Instructor:
Alex ALVAREZ


Formats:
DVD/DVD-ROM


Deformers are intuitive and interactive tools used to sculpt surfaces into new shapes, circumventing the need to edit vertices one-by-one. Maya offers a large suite of unique deformers which can be used in conjuction with each other to yield complex effects. Whether you are rigging a character or designing a crashing wave, a thorough understanding of Maya??�s deformers is crucial. Simple mistakes made early on can cause big problems down the road.

Clusters and Blendshape are two indispensible deformers which you will find yourself relying on over and over again. Clusters allow you to apply transform node functionality to multiple vertices, while Blendshape is a morphing tool. We examine the application of these deformers to NURBS, Polygons and Subdivision surfaces (including NURBS patch models), with a focus on higher-level workflow techniques.

Product Code: DEF01


Clusters
Paint Select
Component Editor
Weight Tool
Edit Membership


Blendshape
NURBS
Polygons
SubD Surfaces
Deformation Order

01: Introduction
02: Clusters
03: Weighting
04: Relative Mode
05: Blendshape Basics
06: Organizing Targets
07: Poly / SubD
08: Patch Models
09: Inbetween
10: Credits

Click here to view a sample clip from this DVD. Note that while this clip is 640x480 the actual movie size is 720x480 with higher quality compression. View the stills to the right to see the actual resolution.

Alex is founder and director of The Gnomon Workshop and of Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood. Alex has been published in industry magazines, websites, and books - plus he has taught courses at several major trade conferences. His character animation projects have appeared on many computer graphics websites, on the cover of the ???Maya Character Animation??� book published by New Riders, and his 'Zufuhr' project was commissioned by Alias for their Siggraph stage presentations. Alex is president of the Los Angeles Alias Users Group and sits on the Advisory Board for Highend3D.com. Prior to Gnomon, Alex worked for Alias, as a consultant and trainer for studios in the Los Angeles area. Alex is an alumni of the Art Center College of Design and the University of Pennsylvania.

Description:

If you guys are fans of LOTR then this is just the project for you! Remember the awesome looking Oliphant? Well you to can now follow through this step by step tutorial and model it yourself!

We continue the Oilphant Modeling by laying out the UV's using strips of color which we will use to planar map as well as automatic map to achieve flat Uvs. Once we have our creatures UV's underway we will use tools such as move and sew UV's, as well as cut UV's, to combine and reshape to create a nice flat combined UV map. After our UV map is created its time to learn how to create a UV snapshot to import into a paint program like Photoshop so we can begin to hand paint both the skin color as well as the bump textures of the character. You will learn how to use layers and colors in Photoshop as well as different brush settings to build up skin color. Near the end of the project we will do some prodedural texturing using some of the built-in Maya materials and textures to texture the rigging on our characters back.