CS 359 Homepage

CSCI 359

Digital Animation

Fall, 2005

Syllabus
References
- www.learning-maya.com This is a database of Maya tutorials. Some are useful, others aren't.
- Jason William's page of Maya keyboard shortcuts.
- The home page of Alias (the creator of Maya). From here you can download your own Personal Learning Edition copy of Maya. This is fully funcitonal, but it put an annoying watermark over any renders you do and you aren't allowed to save anything to a file.
- The Alias Maya Community home page. This gives you access to discussion groups, tutorials and other useful tools. Some of these require a paid membership, but many are free. You can also get to this page via the Community tab from any of the Alias pages.
- Safari. This is a full-text database of technical books, including everything published by O'Reilly Press. Here you can get access to the full text of 7 books on Maya.
- AVI files -- Maya can make AVI files (for animations that can be played by standard software, like the Windows Media Player), but it makes rather crappy ones. If you want to share your work with family and friends who don't have Maya, you really want 3rd party software for this. Adobe Premier is said to be good, but will cost you about $200. The Virtual Dub project provides free video processing software for the Windows environment. This makes both compressed and uncompressed AVI files (you will want to play with the compression algorithms; a 30 second animation can easily take up 500MB if it isn't compressed. Compressed versions of the same animation will take up between 10 and 50MB.)s
- Here are some notes on NURBS that I wrote up. I've toyed wth the idea of writing a book on Maya; this is preliminary fooling around for it, bt you might find it useful.
  - Section 1: Understanding NURBS
  - Section 2: Creating Curves
  - Section 3: Modeling with Curves
  - Section 4: Creating Surfaces
  - Section 5: Modeling with Surface

Projects

Project 0: The Framework: due on Monday, February 11

Project 1: Modeling: due on Monday, February 18

Mini-Homework 1: demo on Thursday, February 21

Project 2: Shading, Lighting, and Rendering: due on Monday, March 10

Project 3: Keyframed, Path, and Driven Animation: due on Monday, April 7

Project 4: Character Rigging due on Monday, April 21

Project 5: Final Animation Project  due on Thursday, May 15

Fall 2005 Final Projects
Miscellaneous
Here are three models that came with my version of Maya 6.0.

Demo Programs