Introduction to Maya 2023 (Vol 1-3)

DESCRIPTION

Volume 1 Get up and running quickly in Maya

2023 with this beginner’s guide tutorial by one of our most-watched instructors, Eric Keller. Introduction to Maya 2023: Volume 1 is comprised of 12 chapters that take you on a comprehensive tour of the Maya interface, covering navigation along with the many editors that you’ll need to use when building 3D models and scenes.

Eric then walks through the creation of a Maya scene using a network of interconnected nodes. The relationships between these nodes define the shapes of your virtual objects, the shaders that determine the material qualities of those objects, the animation that moves them, and the lights and cameras that turn your creations into cinematic elements, game assets, scientific visualizations — or whatever you need to bring your digital art to life!

A number of helpful assets are available to download as project files with this workshop to help you with examples and to follow along with the workshop.

Volume 2 The goal of this workshop is to help you establish a foundation of understanding of the Maya polygon workflow and the various approaches to animating your models. You’ll learn about the Modeling toolkit, the UV toolkit, the GraphEditor, improvements to deformers, and animation visualization tools and animation layers. The skills that you develop in this workshop will help you tackle many of the more intermediate and advanced tutorials available at The Gnomon Workshop.

A number of helpful assets are available to download as project files with this workshop to help you with examples and to follow along with the workshop. Plus, a bonus chapter describes some of the new tools and updates recently released in Maya 2023.

Volume 3

In the third and final volume of Eric Keller’s Introduction to Maya 2023, you’ll learn all the fundamental concepts of shading, lighting, cameras, and rendering, focusing on using the Arnold render plug-in and associated interfaces. This introductory series gives a comprehensive overview of the Maya interfaces you’ll work with to shade, light, and render your scenes.

In the finale of this beginner-level Introduction to Maya series, Eric demonstrates the different types of lights available, how to set up rendering cameras, and how to use the render preview windows to fine-tune your images. Eric details how to work with the Hypershade interface; how to create render nodes, such as file textures, and how to connect them to your materials; how to create Standard shaders; and how to create and apply material presets.

The detailed instructional videos also show the process for setting up AOVs, render layers, and how to work with UDIMs when applying file textures to models. You’ll learn how to work with file references and alembic caches, as well as how to use references and MASH networks together when setting up environments. You’ll also learn how to set up a batch render to create an image sequence of your scenes using the Arnold

plug-in.

This third volume concludes with an overview of using the Game Exporter interface to export models and animation clips from Maya into Unreal Engine 5. Example files for all chapters are available to download as Project Files with this workshop.

The goal is to get you up and running quickly, so you know where to find the tools you need and how to use them. By building a foundation and giving yourself a roadmap, you can then go on to explore some of the more in-depth and advanced series available on rendering in Maya with Arnold available at The Gnomon Workshop.