Announcements

• Please be prepared to discuss issues you’ve encountered this week regarding 3DVE.
• NEW Items in the 3DVE Menu: 
  • Data Sources
• Some of you still need to submit Project 1. You’ll receive a DM today.

Agenda

• 3:10
  • Project 2 screening. Did you run into any issues?
  • Project 2 troubleshooting
  • Scripting 
    • MEL Overview
    • Looking at built-in MEL scripts
    • Digital Universe and Constellation Vis
    • Constellation Jams: Steps to get to Ursa Minor and Orion constellation.
• 4:50 Break
• 5:00 Discussion
  • Follow-up on tech topics
  • Follow-ups: 
    • Reference image in mindrider.
  • Deformers (if there’s time)

Assignments

• Technical Stuff. 
  • With Ursa Minor, try
    • Setting up the camera to show the constellation as we see it on Earth.
    • Rendering it as a short (5-second) animation in which the camera moves smoothly.
  • Now that you’ve submitted Project 2, you can continue to fine-tune your rendering and animation skills through either
    • the Rendering tutorial or
    • the final Rocketship tutorial (Arnold required) in Maya 101.
  • Optional:
    • Watch and follow a more advanced scripting tutorial on YouTube.
    • Play around with USGS EarthExplorer (account creation may be required), then try downloading New York GMTED2010 data and following this video about importing a digital elevation model into Maya. I’ll run through this in a tutorial next week.
• Conceptual Stuff: None for next week! We will return to this on March 18.

Announcements: Extra Credit

• Submit your Ursa Minor image or animation for extra credit.
• Try running a different Constellation MEL file in Maya and render a quick animation like with the Ursa Minor animation.
• Don’t see the constellation you want? Try generating it using one of these Perl scripts and send me the file for EC. If you don’t like Perl, try converting the script to Python and send me the script for EC.
• You can now check the Projects +Extra Credit page for a running list of EC options.