10 Maya Tricks To Save 3D Artists Time

hello everyone and welcome back to the yellow dog 3d tips blog this week we're going to be doing something slightly different instead of me running through a specific tutorial on how to create a particular effect I'm gonna be showing you ten useful mayor tricks that you might not know about you might know some of them but you might not know all of them that will save you time so let's get straight in so number one this is my favorite little hidden feature of mayor and it's the middle mouse click on these top menus repeats the last action specific to that menu so let me just show you an example so let's say I create a polygon primitive and let's just create let's say a soccer ball let's say I wanted to do a mesh smooth on that as well so I'll just perform two different actions from these top menus but if we middle mouse click on the header of those menus we can just repeat what we eat lasted so if I middle mouse click on create it's gonna create a soccer ball and if we go over to mash and middle mouse click it's gonna smooth it so this really just saves you time it's different from just pressing G to repeat the last action because it remembers the last action just specific to that menu okay tip number two is something really basic boy something that I honestly didn't know about for a long time and I is that we can use the channel box or the node editor to delete the operational history of an object and what I mean by that is so let's say we've got a bevel here and a bevel here and then we've got a mesh move I used to think that if we wanted to delete the first bevel we'd have to undo the two operations after that but that's not actually the case we can go ahead and delete the initial bevel and keep the two operations after that so if you can see in the channel box here we've got the poly bevel one I'll just select that we can actually just go to edit and delete node seems really basic but I think that's quite a hidden little thing if you can't get it to work like that sometimes you can get the same result through the node editor so I'm just gonna go to window and node editor and with the P cube shape selected I'm going to press this button here which is the input and output connections and I'm gonna slap the polycube one and press the same button again and here you can see the construction history so we've got our first bevel a second bevel and our police move face so what we can do is actually just expand the nodes by clicking these little squares here so I'll click the squares and the polycube on and let's say we want to bypass the poly bevel one I'll expand the poly bevel two and I'll just show you what effect this is gonna have just to show it works we can just pipe the output connection straight into the input of the poly bevel 2 and that's gonna bypass the poly bevel one so sometimes I can really really save you some work if you don't want to go back and undo what you've done so next up is the snap together tool which is the tool I wish I knew about way earlier but it's all for aligning geometry to all the geometry essentially so I'll just open up the snap together tool so I'll go to modify and snap together tool and I'm just gonna click on a vertex on this cylinder here I'll just hold down V to turn on vertex and a pin and then with V still held down I'm gonna click on that vertex on this plane and you can see it's drawn this little path of why it's gonna move the cylinder too if you hit enter now it will place that for you so I'll just hit G and do that again see super easy to place geometry but let's say we wanted to maintain the rotation of these cylinders if we just open up the snap together tool we can just click move objects only and I'll do the same thing but it would just to keep the rotational offset so I'll just do that again to just show you what its gonna do and as you can see it snaps at the vertex to the vertex with the rotation offset maintained so that's just a super simple tool but it can save you tons of time ok so next up is the simplified curve option in the graph editor so let's say you've got a piece of geometry with some animation on it such as this and we need to make it change to it but as you can see from the timeline it is all baked so there's a keyframe on every frame so there's not really much you can do about that unless you reanimate it so sometimes you can get away with just going into the graph editor and selecting all the keyframes and going up to curves and simplified curve and I just open the options for this and just reset them and I'm gonna leave these as default for now but you can feel free to play with the settings sometimes changing the time tolerance and value tolerance you can really get the kind of curve that you're after so just click simplify there and as you can see we wanted to make changes to this now it would be a lot easier obviously it's not perfect but you can go and start refining it a lot easier than there was a keyframe on every frame ok so next up is just a really quick tip on the hypershade so if you've downloaded materials from somewhere like mega scans or somewhere that provides you all the individual maps for creating a realistic surface I've literally seen people for each map I think a file node in the hypershade and then painstakingly going into the image name here and navigating to the individual maps don't do that that takes ages you can literally just from your Windows browser or your Mac browser you should just be able to drag them straight into the hypershade window and it creates all the final nodes for you super quick and easy if you're working on a network it's worth noting see this little bone up here I've got it switched to off it's on by default and this is gonna basically builds a little swatch preview you don't really need it it doesn't really make much difference to most people so if you're working on network I usually switch this to off and it'll really speed up the import speed of your individual Maps so next up is the curve to tube mesh which you can find in the bonus tools if you don't have the bonus tools for mail you just need to go to help mayor resources and tools and click download bonus tools and then just run through the instructions they lead you to a page like this and you just click download and it will install it for you and at once you've got them installed it'll give you a tool called curve to tube mesh and allows you to make really really easy tubes so I'll just create a really simple curve here something like that and we can easily now extrude that into a tube so I'll look up two bonus tools they're modeling we can either create a ribbon mesh which is a flat tube or a tube mesh so I'm just going to click tube mesh and you can see we've got our tube mesh but it's not got enough divisions so we're just go up to the channel editor here you can see we have options for the length and width divisions so I'll change the length divisions to let's say 100 change the width divisions to let's say 15 and we've got a really quick and easy to mesh I don't know why it's reversed the normals are reversed so you might have to go to mesh display and reverse and flip it to the right way but you also get options for twist so if I change this twist so let's say 50 you can't really see what's happened there but it is twisting it a promise so as you can see it's twist the ends of that tube mesh and it's got an option for tapering it as well so this kind of stuff is just a little bit of a pain to do in maher using the classic tools normally but this is a really easy way of doing it once you're done creating the tube you might want to just delete the history on it because it does create a series of little point constraints and stuff which you can just delete once you've it delete the history and there you go it's got a really quick and easy tube mesh so next we've got the replace objects tool so this is a really useful tool for just replacing a load of objects in the scene really quickly so in this scene it's obviously really basic I've got a load of spheres just on a plane but these objects could be lets say street lights on a really complicated street scene that you spent a long time placing or trees in a forest if you wanted to replace the mesh you might have a lot of trouble trying to do that manually it could take you a long time so the reason tool for doing that so let's say I wanted to replace these spheres with a cone I'll just drag this cone over to one side so we can have a look at it make that Lobby bigger so this works by just selecting all the objects that you want to replace and then ctrl clicking the object to replace them with at the end and then you can just go to modify and replace objects and there you go it's replace all the objects with the new cone if you wanted to do something a little bit more advanced there are more settings that you can play with so under the replace objects settings there are options for possibly copying the rotation or the scale or just copying it as an instance so that's something to have a look at what this tool can save you tons of time and honestly not a lot of people know about it okay the next tool I want to talk about is the camera sequencer so I've got all these different cameras in this scene here and the camera sequencer it will allow us to sequence them just like their clips in an editing timeline so I'm just going to go up to Windows animation editor and a camera sequencer and it will bring up this window here so what I want to do is just go to create and shot and click the options I'm going to call this shot one and I'm gonna use the shot camera one and I know that all of these cameras are 200 frames long so I'll just leave that as 1 to 200 and new shot placement this is the first one so it doesn't really matter I'm just gonna put after current shot and that should just put it at the beginning and I'll click create shot so we've got one shot here and that starts at frame 0 and goes to frame 200 and in another shot which will be the second camera so I'll go to create and shot then just click the options again I call this one shot to the camera to make sure we've got after current shot I'm selected and click create shot so now if you see if I scrub through the timeline you'll see it's cutting between the two different cameras pretty neat and next I'll just create the third camera shot and I'll just go to create and shot and just like we did before I create a shot three shot camera is a shot comma 3 and after current shot is selected create shot and that's just going to cut between all the three different cameras in the scene and finally what you want to do is just go to create and you become and this is basically gonna create a camera in your scene that cuts between all of those cameras for you so there's the e become if I look through the you become it has all the cuts in it for us so this is just really useful for queuing up a render with multiple cameras and lighting it just run through in one go and not a lot of people know about that one either ok so next up is just a really easy expression which I use all the time no pun intended and it's the time expression so in this scene I've got a plane with a noise sexual attached to it and if you look if I move this time slider here it makes the noise so let's say I wanted to animate this noise but I didn't want to add any keyframes well we can use the time expression for that so I'm gonna right click time and click create new expression and under expression where it says objects you can see we've got noise one selected so I'm gonna type in noise one dot and after the dot is where you type in the attribute and the attribute that I want to animate is time so I'll type in time and just put equals time and I'll put a semicolon and click create and what that's going to do is just tell this attribute to look at the time slider and animate it according to what the value is on the time slider this is working in seconds so when I put this to frame 12 you can see that the time is set to 0.5 because we're at 24 frames a second so as 12 rooms is half a second and you can see if I just play that now it's just going to automatically animate I can go and edit this expression and if I wanted to I could divide this by two if it was too fast or something along those lines so I'll put divided by 2 semi-colon click Edit and now that's gonna half the speed which is animating all I could speed it up if I wanted to times that by let's say 10 click Edit it's gonna make it super fast so I hope you getting the idea that you can add a mathematical symbol here and a number after it and that's just going to create a basic bit of animation without using any keyframes so you can obviously animate anything using this expression so let's say only this cube to just move in the x-axis over time you could right click the translate X and click create new expression and in the expression we could type in P and Q but one which is the name of our object dot translate X x equals time semicolon and click create and now when we press play you can see that that cube is just animating over time so it's just a really nice way to animate things over time without any keyframes so last but not least we've got transform components' and this is a tool for allowing you to transform the components of an object based on their normal direction and so in this example I've just got a tube mesh and let's say this tube wasn't thick enough but we have no history on it there's no way to actually react strewed it what we'd have to do is redraw the spline then extrude it as a thicker piece of geometry but transform component will allow us to actually make it thicker without having to remake it so what I mean by that is if I go to face and just select all the faces with shift selected I'm gonna right click and go down to transform component and you'll see we've got these arrows here and these are the different directions of the normals so what I want to do is just drag this z-axis and if I move that up you can see it's actually making the tube thicker and thinner if I move these other accesses it's gonna probably destroy the mesh so as you see yeah it is destroying it but it's basically looking at the normal of the face and moving each component in the same way so you can create extra thickness objects like that but let's say we've got a sphere here so I'm just gonna select all the faces on this and go to edit mesh and transform which is transform component it's just another way of accessing it I'm gonna select the options this time and what you can see is we've got this random here as well so I'm going to turn the random up and click transform face and again I'm gonna move this z axis component and as you can see it's creating some randomness on the face there so there's the object but the good thing is about this transform component is that we're going through the channel editor and go to a poly move face 1 you can see we can actually change this afterwards so we could move the random let's say to 0 or we could move the random up to a lot more random than it was and we can change which axis this was happening on so it doesn't have to just be faces that you can do you can also just select all the vertices and do the same thing edit mesh and transform same again we'll put the random up and click transform vertex and it will work on the vertexes as well so I hope that was helpful and I hope there was a few things there at least that you didn't already know if you liked what you watched please go and drop subscribe on the YouTube page it would really help us out or if you feel an extra generous go and drop a like on the Facebook page while all the 3d tips get posted as well but once again thank you so much for watching this has been the yellow dog 3d tips blog and stay tuned for more 3d tips Cheers you

Channel: YellowDog

Views: 5,162

Keywords: 3D Tips, 3D Tutorials, Maya Tips, Maya

Id: oJwSaDtkMDE

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019