3D with Anu

In 3ds MAX Particle systems are a type of objects which can be used to simulate particle effects such as rain, water, smoke, birds or even crowds. You can use particle system with dynamic space warps to simulate wind, gravity, friction or bounce.

Creating an explosion with a PArray system

1. Create a teapot or any other object that you want to explode.
2. Create a PArray object under geometry>Particle systems. The PArray doesn’t have o be at the same poison of the teapot.
3.   Select the PArray and go to the modify panel. PArray is an object based emitter which means the particle will be emitted from the objects you choose. In the basic parameters rollout, under the object based emitter section click pick object and click the teapot in the viewport.

4. If you now play the animation you will see particles emitting from the teapot. Set the viewport display to mesh.

5. In the particle generation rollout, under particle timing section, set emit stop to 100 and life to 100.

6. In the particle type rollout, set particle type to object fragments. Now if you play the animation you should get something like this. The PArray is emitting the fragments of the teapot.

7.Scroll down to object fragments control. Turn on number of chunks and set the minimum to 8.

8.On the rotation and collision rollout set the spin time to 1 and variation to 10. Play back the animation. Now we need to set key frames to animate the explosion.

9.Back in particle generation set the speed to 5. Apply a new material to the teapot and apply same material to the particle system.

10.Now for the animation. Our explosion will start at frame 20. So turn on autokey. Go to frame 20. Right click on the teapot in the viewport and select properties.

11.In the window that appears, locate the rendering control section and set the visibility to 0. Click ok.

12.Two new key frames have been added to the track bar. Select the first key frame ad drag it to the 19 the frame. Turn off auto key.

13.Select the PArray and set the emit start to 20.

Add an omini light to the center. And another to the side.

14.To add the motion blur effect, select the PArray, right click, properties. Set the motion blur to image. You can increase the multiplier to blur more.

15.Add a sphere gizmo to the center.

16.Select the gizmo and on the modify panel click add, double click fire effect. Select the fire effect and click setup.

17.Set the flame size to 10. Turn on explosion.

18.Click setup explosion, set the start to 20.

In this tutorial we will create some hair styles with Maya fur plug-in. I’m assuming that you have a basic knowledge in Maya and its core concepts and procedures, which will help to keep this tutorial as short as possible.

First well create a new UV set which will be linked to the fur description node later.
1.    Select the head and go the side view. And press F11 to go the face selection mode and select the faces which make up the scalp area. You can start with a basic selection and also try using the paint selection tool (edit > paint selection tool).

2.    After the faces have been selected we need to create a UV projection node.
On the Create UVs menu select Cylindrical Mapping. This will create a new mapping node.

3.    Now locate the polyCylProj1 node and set the rotate x to -90. This will rotate the projection node so it should look like this.

 4.    Now we will save this set of UVs to a new UV set. Select > convert selection > to faces will convert the selection to UVs.

 5.    Open window > UV texture editor to view the UVs. You can use the UV texture editor to scale or move the UVs if needed.

 6.    Select a UV from the UV texture editor that belongs to the UV set we want to save. Select, select shell from the select menu. This will select all the UVs that belong to the UV shell.

 7.    Select polygons> copy UVs to UV set > copy in to new UV set >  to open the copy in to new UV set options box. Enter fur_hair as the new UVset name. Click, apply and close.

 Now we are ready to add the fur description node.

 8.    Press F8 to return to object mode. Select the head and select, fur > attach fur description > new. This will attach a new fur description node to the head mesh.

9.    We need to edit the fur description node’s attributes to the desired values to make the hair style.

 10.    You can start with a preset from the fur description node to make hair styles.  It is the easiest way to start. However I have added some methods of creating different hair styles.

Making different hair styles

 All these hair styles have been started with fur presets and customized for the look. The actual values such as length may vary depending on the size of the model.

 Style 1

1.    Start with the mouse preset
2.    Length = 2
3.    Inclination = 1
4.    Polar = 1
5.    Tip curl = .2

Style 2

1.    Start with the wet otter preset
2.    Length = 1.5
3.    Inclination = 0.9
4.    Polar = 0.14

Style 3

 1.    Start with the squirrel preset
2.    Length = 1
3.    Inclination = 0
4.    Clumping = 1

Here are some tips when selecting the best video card for maya;

• Avoid purchasing GPU based cards. GPU based cards such as nVidia geforce and ATI radoen does not support maya, and you may experience various refresh, display and stability problems and inadequate performance.

• Go for a proffesional workstation card such as nVidia quadroFX  or ATI fireGL series card. However recently maya does not fully support the fireGL range. Problems include texture paint errors and slow performance.

• Make sure your card supports hardware overlay panels. This feature is required for Maya artisan tools and most of the modeling panel tasks. Using video cards without Hardware Overlay planes (or Hardware Overlay planes turned off) can result in poor performance for certain operations within Maya.

• The graphics card must have atleast 256mb of vga RAM. The more memory the better the performance. If you’re using a lot of high polygone models all the time consider going for a higher vga RAM.

Here’s a list of the nVidia Quadro FX cards that supports Maya.

Table from Autodesk® Maya® 2009 Graphics Hardware Qualification white paper