Hasta La Motion!

Hey all, forgive me, I am not a 3D guy at all really. But I have to be for a project.

#1
I need to have a bunch of pieces of paper flying past the camera (each one has an animation on it). Rather than just parade flat cards past the camera, I’d like to do something more dynamic -so that the edges of the paper curl in and out slightly based on the animation… much like real paper falling, that would catch wind pockets, etc.

I looked into nCloth and some IK ideas – I think the best thing I have come up with is a jiggle deformer, with the weights inverted on the inner and outer vertices of a plane. But this doesn’t totally work. nCloth is cool, but more of a beast than I want to deal with for this animation.

#2
Smoke. This one is killing me. I’ve used 3D containers, particles, nParticles… I just can’t seem to get what I want. I did better making a perlin noise gizmo in Nuke to do this. I’ve looked everywhere, and no tutorial is quite exactly what I want.

Basically, I import a block of text from Illustrator – like "WELCOME TO" – Extrude it a little, etc. Standard stuff. This comes flying at the camera, and right before it breaks frame, the text breaks/morphs into smoke that continues flying at the camera until it evaporates/fades away.

I’m fine with rendering two passes and blending in Nuke or something… but I can’t seem to get a 3D container to make the smoke right. Also, I don’t want a continual steam of smoke, just one puff from the letters. I also want the letters to deform with the smoke.

Any ideas or points in the right direction are much obliged… I’ll buy you a cookie one day!

I’m relatively new to Maya, and I stuck on something. I have a CG character that, when eventually composited, will enter my scene from behind a building. So in Maya I have the character walking on a ground plane, and I set up a "physical sun and sky" light and another directional light to simulate the position of the sun. The ground plane has a "Use Background" shader applied and everything looks good. The character casts shadows on the ground nicely. The render looks good. But I also need the building to cast a shadow on the character when it emerges from behind it. So I made a cube and scaled and positioned it to simulate where the building is, and put the"use background" shader on it. Now the cube makes a nice shadow on the character, and the render looks great. Except.. the cube also casts a shadow on the ground, which i don’t need. Is it possible to have the cube only cast shadows on the character? Or do I need to set up seperate lights for that? Any clues?

am learning maya and i want to use it for motion graphics ….. BUT it feels its Time consuming when it comes to make effects ( like those in C4D Mograph )

1. Posted a maya video tutorial, on how to create your own marking menus to speed up your work Here is the link http://mayafreaks.com/tutorials.php

2.Another video tutorial on image based lighting and here is the link http://mayafreaks.com/tutorials.php

3. just a short overview of how ramp shader works in maya, following with making of a handy flower model. Link is on the same as the above ones..

4. know how of isopams and hull in maya using nurbs in conjucnction with creation of a hat

Hi everyone,

I was just wanting to know if your 30 day trial is renewable once it has expired for maya complete. I have noticed that after effects will let you resign up for the demo and I was wanting to know if that is possible with maya demo. Thanks!

Hairston