How to Animate Grass Waving in Maya

so this is a short video designed to show how to use the paint effects tool in maya to create the effect of grass and we're going to do four things we're going to create some grass we're going to animate it so that it waves in the wind then we're going to finally convert the paint effect into polygons um and cache that out so that you've actually got polygons moving in maya get rid of the original paint effects file and then we're going to do a little bit of lighting and create a movie file so the paint effects tool is really really powerful tool in maya you can create all kinds of stuff with it so let's find it so i'm in my 2016 here and i'm going to go to windows general editors visor now in my 26 2017 it's got a different name it's called the content browser so visor has become content browser so let's click on that and you see there's all kinds of stuff you can do here now we could animate if we wanted to we could animate flowers waving in the wind we're going to stick to grass just for now but you could just equally easily use this to create a field of flowers up here so there we go grasses and i'm going to select grass clump and then uh minimize this window so now let's go ahead and create some grass and to create grass all we have to do is do a stroke like that and we will get some grass now we can't see anything yet so we've got to go ahead and turn it on so let's just go back to the standard select tool because we were in the paint tool just then and under show let's make sure that strokes is turned on we need to see strokes and now you can see whoops just close that out now you can see the grass strokes in the perspective view now you'll see that the grass looks a little small so let's go into the attribute editor and fix that we want to be in grass clump one in this tab here and if i increase global scale i can make the grass much bigger so now i've got some nice tall grass which is much more the effect that i'm looking for now to to animate the grass we're gonna have to go and do some digging in the grass clump one tab so if i scroll down until i get to tubes let me open that up and the sub tab behavior takes me to turbulence maya doesn't like to make this stuff easy for you and let's turn on grass wind and let's take turbulence up to let's try 0.5 and let's just see what that does let me press play there we go so now i've got the grass blowing in the wind so that's probably a little bit too much that's going to be pretty breezy day so let me go to 0.25 better let's try point one great okay so that's like a sort of kind of normal kind of not insane kind of hurricane strength but still a a breezy day now once we've done that of course you can press play and get the simulation to work anytime but what we want to do now is to convert this into polygons um so that we can we don't have to make maya do the simulation every time you plus press play for something like this it's fine but the more grass you have in your shot the more it will slow down your shot so let's convert it to polygons now so we go to modify convert paint effects to polygons modify convert paint effects to polygons now if we go ahead and look in in our outliner windows outliner we should see there we go we've got a polygons uh group we've got the mesh there but we've still got the uh the paint effect in our outliner and if i press play there you can see it's still blowing away in the breeze if i try and delete this i've lost my animation so i had to hit z there uh to get the animation back now if we want to keep the animation but get rid of the simulation uh what we need to do is go and export a cache so in order to do this we need to do something slightly different so we need to go to cash alembic cash export selection to alembic actually before we do that we need to make sure we've got the grass selected so with the grass clump selected let's go ahead and do that again so we go cash alembic cash export selection to alembic and let's go into options box and just make sure we've got everything set properly and yep the whole timeline and now let's go export selection and that's going to take it to our geocache i hope it now wants us to name it so let's call this grass geo cache and export so now if we look in our projects folder so that's documents my project graph wave cache alembic there it is so now we need to import the geo back into the shot so i'm going to go to file import and let's go up one cache alembic geocache there it is and let's import that so i'm actually just going to try doing this one more time because it's a bit of a fiddly process so let's do this again cash alembic export selection to alembic and let's call this grass cache grass geocache one export now it should run there we go now it's running through the simulation in the timeline and caching it out so this should work correctly so let's now go and pull that back into the shot so we go file import and there we go i think that's the one i just made so let's import that now into the shot windows outliner and i should have a separate there we go so now i've got a separate grass clump and if i go ahead and get rid of the first one that i created i should have one now which retains there we go so that clump is now going to retain the original actually i can go modify center pivot and now we don't have any simulation to slow us down and there it is and of course we can if we want to color it we can apply a lambert so a sign you won't be able to see this but i'm going to assign favorite material lambert so let's call this grass material and then we can make it green or we can upload a texture whatever we want to do there we go so something like that and there we have it now of course you can't change the properties now because it's been cached out but it won't slow down your shot you can do as you can do this as many times as you want i mean you can keep going and making more grass and keep running simulation and then convert that into geo as well now if we wanted to do some really simple lighting we could uh let's see let's create a ground plane polygon primitives plane let's make it nice and big scale it up and let's do some really really simple lighting with physical sun and sky so i need to go into my render settings there we go make sure we're in mental ray go to scene create physical sun and sky and now if i go back to my perspective view i can do a quick render and i'm going to have a very very simple uh but effective lighting setup physical sun and sky with some grass so we could create multiple layers of this um and then we could do a batch render and export it as a movie file so this is a really really quick way of getting animation on grassy as i say you can do this with leaves on trees you can do this with flowers as well and it's one of the many powerful tools that maya has to get some animation done in a hurry

Channel: Alexander Williams

Views: 1,485

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Id: jLh6ktxf_uk

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020