Getting Started with Maya

Alex Mohr, February 2002

Slightly updated by Matt Anderson, January 2003


Learning to Use Maya

Maya is a very large and complex piece of software developed by Alias|Wavefront. Therefore, it has a reasonably high learning curve. There are several different sources that can make this process easier. Using these sources, it should be easy to become sufficiently proficient in Maya for this course.

Maya may be run on the Windows NT CSL workstations by clicking it's icon on the start menu. It may take some time to start up.

When using Maya for the first time, it is recommended that you have some sort of a guide to help you. A very good guide is the Learning Maya book. We have a copy of the Learning Maya 2 book available as a PDF file on AFS. This pdf file is located at:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/maya/private/LEARNINGMAYA2.PDF
or
/p/graphics/public/html/maya/private/LEARNINGMAYA2.PDF

This link can only be accessed from machines in the Computer Sciences building.

Note that this is for Maya 2/2.5, not Maya 4.5. However, nearly all of the information in this book is relevant for Maya 4.5. I have found it useful to keep a browser window with the book in it open along with Maya.

This book is not meant as a reference. Instead, it contains a series of tutorial projects that are meant to familiarize you with important aspects of Maya. I recommend you do Project One, and then others as you see fit.

The online documentation (accessed via Help->Library (or F1)) is more valuable as a reference guide. The Alias|Wavefront website also has some how-to guides for some more advanced tasks.


Making Pictures and Movies

Once you have a scene that you would like to render, you should set up the rendering parameters. Go to Window->Render Globals to bring up the Render Globals dialog.

Set the image file type to what you want. If you're rendering a single image, just pick something that you know how to deal with (if you want to modify it with Paint Shop Pro, for example).

Also set the image resolution to what you want (by expanding the Resolution section). If you're interested in just rendering a single image, you may pick anything you like. However, if you are rendering a sequence of frames for a movie, you should probably use 320x240 to conserve on space and time.

You may wish to experiment with some other settings in the Render Globals dialog. For instance, when producing a final rendering of an image, you may wish to set the anti-aliasing quality to "Production Quality".

To render a single image now, make sure you have the "Rendering" set of menus selected in the drop-down box in the upper left. Go to Render->Render into New Window. A new window should pop up and the image should gradually appear in that window as it is rendered. To save your image, simply click on File->Save Image in that window.


Movie Considerations

Making movies in Maya is not necessarily a simple task.

To start, you must render your movie. Go into the Render Globals dialog as before, and make sure you have the Start and End frames set appropriately.

Now, you may render your animation directly to an AVI. This is very simple to do, simply select AVI for the image file type in the Render Globals dialog.

To render using this method, simply start a batch render and you should end up with an AVI file when it finishes.

There are some drawbacks to this technique. The primary one is that in general you cannot tell how far along the rendering is. This is a disadvantage because if the rendering fails before it completes (Maya crashes, or the system is shut down, or you have to leave, etc.) then you must redo the entire thing.

An alternative method is to render the frames to individual image files, and then combine them into a movie later. To do this, make sure you select the numbering scheme in Render Globals that says, "name.#.ext". Then go ahead and do a batch render.

With this method, you can see how far along the rendering is because Maya tells you the filename it's working on currently. Also, if the render is canceled or fails in the middle, you do not lose all the frames -- only the ones that had not yet been rendered.

A final advantage to this technique is that if you have more than one computer at your disposal, you can assign chunks of frames to each computer to manually parallelize the job.

The disadvantage is that you must find some way to stitch the frames together into a movie. Many professional programs exist that can do this. For example, Adobe Premiere can do this. Unfortunately, we do not have access to this program. Fortunately, there are some freeware and shareware utilities on the web that can do the job. One such program like this is pjBMP2AVI, which can turn sequences of BMP files or TGA files into AVIs, using whatever codec is available on your machine. This program can be downloaded here:

pjbmp2avi.zip

If you want to use this program and you rendered your frames in the "name.#.ext" format, you must rename them to the "name00###.ext" format. A method for doing this can be found at Andy Gardner's 838 web page from spring 2000 that is mentioned later as well.

Something to note: Make sure that if you use this technique you render the frames in a format that the movie-making program can read.

The numbered format "name.#.ext" that Maya produces may also not be comprehensible to your movie-making program. You may need to rename the files. To do this, please look at Andy Gardner's page from Spring 2000. This page has a link to a renaming program on it, and instructions on how to rename your files into a "name00###.ext" format. The page assumes you'll be using Premiere, but the instructions are useful regardless. There are also useful tips here for setting your Maya rendering parameters.