Gatlin International

Description

Maya training from Gatlin International will euqip you with the skills you need to advance your career in the exciting field of 3D game design.

Maya puts the the power of  3D in your hands. Our Maya training course helps you take your basic modeling and animation skills to the next level and allow you to include professional-quality pieces to your game portfolio.

Our six-session Maya training course gives you hands-on experience with modeling with NURBS and subdivision surfaces. You'll also learn the essential skills you need to create a character skeleton and rig, looped animation cycles, characters interacting with their environments, special effects using textures and dynamics, lighting and rendering techniques, and varioius strategies for pulling all these elements together.

Maya expert and educator, Nathaniel Stein, will  guide you through a series of creative and technically challenging projects that are sure to stretch your Maya skills to the max.

Enroll in our Maya training course today and get started building an impressive portfolio that's bound to open new doors of opportunity!  Click on the registration button to get started!

Outline

LESSON 1 More Modeling Mojo

Polygons are great, but there's much more to modeling than this basic geometry. Your first lesson begins with a look at NURBS, the perfect choice for smooth, precision objects. You'll learn a variety of methods for creating NURBS curves and surfaces, including revolves, lofts, birails, and trims. Subdivision surfaces, a cousin of polygons, are also explored to help you get extra detail in your models. An additional focus is strategies for quality, efficient modeling. In the exercise, you'll model a character using all three geometry types.

LESSON 2 Bones, Deformations, Skinning, and Other Unpleasant Things

Without bones, a character can't move... and without motion, you don't have much of a game. This lesson introduces you to the concept of rigging a character, beginning with giving it a skeleton of joints. You'll learn to bind the skeleton to a character model, and how to apply weight to your mesh for proper deformation when the character moves. Your character from Exercise One reappears in Exercise Two to get his skeleton and weighting.

LESSON 3 Constraints, Connections, and Rigging

Our bodies have certain rules for how we can bend and move, but at this stage, our 3D characters don't. Lesson Three introduces constraints and connections as ways to limit a character's movement to a realistic range of motion. You'll learn how to use the Connection Editor and other Maya features to make this happen, and explore the concepts of forward and inverse kinematics. The lesson wraps up with a look at creating a usable rig interface that makes the animator's job easy. For the exercise, you'll finish up your character by adding constraints, connections, and a quality rig.

LESSON 4 Animation and Cycles

All the character rigging done in previous lessons leads up to the important task of animating. Lesson Four is all about animating a character, going beyond basic keyframing to explore the concepts of straightforward animation and non-linear animation. You'll learn to create character sets to enable efficient straightforward animation and use the Trax Editor to make cycles and loops for non-linear animation. Most importantly, you'll explore methods for making your character interact with objects in the environment: picking up things, dropping things, and more. Your skills will be put to the test in the exercise as you animate a character.

LESSON 5 Bells and Whistles - Special FX

Special effects can be the hallmark of a fun game, and are fun to produce too. Many effects start with textures, so this lesson begins with some texturing tricks you can use to create lasers, swirling effects, glows, and much more. You'll learn how to produce these using layered and combined textures as well as animated textures. Then you'll turn your attention to DynamicsÑhighly technical tools you can use to create smoke, fire, and other advanced effects using particles, emitters, and fields. The exercise is your special effects playground where you'll work with both texture and Dynamics effects.

LESSON 6 Rendering, Lighting, and Putting It All Together

By Lesson Six, you've learned a great deal about the modeling, character building, and animation components that make for solid, professional work. The final lesson focuses on finalizing your work with high quality lighting, shadows, and renders. You'll learn about light linking, light effects, raytraced shadows, depth map shadows, and a workflow for dealing with your scene's lighting needs. Then you'll go beyond the basic renders you've used up to this point, using special render options and layered renders for more complex output. You'll finish the course with a project that puts these to the test and demonstrates your advanced Maya knowledge.

Additional Info

Languages

English

Course Length

60.00 hours

Duration of Access

Enrolled students have access to the class for six months. During this period, questions or assignments may be submitted at any time to the instructor. Each course lesson requires an average of 10 hours of study time.

Instructor

Nat Stein is a modeling supervisor and CG artist at Anzovin Studio. He has worked on animation for games such as Sid Meier's Railroads and Halo 2, as well as a variety of TV shows and movies. Nathaniel attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he also taught courses in Animation and Modeling after his graduation. Nathaniel co-authored the book Visual Quickstart for Maya 7.0, and is currently working on a new book. Nathaniel received his BA in Computer Animation from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Prerequisites/Audience

Courses are designed for adult learners interested in building skills and portfolio for a design career. To take the course, students simply require a computer (PC or Mac), an Internet connection (56 Kbps modem or faster), and any required software. For courses with software requirements, computers must meet software manufacturers' system requirements.

Requirements/Materials Included

To take this course you'll need Autodesk Maya and experience in Maya, Adobe Photoshop and basic experience in Photoshop, and a computer that meets the Autodesk Maya system requirements. Three button mouse required for PC users, recommended for Mac users.

Certification

3 CEU

Sessions College is accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC). Certificate programs are accredited by the Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools.