Just got Maya 2011 with the morning mail. I like : ). I´m currently installing and exited to see if there are any new features. I hope Autodesk have worked abit more on the Mental Ray / Maya integration.
Regarding Maya 2011 I found this interesting video on the camera sequencer.
I have had a focus on interactive graphics, AS3, vector math and other related projects quite some time now. I will now go deeper into our rendering workflow at Petfactory. So if you are interested in rendering and animation many of the comming post will probably be of that nature. So now you know and can sleep safely ; ).
The XrossMediaBar (pronounced CrossMediaBar and officially abbreviated as XMB) is a graphical user interface developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. The interface features icons that are spread horizontally across the screen. Navigation moves the icons, instead of a cursor. These icons are used as categories to organize the options available to the user. When an icon is selected on the horizontal bar, several more appear vertically, above and below it (selectable by the up and down directions on a directional pad). A thing that defines a good interface, in my humble opinion, apart from the system beeing intuitively logical, is when you enjoy yourself just “browsing around” in the menu system. Pure joy is what I feel when I navigate in the XMB ( ok, a little exaggeration there but almost : ). As an interaction designer I have been interested to script my own AS3 version of the XMB, just to understand how to program such a menusystem. An interactive example to be posted when time is on my side.
I was asked to animate a graphic element blinking with the frequency of 1,4 hz. That means that the light needs to blink 1,4 times per second. With a framerate of 25 fps that means that a cycle or 1 wavelength of the animation is 25/1,4 = 17.86 frames. With a repeating animation with a specified frequency like this I found it better to write an expression using a sine wave to describe the animation rather than using keyframes. As a visual explanation of how a sine wave is constructed see the post Unit Circle.
A few weeks later, in another project I needed to animate alot of flashing lights, so I refined the expression and made it to an animation preset. I added some extra attributes to have more control of the sine wave. I promise to post images and animations from the project as soon as possible. It´s looking kinda´nice … : )
freq: is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time.
offset: Offset of the wave. Specified in degrees. A value of 180 shifts the wave half a wavelength.
max: The max value.
min: The min value.
output: the result of the expression. Used to connect to or as a visual reference. To use this preset create a null object and apply the preset to the null. Then connect whatever property you want to the output value. I come to like this approach to setup stuff in afx.
As always, if you have any comments of any kind or ideas on how to improve this workflow let me know. I am always interested in improving my skills : )