This tutorial section is a collection of scientific visualization-oriented training materials. One can browse this material either by difficulty level, software package, or 3D topic area. Tutorials will either be in PDF or video/audio format - a link to download any associated scene files and scripts is provided next to the link for viewing the tutorial.
If you are new to working in Maya and/or After Effects, here are some convenient "shortcuts" pages for both applications to help you through the tutorials:
This introduction covers the fundamentals of the After Effects interface, importing & organizing footage, creating compositions, keying layer attributes, and queuing for rendering/export.
This tutorial takes you through the process of rigging, skinning, and animating a simple NURBS 'tentacle' structure. Basics of key-, expression- & fractal texture-driven motion are covered.
Like the 'VIllus Capillary' tutorial, this is meant as a brief introduction to the Maya pipeline. The scene starts with PDB geometry of E-cadherin and explains the very basics of animation and rigging.
This tutorial shows you how to create and prepare a mesh from a PDB file,
use constraints and a softbody motion path to animate binding events, and MEL to add membrane-tethered receptors and generate ECM fibers based on particle trajectories.
This tutorial goes through the basic 'box modeling' approach to modeling with polygons. Benefits and pitfalls of both the 'poly-to-subD' and 'smooth proxy' workflows are described.
An introduction to Maya's PaintFx system. Preset brushes are modified to generate custom brushes and, using either default PaintFx turbulence or nCloth, animated lipid bilayer membranes are created.
Global Illumination & Ambient Occlusion |Gaël
McGill
Software: Maya & mental ray
Level: INTERMEDIATE
Topics: rendering & shading
This tutorial takes you through the basic steps for enabling and optimizing global illumination, as well as methods for adding ambient occlusion to your renders.
This tutorial serves as an introduction to Maya's render layers and shows how multiple render passes (color, depth, occlusion etc) can be composited together in After Effects.
