your cg Problems solved
Jeffrey Glade, London
Bake textures, add ambient occlusion and much more
First things first, I know this has been covered by Greyscalegorilla for Cinema 4D but not Maya, so that’s what we’ll concentrate on. In Maya, this is much more difficult than C4D because C4D is built for motion graphics, so uses instancing geometry, which is a bit of work in Maya.
The first thing you do is create a geometry. I’m going be using a simple torus for this. To make copies of that, simply duplicate it; don’t over-complicate things with stuff like particles. You CAN use particles but I would advise against it because they’re a bit difficult to texture properly since their UVS are a little off and also, they’re difficult to render with V-ray. So create a torus, then make about 400 copies of it, vertically stacked.
We have to remember something really important. Make sure all of your objects are in a common 0 to 1 UV space. I’ll talk more about this in the following steps. A simple method for this type of object would be to combine them into one object and unfold the UVS. That way all of your objects will share a 0 to 1 UV space. Then, simply separate them into objects and
you’ll have all your objects separate, but in a common UV space. Be sure to keep some distance between the bowl (or whatever they’re going fall on), otherwise the simulation looks weird because they all fall in an unnatural way.
We’re going to be using Bullet Physics engine for this because Maya’s legacy engine doesn’t work well with a large number of objects. So, select the torus (or whatever your particle of choice is) and set to Dynamic Bodies or Active Rigid Bodies, whatever the terminology is, in your Physics engine. Make sure that, if you’re using Bullet, you put it into a set of Rigid Bodies. That way, you’ll have the torus become one object, which is easier to deal with. Then, we’ll set the bowl to Static Body or Passive Rigid Body. Run the simulation and you’ll see where each torus falls. Once you’ve run the simulation, cache it to make sure it doesn’t change after multiple simulations. Then it’s on to texturing, where we’re going to project the texture on top of our objects.