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Paint FX FAQ FAQs for Maya
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Capabilities and Design of Paint Effects: |
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I have an Animation to do where a character spits fire. I'd like to do it with Paint FX, animate the clip values of a soft body curve where a brush is attached. Looks good so far, the only thing I can't figure out is the effect that at the end of the path the flames should be bigger than at the beginning. I have no tablet available where I can use the stylus pressure, but there must be a way to map this. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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What is the difference between the brightness rand and the color rand parameters? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I've painted a logo in vines onto an object. Can I turn the strokes on the object into a texture map that roughly matches the placement of the strokes? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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If you use the paint on view plane option, then you decide you want to detach those strokes from your view plane, how do you do that? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Creating a 2D painting with editable strokes (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Getting Depth Output from Canvas I'm making the fibers (microscope view) of a toilet paper. ....but I need the depth information of the fibers.although I’ve painted with depth on, when I do "save Depth as Grayscale" it doesn't save anything. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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So has anyone worked with both Renderman and Maya using Z depth to comp? Will this work for paint effects? (imagine a character walking through grass). (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Is there some kind of RenderPass (ala Fur) that happens in the renderer..(and here’s the real reason for the question..will any instanced geometry pass over to say RenderMan?) (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Let us paint on non-nurbs! If the split poly tool and artisan can somehow follow the surface of a poly object, the paintfx tool should be able to, no? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Why doesn't paint effects evaluate shading networks? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Are all attributes texturable and connectable, e.g. can one use maya textures (procedural) to texture colour? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Will paint effects cast shadows, including shadows from volumetric lights? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Can PaintFX be 3D motion blurred and ray-traced? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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If one maps textures to them can the textures be anti-aliased? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Can one specify all the same attributes on the strokes as on the materials? I.e. can they be bump, specularity, transparency and diffuse-mapped? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How could we use this digital toolset to simplify and speed up our current use of projected artwork on 3d sets, props, etc. ? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Building custom brushes from production designed, art directed, flat artwork. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How can one brush stroke give a fully modeled 3d leafy tree with turbulent wind controls and render in less than 1 minute a frame ? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How does it relate to 2dPaint+3dCamera paradigms with its inter-related use of 2d paint brushes with 3d geometry and animation controls ? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How can paint effects model with such organic complexity and render so fast using so little memory ? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Optimization: |
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Is there a way to speed up the redraw of the strokes so they approach the speed of curve drawing? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I find that the wireframe redraw (in persp window without shading) of strokes is much slower than a simple curve. If you make group 'curves' (1000 curves) visible and tumble it around, then make group 'strokes' (1000 strokes) visible and tumble it, you should find that the redraw of the strokes is an order of magnitude slower than the curves. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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In general, how can we optimize for unseen strokes? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Will this affect specular? for the grass, most of what you see is just specular.... (updated: 03/13/05) |
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What's the splitMaxDepth do? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Will this make far away grass too spotty, or will it basically be unnoticeable? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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This is a great suggestion--If I select all the far away grass stuff (and trees?), will my adjustments affect all selected strokes, or will I have to make changes individually? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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The scene has many brush strokes, but only a small portion of the scene is lit at any time (by moving spot lights). (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How can I make a forest scene render and display faster? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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What are some general tips to reduce render time for paint strokes? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I was trying to simply create a plane the size of the default perspective grid and cover it evenly with "GrassLawn" I am able to get wonderful results...even simulating lawn mower cut direction..like you see on golf coursed...however to get enough density my frame times are ending up at around 20+minutes. Any ideas? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I have a paint FX scene where I have about 150 strokes of corn brush, that's a lot of corn, I know. But I need a lot, only problem is its taking 15 to 20 minutes a frame to render on a pII 450 with 655 mg of ram. This is because paint FX renders all the strokes even if they are not in the camera view. Is there a way to constrain paint FX rendering to only what is visible to the camera on that frame? Paint FX would be a thousand times faster if it could do this... (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Optimizing PaintEffects (updated: 03/13/05) |
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What hardware mainly effects the strokes you make using paint fx? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Curves: |
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Does anybody now how to get the tubes to be evenly spaced alone the stroke curve (like a fence)? (updated: 04/30/07) |
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I have this file from a gentleman who is trying to have the stroke lie exactly along on the length of the curve that it was created from. First off, he created a curve and attached the fern brush to it. He then changed the tubes per step to 0,001 so that only one fern exists at the beginning of the tube. He increased the number of segments, as well as changing the Tube Direction to "Along Path". The Path Follow and Path Attract attributes were tweaked but he could not get the tube to occupy the same position as the nurbs curve. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Is there a way to manage which control curves are being used by specific brushes? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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When the amount of strokes becomes large, must the number of control curves be equally large? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How does curveMaxDist work? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I just deleted all my pressure curves, and then the lengths of my hairs jumped out to great swirling arcs. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I created several strokes and applied pressure curves to them. This works well, but when I then reference this file into another, it all falls apart. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I've got several paint fx stokes that where created by making an object paintable. I now want to get rid of the original object. When I delete it, the strokes go as well (they still are in the scene, they just disappear). Is there an easy way to detach these strokes from the paintable object? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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When would you want to use the normals on the Stroke node as opposed to setting the Elevation and Azimuth on the Brush node? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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How is the stroke path curve normals determined in Maya PFX? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I selected a sphere for painting and painted a stroke on the sphere with paintAtDepth on. When I transformed the sphere the stroke did not move. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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One draws a stroke on the grid plane and gets a certain look to the brush. If one creates a similar sized EP or CV curve and applies the brush to this new curve, the look (when rendered) is drastically different. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Reflections, Refractions, Fog: |
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Auto Painting Multiple Strokes: |
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Plants: |
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How do I make a tree growth animation?
(updated: 02/24/07) |
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How can Irandomize the width of tubes along the tube length (i.e.. the growing direction)?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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Is there a way for me to get Behavior>Displacement>Curl applied ONLY to twigs? I've built a cactus brush with tubes, twigs and leaves (leaves are the needles). I want to curl the twigs only.
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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The trunk of the tree sways in the wind a little bit too. How can I stop the trunk from swaying but still allow the branches and leaves to be affected by turbulence?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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Do I have any other options of adjusting the growth rate of flowers other than frame beginning to end and growth rate? I'm looking for a way to tweak the animation curves of the growth (i.e. path animation) to control the timing of the growth. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Is it possible to animate a paint effects tube growing backwards? I want it to start full grown, and during time it will kindof crawl back to its initial state of birth.
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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How do you determine the relative timing of growth events when using flowspeed for plant growth?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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The texture on my tree trunk flows up the tree as it grows( in an unnatural fashion ). (updated: 03/13/05) |
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After doing a batch render of 50 frames I check out the scene in f-check ... and the bark moves up the tree!
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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if I want to do an entire field of uniformly distributed grass, like a soccer field, what's the best way to do that? it isn't working so well by scribbling a lot to try to cover the whole area. thanks for any advice.
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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I painted a grass with paint fx over a surface that was like a revolved surface to simulate an island in the middle of the ocean. I use the brush over it and everything is ok until the brush reaches the edge. Imagine it is a circular table. When I reach the edge of it, the grass in that part seems to separate and grow from the air. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I am testing some things with maya paint effects and was trying to create different kind of plants with some fruits on it. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I've created some environments in Maya - trees, grass, bushes etc, and want to animate them with local force. It seems to me, that the only way to animate them is to go to each strokes attribute editor and set the animation. Is there any way to animate all strokes as a whole, instead of animating them individually? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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I have a fast moving object going past some paintFX trees, and I want the effect of wind created by it's passage to cause realistic swaying and wind blowing the branches around. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Can't you animate the values of the build-in wind feature? I was hoping to have a clearly "directional" effect... With the built in wind-type turbulence, it seems hard to make it come from a specific direction such as east-to-west.
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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What is the difference between, tree wind and grass wind? I've noticed on some preset tree brushes you use a grass wind. My observation is that a tree wind affects the branches and leaves more so than a grass wind which has more an affect on the tube and everything below it. Is this accurate?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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We are trying to have wind affect some PaintFX trees in our scene, but cannot find a way to create the motion with varying degrees of intensity. i.e. the trunk should remain rigid with slight motion in the branches and more motion through the leaves. Is this possible?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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In the growth_leaves parameter settings is there a way to offset the leave clusters (not leaf dropout) so that the leaves are nonsymmetrical on a tube?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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Try Painting a Willow Tree in a z-up environment. The leaves go sideways!
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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In the stroke node, I've noticed that there is a wide range of control of a referenced color image map (shading_texturing). there doesn't seem as much text controls (tex Uniformity, Repeat U, Repeat V, Offset U, Offset V, Blur mult, Smear...etc) in the growth parameters (branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, and buds.) Is there a way that I can get to those parameters? is this possible? (updated: 03/13/05) |
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The length of leaves and petals are in world units. But the width and tips of them are in what units ? If the widths and tips are in world units also, the number seemed to indicate somewhere about ten times that of the length attributes. (updated: 03/13/05) |
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Buds seem to take in branch texture as default. Are there any way to get rid of it for the buds only, and leave the branch texture for the tubes and the branch ?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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I am trying an example of putting some trees on a slope where at the bottom the trees are behaving properly, but as they are planted along the slope itself the trees are angled according to the surface normals. If I set the use normals on the stroke node all the trees get scrunched and no longer look like trees.
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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When I paint on the canvas everything seems to be oriented as if you were "looking down" on the curves in a normal 3D view. Is there a way to rotate them so you can paint them sideways in the canvas?
(updated: 03/13/05) |
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Related Learning Tools
Maya Related DVDs
Digital Sets 1: Design, Modeling and Camera |
Maya Related Books
Learning Autodesk Maya 2008: The Modeling & Animation Handbook |
Global DVDs
Digital Sets 2: Lighting and Texturing |
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