great cats using Enhanced IK in Maya 2012. While the course centers on a puma/panther these techniques

work on all the great cats and any quadruped with similar anatomy.

By the end of this course, we will understand how they operate, as well as discuss practical uses for each of them.

focusing on a holistic approach to color and depth effects

These video lessons will introduce a compositing workflow that emphasizes efficiency.

We’ll look at a variety of color correction methods, depth and height-based haze, and faked

camera effects such as depth of field and motion blur. Throughout, we’ll develop a

visual style for our comp that will be easy to replicate and re-use for later shots.

In this series of lessons, our objectives include understanding a character’s emotions and thoughts through their eye patterns.

We’ll cover techniques and workflows for animating believable eye jitters and eye darts. We’ll dissect various eye animations and

discuss WHY they move a certain way. Overall, we’ll learn how to animate the eyes and brows to feel organic and life-like.

1. Introduction and project overview
2. The importance of scene scale in rendering
3. Preparing scene for initial rendering
4. Utilizing IES light profiles in mental ray
5. Adding secondary illumination to our scene
6. Using lens shaders to improve lighting results
7. Gamma-correcting materials and textures in Maya
8. Assigning materials to the walls and ceiling
9. Creating materials for the kitchen cabinets
10. Creating a material for the kitchen table
11. Adding realistic color temperature to lights
12. Adding additional light sources to our kitchen scene
13. Adding a final light source into our kitchen scene
14. Building a brushed metal material in Maya
15. Fixing common reflection and refraction errors in Maya
16. Improving glossy reflection quality in mental ray
17. Adding visible illumination sources to our scene
18. Enhancing shadows and indirect illumination in our scene
19. Making final quality adjustments to our render

1. Introduction and project overview
2. The expectations of the facial control rig.
3. Setting up a shelf to access our rigging tools
4. Building the primary bones of our head rig
5. Creating the jaw bones
6. Creating the eye bones
7. Group hierarchy for the facial rig
8. Binding the face
9. Blocking in the weights of the lower jaw
10. Blocking in the weights of the head
11. Refine the deformations around the corners of the mouth
12. Correcting the deformations of the neck and head
13. Using curves to control the deformations of the eyebrows
14. Rigging the brow curves with clusters
15. Weighting the clusters of the brow curves
16. Making the brow curves influence objects
17. Fine-tuning the brow deformations
18. Setting up the nose bones
19. Painting weights on the nose
20. Beginning the lip rig
21. Blocking the weights of the lips / connecting the blend shape
22. Correcting the deformations of the lips
23. Finishing the lip deformations
24. Building the eye lid rig
25. Deforming the eye lids
26. Beginning the fleshy eye rig
27. Wrapping up the fleshy eye rig
28. Setting up the cheek deformations
29. Tying the cheek shapes to the blend shape head
30. Completing the cheek rig
31. Extra cheek deformations
32. Setting up the lip rolls
33. Finishing the lip roll functionality
34. Creating animation controls for the head and neck
35. The Jaw controls
36. Setting up a system to glue the lip controls to the face
37. Finishing the lip connection meshes for the sticky controls
38. Gluing the lip controls to the mouth
39. The lip controls
40. Driving the lip clusters with the lip controls
41. Building a control to translate the mouth
42. Custom attributes for the lip rolls and cheek expansion shapes
43. Creating the nose controls
44. Completing the nose rig
45. Rigging the eyes
46. The eye controls
47. Finalizing the eye rig
48. The brow controls
49. Creating tongue bones / binding the tongue mesh
50. Finishing the tongue rig
51. Trouble-shooting the lip controls
52. Cleaning up the control rig
53. Character sets for animation
54. Preset expressions for fast animation
55. Connecting the facial rig to a character control rig

• 31 min. 18 sec.
• Released on June 30, 2011
• Project Files Included
• Required Software: Maya 2012 and up

In this series of lessons we will take a quick look at some of the new modeling tools in Maya 2012.
We will cover the new attribute sliders for the show manipulator tool and how they can
speed up our polygon modeling workflow. We will also take a look at how we can project
curves onto polygon surfaces to create fitted geometry and use those projected curves to
split or cut apart those polygons. We will also cover the new curve generation option for
the extrude tool. In addition we will cover the interactive split tool and finish up by looking
at the new interoperability features that will allow us to work more closely between Maya and
other Autodesk applications.

Contents
1. Introduction and project overview
2. Using the attribute sliders when extruding
3. Modifying geometry with the Interactive Split Tool
4. Generating curves when extruding
5. Projecting curves onto polygons
6. Splitting polygons based on curves
7. Integrating Maya with other applications