Quick Tip: Floral Animation with Maya’s Paint Effects

Quick Tip: Floral Animation with Maya’s Paint Effects

Tutorial Details
  • Software: Autodesk Maya
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Completion Time: 20minutes
  • Tutorial Files: None

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

In today’s quicktip tutorial, Abed L. Ibrahim walks us through how to create impressive floral animations that grow gradually over time, using Maya Paint Effects. Let’s take a look!


Step 1

Start a new scene, and then open the Visor from ‘Window > General Editors’. Once there, choose the vineGreyBud plant.


Step 2

With your brush selected, draw something like this directly in your scene.


Step 3

Set the end time of your playback range to 100.


Step 4

Make sure you’re on the first frame of your animation, and then in the Attribute Editor for your Paint FX stroke, expand the End Bounds as shown and set a key frame of 0 in the Max Clip.


Step 5

Now go to the last frame in your playback range and set another key, this time at 1.000.


Step 6

If you now go ahead and press Play you will notice that the whole plant/shape grows over time! To increase this effect, and introduce some more growth into your object, go to the vineGreyBud1 attributes, expand Tubes and then uncheck Tube Completion. Replay to see the result!


Step 7

Once you’re happy with your shape and animation, go to ‘Modify > Convert’ and select Paint Effects to Polygons. This converts your whole object into polygons that are a little easier to work with!


Step 8

Now all that’s left is to assign a new material to the shape. For instance, something like this :


And that’s it! To create the animation above, all I did was render out the scene (as either an AVI video using the Maya Software renderer, or as an Image Sequence using Mental Ray) through an animated camera.


Optional Step 1: if you want to add some turbulence to the floral growth effect, in the Attribute Editor for the vineGreyBud1 go to ‘Tubes > Behavior > Turbulence’ and set the type to Grass Wind. Now experiment with Turbulence, Frequency and Speed as needed.

Optional Step 2: You can also manipulate the branches using the controls in ‘Tubes > Growth > Branches’.


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Discussion 20 Comments

  1. arimo says:

    this is so nice and easy! thanks

  2. hakem says:

    Amazing! Thanks Abed ^_^

  3. HISHAM says:

    COOOOOOOOOOOOOL effect dude :)

  4. nice effect man, looks easy with maya :)

  5. Nico says:

    Nice work !!
    Can we know which song you used into the final product video ? Cause it seems to be a great song…

    Thanks !

  6. Abdo says:
    Author

    Thanks every1 i’m glad you liked it :)
    @Nico this song by Yanni called “1001″

  7. Jonathan H says:

    The results are awesome and take no time at all to render, but not exactly the same as the tut shows us. Would be nice to have a bit more about manipulation options over this as it’s new to me. But thank you. :)

    Oops, ignore that. Forgot to read the updated bit! :) really nice tut!

  8. Nisarg says:

    nice tut!

    just facing one problem. the keys disappear when i convert the shape from Paint fx to Polygons.

    can anyone help please. I am using Maya 2010

    thanks,
    Nisarg.

  9. salvador says:

    which version of maya you need?

  10. jyoti says:

    its a nice website.

  11. Vincennt says:

    I simply cant get this to work! Im on a Mac using Autodesk Maya 2010 and when i set the End bounds to 0.000 at the first key frame it disappears like i would expect but then when i go to the last key frame and set the End Bounds to 1.000 it also sets the End Bounds to 1.000 in the first Key frame….
    I am totally new to maya just started using it last week.

    Thanks!

    • Deacon says:

      You didn’t set any keys.

      • Vincennt says:

        Yeah i actually found that out for my self just after posting this but i appreciate your help anyway.

        Thanks!

    • Psiloman3 says:

      I am using Maya 8.0.

      The same as Vincent, I wasn’t able to make it.

      I figured it out with the ff:
      1. Follow steps above 1 to 2 in the above tutorial to draw a vine.
      2. Click on attribute editor > “vineGreyBud2″ > Flow animation > Check the box in (texture flow, stroke
      time, time clip and make flow speed at least 1)
      3. In Time line, i click and drag the cursor to the first frame.
      4. In atribute editor, I Click strokeShapeVineGreyBound2 > End Bound = 0
      5. Repeat step 2 and 3 but dont change anything, except drag and slide cursor to last frame in time line.
      6. In atribute editor, I Click strokeShapeVineGreyBound2 > End Bound = 100.
      7. And everything works perfectly.

      Thanks a lot for the tutorial though as it challenged me to figure it out.

      Merry Christmas….

      • Steve says:

        I found that if your having trouble setting the key frame. (Like i was for an hour by hitting S.) Try doing a right click on the box of the box your trying to set the attribute for and hit set key in the pop up.

  12. Taylor says:

    This is a really cool tutorial :)

  13. CG motionbox says:

    Thanks a lot for this tut, its a very nice and detailed, Best of luck for Future :)

  14. Naye says:

    I’ have the Vincent’s problem, I can’t do. I followed the Psiloman3′s steaps, but I can’t. I have Maya 2011

    Thanks :)

  15. gunjan says:

    hey i tried this… as u did in end bounds i did the same but its not cuming out well.. in my result its showing the direct result in 100th frame… not like it should show like forming the design.. but its showing the final formed rsult… plz help…

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