Maya: Introduction to Keyframe Animation

In this tutorial we will cover basic keyframe animation in Maya.  Maya has incredible flexibility for setting up animations.  Any parameter that you can adjust in Maya can be animated.

Maya: Introduction to Mental Ray Materials

In this tutorial we will briefly cover some of the basics of Mental Ray Materials.

Maya: Simple HDRI Rendering Setup in Mental Ray

This tutorial will show a method for quickly setting up an HDRI lit scene in mentalray for Maya.  HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Image.  Images of this type hold color intensity values beyond the black to white limits of a standard 8bit image file.  For more information and sample HDRI maps see the site of Dr. Paul Debevec a pioneer of this type of image (http://www.pauldebevec.com/Probes/).  We will use this type of rendering to setup a scene quickly for realistic lighting and reflections.

Maya: Importing from Rhino and Nurbs to Polygons

In this tutorial we will cover the workflow for moving from Rhino into Maya and the conversion of nurbs surfaces modeled in Rhino into polygon meshes in Maya.  Maya works well with Rhino, as they both share a true nurbs modeling package.  Maya also offers a more comprehensive polygon modeling package to Rhino which allows for quick modeling on formal and massing studies.  It also can assist in the production of clean 3d print files.  Also, converting to polys in Maya allows more intuitive control of tessellation than Rhino's mesh from Nurbs tool.

Grasshopper: Procedural Panels

For this tutorial we will be developing a panel system for the superformula towers we made in the previous session. This tutorial is heavily influenced by the parametric truss tutorial by David Fano which can be found at http://designreform.net/2009/07/rhino-grasshopper-parametric-truss .

Processing: Flocking

This is the Processing code for a flocking algorithm as covered during a workshop on 2/6/2012.

Grasshopper: Superformula Tower

This workshop will utilize grasshopper to create a volumetric surface based on a series of the superformual equations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superformula

In the workshop the tower is composed of five curves, though only three are used here for cleaner definition screenshots.

Fig 1. A collection of example curves using the superformula from wikipedia.