Computer Animation Arts

Texturing Tutorials Creating Demo Reel Shots (Preview) Attention all third year students - The Pipeline 1 (Jetpack Jones) texturing and turnaround tutorials have been updated to work with Arnold and Maya 2018+.  Many of you are reaching the stage where these tutorials are going to help support the next stage of your project. Including, helping you light, texture, and present your work for your submission where a 'demo reel' shot is a must. Please make sure you watch these to at least understand the possibilities and what is expected of you for January. The tutorial topics include... Texturing tutorials: Baking normal maps, setting up lighting. Creating Arnold shaders for clothes, skin (subsurface scattering), and normal maps. Blocking out colour maps, exporting geometry to Mudbox, painting in Mudbox, adding decals, and using Xnormal to create ambient occlusion maps. ( Link ) Demo reel (turnaround) tutorials: Rendering turnaround and static beauty, ...

Over the past year there have been a series of fixes and updates for Maya and Arnold. Including interface fixes, rendering updates, and the addition of new Arnold Shaders like the aiToon (shown above/top). You can update Maya 2018 (student version) for free by going to your Autodesk account and then 'Management' (above). Under your Maya license you'll find 'Updates & Ad-ons'. From the list select Maya 2018.4 update (the latest). There has been no news about Maya 2019 - although I suspect that will be announced very soon - so I'd recommend upgrading before the start of the academic year.

 Displacement Settings After today's class I took a look at the displacement settings (above) on my PC. As suspected the graphics cards are potentially the issue and the cause of the incorrect results. As you can see all of the settings are the same as used in the class. In this tutorial I haven't used 'Bounds Padding' (calculation cut off point) or 'Scalar Zero' (grey mid point) which can be used as an alternative to setting a positive/half negative setting in the color balance settings. As I said try this at home, I would be interested to hear the results.

OK Everyone. There have been important changes to the way in which we are going to use Maya on Computer Animation Arts...  As you are all aware, we (as a course) have stayed with Maya 2016 extension 2 this year instead of updating to Maya 2017. The reason for that is due to the change in ‘bundled renderer’ and licensing. However we are going to move a new system as of September. To explain why and what it means for you please read the following. The Change: Mental Ray has been replaced by Arnold (by Solidangle) as Maya's ‘bundled render’ in version 2017. That change has come after 17 years of Maya and Mental being connected.  Rendered using Arnold It has been unclear until recently if Mental Ray would  continue to be supported beyond the change and what using Arnold would mean for students learning Maya. Hence our 'hold off' period sticking with 2016 ext2.   We didn't want to rob you of knowledge due to a abrupt software change. ...