Nobody Understands This About Maya

hey guys henry morton from flick normals here and in today's video we are going to take a look at using nodes in maya this is a bit of a different video from us as it explains more of a fundamental view of how maya works this is going to be useful no matter what you're really doing in maya so let's get into it so in maya we are now gonna be looking through the node editor you can find that under window and then you take the node editor from here and just dock it down i've also removed the animation menu as well because i don't need that now this video is more of a foundational video which means this applies to all skill levels i've seen very advanced artists who don't understand this and i've seen beginner artists would really benefit from this as well we are looking into how nodes really work in maya everything in maya is node based and you might have heard that before but now we're going to take a look at what this actually means so we're going to be using the outliner and we are going to be making a simple cube so with a cube you can see that in the outliner we just have it says p cube1 and it's very nice and easy for the outliner but if you go under the node editor you can see that we have more data currently we have three nodes and these nodes represent different parts of the model or how the data is represented the first one is more of on of like a beginner node this is how i like to think about this has been created right and beginning when you make a primitive and this determines what the primitive looks like so if we go to the attribute editor we can now access that information from the node so now you can see that we have the width and the height and the depth a little tip as well if you want to change these without actually scrubbing here you can just hold down the control key and left mouse button to get like nice little numerical or incremental numbers so this is where we can change the height we can change the depth we're really just changing the segments right here nothing special at all and then we have the shape node the shape note is telling maya how is the cube actually going to be drawn every single 3d object in maya will have a shape node so this is where it tells the viewport and the rend range and how it's going to draw the object for instance if you go on arnold we can now see that we have different options is this going to be a polymesh it's going to be a mesh light it's going to cause shadows and a bunch more render specific options then we have a transform node the transfer node is is a bit different in the sense that this determines where the it actually lives so this determines the transformation the rotation and the scale of it so once we have once we understand that we have these nodes everything in maya becomes a bit easier to understand you you have a shape node and you have a transform node for everything and if you delete history you will not have this p cube anymore or this polycube1 anymore which means if you import an object you're not going to see this so let's just delete history real quick and you can see what happens then this is gone and if you want to change segments later on then you just have to delete these over again so if we just restart this and then we make another cube let's do a quick example so now we we just have the same cube as before and now we want to add a bevel to this and we can now see if we just bring this back like this that there is now a bevel node attached to this the reason we're showing this to solve for this simple bevel is that you can now understand a little bit better how the data is actually connected in maya unlike some other software like max and blender we have more stacks maya doesn't work that way we don't really have a stack which means that stuff is connected like this if we add another bevel to it you can see that we will have another bevel node to it so we can start to rename these and keep this very simple so we can call this top bevel and we can call this bottom bevel and no matter when you're opening the scene up you can always access this so if you want to go into the top bevel and you want to change the segments you can do that you've gone to the bottom bevel and change the segments you can do that and you might start to see some advantages to maya being node based now because now you can start to see some advantages in terms of being procedural you can now do some cool stuff with procedural modeling but this is a bit too stylized and so for example like this is very a very tutorial example where we're showing how to make a cube and using only specific nodes we will um we'll create the model this doesn't necessarily translate to production methods when you're when you're doing modeling for example for some specific kinds you might use this but in reality for the mass majority you're not going to be using this but this is still valid in order to understand how the data actually flows so where does this not become valid where does this become messy well like with everything in in maya or if you have flexibility you also have more complexity and this becomes very apparent once you start actually model something so let's select a single face and let's do an extrusion just holding the shift key and drag it out you see now see now we have an extrusion awesome let's do another one and let's do another one let's do another one and you can start to see that this is going to go completely bonkers you know after you're not just going to keep doing extrusion after extrusion like this you could do this in a more optimized way but just the reality of it if you're doing any kind of real modeling you're just going to be doing a lot of different operations to it this could be anything from inserting an edge loop to deleting vertices whatever you might want to do everything sort of leaves a node trace behind which is cool because that means we can delete the nodes and you can now see this whole thing disappeared but it also means that this is not practical this is not user friendly in any way and now we're starting to see another thing as well which is if we go to the channel box just hit ctrl a and you go down here under inputs you can now see this long list of of just inputs we're seeing and if you don't know that maya is node based you might think that this is some kind of stack that everything you do just ends up in the stack but this is not the case they end up in they looked like a stack because they were just placed the way they are or they just display the way they are but this is showing you that the connections of the different nodes these are all the inputs of the mesh and this is what you might just know as history and when you delete history which is shift alt d then all these are gone and you now have a nice clean model so if you want just want to display it again click on this button here which displays input and output and now we're back to uh regular shape node we have a shading group and then we have a transform node so this keeps your scenes really clean now if we want to assign a material to this we can easily do that right mouse button favorite material and we're just going to sign on lambert now we can see we have a lambert you see the downside to this is now you've lost all the procedural nature of the modeling but the upside is you're you've massively sped up your scene as well because as you start modeling or doing other action sliding rigging whatever it is nodes take up computational space and it starts to get pretty sluggish sometimes it also starts to get pretty crashy oh there's that too if you have a if you have big scenes like this your scene will just crash at some point there are just too many connections and too much going on so now we have a material and if we want to assign um if you want to assign a just a quick file node to this you can do this by clicking here or we can hit the tab key in the node editor and hit file and then we go to texture and now we have a file node and this is again just illustrating how everything is really a node you in some software you just kind of import your map and it's just kind of floating about in a non-specific manner in the three days after but in maya it is very much a node here's a file node and then you have a place to the texture node which describes this file node is this is this wrapping around does it use a uv map what happens to it and then we will import a map here and if we now just connect this file node to our shader we will now have a color assigned to our model like this not the greatest uvs but it displays you it shows the it shows the example where this is how you actually get stuff connected up we have a file node now connected to a material next up let's have a look at the attribute editor so one of the reasons why i want to show you that maya's node base is because it explains a lot of things in maya specifically in this case the attribute editor here we have a model which has a shape node it has a shadow group and it has a transform node and this is exactly what you're seeing up here as well we're now seeing the raw poly which is transform the transform is always first then we have a shape node where we can just change it this cast shadows if it's primary visibility all of that and then we have the material so this is always corresponding to the nodes attached to your model this is i was really confused about this when i first started using maya but this just seems like a collection of things i didn't really get what this was if they were just kind of things properties somehow related to the model but they're not they're very specifically displaying the nodes attached together and then let's look into the last example which is how can you use this to clean up your scenes now it's it's a bit hard to see where this is a this is practical knowledge uh right now we just be showing how data flows and essentially just delete history but this is practical for a whole bunch of different use cases if you're doing anything with a rigging lighting pipeline scene setup even some kind of modeling this is going to be really helpful for you currently we have a pretty clean scene if we just delete the cube we had before now you can see we have just a rope pulling model and we have a point light so you assume this scene is nice and clean but it's not the way you can know that is if you were to display every single node in your scene you can do that in the outliner go into display tag objects only and here you can see every single node you might have clicked this by accident and wondering what the hell happened and now you're just restarting maya frantically panicking but what this is doing it shows you every single node in the scene currently you're just seeing it like a nice view an organized view but if you enable it everything will be visible and now you can see that we have a lot of junk all of these are just junk they're just junk nodes these are junk just junk file nodes these are junk material nodes and it might even be some bevel nodes or something left from before so this creates really complex and nasty scenes if you were to import this scene in this model into another scene you would just create a crazy amount of mess let's say you have 10 models like this and they're all imported into 10 rig scenes which now all have their own things and those are important to animation scenes which have their own things you import this into the lighting scene it just becomes a mess and your myosin will crash and you have no idea why it's crashing most likely it will be because you just have so much junk in your scene so how do we fix this well the easiest way would just be to simply just delete them but the danger of that is that some of these might be connected to things you don't really know what's connected or not just by looking at this so the easiest way for me is to go up into the hypershade and then we go to edit and delete unused nodes now this is where actually knowing what nodes are and how the connect is useful because what does unused mean well it means it's just a simple node just floating around by itself if we do it to go in here and we just just to graph this out there is nothing it's not connected to anything which means it's unused so by going to edit delete unused nodes we can now easily delete all the nodes and we do that and now we have a nice and clean scene these are all nodes you just need by default mine just requires this first the scene to work but there is no junk in this scene at this moment it also be powerful to know that this exists as well if we do have a lot of a lot of these nodes for instance if we have we just undo this and we have let's say this node right here and we want to attach this to a material we can now just take any one of these file names and just middle mouse button drag them into a different attribute into a different connection so this is a very powerful way of working as well i do this a lot when i'm working more complex scenes where i have all my all my file nodes here and then i can just middle mouse button drag them into different places like so so that's really how maya works in a very simple way we have a like initializing node a beginning node then we have a shape node then we have a transform node for all models the shape node or the beginning node initializing node is removed the moment to delete history all all nodes in the attribute editor are directly connected to what actually happens to your model and if you see under the inputs and you delete history that is deleting and merging together the different nodes so i really hope this here has been useful for you if you have any more cool maya tips like this or more of a fundamental understanding of how my works and once your videos on that let us know and we'll be more than happy to make videos on that you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 16,903

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, maya tutorial, nodes in maya, using nodes in maya, how maya nodes work, node editor maya, nodes, 3d nodes, what are nodes, outliner nodes, attribute editor maya, file node

Id: 22a1CAlr8ZQ

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020