I’ve been asked to design some logo’s for a new web design company. The vision is to create 3 shiny orbs with the words web design studio on them. To facilitate this I’ve taken a few days online training with Maya 3D to learn the application.

Maya learning notes

If you forget the basics. View the ‘essential maya’ videos option when opening the application, they take 5 min and will bring you up to speed.
G:\Program Files\Maya\movies\quickStart is where they are located should you wish to view them.

Key knowledge

moving the objects pivot point is done via insert key(ensure move tool is selected) then drag the pivot yellow square

ctrl-a attribute editor – shows you everything.

qwer – various maniulation options

space bar changes windows and offers lots of shortcuts

read the status bar!

Cool UI note – MMB – middle mouse button is used a lot for nifty things like adjusting properties… select property and then mmb drag to adjust value making a child parent object relationship via mmb dragging in the outliner window

Note – projecting curves on curves and trimming the result – was a problem due to maya 8.0 creating a closed cylinder so the object was a compound object – this functionality needs to be a nurb

Lattices – deform any object going into their space… great for animations

deformers – coool tool for twisting, bending, making waves.

When modelling polygons, mesh->extrude on a face is the fastest way to form a model. It is critical one understands the rgb axis that appear when extruding. dragging the arrows extrudes alongs that axis, whilst dragging the little cubes scales the selected face. Play!!

Smoothing doesn’t work unless you are in the correct selection mode…if in component mode it won’t work need to be in object mode.

When pasting textures on you need to click on the paint texture button – top right.

Duplicate special command… rocks for many shapes/objects offset. Dominotastic

Hypershader – this tool lets you see the relationships of the various textures you have applied to objects… right click and graph a texture to see how its component parts
The really cool thing about this tool, is you can connect pretty much anything to anything else. Every texture has a bunch of input and output properties. So you can pump a color gradient into a noises alpha property and get a noise effect with gradient.

Rendering bits

Mental ray has more advanced shaders and looks better, but requires a bit of fine tuning to get the most out of it. You need to add ray tracing and either global illumination or caustics to the light in your scene. Then turn on caustics/global illumination within the ray tracing options. If you need to light up a dark corner or create sun refraction through glass effects you may need to increase the photon intensity value within the lights settings.
use the photon map tool to see if you have enough photons in your picture
resolution gate useful framing tool

Animation Stuff

Moving keys within the timeline is done via the middle mouse button
Graphing/curves animation screen is very important to get the natural movement we see around – linear movement just isn’t realistic.
When moving keys around cutting seems to work better than delete to clean up unnecessary keys

Paint Effects window – just awesome – play with this – build texture maps, add anything to a scene quickly and efficiently.

Techy words in simple speak:

NURB – curvy object – can be complex to model with but very nice results
polygon – straight lined surface – easy to model with but can look blocky
subdiv – combines the best of both worlds – curves and polygons – creases are used to add harder pologonal style edges
fillet – a connection between two curvy object, like the neck of a bottle is between a big cylinder and a small cylinder for example.
wedge – creating a wedge from a face and a edge. think air conditioning duct on top of building

Summary: How to Create an awesome logo

Model your geometric shapes, give them physics if you fancy introducing some animation

create a curve of your text and project the curve onto your geometric shapes

trim the projected curve away leaving your text

When animating a dynamics simulation – patience is the key… if you change an objects geometry when adding lettering the collisions it makes can be affected, there is a very useful option in the rigid body attribute called performance attributes which you can use to tell the simulation to pretend your object is still a sphere after adding lettering.