Paint Effects is a powerful and complex program. To ensure that your first experiences with Paint Effects are successful, go through the following checklist before you begin.
Currently, you can only paint effects on the view plane (the plane that is ortho-normal to the camera view), the grid plane of the perspective view, or on NURBS or polygonal surfaces.
Although you cannot paint 3D effects on subdivision surfaces, you can paint 2D effects on them using the 3D Paint Tool, or you can create textures using Paint Effects and apply them to the surfaces. You can also try the following workflows:
To start using Maya Paint Effects, it must be loaded. Paint Effects loads automatically when you install Maya, however, if you should need to load it, use the following procedure.
Maya loads Paint Effects and the Paint Effects shelf, adds the Paint Effects menu to the Rendering menu set, and the Paint Effects panel to the Panels > Panel menu.
The Paint Effects shelf contains a range of Paint Effects tools and brushes.
If you are new to Maya, the Paint Effects shelf, like the other Maya shelves, is loaded automatically on Windows and Mac OS X. The shelves are not loaded by default on Linux because they can seriously impede the start up performance of Maya. To load these shelves on Linux, follow the instructions in Load the default shelves in the Basics guide. To load only the Paint Effects shelf, follow the instructions below in To load the Paint Effects shelf.
To load the Paint Effects shelf
loadNewShelf "shelf_PaintEffects.mel"; saveAllShelves $gShelfTopLevel;
Maya provides over 200 preset brushes in your mayapath/brushes (Windows and Linux) or mayapath/Maya/Contents/brushes (Mac OS X) folder.
When you load Paint Effects for the first time, the preset brushes can be accessed from the Visor, while a small subset of preset brushes are available in the Paint Effects shelf. You may want to drag and drop these preset brushes to the Paint Effects shelf, or another shelf, so they are available for easy access.
To save preset brushes to a shelf
The following Paint Effects actions have hotkeys defined in the Hotkey editor (Window > Settings/Preferences > Hotkey Editor).
In addition to setting hotkeys for each of the items on the Paint Effects menu, you can set hotkeys (under Categories > Paint Effects in the Hotkey Editor) to do the following:
For information on defining hotkeys, see Hotkey editor of the Basics guide.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License