicating objects. Like if I select this object and then go to Edit menu, click on this box icon for Duplicate special. This will bring up its options. Here you will find not one, but many transformation attributes using which you can create multiple copies of the same object along with more than one transformation. I can type in here the number of copies to be eight and rotate each of them by 45 degrees along y direction. Now once you're done with entering the required values, you can click on Apply or duplicate Special. This will duplicate the object up to eight times, each rotated by 45 degrees along Y direction. Now there is another form of duplicating objects, which is called cloning. To clone objects, you have to select the object, then go to Edit menu, and then click on this box icon for Duplicate special Here within the options, you have to change this geometry, type copy to instance, then keeping the rest as same. You can click on Duplicate Special. This will create eight clones of the selected object. Now, clones behave little differently than duplicates. They are connected versions of the source object. If I do anything on any of them, all of them will be affected. Which means anything you do to the source object or any of them will affect the rest can see how beautifully they are connected to one another. Right now, coming to mirror, we generally mirror an object when you need an exact copy, but in the opposite direction. It is much like flipping an object along with duplicating to mirror an object. First we have to select the object, Then go to Mesh, and click on this box on for mirror to bring up its options here. One thing you have to remember is this. That you have to position the object properly in the three D space, because you can mirror an object across an axis. So you have to choose between x, y, or z axis in order to mirror the object across that axis. Here I'm going to mirror this object across x axis. I'm going to select X axis and click on Apply. This will mirror the object across X axis and both of them will be a combined object. If you don't uncheck this box for combined with regional, this combining feature is actually meant for mirroring and combining two halves of the same object. Like if I delete half of this object and then extrude one of its spaces and then snap it to the central axis line. And then keeping it selected. Just go to these options for mirror and click on this checkbox for combined with original. Then click on Apply to Mirror. This will mirror the original up to the other side of the axis and also merge both of them vertex by vertex to create one single object. All right, this is useful especially when you have an object that has to be identical on either side. You model only one side of the object. Add all the details simply mirror the other half. Examples are like human head, human body, car, airplane and so on, where the left side of the body is similar to its right side. This is how we can duplicate and mirror objects in May see in the next video. 28. Duplicate Special - The Impact of Axis Orientation: Hello and welcome back. When using the duplicated special option, you may find something that may not work in the way like I have shown in the previous lesson, that is this separation of duplicated objects from one another. Let me show you again, if I select this object, go to the Edit menu and click on this option for Duplicated Special. Here are all the previous settings. I want to create eight copies of the selected object, each rotated by 45 degrees along it direction one cyclic. On Duplicate Special, it creates eight copies of this object, each rotated by 45 degrees. If I push them out, all of the eight copies will still be together. Now the question is why this is because the move tool is currently working in the global direction. It will move all the duplicated objects in the same direction as pointed by the global axis. In order to move the objects in their own direction, we have to double click on the move tool to open its settings and set this axis orientation to object instead of world. Now if I push them out, all of them will move out in separate directions, which is their own z direction, each rotated by 45 degrees. You can see as I select them, each of them has their own z direction, facing in a different angle according to the orientation of the object. This is how it works. All right, see you in the next video. 29. Working with Image Planes - Concept and Practical: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to work with image planes and use them to model objects in Maya. All right, now you might be wondering, what are image planes? Image planes are actually images, such as blueprints that we import into Maya for modeling objects exactly as given. In the blueprints, we generally have a top view, front view, and a side view of a three, the object in the blueprint. But sometimes we also have a separate left and right view and a bottom view as well when there are details present on every side of the object. All right, as soon as you have downloaded the blueprints of an object from the Internet or you have created one on your own, you can copy them to the source images folder of your project. That everything stays inside one project folder. Then you have to import them one by one for each of the orthographic views in Maya. Let me first switch to the four view here under the Umenu top view. Go to Image Plane and click on Import Image. This will open up the Explorer, where you can select the image containing the top view of an object and click on Open. This will import the image and place it on Zx plane, which is our top view. The same thing has to be done for the front view as well. Go to Menu, the Image plane, and click on Import Image. Select the front view image, and click on Open. Then go to Menu for the side view, then Image Plane, and click on Import Image. Select the image. Click on Open. Now we can switch to the perspective view and rename these image planes to image plane, top image plane, front and image plane side. Then move the side view to negative 20 in x direction, front view to negative 20 in z direction, top view to negative 20 in y direction. We need this space so that we can create the model here. These image planes should not be on the grid in between of our object. I moved them all away from this space. Now all we have to do is select this image plane and click and drag on the translate X, Y, Z attributes to select them. All right, click on it and hold and select this lock selected option. This will lock the image plane to prevent us from accidentally moving it while we try to move the components of our object. All right, we can do this for all of the image planes within our scene. I'm going to model the ice cream using these reference lines on the image planes. First, let me create a cube, then change its x and z value to zero to move it to the center of the grid. Then go to vertex mode and switch to the front view. Then I'm going to select and move and scale these vertices in pairs to reposition them over the reference lines of ice cream. I'm going to bring these vertices down to align with this bottom line. And move these vertices up to align with the topmost line here. Then select all of the vertices and scale them in x axis to align with the side lines of the ice cream. You need to constantly dolly in and out to position the vertices precisely over these reference lines. Now I'm going to switch to the side view. Scale up these vertices in z axis to align with the side lines here. If I switch to the top view, you will see that all the ages or vertices are already aligned with these reference lines. Now let me switch back to the perspective view and switch to the object mode. Then go to Modify menu and click on Center Pot to move the pivert to its geometric center. Then press control plus D to duplicate this bar. And then move it little out of the original bar so that they do not overlap. While selecting the vertices, go to vertex mode and switch to front view. Scale it down in x axis, Then switch to object mode and set its translate x value to zero. This will bring it to the exact center. Now switch back to the vertex mode and scale it down even further to align with these reference lines. Select the top ones and move them to here. And select the bottom ones and bring them to here. Now switch to the side view and select all of these vertices and scale them down to align with the reference lines of the stake. Right? I can now switch to the perspective view. Then switch to the object mode and go to Modify menu. And click on Centervert to bring its vert to center. Now what I'm going to do is use the Insert Edge Loop tool to insert few edge loops. Then position the vertices to align with these reference lines. And I'm going to show you all of this in little time lapse in order to save some time. Right, let us begin. I'm using multiple edge loops to equally divide the surface so that I can add more subtle variations along the perimeter moving the vertices in pairs. To keep both the left and right sides equal, I need to do the same thing within all of the orthographic views, loops wherever required. And reposition the vertices in pairs to align with the reference lines. Once all the vertices have been aligned in all of the three orthographic views, I can switch back to the object mode and select them and press number three to see the objects in smooth preview. As you can see that the objects are becoming too much curved along these sections, I'm going to add multiple edge loops to hold the surface and prevent it from becoming too much curved in those areas. I'm using the scale tool to straighten the edge loops, using the move tool to reposition them as required. This will create nice and gentle smooth corners. All right, now if I select them and press number three, you will see a quite acceptable model of an ice cream exactly like in these blueprints. Once I'm satisfied with the result, I can save the project file. All right, this is how we can work with image planes and use them to model objects in May. See you in the next video. 30. Creating 3D Text and Camera: Hello and welcome back. In this video I'm going to show you how to create three D text and a camera within your scene in Maya. All right, to create three D text, you have to go to Create Menu and click on Type. This will create a default three text which you can change using the attribute editor here. The first thing that you can change is the content of the text from three D text to anything like I'm typing here, Hulk. You can change its font from this dropdown. I'm selecting Impact. You should also change the name of your theory text from type one to an appropriate title that it is easy to identify it within the outliner. Now coming below, we have the tabbed sections. Each of them contains parameters for modifying different properties of the text, including its animation. Now we are going to take a look at these two most important sections, which is this text and the geometry tab. All right, under the text tab, we have these more settings on character, such as you can set the alignment of the text with respect to three D origin, also the font size. There are other settings here which are not always that necessary, but you can still check this out by yourself. Using this, you can actually change the letter spacing. And spacing in between the words and so on. All right. Now the geometry tab is the most important section here as we are creating a three D text. Here under this tab lies all its settings. The curve resolution is actually the parameter for changing the density of polygons or edges on the letters that have a curvature such as this. If I change this by dragging the slider, the number of edges will change around the curvature of this letter. This is useful for making the curvature either smooth or rough, just as we want. You can leave the colinear angle and distance to the default values for now. This checkbox below with the title Delete Caps, is used to delete the caps of the letters, which is actually the front and back sides of the letters. The side part remain as it is if you're looking for this type of text, then you can keep this checkbox checked. Now coming below, we have these parameters for extrusion, using which you can actually set the depth of the letters. By changing this distance value can change the divisions of the extrusion for adding more detail to the letters. Below that, we have a checkbox for enabling bevel for the text. You can check this if you want to bevel the letters of your text. You can change the bevel distance to set the width of the beveled corners, like how wide the bevel would be. The offset value will determine the beginning point of bevel, Like whether it is starting all the way from the center of the depth of these letters or it is starting from just round the corners. The divisions can be used to set the roundness of the bevel, more the number of divisions, greater is the roundness and vice versa. Always remember that beveled corners account for the highlights that we see on the corners because of the bouncing of light due to such an angular surface. All right, this was all about creating a three text and customizing it to your need. Now let us move on to creating a camera within your scene. Creating a camera is as easy as creating a primitive object. You just have to go to Create menu, then Cameras. And click on this camera option will create a new camera at the center of your scene. From here, you can move the camera to any appropriate location of your choice. Using the move tool, you can even rotate. Using the rotate tool, you can name your camera to something like primary camera or anything you wish. Now to switch to this camera view, all you have to do is go to Panels menu. Under perspective, you can select between the default camera and the camera that you have created within your scene. I'm selecting this primary camera that I have created here. We have switched to that camera view. As you can see, the name of the camera below has changed from perspective to primary camera, right? Using this mode, you can do a lot of things like positioning your camera, which is the most important thing. Also, you can change all its settings within the channel box like a real world camera. Not just this, you can also lock your camera so that you don't move it by mistake. And that can be done by clicking on this lock icon on the view panel tool bar. Once the camera is locked, you cannot move it anymore. And hence you cannot navigate using that camera, like tumbling, panning, or anything. The same option is present under the human as well. Then you can switch back to the default camera by going into panels, perspective, and selecting RSP from here. You can also lock a camera or any object directly by selecting it and then selecting all of its attributes within the channel box by dragging your cursor on them. Then you have to right click and hold and select, Lock selected. This will lock all of the selected attributes. You can unlock them in the same way. All right, one last thing that I would like to show you is this. That you can always create a new camera from the current perspective view by going to View Menu and clicking on Create Camera From View option. This will create a new camera right at that particular position and angle from where you are looking at the subject. You can see that the name here has changed from RSP to RSP one, which means that we are currently looking through our new camera. You can switch back to the default camera from the panels menu. Here is the camera that we just created can rename it from RSP one to anything you wish like shooting cam. This is very much helpful when you have found a certain camera angle quite appropriate for your subject. And you want to create a camera right at that particular position and angle as soon as possible without losing that view. All right, this is how we can create three D text and a camera within our scene in Maya. See you in the next video. 32. Creating Lights and Arnold RenderView - Concept and Practical: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create lights in Maya and render the scene in Arnold Renderer. Now that you know how to model objects in Maya, it is time to take a look at how to add lights in your scene and render the output that looks close to something real. Now, before I create a new light, I'd like to mention that there are at least two render engines in Maya. One is the Maya's own default renderer, and another is the Arnold Renderer. In this course, we'll mainly be focusing on the Arnold Renderer which has been used in big Hollywood movies like Pacific Rim Cloudy with a chance of mid balls and many others. I have been using this renderer for almost nine years. I have also used Pixar's Renderman, which has been used in rendering almost every animated movie produced by Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. Arnold Renderer is an industry standard render engine that produces a very realistic output close to what we see in a real life environment. It is being used by Industrial Light and Magic, which is the biggest visual effects company in the world. This is something that should definitely grab your interest in learning it and making the best of what is possible for you. Coming back to Maya, there are two places from where you can create lights in your scene. One is by going to the Create menu. Then under lights, you can find all the default lights of Maya, out of which the ambient light and the volume light is not supported in Arnold Renderer. Another is by going to the Arnold menu. Then under lights, you can find all the lights that are specific to Arnold Renderer and have more features than the default lights of Maya. In this course, I'm going to show you one default light of Maya and one Arnold specific light and two more Arnold lights in an upcoming lesson. All right, first I'm going to create a new light by going to create menu lights. And I'm selecting the spot light from here. This will create a new spot light at the center of the scene. We can move this to any location using the move tool and also rotate it to change its direction. I'm going to put some exact values here, rather than keeping them in decimals right. In real, a spot light is a light with a parabolic reflector and hence it is conical in shape. It is a light with a specific direction. Now to see a rendered preview of the lighting, you can go to Arnold menu and open the Arnold Render View. Here is the start and stop button to start and stop the light preview. Let me close this for now. There is yet another way to see a light preview of your scene. That is by going to view panels, Renderer menu, and selecting Arnold From here, little floating window will pop up using which you can start and stop the preview as needed. You will see the preview right within the viewport. You don't have to open any separate window for this right now. You might have observed one thing here that there is hardly any light that we can see in the preview. What I need to do is increase the intensity of the light unless it becomes visible. You can always type in a value that is greater than what is possible with this slider. You can also choose the color of light by clicking on this box, like yellow or green, but I'm going to keep it white for now. Coming below, we have this drop down for changing the decay rate for the light from no decay to quadratic in real lights, decay over distance at this rate. All right, the cone angle sets how wide or narrow the cone will be. Hence, the light will be spread over a larger area once I increase this value for the cone angle. Now as you can see that currently we can see the edge of the light where it ends, the penumbrangle is used to create a fade out effect for this hard edge and make it softer. If I increase this, it will create the effect after the edge. If I decrease this, it will create the same effect before the edge. The drop of bello is something that controls the rate at which light intensity decreases from center to the edge of the spot light. With this, you can create a light with a very smooth fading effect from the center to the edge now. Scroll down. We're going to find here another section with the name Arnold. You have to click on this little icon to expand this section. The settings here generally overwrite the above settings for the default lights of Maya. All right, here is a check box for using color temperature for light. If I check this, it will overwrite the color attribute of light. Which means if I set the color of the light to green and then come back here and check this box, it will disable the color attribute and use the color temperature instead. This scale is based on Kelvin scale value of 6,500 producing white light. Value greater than that will produce cooler colors, while value less than 6,500 will produce warmer colors of light. All right, I'm going to keep it to 6,500 so that we can have a white light for now. Coming below, we have this exposure value, which is an Epstop value that multiplies the intensity of light by two to the power of the stop. If I use value of nine for exposure, the value of one for intensity, it will be same as intensity of value 512. Exposure of value zero. We generally use the exposure value more often than the intensity. Hence leave this intensity value to one and change this exposure value to whatever we need for now. It looks better With a value of ten samples is used to improve the quality of the shadows by removing noise from those areas. I would recommend not to increase this above the value of four, which is sufficient in most cases. Otherwise, it will simply increase the rendered time or the processing time for the output radius is used to increase the size of the light source. Resulting in Shofter shadows instead of hard shadows. This creates a very smooth lighting, like a diffused light normalize is used to keep the amount of emitted light to constant as we increase its radius. Otherwise, if we uncheck this, the amount of light will increase as we increase its radius and vice versa. In this case, the radius controls the amount of emitted light. But with normalize, we can have shot shadows out affecting the amount of emitted light, no matter what its radius is. All right, now to observe the effect of roundness, we have to first set the penumbrangle and drop p values to zero. With roundness set to one, we are going to have our light in a circular pattern. Whereas if we bring this value all the way up to zero, it will create more of a rectangular pattern. Unchecking the cast shadows option will disable the shadows for the objects created by the spotlight. This produces a very unrealistic and inaccurate result, as we can see here. But this is useful when we have more than one light in a scene. And we want the shadows to be cast in only one direction and not in all the directions. All right? The shadow density controls the value or darkness of the shadows in case, if we want to lessen the strength of the shadows created by a particular light in our scene. The aspect ratio is the ratio of the width of the cone to its height value of one means the width of the cone is equal to its height. By decreasing this value, we make that proportion unequal. Hence, it creates this light coming from some narrow opening on the wall or door or something. The lens radius is used to coincide the position of the light with the vertex of its cone, making the light appear to be coming from a point. Whereas on increasing its value all the way up to one, the light will appear as a truncated cone. We can observe this only under volumetric lighting set up where we have mist or smoke within the environment. All right, checking this box will disable the volumetric shadows that form within the air due to the presence of these objects. Lastly, the volume samples is used to improve the quality of the volumetric shadows by removing noise from those areas. I would again recommend not to increase this value above four unless it is necessary. All right, this was all about the spot light up, Maya. Now let us move on to creating an Arnold specific light. The light that I'm going to create is called a mesh light. To create it first I need to select an object which I would like to turn into a light. Then go to Arnold menu within Lights, select the mesh light option. This will turn the object into a light source. Here within the attribute editor, you can change its settings. I'm not going to explain the common attributes again. You can increase the exposure value to make it appear more prominent and set the color to something like green. There is a checkbox here with an option to make the mesh light visible to the camera. We should definitely check this if we want to create a light that can be seen like an object. Below that, we have samples to control the quality of shadows and reduce the noise. We can change the color of the shadows created by the mesh light, especially if it itself is emitting a different color light. The shadows can be of a different color as well than the usual black. You can change this for giving an artistic feel to your scene. Otherwise, change it only when you have acquired sufficient knowledge in lighting, right? This was all about using an Arnold mesh light in Maya in case you're thinking, how did I create this volumetric effect like this smoky environment? It is simple. You just have to go to Render Settings, which can be accessed either by going to Windows Menu Rendering Editors, and click on Render Settings. Or you can simply click on this icon on the status line to open the same settings. Here you have to go to Arnold Renderer tab and scrawl below to find this environment section. Then you have to click on the Stoggle button to expand this section. Here you have to click on this icon for the atmosphere option, and then select Create AI Atmosphere Volume. Once done, you can close this window within the attribute editor. You just have to set the density of the volume to 0.01 That's it, right? You can definitely take an advanced course in lighting to learn more in depth about the different types of lights. This is indeed a broad topic and cannot be covered up in one or two chapters. On the other hand, sometime later if I decide to make a course on lighting, I'll notify you as soon as I appload the course. All right. This is how we can create lights in Maya and render the scene in Arnold Renderer. See you in the next video. 33. Viewport Rendering in Maya 2024: Hello and welcome back in Maya 2024. The port rendering has been enhanced. A new render button has been added within the Viewport tool war. It is used to start and stop the eport rendering. Also, it will display the progress bar right within the viewport with all the other information. Okay, if you go to the Renderer menu and click on the Options for Arnold, you will find the option to change this HUD color. The full form of HUD is heads up display. It is meant to display the information right on the main screen like an overlay. This color setting is useful when the HUD is blending with the background and we are unable to read anything. In that case, we can set the color to something else. All right, whenever you need to start or stop the viewport rendering, just click on this button. Okay. There is also another option here to select a specific area to render instead of the entire viewport. To save time, you just have to drag an area using your left mouse button. Make sure you disable it if you want to render the entire viewport again. Okay, this is a major update in the viewport rendering in Maya 2024. See you in the next video. 34. HDRI Environment and Physical Sky - Concept and Practical: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to do an image based lighting using an HDRI and use the physical sky system in Maya. Right? The full form of HDRI is high dynamic range imaging. An HDR image is a 360 degree image or photograph of a place with a lot of color information that is wrapped on a sphere in a three space to simulate a real life lighting condition. You will understand it once I demonstrated use inside of Maya. Right now, the first thing that you have to do is go to Arnold menu, then lights and click on Skydome Light. This will create one giant sphere around our objects, which is our Skydome light. You have to dolly out to be able to see it. This is extremely big and you can scale it up or down if needed. This is a kind of light that uses a spherical shape to emit light from all the direction and illuminate everything that is inside this sphere. Hence, it creates a global illumination within your scene. Generally, it has a color and intensity attribute. Like all the other lights, you can change its intensity and use this light for global illumination. You can either choose the color of light, which is white by default and looks quite better this way. Or you can choose an HDR image to use it as an input for the color attribute of this light. Let me show you how to do it. Instead of moving this slider or clicking on this box, you have to click on this checkered box here to the right of this slider. Then it will ask you to create a new Rendon node where you can actually choose the kind of input that you want to plug in to the color attribute of light. As I want to use an HDR image, I can click on this file option here. This will create a new file node, which will allow you to select any image file on your computer that is supported in May. Let me first rename this file node. Always make sure that you rename everything you create, otherwise you may not be able to identify anything in the end. Now we just have to click on this folder icon to select the HDR image, which is located in the source images folder of our current project. And click on Open to load the file. Now if I just dolly out, you will see that the HDR image has been wrapped on this sphere and is being used as a source of light. All the bright, high lights, such as the sun on the image, is used to emit light in such a manner as if our objects are really within this environment that you see. Within the HDR image, you will find the shadows forming according to the position of the light source in the image. Not just that, the environment will be reflected on the objects that have reflective materials. This environment also be visible to the camera as a background. We can even rotate the Skydome light to change the direction of light coming from this HDRI and hence the shadows that form as a result. Here within the attribute editor, you will find an option to enter the resolution of the HDR image in pixels that you're using. You have to enter the size of the largest dimension, which is usually the width of the image. In my case, this HDR image has a size of 4096 pixels wide by 2048 pixels tall. I can keep it to 4,000 I would have entered 2000 if the size was around 2000 pixels wide. All right, I can increase the exposure of the light if I want to, but I think it is already bright enough. Instead, I'm going to reduce the intensity to 0.8 that the highlights don't appear over exposed. I can also increase the samples to reduce the noise from the shadows below all of these common attributes, we have this visibility section where we can set whether the skydome light will be visible to the camera or in transmission in diffuse and so on. You can turn the visibility to zero for the camera. If you don't want the Skydome light or the DRI to be visible directly through the camera, you'd have to disselect the Skydome light here to see the effect. If you turn this diffuse attribute to zero, no light will bounce from the surfaces of objects. Hence, everything will appear colorless and dark. Now you might think that if there is no bouncing of light from the surfaces, then how come we are still able to see these objects? They should all become invisible, right? Yes, definitely. But in a standard material, the surface color and the high lights are controlled by two separate attributes. One is diffuse, which is the base color that controls the appearance of surface. And another is a specular that controls the appearance of these high lights and reflections. If I turn this specular attribute to zero as well, then the Skydome light will not be visible in reflections, as well as the stuff creating the high lights. Because of which, the skydome light will have no impact in illuminating our scene, and hence the scene will become completely dark. All right, same way the transmission will decide whether or not the skydome light will be visible through transparent objects. Just keep this in mind, that if the Skydumlight is not visible in any of these components, then the HDRI will not be visible as well, because both are linked together. Lastly, if you wish to change the HDR image, you can do it by selecting the Skydome light and then going to the color attribute. And clicking on this black icon here. This will take you to the same pile node. You can select a new HDR image, just like you did before. Once you have chosen a new file, it will update on the Skydome light after a few seconds, right? If you're wondering where to find this type of HDR images, then you can visit this website, Polyhaven.com where you will find free HDR images that you can use in your projects. However, always check the license before you use them in any commercial project, right? This was all about using the Skydome light and HDR image as a source of light. Now coming to the physical sky, you have to go to Arnold menu, then lights and click on Physical sky. This will create a Skydome light, but with a physical sky shader plugged in to the color attribute of the skydome light. Physical sky is not actually a light in itself. It is a system or a shader that acts more like an image. And hence it needs the Skydome light to illuminate our scene. To see it properly, you have to switch to the Arnold Render View. Instead of this viewport rendering. Let me open it. You can go to its Window menu and click on Frame All to fit the preview within this window. And click on this button to start and stop the preview. Okay, it is a system in which you can simulate an actual physical sky with the sun, where its direction and intensity can be changed. All right, to access the attributes of the physical sky, you can select the Skydome light. Always remember that you can select the same from the outliner as well. Okay, After selecting the Skydome, click on this black icon beside the color attribute that will take you to the attributes of the physical sky. Here, the first attribute is turbidity. It is used to set the amount of particles in the air like that of dust, smoke, and others. The causes are shifted in the color of the sky from clear blue to dirty blue. You can increase the turbidity if you're creating a scene for a city because the air is mostly polluted there, and also when there is a bad weather. All right. The next attribute is ground albedo. It is the color that is reflected from the ground towards the sky, causing a shift in the color of the sky. You can change it according to the scene you are creating. Like if it is a grassland, you can change this to somewhat green. If it is a desert, you can change this to yellow or orange. If it is a place covered with snow, you can change this to white or light blue. I usually don't change it unless necessary. Next is elevation. It is used to change the angle of the sun from sunrise to sunset. Hence, it has an angle ranging from zero degrees to 180 degrees. The sun lies above the head at 90 degrees. You can take this value beyond 180 degrees, but that is totally meaningless because it will start looping. The asymerth is used to change the direction of the sun around the sky. Hence, it has an angle ranging from zero degrees, 60 degrees. Using this, you can actually set the direction from where the sun is rising and where it is setting. Then we have intensity to increase the intensity of the sun. This will also increase the light in your scene as well as in the sky like it should if it was a real sun. We can also change the color of the sky and the color of the sun if we want, by selecting any color from the stint attributes. These attributes are rarely needed, because we hardly ever need to change the color of the sky or the sun. Unless we are trying to achieve some artistic look by changing the color of the sky, the light is not going to be affected that much. But by changing the color of the sun, the color of the light will change as well. The sun size will allow you to set the size of the sun. But that is again, unnecessary, because the sun within this physical sky doesn't look that original as our real sun. It doesn't have all that glow or anything but just a circular shape filled with a single color. This is mainly useful in case the sun is reflected on a shiny surface. You can increase this to make the sun more highlighting or prominent on the surface. Lastly, this checkbox below is used to enable or disable the visibility of the sun in the sky that whether or not you want the sun to be visible in the sky. Hence, as a result, there will be no formation of shadows due to the absence of direct light. This is particularly useful when you're creating a sky covered with clouds or when the weather is cloudy and the sun is hidden. All right, one more thing I would like to tell you that you can increase the quality of the output by increasing the samples of the skydome light. This will reduce the noise within the shadow areas. All right, this is how we can do image based lighting using an HDRI and use the physical sky system in Maya. See you in the next video. 36. Working with Arnold Shaders - Concept and Practical: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to create different types of shaders or materials and assign them to objects in Maya. All right, the appearance of a surface is defined by how it is shaded. In Maya. We use materials or shaders to define the substance that an object is made of. A shader defines how light is absorbed, transmitted, or reflected from a surface. Without a shader, an object will not be visible. Because we can only see an object when light rays will bounce back from the surface of the object to our eyes. In Maya, all objects come with a default shedder known as Lambert, which accounts for the visibility of objects as we create them. When we render our scene for the first time without adding any shedder, it is the Lambert shader that allows the objects to be visible in the final output. If an object has no shedder assigned to it, it will appear in green color within the viewport and will not be visible in the rendered output right now, as we are focused mainly with the Arnold Renderer. In this course, we are going to take a look at the Arnold Standard surface shader that comes with Arnold Renderer, which is highly flexible and can be used to simulate most of the materials that we see in our daily life. To create your very first shader or material, you have to open a new window known as the Hypershade. You can open it either by going to the Windows menu, then rendering editors and clicking on Hypershade option. Or you can also open the same thing by clicking on this little icon on the status line. Now here we have many panels, each for a different task, such as this section. Here is the place where we can find all the shaders that we have created in our scene. Not just shedders, but also we can find all the textures, lights, cameras, and other assets that we have used in our scene. Below that, we have a section where we can select different types of shaders and nodes we'd like to create for our objects. Beside that, we have another section where we can build complex shedding networks to add more detail to the shaders and create more realistic materials. Here on the top, we have this material view section where you can take a look at the preview, how the shader is going to appear in presence of light. We can tumble here and do in and out, just like we can do it within the viewport. Below that we have the property editor using which we can modify the properties of the shader that we have created. All right, now we are going to work with Arnold shaders. You have to go to this Create panel and toggle this Arnold option, below which you will find this Shedder option, which you can toggle as well. Below that, you will find this Surface option on which you have to click to get this list of surface shader. Here you have to click on the AI Standard Surface Shader. This is like an universal shader using which we can simulate most of the materials that we see in the real world. Now as you click on it, the shader will be created and it will appear as a node. Within this section, you can rename the shedder like any other object in Maya. The first property that we can set for a material is its base color or the color of the surface. You can change it to anything you wish. This is also known as the diffuse color. Here you don't need to change this weight value unless necessary, because this determines how much light is reflected back from a surface and how much is absorbed in Arnold shaders, everything is set to physically accurate values. By default, a value of 0.8 means the surface will reflect 80% of the incident light and absorb the rest 20% All right, increasing the diffuse roughness will cause more scattering of light on the surface, which will make it appear a little darker as we increase the roughness. Roughness of higher value is suitable for materials such as concrete plaster or sand. Metalness is a straightforward property to make a material more reflective and metallic in nature. By just changing the base color, you can change the look of the metal and hence use it to create all the different types of metals. Such as for steel, you can set this color to white. For gold you can set this color to yellow, while for copper you can set this color to somewhat orange. Right below that, we have a section for specular property, which is responsible for creating high lights and reflections on a surface. By changing the weight value, you can change the strength or brightness of this high light created by a light. Can also change the color of the high light by clicking on this box and selecting an appropriate color. This should be used only in case of certain metals and not for all types of surfaces. Because nonmetallic surfaces do not have colored highlights, make sure you spend some time in observing the real light materials, how they appear in presence of light. Before you start working with these virtual materials, the more you study, the better and accurate you create. The roughness attribute will let you increase or decrease the roughness of the surface. Hence, if we decrease this, the surface will appear more polished and shiny, resulting in prominent highlights and clear reflections. A value of zero will produce sharp reflections like that of a mirror. While if we increase this value, the surface will appear more mat or dull or rough, resulting in high lights that are more spread on the surface and produce blurry or diffuse reflections. If you want to create a surface like a mirror, you can set this roughness value to zero, give this weight to one. And also increase the weight value to one for the base. And set the metal ness to one as well. This will give you a perfectly sharp and mirror like reflection, exactly as you want. All right, now below all of this, we have a section for transmission that is responsible for transmission of light through a surface. Which determines how transparent a surface will be. If you set the weight for the transmission to one, the surface will become totally transparent. Also, this will automatically disable the attributes for the base that no light is absorbed by the surface, almost everything is just transmitted. All right, One important thing to remember here is this. That if you set this d value to one, then the object may not cast shadows at all. Whereas glass objects usually cast shadows no matter how light this shadow is. In that case, you can set this value closest to one, but not exactly one. All right, Color attribute is used to set the color of light that is allowed to pass through the surface. Hence, it affects the color of the surface, such as if it is set to white, that will allow all the colors of light to pass through the surface, resulting in white or colorless appearance. Whereas if I set this to red, it will cause the surface to absorb all the colors of light and allow only red light to pass through, hence making the object appear red in color. This is all real life physics, which makes these materials behave exactly as it should in real world. The longer light travels inside an object, the more it is affected by the transmission color. Therefore, red glass becomes a deeper red as light rays travel through thicker parts of the glass. Hence, it is recommended to use light or subtle color values here to make it look more appropriate. All right, now all the attributes that I didn't explain here belong to the advanced category and will require a good understanding of physics. If I try to explain all the other attributes, now you will become so much confused that you might lose confidence in moving forward. Hence, I'm leaving these attributes to be explained in an advanced course of shedding and lighting in Maya. All right, well if you're thinking you don't understand a lot of physics and yet want to create physically accurate materials, then Arnold Renderer provides quite a huge list of presets that you can find by clicking on this presets option located beside the name of the standard surface shedder. Here you can select any material from this list. Apply it over an existing material by replacing it completely or partially as needed. I can select from here brushed metal and replace the existing material completely by selecting, replace. Now I have brushed metal with all the attributes already set to what makes this material look like a brushed metallic surface. Same way I can select glass from this list and replace the existing one by 100% Now I have glass with all the attributes set to that of a glass material. All right, so even if you don't know how to put in accurate values here to simulate a particular material, you can still create a better one by using this list of presets that come along with Arnold Renderer. All right, now I'm going to quickly create a few materials and assign them to these models that I have created here. First, I'm going to create a ceramic material, hence rename it to AI ceramic. Then leaving everything to default, I'm going to change the specular roughness to zero. Then I'm going to create a metallic shedder such as steel, hence rename it to AI. Steel then set its metal ness to one and decrease the specular roughness to 0.15 This should make it a little more reflective, but prevent it from being totally reflective like that of a mirror. Then I'm going to create a glass material, hence rename it to AI. Glass set its transmission weight to close to one, something around 0.95 so that it can cast shadows and still be transparent. And set the specular roughness to zero and leave everything else to default. Then I'm going to create a shader that should appear as a black surface which is somewhat rough and not that shiny like the others. I'm going to rename it to black mat and set the base color to black. Set the diffuse roughness to one and set the specular roughness to 0.6 to make it appear less shiny. Now, this area here may become cluttered with nodes as you keep creating shedders. You can clean it up by clicking on this icon here with stars on it. If you want to bring up the nodes for any shedder that you have created, you can select that shedder and click on this icon with double arrows. This will display the shedder here with all the input and output connections to other nodes. Same way, this one displays all the input connections to the shedder, while this one here displays all the output connections from the shedder. Currently, there are hardly any nodes connected to the shedders. You won't see much of anything now. Okay, so let me clear this area again. All right. I have created all the necessary materials here that I'm going to need. Now I'm going to assign these materials to all of my models that I have created here within this scene. There are two ways to assign a material or shedder to an object. The first is by selecting an object, then going to hypershed window and right clicking on the material. Selecting assigned material. To selection look, the material has been assigned to the selected object, Hence, it looks different than before. Another way to assign a material is to keep the hyper shed window open, right on top. Anywhere on the screen, just drag and drop the material using the middle mouse button on top of the object to which you want to assign the material, right? It is very easy. You just have to get used to it by practicing. And you can always do it in the way you are comfortable with. You don't have to stick to any particular way to do that. Not just that, you can also select only a few faces from an object and assign a shedder to those faces by using this right click method. Now I can close the hyper shared window and go to this Renderer menu. And click on Arnold to bring up this window. Let me click on this Start button to initiate the Viewport rendering, so that we can take a look at how the sheders are going to appear in our final output. Here it is. This is what the output is going to look like. Now what I'm going to do is change the color of this glass material to somewhat red. Let me select the cup, and within the attribute editor, just keep going to the right by clicking on this button. Unless you reach the shedder node, which is our AI glass here, you can change this transmission color to light red. And select the same color for the base and specular as well. I'm also going to remove the steel shader from this ring of faces by keeping the cup selected and going to hyper shade, right. Clicking on the glass shader, selecting assigned material to selection. This will replace everything with this glass material. Then close this window and wait for the vendor to update. You can disselect the cup by going to select Menu and clicking on Disselect. All the shortcut is old plus D. All right, this is how we can create different types of shaders or materials and assign them to objects in Maya. See you in the next video. 38. Unwrapping and Texturing - Concept and Practical: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to unwrap your models and assign textures to their surfaces in Maya. All right, what exactly is unwrapping? It is a process in which we unfold and map the surface of a through the object On a two dimensional plane mapping a surface means we place the unfolded surface in a specific order or arrangement as required. For example, this is an unwrapped cover of a box. A box is cubicle in shape. We cannot just put a box inside a printer, print all the details on its surface. The levels are generally printed on a straight sheet of paper or cardboard, and then they are cut and folded in the shape of a box. In three D, we follow a similar process, but in a little different way. What we do is we unfold the surface of an object on a two dimensional plane. Then we map the images or textures on its surface. Then that surface is folded back to its original form automatically. All while texturing is a process of mapping images or textures, an unwrapped or unfolded surface of an object so as to render the surface with all the details as found on real life surfaces. Let us take a look at a simple demonstration to help you practically understand these concepts in a better way. Okay, here is a simple cube representing a box. I'm going to unwrap this cube and place all the textures on its surface to make it look like this object right next to it. Now if I go to the UV menu, we are going to find here many methods in which we can unwrap the surface of an object. The one that we'll choose depends on the shape of the surface that we are trying to unfold. That whether it is cylindrical in shape, or cubical, or spherical, or a combination of more than one shape. All right, let me first isolate the cube by selecting it and pressing control plus one on the keyboard. This will isolate it from the rest of the scene and also press to focus on the object. Now as our object is cubical in shape, so we can select it and go to Ub menu and select this automatic projection method. What this will do is it will unfold the cube from all the sides. If we open the UV editor by going back to Ub menu and clicking on it, what we are going to see is six separate sides of a cube placed here on a two plane, which has U and V axis, just like x and y. I can select all the sides and move them. Using the move tool. You can use the shortcuts for move tool for rotate tool, and R for a scale tool. All right, there is something that you have to understand about the projection techniques and some associated terms like what are UVs and what is and UL. First of all, this tod plane has U and V axis, which you can take it like x and y axis, like we normally have on a graph paper. Hence, these points are called UV coordinates, The very same points that we call as vertices in a three D space having x, y, z coordinates. This separated chunk of phase is called UV shell. And UV shell can consist of a single phase like we have here. Or it can have a group of phases as long as they are connected to each other and not separated like this. All right, now as I unwrapped the cube, you might have noticed one thing here that we have definitely unwrapped its surface into six different sides, separated from each other. But that is only applicable here within the UV editor, and nothing has exactly happened in the three D space. It is still just a cube. How does it work? Have you heard of a projector that we use to watch movies and presentations? What the projector does is it projects the photo or video on any screen, which can be anything like a wall whiteboard or even a piece of cloth. The same technique is used in Maya. That is the reason why these are called projection methods, because what happens here is this. We use one of these projection methods. It projects the surfaces of a three D object on a two dimensional plane that we have here within the UV editor. Then what we do is we manipulate these projected surfaces to map them on a texture file. Then what Maya does is it uses the same projection to map the texture on the surface of this three D object. The projection works in both the direction. First we project the surfaces from a three D object on a two D plane, then we are just the projection on the texture file as required. Then finally, the same projection is used to wrap this texture around the through the object. All right, this is how it works. Hence, what we manipulate here within the UV editor is the projection of the surface and not the actual surface. Basically, when you're selecting anything within the UV editor, you are actually selecting the projection. When you're selecting anything within the viewport, you're selecting the actual surface of the object. Just keep this in mind. All right, now, in order to assign a texture to the surface of the cube, we have to first create a standard shedder by going to Hypershade, Clicking on the shedder option and selecting this standard surface option. This will create a new shedder, which you can rename it to anything you wish. Then go to this color attribute for the base and click on this checkered box here. This will bring up this dialog box where we can select the file node and then rename it as well. You can rename its placeholder to then select the file node from here. And click on this folder icon to locate the texture file. All the textures are located in the source images folder of our project. I'm going to select this Allora Cream Dog. Here is the preview, and click on Open to load the file. What happens here is the shedder, instead of using a single color for the surface, it is now going to use this image to add all these details to the surface of the object. Without a shedder, textures cannot be displayed on the surface of an object. You have to go through this process whenever you want to add a texture to the surface of an object. All right, now I'm going to select the cube. Go to Hyper Shed and write. Click on the shedder and select a sign material to selection. Once done, I can close the hypershed window. Now all I'm going to do is select all of these UV shells and scale them down together to bring closer to the dimension of this part of the texture. Once done, I can go to the viewport and right click on the cube. Go to UV and select UV shell. This will let me select the UV shells directly from here. Okay, I'm going to select the top shell. Go to the UV editor and move it to the top section of the texture. You have to adjust it properly so that it doesn't overlap with some other parts of the texture or UV sells. Once done, then select the front shell and move it to this part, right? Then I'm going to select the right EV shell and move it to this part of the texture. Then select the left Vi shell and move it to this part. Select the back one and move it here. Then I have to make some proper adjustments so that nothing looks inappropriate, everything should appear correctly. As you can see that this back shell is projecting the texture upside down. We can fix this by rotating the UV shell. We just have to select it. Then go to UV Editors Modify menu and click on Rotate. We just have to do it again. Now it is appearing in a proper way. Finally, I can move this bottom shell right here. Right now I can minimize the editor. Go to object mode and disselect it. I'm going to do a quick render to see a preview of the final output, how it is going to look. It is. Everything appears to be good and working. Now I'm going to unwrap this cylindrical object the same way, but using a different projection method. First, let me assign the shedders to the top and bottom parts of the container. Let me open the hyper shed, select the top cap, and assign this material to the cap. Then select the bottom part, and assign this material to that object. Once done, I'm going to create a new shedder for the middle part of the container where we want to put the level like the one on this container. All right, let me create a new shedder and rename it to something more appropriate. And change this roughness attribute for the specular to 0.35 to reduce the reflections on the surface. Then click here on this checkered box, select a file node, and then rename all the nodes, just like we did previously. Okay, Select the file node, then click on this folder icon and select the texture file. This is how it looks. And click on Open to load the file. Now we can minimize this and select the cylinder and isolate it by pressing control plus one on the keyboard. And also press to focus. Then go to phase mode and select this entire loop of phases by holding down the shift key and double clicking on the adjacent phase. As it is cylindrical in shape, I'm going to use this cylindrical projection method to unwrap the surface. Now this is only covering half the surface, so we have to select and drag these handles unless it covers the entire surface. You can also use the slider to do that. All right, now deselect everything and select the loop of faces. Again, go to hyper shade and assign the shedder that we have created. Now go to object mode and press control plus one to exit from the isolation mode. I can rotate the cylinder to make it face towards the front side. Then go to UV editor, go to UV shell mode and select the shell. Activate the scale tool by pressing R to match this line on the texture, you have to carefully adjust it to make it appear correctly. Once done, we can go to object mode and take a look whether or not the texture has been wrapped properly on the surface. For me, it appears to be correct. I can do a quick render of the scene again to see a preview of how it is going to appear in the final output. Right. Now, if you are comfortable working in Photoshop, what you can do is arrange all the UV shells of an object within this section, ranging 0-1 both in U and V axis. Select all of them, then go to Image Menu and click on U Snapshot. This will let you save this UV layout. As an image, you can enter the size of the image in pixels, how bigger you want the image to be. It will be saved in the images directory of your project folder. You can also choose the color of the edges. For the UV shells, click on Apply and close to export the image. Here it is. You can use this image as a reference to manually create the texture exactly where it has to be on the UV shells. This technique is mostly used for complex models. Made a variety of shapes and forms. All right, this is how we can unwrap our models and assign textures to their surfaces in May. See you in the next video. 40. Animation, and the Graph Editor: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to animate your objects in Maya. All right, in three D, animation is a process in which objects are manipulated over time so that they appear as moving or exhibit some form of change over time. Animation represents change in the state of an object over a particular time period. Any change that we can observe over time is animation. Animation is what gives life to objects and characters. The very foundation of every animated and science fiction movie that makes us feel like everything is real and automated. Animation is such an art form that is used everywhere. Today, almost every movie involves some form of animation. Whether it is to bring the dinosaurs to life in Jurassic World, or the human like apes in Planet of the Apes, or just the movie titles alone. You will find animation everywhere in almost every industry. Hence, the opportunities that come along with animation are endless. Technically, the main objective of animation is to make an object move over time, all by itself, exactly in the way you want. If you can do that, you can animate anything no matter what it is. In Maya, we animate objects using key frames. Key frames store the values for the parameters or properties of the objects. These key frames are set on a timeline to measure the change that happens to an object over time. Right now, this might feel a little confusing to you, but it will eventually become clear as we move on to animating our objects. In Maya, there are certain things that you need to know before we begin animating our objects, such as time slider is divided into frames. Now, what is a frame? Ever wondered what a video is made of? Yes, that is where the frames come in. A video is made of frames. Frames are like images, each containing a particular state of an object or seen. When we look at these frames one by one, at a particular speed, like 24 frames a second, the objects appear to be moving. This playback speed of 24 frames per second is called the frame rate of a video. As we watch animation in video format on our television and smartphones, we use the term frame when creating an animation in Maya. Hence, the frame rate within Maya is called the frame rate for animation. Here, 24 frames make 1 second of time. If the frame rate is 24 frames per second, this frame rate is different for different purposes. Like for movie, 24 frames per second is the choice. For a TV show, the frame rate is usually 30 frames per second. Today, we even use 61, 20 frames per second to make our animation look smooth and clean. 120 frames here on the time slider means we have 5 seconds of time. If the frame rate is 24 frames per second, you can change the frame rate by clicking here on this drop down and selecting the desired frame rate from this list. Now I'm going to select 60 frames per second. Once I have selected this, the time slider will now display 300 frames, because it displays 5 seconds of time by default. If there are 60 frames in 1 second, then 5 seconds will have 300 frames, all right. Same way, using the range slider, you can set the number of frames displayed within the time slider, either by dragging the slider from both the sides or by directly entering the numbers. Here, this number marks the beginning frame on the time slider. While this number, the ending frame, you can also set the beginning and end frames of animation. Is like the total number of frames for animation right now. Basically, you can animate almost any property or parameter of an object. All you have to do is select the object and either press on your keyboard, which will set a keyframe for all the transformation attributes of an object. Or you can write, click on any particular attribute and select Key Selected to set a key frame for that attribute. To do the same thing using the attribute editor, you have to write, click on any attribute and select Set Key to set a key frame for that attribute. You can see this red vertical line here represents the key frame, and also the attributes will turn red for which you have set a key frame. Okay, you have to set at least two such key frames for an attribute to create an animation. And those two key frames must have different values for that attribute. If there is no change in the value, there will be no animation. All right, for now, let me press the S key on keyboard to set a key frame for all the transformation attributes of this object, and make sure you are on the right frame. I have set the key frame on frame number zero. You can also enter the exact frame number here to jump to that particular frame where you want to set the key frame. Okay, now I have to set another keyframe here to be able to animate this object. Let me jump to the frame number 300 by typing in here 300 and pressing the Enter button as I can choose to animate any of these attributes. So I can move this object using the move tool, you can directly type in the value here and then press the SK again, which will set a key frame on this particular frame, which is the last frame on the time slider. Once the key frames are set, you can click on this Play button to play your animation look. The object starts moving on frame number zero and stops at frame number 300, exactly where the key frames are set. All right, you can stop the looping by clicking on this button here when it displays one. It means the animation will play only once. There will be no looping. When I click on it again, it turns into an oscillation mode, which the animation will loop, but in a forward and backward direction, as if it is bouncing between the two key frames. When I click on it again, it will turn to continuous looping mode, where the animation will keep looping. Okay, I can stop the playback. Similarly, I can animate the rotation attribute of this object. I can go to frame number zero by clicking here on the time slider. Remember, you can always jump to a particular frame by typing the number here and pressing the Enter button. Now, I don't need to set any key frame here for rotation because a key frame has already been set for all of these values. When I pressed the S K for the first time, I just have to go to the last frame and rotate the object. Using the Rotate tool, let me enter a specific value here. Whenever we change a value and it has not been saved within a key frame, the attribute will become light red in color. We have to press the SK again to store these changes within that key frame. Okay, now if we play our animation, you'll see that the object is both moving and rotating at the same time within these 300 frames. The same thing can be done with its scale values. Just select the object, go to the last frame, scale it up, also move it a little upward, and place it properly on top of this plane. Once everything looks good, press the S key, and the key frame will be updated with these new values. Now I'm going to play it again. This time it is rotating and moving. Also scaling up over time. All right, we can even set multiple key frames for animating our objects. Like I can go to frame number 150 and scale it up and move it upward like the way it was in frame 300. Then press the S key to set a key frame for these changes. Then go to frame 300 and make everything normal the way it was before. And press the S key again. Now if we play our animation, you'll observe that the object scales from frame zero to frame 150 and scales down from frame 150 to frame 300. In this way, you can animate an object in any manner you want over a particular time period. All right, now what if we wanted to edit this animation and move the key frames from one frame to another? Well, there comes the graph editor. You can open it by going to Windows menu Animation Editors, and click on Graph Editor. If you select the object which you have animated, you will find its animation curves within the graph editor. These curves define how the animation will happen over time. We can edit the placements of the key frames as well as their values. Here on the left hand side, you will find the name of the object that you have selected and below that all its attributes. Doesn't matter whether or not they are animated. You can either click on the name to display the curve for all its attributes, or you can click on each of the attributes to display their individual curves one by one. Those that are not animated will have straight horizontal lines on the graph. You can even select the key frames by dragging a marker around them and change their values to anything you want. And press the Enter button to confirm. This box is for changing the values. This one here is for changing the frame number on which the key frame is located. This means I can not only change the values for a key frame, but also its location. On the time slider, I can click on the name to display the curves for all of the attributes, and drag select all of these keyframes on frame 150, and change their location from frame 150 to frame 75. And press Enter to confirm look, all the keyframes have been moved from frame 150 to frame 75 on the time slider, same way, I can now drag select all of these keyframes on frame 300 and change their location to frame 150. You can fit the grab by clicking on this button here. If I play the animation now you will see that the object is moving from frame zero to 150 and then stopping after 150. As there are no key frames after that, also the speed has doubled because the same animation is now happening within 150 frames, which was previously happening within 300 frames. I can move these keyframes back to frame 300 and delete the ones on frame 75. By selecting them and pressing the delete button on keyboard, you can again click on this button to fit the graph within this window. Now I'm going to minimize the editor and create a new camera by going to View Menu and click Create Camera From View. This will create a new camera which I can select by going to View Menu and clicking on Select Camera, and then rename it to Shooting Cam. Then I'm going to switch to Top View and move it Speed word to the center of the grade. Pressing and holding down and X key on keyboard. The D key activates the Piot editing mode, while the X key is for snapping the pot to grid intersections. Using the move manipulator, I can stay in a particular axis while snapping. All right, then I can switch back to the perspective view. Move to frame number zero and set a key frame, particularly for rotate y attribute of the camera. Then move to frame 300 and rotated somewhat around our scene or around the animated object. And then set a key frame again. If I play the animation, you will see that now both the object and the camera is in motion. However, you might observe that the camera rotation starts slowly and then ends slowly. We can make this rotation speed constant from beginning to end. By going to the graph editor, press to fit the curve or click on this button. Select both of these keyframes and click on this linear tangents option. This will straighten the curve making a constant rotation over time. There will be no slow in or slow out. This is how it looks like. If you want to add a slow in or slow out, you can go back and select the key frames and click on auto tangents option. You can also addit the tangents of the curve manually by dragging them with the middle mouse button. All right, I animated this ball in the very same way. Of course, there is no camera animation but just the rolling ball on the floor. Okay, so this is how we can animate our objects in Maya. See you in the next video. 41. Animation Updates in Maya 2024: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you the updates in the animation tools in Maya 2024. In this version, the time slider has a very elegant look. You will notice that the rain slider now has only two input boxes. Those are for setting the start and end frames of animation. You can drag this slider to select a range of frames to display within the time slider. You can also enter the frame range directly within the rinslider by double clicking on these numbers and typing the exact frame numbers, pressing the Enter button. Okay, Now another thing is if we open the graph editor, the linear tangent option is located here, while the auto tangent option is located here. All right, these are the few changes in Maya 2024 when it comes to animation that I've covered in this course, see in the next video. 42. Playblasting Animation and Concept of Previsualization: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to play blast your animation in Maya. All right. Have you ever thought what would happen if you have to send a preview of your animation to your client before rendering the final output? How would you do that anyway, especially if it doesn't have Maya installed on his computer? He's just using a smartphone. Well, that is where play blasting comes in. It is a process in which everything within the Viewport area is recorded frame by frame into a movie or video file, which is called a Play blast. You can use this file to preview an animation outside of Maya. You can also use these movie files to create a previsualization for your entire animation. Pre visualization is like creating a preview of what a film is going to look like after it has been shot. No matter whether it is live action or animated film. It is used in almost every big budget film. And game helps us troubleshoot all the problems before finalizing our shots. And definitely helps in saving a lot of time and money. In the end, once your animation is ready, you have to go to the Windows menu and click on this little square icon for Play Blast to bring up its options Here you just have to keep few options in mind, like what is going to be included in your playblast, especially the number of frames. You can select the time slider option if you wish to include only the frames that are currently displayed within the time slider. Or you can select this option and enter a specific range of frames that you'd like to have in your playblast. All right, you can uncheck this option for show ornaments if you don't want the camera name or this xyz axis to appear in the playblast. Whereas you should definitely check this option for render off screen. This will prevent recording of any other windows that may be lying on top of the port area. Like you may have the graph editor open right on top of the Viewport area. Checking this option will prevent the graph editor from being recorded in the playblast. All right, you can leave this format to AVI and change this encoding from non to x d so that the video file size is minimum. Keeping it to non will produce a large file size such as 1 gigabyte for just a five second video. Always set this encoding to something other than none. The quality of 70% is fine. You can increase it if you want the play Blast in higher quality. I leave it to the default value of 70, which gives me an acceptable quality. You can choose the display size of the playblast either to be the same as that of the view port window or from the render settings, which you can find here, you just have to click on this dropdown to select the desired size, or you can enter your own custom size in pixels. The first one is for weight, the second one is for height. Like I can enter here 1920 by 1080 pixels, which will create a full HD output. All right, the scale value multiplies the width and height by the number you enter here. 0.5 means it will multiply the width and height by 0.5 I can turn this to one. This is useful in quickly scaling up or down the display size of the output. You don't have to change this frame padding. It is mainly associated with the numbering of frames. In case you want a sequence of images instead of a single video, a value of four will number the frames using a four digit system. A value of three will use three digits to number the frames. All right, you can check this option for saving the file. If you want to keep it for yourself or send it to your client, you can enter a specific name here for the movie file and also browse its location if you want to save it in a different folder, like in a pen drive or somewhere else. By default, it saves the file in the movies directory of your project folder, which is an appropriate location to keep everything in one place, okay? Now, once done setting up these options, you can click on Playblast to create the movie or video file. You have to wait for some time until it finishes creating the movie file. Once finished, the file will open automatically. In your default player look gives a real time playback of our animation. We don't even need Maya to watch this playback of our animation. You're going to find this movie file in the movie's folder. Here it is. Now you can send this file to anybody you want for taking a look at your animation and giving some feedback. All right, this is how you can play blast your animation in Maya. See you in the next video. 43. Maya and Arnold Render Settings: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the render settings in Maya. All right, now, before you render the final output, you need to change some of the render settings in order to get the desired result. The render settings can be accessed in two ways. One is by going to the Windows menu, then Rendering Editors, and clicking on Render Settings. Another is by clicking on the scon present on the status line. Let me place it here. Now there are many tabs here, also sections, each having its own group of settings related to a specific purpose. The most commonly used settings are present under the Common Tab and all the quality settings under the Arnold Renderer tab. All right, under the Common Tab we have all the general settings using which we can change the format and dimensions of the output. You just have to click on this drop down and select the format for your output. Whether you want the output to be in Epec format or in PNG or in IF and on. I mostly use the NG format because it is a lossless format and supports transparent backgrounds. Will Pec format doesn't support transparent backgrounds, but it will definitely give you an output with a smaller file size when compared to other file formats. Okay, Then we have this another dropdown where you can select the naming system for your frames containing your animation. Especially if you want to export an image sequence as the output for your animation. Okay, if you are a little confused about what an image sequence really is, you can take a look at a practical example. Here you see these are called a sequence of images. It is like rendering every frame of your animation as an individual image later. We can easily create a video using the sequence of images. All right, coming back to the settings, you can select from any of these predefined systems for naming your files. You can always take a look at the preview of how everything is going to be right here within this window. The hashtag is replaced by the frame number as you render the animation. The dot stands for the file extension that is defined by the file format that you choose from. Here. For the output, choosing PNG format will give the images a dong extension, actually defining its format. You can change this frame padding to keep the numbering system to four digits or three digits or anything you wish. You can also set the range of frames that you want in the final output. This is the frame number from where it will start rendering until this frame where it will end the rendering process. In case, if you want to render only a single frame of your animation or just the scene, you can select this option, which is single frame. Right below that, we have a dropdown for selecting the renderable camera. Which is like, from which camera do you want to render the scene or animation, especially if you have created multiple cameras within your scene. You can even remove a camera from this section by clicking on this dustbin icon. If you don't want to render using that camera later, you can add it again using this dropdown if you want to render your animation using that camera. At last, we have this dropdown for selecting the dimensions of the output you can select from here, what kind of output you're seeking, such as high definition, which is this HD 720, or full HD which is D1080 and so on. All right, once everything has been set here, can move on to the Arnold Renderer tab. We're going to find here all the settings that are specific to Arnold Renderer. There are mainly two sections here that you're going to find useful most of the time. The first is the sampling settings and the second is the depth settings located here. Okay, coming to the sampling settings, we have here all the settings that are responsible for controlling the quality of the rendered output. The camera sample is like a global control for the quality of the entire output. It is used as a multiplier for all the other samples given here. Hence, as you increase this, you'll see here on top that the diffuse is specular and all the other samples increase as well, and that too exponentially. Of course, there's a mathematical formula working behind all of these settings and how they are connected together. But right now, let us give this to simple. That every sampling setting here is responsible for controlling the quality. Each of the aspect, as their names suggest, like the diffuse samples, controls the quality of the shadows formed on the surfaces of objects. No matter how light or dark the shadow is, there will always be some amount of noise in those areas. By increasing this number, you simply tell the renderer to do more calculations in those areas. Ultimately reduces the noise, but increases the rendered time. If you want quality, you have to sacrifice time. And if you want to render the output in time, then you have to sacrifice its quality. Or otherwise, you can simply choose a better work station for rendering. More processing power means quick rendering, okay? Similarly, the specular samples controls the noise within the highlights and reflections on a surface. The transmission samples controls the noise within the transparent surfaces and so on. Always remember that these noises mostly appear within the areas where the shadows are soft or the reflections are blurry, or the transparency is soft, like that of a diffused glass. Mostly in those areas you're going to find noise. And so are these settings to control their amount? The more you increase them, the less will be the noise. Hence, it will take more time and processing power to render the output. And also do not always increase just the camera samples alone. Thinking that increasing this will any way increase the other samples as well. If you do that, you'll end up with a very long rendered time for your project. Instead of increasing just the camera samples, increase the sampling for only a particular aspect where you find the problem, like noise. And keep the camera samples to a standard value. Not too high. Not too low. All right. Now below this, we have the red depth settings. It defines how many number of times light rays will bounce or reflect between surfaces or transmit through the surfaces before reaching the camera. The diffuse attribute will control the number of times light rays will bounce between the surfaces of objects. More bounces means more illumination within the scene. The specular attribute will control the number of times a reflective surface will be reflected on another reflective surface. In real reflections can go up to any number of times unless they diminish into a point. But here you can put a limitation to that. I have a very good example of this. This is from one of my very old projects rendered in Maya 2013. You can see that here, one mirror is reflected into another. It is like looking at a mirror that is in front of another mirror. Well, this reflection within reflection had to go up to any number of times unless it diminished into a point, a line in this case. For this to happen, I had to increase the specular depth to almost around 80 or something. Meaning that it will keep reflecting for at least 80 times. After which it will stop reflecting and that portion will appear as a black area. Back then, we had a separate attribute for this effect, which was the reflection depth. But now everything has been included within this speculate depth, right? There is one simple thing that you have to remember, that if the objects are closer to the camera and the reflections are noticeable, then you have to increase this red depth. Now coming to the transmission attribute, it controls the number of transparent surfaces through which light rays can pass before reaching the camera. On the other hand, the transparency depth controls the number of surfaces that are allowed to behave as transparent, which will not cast shadows like an opaque surface in three D. If an object has some depth or thickness, it is definitely going to have at least two surfaces that make up the depth. Every such surface will be counted as one while setting the transmission and transparency depth. If there are two surfaces, we can set this to either two or more than two if there are more surfaces through which light rays have to pass. If there is an insufficient transmission or transparency depth, the surfaces might start appearing black due to light not able to pass through them. Increasing these numbers can help in fixing such problems. Both of these attributes work together when dealing with transparent objects. All right, in the same way, the volume attribute will control the number of times light rays will scatter within a volume, such as cloud and smoke increasing. This will cause more scattering of light, which means more elimination within the volume. As we are not dealing with volumetrics, we can give this to zero for now. Lastly, all of these values when added together gives a total number that is limited by the total attribute. If it is set to ten, then all of this together cannot go beyond this limit of ten recursions. In order to allow more of these recursions to happen, you have to increase this number according to what you set for these attributes. But keep this in mind that as you increase all these numbers, it will increase the rendered time as well. Hence, set these numbers to only what is sufficient for your scene, neither too high nor too low. Okay. These were all the necessary settings that you have to go through whenever you are going to render your scene or animation. All right, see you in the next video. 44. Rendering the Scene and Animation: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to render your scene or animation in May. All right, rendering is the last step where we create our final output. This output can be in many formats, like we can either render our scene into an image file which will contain only a single frame shot even if it is an animation. Or we can render our scene into an image sequence which will contain all the frames of our animation rendered as separate image files. There are two ways to render a single frame of our scene or animation. The first is by using the Arnold render view and the second is by using the render sequence option located under the render menu. And you're not going to find this menu unless you switch to the rendering menu set from this dropdown. Okay, Now before you start rendering your scene, make sure you have made all the necessary changes in the render settings and you have set all the values for producing a good quality image, like you should definitely set the image format to render. In this case, it is single frame, the camera, then the dimensions, all the sampling and red depth settings. Once you have set all of these, you can close this window. If you have an animation within your scene and you want to render only a particular frame of your animation, you can simply drag the sliders to move on the frame which you want to render. Then you have to go to the Arnold menu and click on Arnold Renderview. Click on the Surrender button and wait for the rendered to finish. On the bottom right of this window, you will see the progress bar. You have to wait until it reaches 100% Once finished, you will see the rendered time here on the bottom left of this window. To save this output as an image file, you have to go to the File menu and click Save Image. Here you can choose a location where you want to save the image file. By default, it saves everything within the images directory of our project folder. Just have to enter a name for the output, like I'm going to enter final render 01. You can just type in the extension manually like G or JPG, whichever you like. It will save the image in that particular format as the extension, click save to save the file. If we go to the images folder of our project, we are going to find the image file that we saved using the render view. You can write, Click on the image to check its properties. You'll be able to see its format, the file size, and also its dimensions. All right, make sure you stop the live update and close the render view. In the same way you can use the render sequence option to render a single frame as an image file, you just have to go to the render menu and click on this box icon for render sequence. This will bring up its options where you have to click on the render sequence button to start the rendering. This will open a new window where you will see the rendering in progress. You have to wait until the rendering is complete. Did not open any other programs during this process, otherwise your system might freeze. Okay. So be careful, once you see the surrendered time and all the other details, it means the rendering is complete. The good thing is that you don't have to save anything manually. You will find the surrendered image within the same images folder where we looked previously. Here it is. It is going to have a similar name as your project file. The image format, as well as the dimensions are going to be exactly what you have selected within the render settings right now. To render an animation into an image sequence, you have to first go to the render settings and select a naming format from this drop down. Something like this. Change this frame padding to three if there are only a few hundred frames in your animation. If you have more than 1,000 frames, you can change this to four. Okay, for the sake of this demonstration, I'm going to reduce the dimensions so that it takes less time to render the sequence. You can keep it to whatever you want. Okay, once you are set, you can close this window. You can also save your file if you want to save those settings, then go to the render menu and click on this box icon for render sequence. Here within its options, you can actually select the camera from which you want to render the animation, just like it was there within the render settings. Then you can also select a different location to save your image sequence In case you don't want to clutter your images folder, You can create a new folder by clicking here on this folder icon, enter a good name and select that location to save the images. Once you're set, you can simply click on the render sequence button and it will start the rendering process. Now this is going to take a longer time because it has to render each and every frame of your animation one after the other. You can take a look at the progress bar on the bottom left side of Maya right on the help line. In the meantime, you can also take a look at your images folder or the location that you have selected for saving the image sequence. You can see the progressing frames appearing one after the other. Coming back here, you can also see the current frame that is being rendered. Let us wait for a while until this is complete. Once the rendering is complete, you'll find all the frames of your animation here within your selected folder. We can either use these frames for post processing in programs like Photoshop or After Effects, or we can use them directly for our purpose if we want. Post processing is mainly for making the final adjustments, such as color correction, cropping, or compositing in case of an image sequence containing your animation. You can use after effects to convert it into an MP for video, which can be played on any device. This is the interface of after effects, perhaps an older version, but the process is going to be similar. You just have to open the image sequence in after effects by double clicking here within the project panel. Then go to the folder where the image sequence is located. Select the first image and make sure this option is checked. And click on Open. Then right click on the sequence. Go to Interpret Footage and click on Main. Here you just have to set its frame rate to what you had used in Maya for this animation. In this case, it was 60 frames per second. I'm going to type here 60 and click on Ok button. Now drag this sequence into the timeline. And you can do any color correction if you want. By going to the Effect menu. I'm going to select Curves. Make sure the sequence is selected when you add this effect, otherwise it won't work. I'm going to use a preset fun now to save some time. Okay, this is what it looks like. You can even play this sequence by clicking on this button here, or by hitting the number zero on the numpad of your keyboard. This is called a Ram preview. All right, then go to the Composition menu and click on At to Render. Here you can set the video format by clicking here on Loss Less or any other name that you see here beside this output module, you just have to click on it. I'm going to choose 264. From this rub down, this will create an MP four video as the output. In case you do not find this option, you can select AVI and click on the Format options. And select the MPG four codec, or the one above. This codec may not be present in this list by default. For that you have to download and install the Klte Megacdec pack on your computer. All right, Once you're done, you can click on Okay and then okay again. But for now I'm going to select this H 264 and click on Okay. You can also select the output location where it will save the file by clicking here on this name. I'm going to go to the same location and select the movies folder and also type a name and click on Save. Then click on Render. This will render the sequence with all the color corrections and effects and create an MP four video which you can use for your purpose. Once you see the status as done, it means the rendering is complete. I can go to the movies folder. Here's the video that we created from the image sequence. I can even play it in a media player. You can share this file with anybody you want and he should be able to play it on any device that he uses. You can follow the same process for your other projects. All right, this is how you can render your scene or animation in May see in the next video. 45. Step-by-Step Practical - Complete Logo Title Animation: Hello and welcome back. Well, now that you know how to do three D, modeling, shedding, lighting, animation, and rendering, it is time for another practical session here which will cover all those concepts that you learned in the previous lessons. All right, what I'm going to make is a three title animation which you can use for animating your own movie titles or any other text. Okay, let us begin by creating our text. Go to the Create menu and click on Type. Let me dolly out a little within the attribute editor. Go to this type one tab or node and change this three type to any title that you want to create. I'm going to change it to Hulk. You can select the font from this drop down. I'm selecting this font, MNS, st, the seven. Okay. You can download this font from the Internet. Still, I have included this font within the exercise files. All right. Now below, under the text tab, set the alignment to center and leave the rest to default. Under the geometry tab, set the curve resolution to ten. This will increase the number of edges or polygons across the curvature of the letters, such as making the surface nicely smooth. Okay, if we scroll down under the extrusion section, set the extrude divisions to one to reduce the subdivisions across the depth of the letters. Currently, all these letters are behaving as one object, like a word. But I need to separate them so that later each one of them can be animated separately. Okay, Write, click on the letters and switch to the pace mode. Select all these phases that make the letter H. Go to Edit, Mesh, and click on Extract. Go back to the object mode in the same way you have to extract the other letters. To let me select all these phases on the letter. Go to Edit Mesh, and click Extract. Then select all the phases on letter L. Go to Edit, Mesh, and click Extract. You don't have to extract the letter K as it has already been separated from the rest. All right, now select all of them. Delete their history by going to the Edit menu. Then delete by type and click on History. This is necessary so that we can have fresh objects which can be animated. Go to the Windows menu and open the Outliner. And expand all these nested items until there is nothing more to expand. And bring all these polysurface items with the grid icon just below the type node, and delete the rest, which are just null objects. They become created as we start extracting the letters one by one. Okay, Hit the delete button. Now, I'm going to rename everything here. Select the object, press Enter, type a name, and press Enter again. Select the object, press Enter, type A name, and press Enter again. Let me put them in order. This one acts as a null object that holds the four letters together in a group. A null object is an object without a surface or form. It just acts as a placeholder and is not visible in the output. Right, let me close the outliner. Now I'm going to add Vel to all the corners of each of these letters. Select H, go to Edit Mesh, and click on Vel. Set the fraction to 0.15 to decrease the width of the vivel. Set the segments to four to make the vel rounded, and leave the rest to default. Right now, switch to the edge mode and select all the edges of U. Go to the top, disslect the middle ones that make the curvature of U. Go back to the perspective view and re select these corner edges. Go to Edit Mesh and click on Il. Enter the same values again, then select and be wall it two and set these values. Then select the last letter K. Click on Veal and set these values to. Now H and K have problems with engons. Just look at the corners. These are engons here on H, here on K. It will affect the shading in these areas. We have to remove these edges which are unnecessary. Select H, switch to the edge mode. Select these edges. Height control plus delay to remove them. We have to do the same thing on the back side of H. This entire back and front faces are also a, an engone. It has just so many sides, but as I'm not going to use smoothing on them, it is okay for now. It won't be much of a problem in this case. But it can definitely be fixed using the multicut tool, by splitting the engones into quadrilaterals. Now we have to repeat the same process on this letter K. Select it and switch to the edge mode. Select these four edges on the front and hit control plus delete. Go to the backside, select the four edges here as well, and hit control plus delete. All right, now you will notice that as we select any of these letters, all of them have their pivots located right at the origin, which is the center of the grid. Hence, select all of these letters. Go to the Modify menu and click on Center Pivot. Let me open the Outliner and select this movie title group. And click on Centerpivert again. Now I'm going to animate these letters, but first I'm going to create a camera. Go to the Create menu, then cameras and click on Camera, rename it to Render Cam. Then go to the channel box and set these values to position the camera. Then lock all the attributes except for translate Z, which I'm going to animate. Now we can hide the grade by clicking here. And then switch to that camera view by going to Panels Perspective, and click on Render Cam. Now activate the resolution gait by clicking here. This helps us see the boundary or portion of the frame which will be rendered. Then select this entire title and position it properly set its translate x value to -0.7 to make the spacing of left and right equal. Okay, let me close the outliner. With this, our title is ready. Let's move on to animation. Set the frame rate to 60 frames per second. We are going to use 240 frames in total. This should be one, this should be 240. In this way, we are going to have 240 frames on the time slider. Now to reveal this title, I'm going to animate the camera, which will move away from the title. All right, go to the View menu and click on Select Camera. Then we can set key frames on the time slider for translate Z to create an animation. Move this slider to the first frame and set this translate Z to minus two, right click on it and select key selected. Then move to the 90th frame and set this value to 60, right click on it and select key selected. Then move to the last frame and set this value to 80. Right click on it and select key selected. The animation will start from a value minus two and stop at value 80. All this will happen within 240 frames, which is like 4 seconds of time if I switch to full screen mode. And then switch to the fore view and just dolly out, you will be able to see the camera. If I bring up the time slider and go from frame to frame, you will see how the camera is moving away from the title as I move forward in time. Let me open the graph Editor by going to the Windows menu Animation Editors, and click on Graph Editor. All you have to do is select the first key frame and click on Linear Tangents option. Then select the second key frame and adjust its tangent to make this curve smooth. Make sure this curve doesn't go above this line of value 80, otherwise it will create a **** in the animation. Okay, now what do you understand by this curve and the graph? This horizontal axis is time. This vertical axis represents the values for translate Z. The animation will start very fast until the 90th frame, from where it will slow down. Finally, ending on frame 240, how do we know that the animation will start fast and end slowly? It is simple. We do that by measuring change over time. If there is a lot of change within less time, then the animation will be fast. If there is a small change within more time, then the animation will be slow. All right, let me close the graph editor and switch to the perspective view. Exit from full screen mode. Go to the 90th frame, select all these letters, right click and rotate y and select key selected to set a key frame for all of these letters. Then move to the first frame and change this fallow to 90 degrees, then right click and set a key frame again. Now what will happen is that as we scrub through time, these letters will rotate along the y axis from 90 degrees to zero degrees. All this will happen within 90 frames, which is like 1.5 second. All right, there are two animations here now. One is the camera animation, which will move away from the title over time. And another is the title animation, where the letters will rotate over time. As the camera moves backward, the letters will rotate revealing the title Hulk. Okay, with this, our animation is complete. Let us move on to Shedding. Let me open the Hypershade by going to the Windows menu Rendering Editors, and click on Hypershade. Go to the Shedder list, click on AI Standard Surface, rename it to I Steel. Turn this weight value to one, and set this metal ness to one as well. And leave the rest to default. That's it. This will create a fully metallic shader with diffused reflections. Right now, select all these letters. Go back to Hypershade, right Click on the shader and select a signed material to selection. Then close the Hypershade. This will make it appear black. Why black? Because the material is reflective and as there is nothing around to reflect, no lights, no environment, it appears black. With this, our shading is complete. Now let us move on to lighting. I'm going to use an HDRI lighting setup for this title, because in that way, this material will have a complete environment to reflect to the camera. Okay, let us go to the Arnold menu. Then lights and click on Skydome Light. Go to the attribute editor, select this shape node, and click on this checkered box beside the color attribute. Create a file node. Let me rename these nodes. Then click on this folder icon to browse the HDRI file, select the DRI and click on Open. Now select the Skydom light by clicking here within the view port and change the intensity to 0.5 and the resolution to 4,000 Because the DRI is four k, scrawl below turn the samples to four. Also the volume samples to four. And under the visibility section, turn this camera attribute to zero. This will make the light not visible to the camera directly. It will only be visible through reflections. In that way, this HDRI will only be used as a light and not as a background. Okay, now I can just do a quick render to see how everything is looking. At this stage, go to the Renderer menu and click on Arnold. And click on the Surrender button. You just have to disselect the Skydome light to make it disappear from the surrender. Now this is where you get to see the result. Everything we just did. Take a look at these highlights on the corners. That is happening only because of adding well, this reflective material is reflecting all the light that is coming from the HDRI or the Skydum light, and all those reflections are diffused or blurry. Okay, now we have to make adjustments to the light in order to have better reflections on the letters. Select the skydum light and activate the channel box and rotate it a little or simply enter these values then just disselected now we have a much better shot where it looks great. However, this is not the end. I would like to add another light which will create high lights from behind the letters and also help fill up this empty background which is currently dark. Now let me stop the live render and close this window. Go to the Create menu. Then under Lights, click on Spot Light, switch to the side view, and enter the location values by 143 degrees along the x axis. This is the back side of the title and the light will be facing this way. Okay, then go to the attribute editor and said they decorate to quadratic and turn the scone angle to max, and said they drop off to ten. Then scrawl down and expand the Arnold section. Check this box for using color temperature. And set the temperature to 4,000 Kelvin. Set this exposure to 11 and the samples to three, the radius to ten, and the volume samples to three as well. All these attributes have been explained in the previous lessons. I'm not going through them again. All right, now switch to the perspective view and disslect the light. Let us check out the result by rendering it again. Take a look at these reflections on the bottom side of these letters. This is coming from the spotlight that I just added to this scene. This actually acts as a rim light from behind. Okay, now there is one last thing that I'd like to add to this scene is the atmospheric effect. Open the render settings, go to the Arnold Renderer tab. Go to the environment section, click on this checkered box for the atmosphere attribute, and select Create AI Atmosphere Volume. Then close the settings. Then within the attribute editor set its density to 0.01 That's it. Now we have light within the background like a volume. All right, you should always check out the scene at different frames to see if the shading and lighting is appearing correct across all the frames In an animation. Make sure you definitely go through random frames. When lighting your animated scene. Just use this live preview to monitor the result. Okay, now it is time to render our title. Animation. Go to the 50th frame. You can see how much noise there is on the surface. We can fix all these issues within the render settings. You just have to open it and increase the specular samples to five. And press Enter and look at the output. The noise has been reduced. Okay, This is how the quality of the output can be controlled. I'm just going to quickly set all these values for a good quality rendering. Okay. Let me stop the live render and close this window. Now let us go to the Common tab and set the image, format the frame extension, then the frame padding. And set the range of frames that have to be rendered, which is going to be one to 240. Then select the camera that will be used to render the scene, which in our case is the render cam. Then finally select the image size, which is going to be full HD. After all these are set, you can close this window, switch to the rendering menu set. Go to the render menu and click on this box icon for render sequence. Here we just have to select the location for the output by clicking on this folder icon. Like I said in an earlier lesson, that you can always create a new folder to store an image sequence. Here we have to do that, click here to create the folder, rename it, then select it. Now you just have to click on the render sequence pattern and wait for the render to finish. Once the rendering is finished, you're going to find all the images inside the images folder. Within this folder that we had created earlier. Okay, here are all the frames rendered as PNG images that we call an image sequence. Now we can import this sequence into after effects and make some color corrections, or add some effects, and finally render it out as an MP for video. All right, in the end, what you will get is this result. Okay? In this way, you can create your own title animations in Maya. Right? With this, our title animation is complete. Now everything I did in this practical was initially planned, then I executed it here. To get this result, you always have to either imagine or make a storyboard on a paper to plan what you're going to do or how you're going to animate. You cannot just jump into creating anything like this. It always requires planning, either in mind or on paper, to achieve a good result. Okay, now the rest of the practicals, you may find them in PDF and not in videos. That is because I want to give you the opportunity to do something by yourself so that you don't have to become dependent on me or anybody else. This is necessary for the growth and development of your mind. However, you will always find step by step videos on our Youtube channel. But at first, I want you to try by yourself and then look for help, okay? You can always visit that channel if you need more help or want to learn something more. All right. See you in the next video. 47. Bonus Lesson : Complete Guide to Nonlinear Deformers: Hello and welcome back. This is a bonus lesson where I'm going to show you how to use the nonlinear deformers in modeling and animating your objects. All right, what are deformers? Deformers are high level tools that allow us to manipulate or drive the components of an object to create new forms by deforming its surface. There are many complex shapes that you may find difficult to model at the same time. It also takes time, but with the help of deformers, you should be able to model a lot of complex shapes without spending a lot of time. All right, let me create a plane. Set its width and height to ten. That should be enough for this demonstration. Now to deform an object, make sure you add enough subdivisions to the mesh. Because the surface of a single polygon cannot be deformed, a single polygon always remains flat. It has to be a group of polygons instead of a single one. Let me change the subdivisions to 50. That should be enough for creating an appropriate deformation. Now I also want to add some depth, because currently it is just a plane keeping it selected. Go to the Edit Mesh and click on Extrude. Pull it up and set this value to 0.15 Go to the object mode and press three to smooth. This is needed for the smoothness of the surface when it is deformed. Okay, then change this menus, set to rigging. Select this object and go to the deformin. Then inside non linear, you're going to find all the deformers that I'm going to use in this lesson, right? I'm going to select this sine deformer, activate the move tool, and move it out of this object. This is the sine deformer which changes the shape of an object along a sine wave. Let me show you what I mean by that. Let me rotate it first to align the axis of this deformer to this plane. Now if we scroll down within the channel box, you're going to find these attributes for the sine deformer. Make sure you have it selected, otherwise you will not find these attributes here as it deforms along a sine wave. We have these attributes related to a wave, such as the amplitude and web length. Let me set them to particular values to observe the effect. You can see how this object has deformed into a wave. The amplitude sets the height of these waves, while the wavelength sets the length of each of these waves. The number of waves will increase if I decrease the web length and vice versa. Okay. Now, this deformation would not have been possible if this object had no subdivisions more is the subdivisions greater is the level of deformation that you can achieve. All right, now let us take a look at some of these attributes which are common across all the nonlinear deformers such as this envelope. It works like by how much intensity or strength you want the deformer to deform this object. You can set this value to anything 0-11 means it will have 100% impact on the object. Zero means it will simply have no impact at all. Coming to the offset, it allows us to offset the position of these waves. If we change it, it will feel like the waves are propagating in one of the two directions. We can definitely use this attribute to animate this deformation. Like flowing waves. Okay, the drop of value is used to create a fade in or fade out effect on the deformation. If we set it to negative one, the waves are going to fade in from the center of the deformer. Whereas if I set it to one, the waves are going to fade out at both ends. If I set it to zero, there will be no drop off effect. Now the low bound and the high bound values refer to the bottom and the top portion of a deformer. Since I have rotated the deformer, the bottom side is now facing that way. The top side is facing this way. The low bound controls the starting point of the deformer. From where the deformation will begin. The high bound controls the end point, where the deformation will end. We can set those positions using these attributes. All right, these are common across all the deformers. Okay? Now, there is one thing that you should know that this deformation is temporary and is not permanent. What I mean is if I delete this deformer, the deformation on this object will be gone. Also, if I move the object without the deformer, the deformation will change. In order to make the effect permanent, you have to select the object and delete its history by going to the edit menu. Then delete by type and clicking on history. This will delete the Deformer and make all the changes permanent. Now we can freely move this object anywhere in the three space. All right, but what if we wanted to animate this effect in, instead of making it permanent? Well, in that case, we have to group the deformer along with the object. Let me undo that. Okay, once again, here is the deformer and here is the object. We can select them both and press control plus to group them together, we can then move this group without affecting the deformation. This is one way to make it work. Let me undo it again. Another way would be to use the Outliner and drag the Deformer on this object using the middle mouse button. This will make the object the parent of this deformer. Wherever the parent will go, the child is going to stay with it. Okay? In this way we can easily animate the deformation, no matter where the object is. We just have to set the key frames for these attributes here. All right, let me undo that again, close the outliner for now. Let me make this deformation permanent by deleting its history. Okay, now I'm going to use another deformer. Go to the Deform menu, non linear, and select this Bend Deformer. The Bend Deformer allows us to bend an object along a circular arc. Let me rotate it first, just like the previous one, because by default these deformers are aligned towards the Y direction. While our object is resting on the ground, its entire surface is along the X and Z axis. And that is the reason why I'm having to rotate these deformers to align them to one of these directions along which it will deform the object. All right, let me scroll down and select this curvature value. And change it by dragging with the middle mouse button. You can clearly observe how the entire object is bending along a circular arc, and it works in either direction. Let me set it to 180, The envelope, low bound and high bound values work the same way as I discussed earlier. You can try this by yourself. All right, I'm going to make this permanent as well by selecting the object, going to the edit menu, then delete by type and clicking on History. The deformer is gone and this deformation has become permanent. Now I'm going to bring its pivert to the center by going to the modify menu and clicking on Centerpivert. This is necessary if you want to set the deformer right inside this object in order to deform it evenly. The next deformer that I'm going to use is the twist deformer. Currently, it is aligned to the y axis. I need to rotate it in order to align it to this object. And just take a look how it has been placed right at the center of this object. This is the reason why I set the pivot of this object to center. It is taken as a reference to place the deformer. Okay, what does this Deformer do? The twist Deformer allows us to twist the shape of an object in order to see how it works. We can change either the start angle or the end angle. In either way, it is going to twist the object along this axis. All right, let me set it to something better. You can also check out these low and high bound attributes, how they are changing the start and end points of this deformation. Okay, once we have said these, we can delete the history again by selecting the object, going to the Edit menu, delete by type, and clicking on history. Okay, now this deformation is permanent. We can now move on to our next deformer. Select this object, go to the deformed menu, non linear, and select this flare deformer. Let me rotate it. Now, what does this deformer do? Flare deformer lets you flare out an object or taper in along two axis. If you didn't understand anything, let me show you what I mean. If I select these two attributes, start flare x and z and increase them. You will see this end scaling up. This is called flare out to grow in size from one end to another. While if I do the opposite, it is called taper in. It means to shrink in size gradually from one end to another. And we can do this on both sides using the start and end flare attributes. All right? If you change just a single attribute instead of in pairs, it will create an oval shape. Okay, let me reset this to one. What is more interesting here is this curve attribute. Using this, we can inflate the object like a balloon or deflate it to create very interesting objects. The low bound and high bound affects the same way as in other deformers. You can always try these for even more possibilities. We can now delete the history again by selecting the object. Going to the Edit menu, delete by type, and clicking on history. Now the next deformer that I'm going to use is a squash. Let me rotate it. The Squash Deformer allows us to squash and stretch an object along an axis. You can increase this factor attribute to stretch the object and decrease it to squash. You can experiment with the other attributes to find out how they're impacting the deformation. Like this expand attribute, it will expand the portion where the ring is located. This location of the ring can be changed using the position attribute, which is currently set to 0.5 which means it is located in between the low and high bounds of the deformer. There are also the smoothness attributes using which we can add little smoothness to the beginning and end of the deformation. All right, now for the last deformer, I'm going to create another plane. Set its width and height to 20 and the subdivisions to 100. Move it out of the grid. Go to the deformed menu, non linear, and select this wave deformer. The wave deformer is similar to the sine deformer except that it propagates along two axis instead of one. It deforms an object based on a circular sine wave for ripple effects. Let me show you how it works. If we set the values for amplitude and wave length and change this offset value, you will see the waves are either flowing in or flowing out. While the minimum and max radius attributes work like the low and high bounds of other deformers. All right, so this is how we can use the deformers in modeling complex objects and in creating complex animation. Okay, with this, our bonus lesson is complete. See you in the next video. 48. Final Words - What to do after completing this course?: Okay, so this is the end of this course, but in your beginning for you, where you can visually express your imagination, your creativity, your ideas, and show it to people what it looks like. This is one of the most creative career where you have the power to create anything that comes to your mind. Let me tell you that this course took over one year to complete. I had to work day and night, every day, endlessly to make it as better as possible so that you get the best of what you deserve. All of this is totally worthless if you don't make any use of it or take it to the next level and be someone even better than me. Okay, so I am hoping that you've learned a lot of things by now, especially all the topics that I've covered in this course. Now if you'd like to learn more or still have some doubts, you can visit our channel on Youtube. I keep posting a lot of videos there on Maya. I will definitely try to help you there as far as I can. If you're thinking what should be the best thing for you to do now after completing this course, then I would recommend you to spend at least a few months of time practicing what you've learned. Because the more you practice, the greater is the confidence you're going to have when you apply for a job or work on a project. You can also enroll in some advanced courses that focus on a particular aspect of through the animation. Like a course on just modeling or lighting texturing, rigging, animation, and so on. Don't always go for complete courses because in those, not every topic can be covered in detail as possible in a specific course. If you like modeling, you can take a course on modeling. That's what I mean. This will help you gain more skills and you will become capable of doing more advanced things than this. Don't just rush into getting a job right now. Take some time and spend it in growing your skills. You can also work as a freelance artist if you want to gain some experience and earn some money. Definitely, there are a lot of choices to make and you should always choose the path on which you really feel confident from inside. Because in the end, the success of anything depends on your willingness, how desperately you want to do it. My last words will be, unleash your potential and never give up. Okay, with this, it is time to say goodbye and see you in my next course. Thank you.