Lab 1: Introduction to Maya
IDS252: 3D Animation, Spring 2011

Goals

1. Familiarize yourself with the Maya interface.
2. Understand how files and projects are named and orgranized.
3. Understand how to use to turn in assignments via enfuzion
4. Make a model of a temple and a helmet.

In class, I will walk you through some of the more common things you will need to know about the interface and file server.

Mac vs PC Keyboard: The computers in Ford 202 are dual boot. If you hold down the "options" key as the computer boots up, it will give you the option of booting in Windows. If you do nothing, it will boot up as a Mac. At the moment, it does not matter which you use. However, for some of the things we do later, you will need to be working on the PC side which can cause confusion with the keyboard. To see the mappings of a PC keyboard on a Mac, go here.

Directions

1. Open up Maya 2011

2. Learning the Interface: To do this part, it is best to have headphones. If a window titled Essential Skills Movies does not appear automatically, click on the menu Help;Learning movies. Take a look at movies 1 through 5 (i.e. "Zoom, pan, and roll" through "Discover secret menus"). As you watch, try things out in Maya itself.

3. Location, location, location: Organizing and keeping track of files on your computer is critical! For the moment, you can just use your H-drive to store your Maya projects. Create a folder on your H drive called ids252. Within this folder, you will keep subfolders containing your Maya projects. Projects are described below. You should have at least one project for each lab.

   To submit your completed images, you will place the images on the efuzion server before the beginning of class on the due date.

4. Making a Project in your working folder: A Maya project is simply a folder or set of nested folders where all the files are stored. Projects are important to create because when you save or render maya scenes, a number of different files are generated and saved. If you have created and/or set a project, all of these files will be saved into the project folder, otherwise it is anyone's guess where many of these files will end up.
   For this lab, you should create a single project (e.g. called Lab1Project) and save the scenes for this lab into this project. To create the project, open Maya and go to File;Project;New .... Enter the name and location of your project. The location should be your folder H:\ids252. For now, leave all other fields blank.

   Note, everytime you open up Maya you need to make sure that you are in the correct project. If you aren't sure, just set the project using File;Project;Set ....

5. Create a Temple: Open Maya, create (or set) the project, and click on the menu Help; Maya Help. In the index on the left, click on Learning Resources and then Tutorials to open up that tab. Then, click on Getting Started with Maya and then choose Maya Basics. You are to work through this entire section, including lessons 1-4. (Note, you do not need to copy over the "GettingStarted" folder just at the moment.) In the end, you should have a model of a simple temple.

6. Render the Temple: Rendering means taking the scene you have created, choosing a camera, and generating an image file from that scene as described below:
   1. Choose the perspective camera by clicking on the perspective window. Maneuver the camera in this window so that you are looking at a nice view of the temple.
   2. Go to the menu Window;RenderingEditors;Render Settings... and do the following:
      • Choose  the Image Format to be JPEG (jpeg).
      • Set the "Image Size; Presets" to 640X480. Close the Render Settings window. 
      • To actually do the render and generate the image, you must click the render button on the toolbar in Maya (ask if you can't find it)
   3. When you render the image, Maya will save the image in the project folder (you may need to look in the tmp folder within project). Note, if it isn't there then the project was probably not set correctly.
   4. Change the filename of the image so that it is a concatentation of your last name, and underscore, and the item, for example orr_temple.jpg.
7. 
   

   Helmet: The next thing you are to do is to learn how to create a helmet using polygon modeling. As before, click on the menu Help; Maya Help. In the index on the left, click on Learning Resources to open up that tab. Then, click on Tutorials, then on Getting Started with Maya and then choose Polygon Modeling.

   To do the tutorial, you will need two files, HelmetFront.jpg and HelmetSide.jpg. Download these and save into the project folder. You may use the same project you used for the temple but you will need to create a new scene. Make sure you keep versions along the way so that, if you need to, you may go back to an earlier stage to correct a mistake. This is a long tutorial and can be rather tricky to do. If you don't get through the entire tutorial, then don't worry. Do as much as you can. The main thing is to get used to using the polygon modeling tools.

   When you are done the tutorial, render a 640x480 jpeg image of your helmet, named appropriately, (e.g. orr_helmet.jpg)

Evaluation

Before the beginning of class on Tuesday, Jan 25, place your two jpg images (temple and helmet) into the ids252/lab1 folder on enfuzion. It is important that you name them as described above so that you get proper credit. Note, the Maya scene files will not be collected for this lab.

The lab will be graded on a pass-fail basis. To pass, you must complete the temple and have made an effort to have something resembling a helmet.

There is a lot to get used to in this first lab. If you have ANY questions, it is important that you ask.