Coming up on today’s epsiode:

We take a look at how to animate extruding text in Maya. Animating extruded text is a nice effect to get the attention of your audience and it always makes for good screen candy.

If you use a custom font you can import an Illustrator file. For this example we will create the text inside Maya. We go to the create menu > create > text > option box. Enter in some text. Set output for curves. You can create a curve, or use an arc tool. Go under create > arc tools to make arc. Go into the side view and click to create a small arc.

Reset the pivot point the center by clicking the home key to bring up the editor. Then go to modify pivot > center pivot. I like to rebuild the curve to make sure it has an even number of  CV points. With the curve still selected go under the surfaces menu then

Rebuild surfaces > option box

Use the settings

• uniform
• 0 to 1
• keep ends
• for this example, I’ll use spans to 4
• degree to cubic

Position the curve close to the text. Back in the Surface menu we’ll go to the Extrudes option box

Use the settings to

• Tube for style
• At path for result position
• Component for pivot
• Profile for the orientation
• Complete the curve

and output to NURBS

Now we can select the letters curves first, then shift select the curve. If your letters have holes, Shift select letter’s outer curve first then shift select the inner curve. Center the pivot for each letter. then go ahead and Extrude each letter.

Select the outline and under Surface fill each letter with a Planer. Ok, so now that we have all the letters extruded, we can start to animate the letter’s extrude.

First lets increase the extrude quality, by going into the attributes for each surface. Under the Tessellation > enable Display > Primary Tessellation Attributes. Here you can set the uv’s to “Best Guess Based on Screen Size”. You can control the text through the curve we’ve create for the extrude. Just keyframe the point position to animate. To animate along the curve we’ll go into our options for the extrude node.

In the Channel box select the input for the sub curve of each letter. Here you can keyframe the Min and Max values
to animate for text!

To add a tapper, we’ll go into the extrude node and adjust the scale properties. Adjust your animation curves, camera and check your render!

Alright, and that is how to animate text extrusions inside Maya.

I’m Pedro for Pixil.info. See you guys next time!

Coming up on today’s epsiode:

Optimize your iPhone games performance by Baking Texture Light Maps using Maya 2010. Today will be using Maya Baked Lightmaps to speed up game performance. The trick is getting fewer texture draw calls by baking your shadows into the texture.

First will start by creating a texture sheet. A texture sheet holds all of the textures that are used to make up characters and other models in the game. So by combining textures into one file, you can get a faster performance by using less cycles for each texture. For this tutorial we’ll be combining all the textures that make up this cell room.

For this example we’ll use a size of 1024×786. After all the textures are combined, make sure even plain color shaders are also in the Texture sheet.

Link all your texture UVs to the sheet.

Now we’ll Adjust the lighting in the scene, check the render to see the were the shadow are casting.

Now Select all polygons and in the polygons menu under

Mesh < Combine

Create a automatic poly projection for all the ploys in the polygons menu under

Create < UVs < Automatic Mapping Option Box

Using the default settings, under UV Set make sure the UV set name is: lightmap hit apply

Go into your UV Texture Editor and select the new UV set under: UV Sets < and then the lightmap uv set You can switch to original uv coordinates if you need to here

While still having the ploys selected go to the Render Menu Under:

Lighting/Shading < Batch Bake (metal ray) Option Box

The under Settings options check Back Shadows, the rest should be ok

under

Texture Bake Set Override Color mode < only light

Under prefix: use the name of the room to easily spot them out

For the iPhone will use the X and Y resolution of 256×256. Didn’t get any higher quality with a higher number so, We can leave the Number of samples to 4.

Fill Texture seams at: 3.0

Make sure Override mesh UV set assignments is checked with the UV set name to: lightmap

Click on convert to bake the map, This shouldn’t take too long

Ok, now if we look in our project file under

renderData/mentalray/lightmap/.

You can see the room0_lightmap.tif Maya created. Open it up to check it out, Pretty good

Ok we now have both of the UV sets in the scene and the baked lightmap.

Now we have to go to each object in the visible scene and create a Layered Texture shader for each. Then we have to attach the textures and UVs to the baked shadow’s UV set.

We can do this by right clicking on an object Assign new Texture < layeredTexture

Object goes green, The first layer will hold the lightmap file. Add another file node and link it to the lightmap. For the Blend mode use: multiply.

now we can go to the second layer and select a file node. We’ll link that to the color texture sheet. The blend mode should be at: none.

Now we can link the UV sets together for this object and it’s texture.

To set up the UV relationship we’ll go Under

Window < Relationship Editors < UV Linking < UV-centric

Scroll down to find the texture for this object. By default both are linked to the color texture. Select the lightmap and link it to the lightmap UVs

Map1 should deselect the light map UVs from the color UVs.

Now let’s test link by going into the UV Texture Editor and switching between the sets.

Now lets do a test render of the scene with the light off. If linked properly the shadows from any objects should still be in the render!

Now we just have to attach each object and texture to the lighmap UVs, thats how to bake light maps in maya. Hope this helps in optimizing your next iPhone/iPad game.

Coming up on today’s epsiode:

We’re going to take a look at Photoshop’s new 3D features.

Adobe added features but deleted some compatibility available in CS3. Being able to import Product models for print, video and web makes a very efficient workflow.

Although new camera control abilities were added in CS4, an incredibly useful ability is no longer there.

Features add and deleted

3D mesh animation support no longer works in CS4. This mean 3D models with animated parts no longer playback inside photoshop. The new 3D UI has deleted the timeline scrubber for the mesh. Making layer styles out of one object with different product stages would be a great workflow. You can still use CS3 for this, but wont be playback in CS4. Hopefully Adobe is able to bring this feature back. Being able to save all collateral as one psd file would save a lot of headaches. So to use playback, I import my Maya model into 3D Max and export it as a .3DS file.

CS3 Mesh Animation Workflow

You can just open it photoshop cs3. Then just set each layer at the need keyframe. Now set a layer comp for each state.

Coming up on today’s epsiode:

Using 3d objects inside Photoshop and Illustrator. When developing graphics for product, using 3D objects can help position graphics on products more easily and is a huge time saver. Before we had to take pictures, or make a 3D objects inside illustrator. Photoshop’s 3d abilities get around the limitations of illustrator. By allowing you to more quickly visualize objects you rotate in your comp.

3D Objects in Illustrator
In illustrator we’ll draw half of the objects path under Effects, 3D, Revolve. We then map the lable. Then copy and past it into photoshop. Now this is great, but if we needed to rotate the object, we have go back into illustrator. Heres where we start to see the cons.

First we can’t see what it will look like on the comp. We have to re-render the object each time we move the object around. We even have to re-render if we cancel out.

3D Objects in Photoshop

Photoshops ability to read 3D objects is a huge time saver. To set this object up, we can model in any 3D app. We’ll using maya in our example. We can Modify a cylinder and or import an illustrator curve and revolve the surface. A couple things to keep in mind when texturing. First is to not use a small pic to repeat a pattern. Make sure the textures are big enough to cover your UVs. Second is that material shaders will not export. To make a color make sure the add it to your texture map. Another draw back is that lights do not render correctly. We can export this as an OBJ file. Here we can see the two file it exports. The .obj and a .mtl fle that has info on the textures. In addition you will also need the 3 textures files this object use for its cap, label and bottle color. Open up in photoshop. We can use the default size. So we get to our 3D tools by double clicking on the layer. The tools open on at the top. We select the rotate and roll tool to orbit around. This doesn’t look like the texture was in maya. The light info isn’t read properly. We can change the light settings and render mode to something else. The one I found that looked the best is under render mode, shaded illustration. Thats better, but the con to using this render is that it adds a stroke around the object. We can workaround this by cranking up the crease threshold all the way up. Then we can change the line color. If we drop down the the layer options, we can see the textures attached. Something to keep in mind is that we can’t add any new textures, but we can edit. We double click the texture name to open the texture.Inside the label texture we can see that it can handle multiply layers. This make editing so fast and easy. Just save to update any changes that always come up. The file does not overwrite the original file, but imbeds it as a psb file. Plus we can still apply layer styles.

So that’s working with 3d objects in photoshop and illustrator.