Beer glass scene creation
This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.
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1
14-12-2002
, 04:16 AM
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Location: Faringdon, UK
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Spiders!
heres what i dont understand:
i want to take a picture of a bedroom (with wardrobes, drawers slightly pulled out etc) and i want to use that as a still (non-moving) background plate. then i want to have all these hundreds of spiders emerge from beneath the door of the room, from inside the drawers, cracks in the walls, everywhere! what i dont get is how i can do this?
i know i ahve to model and animate a referance spider (no problem) then i instance it to particles, but how do i make the partcles act like theyre climbing along lots of different surfaces? i cant use path animations cos theres more than one spider and theyre coming from all directions in a random manner
any help would be appreciated
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2
14-12-2002
, 07:17 PM
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Hopefully someone else can help you with that part 
.-Imperator
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3
15-12-2002
, 08:10 AM
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Check your docs for it, and it will do the job perfectly for you, with a little tweaking.
If you have Maya 4.5, here is the direct link:
C:\Program Files\AliasWavefront\Maya4.5\docs\en_US\html\UserG uide\Dynamics\helpCreateSurfaceFlow.html
Scene setup tip:
One idea, would be to import your image into maya as a background.
Then, model low-res, degree 2 planes of your scene pieces that your particle spiders would be running on.
Select your pieces, and apply SurfaceFlow.
(you can also select ALL of your pieces together, and check on "createParticle per flow" in the Surface Flow option box to create a flow of spider particles on all your surfaces at once)
JUST REMEMBER, surface flow can be problematic with degree 1 surfaces. It's best to use degree 2 surfaces with enough spans so that you can choose a row of verts as, say, a "drawer corner", and just move the rows of verts on either side of your "corner" row closer to your chosen row to make it look like a sharper corner.
Once you've got your flow working, open the attribute editor to play with the Random speed settings to make your spiders look like they are moving at random speeds etc.
Apply a "useBackground" shader to your nurbs pieces.
Then, tweak your SurfaceFlow settings to taste
Good luck Nem!
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4
15-12-2002
, 11:28 AM
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what do you mean by degree 1 and degree 2 tho?
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5
17-12-2002
, 12:51 AM
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Surface degree is similar to curve degree. The higher the degree, the smoother and tighter the surface. Surfaces generated from degree 1 curves are faceted. For example, you can create the faceted shape of a cut gemstone by revolving a degree 1 curve.
The higher the degree, the smoother and tighter the curve. The lower the degree, the more influence a CV has on the adjacent region of the curve.
Maya provides a variety of curve degrees to accommodate the import and export of objects from other software products. For example, car designers often use degree 5 curves because the extra curve precision is useful for their manufacturing software.
A curve with the default degree 3 setting works best for general modeling tasks, as it provides smooth curvature without excessive CVs. If you are in doubt about which curve degree to use, use degree 3.
Hope that helps a bit
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6
17-12-2002
, 01:10 AM
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7
17-12-2002
, 03:14 AM
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Then again, I'm not really the person to ask about modeling, so...
Sorry
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8
17-12-2002
, 03:34 PM
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oooh question, if i take that idea of surface flow on a picture, how would i do it if it was a video? firstly i dont know how to have video footage as the background, and secondly i have no idea how to track
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