It’s intended to run on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems and was first released in the late 1990s. In order to understand how Maya works, let’s first look at what exactly Autodesk Maya 3D is and why it’s so important to the animation industry.Īutodesk Maya, known as “Maya” or “Maya 3D,” is a computer graphics program that’s used for all kinds of 3D animation in films, television, games, and visual effects (VFX). Never fear! This article will give you 8 tips that will help you leverage the power of Maya while avoiding common mistakes. If you’ve never worked in 3D before, you may struggle with this sophisticated software package.

You’ve heard of this software package called “Maya” and that it’s the industry standard for 3D animation.

Although it seems rather simple, creating an animated outline like this in previous versions of Maya would have been a lot more tedious, making use of Maya’s animation paths for each letter.So, you’ve always wanted to learn animation.

There are a few tips that you need to be aware of when trying to create an animated outline effect, which Ian walks us through. In this case, the trails are using the outlines that were used to create the 3D type in the scene, and uses them to create the animated outlines. This uses MASH’s trail node, which can generate a 3D polygon stroke based off of an object’s motion, or simply, curves. Using MASH’s Trails node with Type to create an interesting stroke effect. MASH is a procedural animation plugin, which is now seen as Maya’s motion graphics toolkit.

Here, Ian Waters shows how you can create an interesting animated outline effect where some strokes will follow the edge of 3D type. Now that MASH is an Autodesk product and comes integrated with Maya 2016 Extension 2, a steady stream of tutorials, examples and tests have been making their rounds.

Maya animation examples