Anima

Here is an example of the best 360 video quality we can pull off at the moment:

Want details on what we’re doing here?
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We’ve been doing tests with 3 popular 3D scanners here at work.

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This is a VERY basic Mecanium tutorial for those who want to take advantage of the example animations found within the video tutorial below. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a brief outline and example of how to create a control panel for animations in Maya 2013. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a list of basic instructions and tips for creating a particle flow along a path. This works great for a swarm look. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Instance Mesh with Particles – PDF

Above is a PDF guide I created that has step by step screenshot examples of how to instance a mesh and apply it to the particles of a particle emitter.

Below are the easy steps to doing this:

To instance a single object to particles

1. Select source geometry.
2. Shift-select the particle shape.
3. Select Particles > Instancer (Replacement).
4. To hide the source geometry, select the geometry and select Display > Hide > Hide Selection.

(As a reminder make sure you put extra frames in your timeline so the particles have time to emit… I used 300 frames)

The last two pages of the PDF are examples of altering and scaling the mesh, all of the instanced particles will experience the same alterations as your source mesh.

I know you can snap a camera to a curve, but wondered how you’d handle switching between 2 curves. Here are two solutions:
http://www.creativecrash.com/forums/animation/topics/one-camera-attached-to-two-motion-paths

(a script to decide which motion path drives translation during which frames, or just keying the level of influence from multiple constraints).
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here’s a cool quick tutorial Calvin found:
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-maya/animating-grass-and-flowers-using-paint-effects-in-maya/

Quick example after the break: 
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Here’s a super cool script James found:
http://lesterbanks.com/2012/04/use-polygon-extrude-along-curve-in-maya-while-adding-animatable-subcurve-attributes
it lets you extrude polygon faces along a curve (much like the NURBs extrusion experiments we gave up on in the past, because they had open ends. Except this script lets you dynamically control the number of Divisions, and gives you a “taper curve” slider to keep the end closed as it grows).

To Set it up:
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