Maya Visual Effects The Innovator’s Guide Autodesk Official Press – E-BOOK

Maya Visual Effects The Innovator’s Guide Autodesk Official Press – E-BOOK

It always seems to me that authors of tutorials use the phrase be creative when
they are not exactly sure what to say. But upon reflection, it’s not really a bad piece of
advice if you stop to think about what drives the creative process. Creativity is the ability
to make connections between two or more seemingly unrelated things. For example,
when chemicals were exposed to light in a particular way, the art of photography was
born. Sound vibrations used to carve grooves into a wax tube gave birth to recorded
music. The aha! moment occurs when an artist suddenly realizes that what makes art
more than the sum of its parts is the way in which those parts are connected. When
successful, this realization is shared by the audience in the form of an experience that
feels new and reveals something about the universe that may not have been immediately
apparent before. It sounds like lofty stuff, but this is the whole point of creativity; it is
an exploration of what new things can be made with the existing tools we have before
us. Innovation is the word used to describe the process of making these types of connections.
Innovation is the engine of creativity.
Autodesk® Maya® is all about connections. It’s a virtual world made of nodes . . .
individual packets of data. A Maya scene is just a bunch of nodes connected together.
This is clearly illustrated in any number of Maya interface panels such as the Node
Editor, Hypergraph, Outliner, Hypershade, and many others. When you first learn
Maya, you generally go through the tutorials that are meant to show you how to connect
these nodes in their intended arrangements in order to create the types of animations
you commonly see. Most tutorials will take you through the process of how to
use joints to make a character walk, how to create snow using particles, or how to
make a ball bounce using the Graph Editor. These are all important, even crucial, skills
to learn. Unfortunately, most tutorials stop there, leaving you to wonder what’s next.
There is a gap in Maya training between the beginner tutorials and the advanced tutorials.
This book is meant to bridge that gap. I wanted to create a series of fun tutorials
specifically for the student who has completed the basic training but is not yet ready
for the advanced techniques. The goal of this book is to help you understand that the
true power of Maya lies in its ability to make connections in interesting ways; in other
words, how to be creative in Maya.