Maya Tutorials

In here you find a couple of tutorials that have been written for students attending the module "Collaborative Virtual Environments"

Goal of the practicals is to populate a CVE. You will do this by creating a virtual character, which will be used as your avatar in a CVE. The avatar should be a suitable model to represent your self. You can create a human-like model, an animal, an alien or what ever comes into your mind - be creative.

To simulate behaviour this avatar should also express some kind of respond to certain events. In this one-week module we will support only one event: a collision of the avatar's aura with another avatar. A response could be something like saying hello or winking. To realise this, you will create a model that is set into at 3 different poses to represent certain gestures. One standard pose (standing or walking) and two poses for the behaviour. These postures are then exported to separate VRML files. After modifying a script file for the behaviour of your character, you can test it in the multi-user virtual environment. After importing your model into a CVE, a behaviour-script switches then between these poses when the event occurs.

Keep in mind that one unit in Maya is about one meter in DIVE (the CVE that you will use to load your character). You shouldn't make the character too big or too small. A suitable height would be around 1.8 units. Of course, you can create an avatar, that is bigger or smaller than usual, if you want to. But you might have some problems in common virtual environments, which are designed with the usual height for avatars in mind (e.g. doors).

Also, you shouldn't make your avatar too complex. To keep a good performance in the CVE, try to keep the number of polygons as low as possible.

Submenu

	Quick Introduction
	Polygon Modelling
	Texturing
	Character Setup