2D + 3D in Maya! Fun Beginner Tutorial

[Music] hello and welcome to yet another exciting CG tutorial today I'm gonna be going over how to create this effect with basically a 2d animated mouth and a 3d character using Maya and whatever 2d animation program you prefer so here's an example of this effect being used in a short that I made called the low zone and basically you can see just adding a 2d mouth onto a 3d character is kind of a fun scientistic choice it gives your animation a little bit of personality and it also allows you to not have to deal with rigging up an entire 3d mouth for the character that you're using it for so it's just kind of a nice alternative option to reading and animating a 3d mouth just doing it in 2d so the start of the process I like animating in flash for for 2d stuff but you can use Photoshop you can use After Effects you can use Toon Boom or TV paint whatever you're a 2d animation tool of choices so once i've animated this mouth in here there's just a couple things to take note of one is that I have set the scene to be a square aspect ratio and this is basically so that I can just apply the texture to a plane without having to adjust it you can definitely use a another aspect ratio like if you wanted to do 1920 by 1080 that's totally fine just keep in mind that you're gonna want to make sure that the plane that you're applying the texture to is also that same aspect ratio so for 1920 by 1080 it's sixteen by nine so you would set the width or something like point nine and the height to one point six or sorry the reverse of that one point six and then point 9 and then you won't have any kind of distortions your thing will will be properly proportioned based on how you animate it in 2d so the only other thing to keep in mind when you're doing this is make sure that the animation that you have you're exporting out as an image sequence I would recommend a PNG sequence because you want the Alpha background as well so that you don't see like the this whole black background around the mouth in the shader that you're gonna apply to the plane so I'm just gonna start from scratch with a brand new scene so you can follow along and I'm gonna start by making our plane and then I'm going to assign a material to the plane so I'll hit assign new material and go down to Phong which is one of the built-in Maya materials that is good for stuff in the viewport but it's not really so good for rendering especially if you're using Arnold you're gonna want to use Arnold shaders but we'll get to that in a little bit so the first step is going to be to click on the plane and you'll see we have this Phong node on here now if we want to get to that those shader attributes you can click on the plane right click and say material attributes and will bring up the Fong stuff in the attribute editor which is super handy and then what we're gonna want to do is grab the color Channel and click on the texture button and then we're going to be as connecting a file the PNG sequence to the color Channel so we hit that and then we go find our PNG sequence and you can pick any frame out of the sequence it shouldn't really matter so I'll pick frame 25 and nothing happens and the reason that nothing's happen is because we haven't turned on textures in our viewport so that's something that you have to turn on right up here at the top of the viewport and now we have wow that's basically what we want so we must be done right well it's a couple things one is that it's not animating so the way you fix that is by going back to the shader going to where we plug the color in and you'll see it plugged this into the color but it also did something to the transparency channel so if you break the connection from that you'll see we don't have our alpha channel anymore and we want that alpha Channel catch to the transparency so Maya's intelligently sort of doing this for us where it's plugging the transparency in which is super nice for a few port purposes and then go to the color Channel and we are going to go to that file node that we added where we where we plugged in the image sequence and we're gonna check out this box that says use image sequence and now what its gonna do is depending on whatever frame we're on it's going to replace the number in the image sequence with that frame number so right now we're getting frame 1 and then as we play through we'll see we keep getting our frames and it's animating until the end of our image sequence so make your image sequence as long as you want your animation to be that you're going to be using this math for so I'm gonna set the time slider to only go to frame 28 since our animation is only gonna be 28 frames long and that we can play through it and we got this nice little viewport representation of our mouth so that's awesome I'm gonna then take the next step and add a sphere which is gonna be like our character's body and I can do this handy trick of just parenting the mouth to the body of our character by clicking on the mouth first and shift clicking on the body and then hitting the P key and that you'll notice in the outliner has placed the grid underneath the sphere so the sphere is the parent of the plane now so that means that if we animate the sphere which I'm going to do right now real quick and I'll sort of add some anticipation nice and now we have this nice little animation that I made kind of keeping the movements of the mouth in mind so animating on top of that adding sort of just like another layer of animation so now we've got this nice little animation going like this little guy and this little squash and stretch and anticipation and you know some animation principle stuff going on so that's great but there's something important to take note of which is that because of the way that we've connected the mouth to the body we're just parenting it so that will basically make the child the plane of the parent the sphere inherit all of the rotations and transformations and scale differences that were animating on the sphere but if we want to just deform the sphere like we would with a proper character rig and I'll do that by going into the deform menu with the sphere selected going to the nonlinear tab and grabbing a bend deformer if we deform the sphere it won't follow along with this animation anymore so I'll just kind of Bend our guy this way I'll move the low to zero and and I'll increase the curvature a bunch maybe maybe like do that to it so it's it's doing this extra sort of bendiness I'll move it down here also so the mouth is not really properly following unparent at it so I'll reparent it and the mouth is not really properly following our shape anymore it's still giving the translations and rotations to it but it's not following along with these deformations that we just added with the benda former so the way the other way I like to attach these mouths and these planes to these bodies is by using something called a wrap deformer so I'm gonna unparent this right now and then select our mouth again select the body and then instead of parenting it I'm gonna go to the deform menu again and remember I selected the mouth first and then the body and then use this super handy deform are called the wrap deformer and now when I do that you'll see it actually follows along so this is a really useful trick for kind of adding on things to geometry that's deforming and is animated and can be super handy and if you want to do a little bit of extra work you could match this mouth up really close to the body and even add yet another Bend áformer on it and make it so it's sort of like wraps around the body properly and that's sort of all there is to to this technique that didn't really work I'm going to edit delete by type history I think that may fix it wait a second that I have to wrap it again excited to leave it the wrap deformer by doing that so I'll do that real quick wrap and yeah there we go it's a nice little wrapped around the body animated math thing so there we go super fun now the last step that's important to keep in mind for this is we don't have our proper Arnold shaders on here yet so we want to get this to be able to render in Arnold or whatever render engine we're using so because we're just using that that Phong shader which is great for the viewport but not great for rendering in Arnold and it may show up an Arnold I'm not really sure but you you want to use the AI standard surface shader for almost everything that you're rendering in Arnold so I will set the scene up for Arnold really quick awesome so now we have the scene going in Arnold and you'll see we have some shaders on these guys and I I threw two lights in this scene one warm kind of key light and one cooler kind of fill light nice basic lighting setup but yeah the plane that we have over here is just showing up black because we don't have a proper Arnold shader on it so the way to fix this is to the way to properly fix it is not to assign a new Arnold shader to it because if you assign an Arnold shader these I've assigned the AI standard surface on it the Phong material that we've set up that shows up nicely in the viewport will disappear but there's a way around this so I'm gonna click on here and I'm going to go to our hypershade editor and then with this object with our shader our Phong shader selected I'm going to click on this button that will show our shader group and then click on that this button again with the shader group selected and we'll see we have our Fong set up we have our PNG plugged in here and if you click on this to expand the node you'll see we have transparency plugged into the transparency we have the color plugged into the color that's where the shader is getting the information from the PNG sequence that we have now over here this is basically saying this is where you assign our shader to our object this is our shader group and so it's plugged into a surface shader which means that that's just kind of the general overall its shading everything with the surface shader but there's some other stuff in here that's not showing up you can expand it open and see some more stuff but you can also see over here in the property editor we have surface material volume material displacement material corresponding to what we see over here surface volume displacement and we also have this Arnold tab here and in here you can assign a separate surface shader that will work only in Arnold so we'll still get the viewport surface shader from the Phong but we'll get this Arnold surface shader separately so I'm going to press tab and create an AI standard surface shader again the only kind of shader you really want to be using an Arnold for 90% of cases and I'm going to click on here again see the surface shader I'm gonna middle click on the standard surface shader and then drop it right over here onto the surface shader and then that plugs it in automatically and then all I have to do is plug the color into the base color of the Arnold shader and then down here we have this opacity channel and I can plug the alpha into the three inputs on the opacity Channel r g and b and this is basically doing the same thing that we did with our Phong but for our Arnold shader so there Arnold reads it properly so now if I close out of this and i refresh the Arnold view and I save before I do that so that we don't lose our data hit play and boom there we have it there's one other thing that I'll mention which is that we're actually getting a shadow from the 2d mouth on the object I kind of like that I kind of think that's cool like you can see right here you're getting that shadow but you don't need to have that shadow there's a way to turn that off if that's bothering you so the way to do that is going to be to click on our object and it's gonna have this plane shape node or the shape node for whatever object you're using and there's this handy Arnold tab down here and you can tweak all these visibility settings so there's primary visibility and if we turn that off you'll see that that basically turns off the mouth but you still see it in the reflection you still see the shadow of it you can turn off cast shadows and you can turn off the reflections and now nothing's showing up now if we turn primary visibility back on it shows up again but no shadow or anything so that's just kind of a handy thing to keep in mind and that works for all kinds of stuff outside of these mouths that works for the rest of your objects you can do the same thing turn off primary visibility of the body but still get the shadow that it's casting so yeah there you have it hopefully that helps feel free to reach out if you have any questions about this thanks so much [Music]

Channel: Christopher Rutledge

Views: 6,006

Rating: 4.9396987 out of 5

Keywords: maya, tutorial, 3d, cg, 2d, render, arnold, autodesk, animation, cartoon

Id: JKL-Vm5ncV0

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019