MAYA - technical groups

The objective is two-fold.

1. The entire class will hear overiews of the important technical areas
2. Each project group have somebody knowledgable in each technical area

An example of the technical groups are:

1. Modeling,
2. Animating,
3. Lighting, Shading & Texturing
4. Rendering & Project management
5. Post-production

You don't need to master everything. You should master the basics and be familiar with more advanced techniques in case you need them later.

Although you can break up the topics among members of the group, each member in the technical group should be familiar with the entire area so that person can be the 'expert' in that area within their project group.

The technical group will

1. present an overview of their area, with examples, to the class when it's due using Powerpoint (or equivalent)
2. hand in a pdf of the slides to be posted on the class web site

1. Modeling, including:
   • polygonal models
   • NURBS
   • Subdivision surfaces
   • splitting polygons, joining objects, extruding faces
   • extrude, loft, revolve, trim, fillet blend surfaces
   • instances v. copies
   • textures & material properties (how to apply to objects; this should be covered in more detail by the lighting & shading tech group)
   • locators, deformers, manipulators (how to apply to objects; this should be covered in more detail by the animation group)
   • grouping, hierarchical modeling
   • creating kinematic chains including IK handles (aniimating these will be covered in more detail by the animation tech group)
   The Modeling group should:
   • give an overview of the techniques
   • identify situations where each technique is useful
   • present a variety of models that they generated with various techniques.

2. Animating, including:
   • path animation
   • camera animation
   • keys and the graph editor
   • driven keys
   • expressions
   • particle systems
   • animating FK & IK linkages, skinning
   • locators, deformers, manipulators
   • constraints
   • dynamics
   The Animating group should:
   • give an overview of the techniques
   • identify situations where each technique is useful
   • present a variety of simple animations that they generated with various techniques.

3. Cameras, Lighting & Shading, including:
   • cameras
   • light source models
   • light links
   • shaders
   • materials
   • shadows, incl. soft shadows
   • textures, UV maps
   • smooth shading
   • baking
   • toon shading
   • contour rendering
   • paint effects
   The CLS group should:
   • give an overview of the techniques
   • identify situations where each technique is useful
   • present a variety of simple scenes that they generated with various techniques.

4. Rendering and project management
   • Rending, including:
     • playblast
     • controlling rendering quality
     • software v. hardware rendering
     • render output: image formats, channels, etc.
     • batch rendering
     • the ACCAD render-farm (if ART students are in class)
     • render layers
     The Rendering group should:
     • give an overview of the techniques
     • identify situations where each technique is useful
     • present a variety of simple images and animations that they generated with various rendering techniques.
   • Project management
     • groups
     • sets and partitions
     • making an object unselectable (template)
     • display layers
     • copies v. instances
     • file referencing
     • proxy references
     The Project management group should:
     • give an overview of the techniques
     • identify how to organize multiple-member groups
     • identify how to update intermediate results

5. Post-processing, including
   • Animation formats and compression
   • titles & credits
   • non-linear editing software
   • sound
     • background music
     • foley - body sounds
     • sound effects
     • importing sound files
     • recording from microphone
   • compositing - render layers
   • output to both datafile DVDs and playable DVDs
   The Post-processing group should:
   • give an overview of the techniques
   • identify how the output impacts the project
   • present examples of output