Maya provides painting tools that go above and beyond what many 3D creative artists might normally envision. These tools allow you to accomplish a wide range of modeling, animation, texturing, and effects work.

The painting tools are separated into three categories: Maya^® Artisan^™ brush tools, Maya^® Paint Effects^™ tools, and 3D Paint. If you completed the previous lessons in Getting Started with Maya, you already have experience with a few of these tools.

The Artisan brush tools have a variety of applications and allow you to directly modify attribute values interactively:

• In the NURBS modeling lesson, you used the brush tools to sculpt a simple face from a sphere.
• In the Character Setup chapter, you used Artisan brush tools to modify the skin weights on a surface mesh to ensure the character’s joint deformed properly.
• In the Character Setup chapter, you used the Artisan brush tools to modify the cluster weights for Control Vertices to ensure a blend shape deformer worked predictably.

As you have seen, Artisan brush tools can also be used to select surface components. This selection method can dramatically improve the speed of your workflow.

Maya Paint Effects allows the user to create natural and fantastic effects either on a 2D canvas or as actual 3D objects in the scene.

• Paint Effects enables you to create a 2D backdrop for your scene, or a dynamic 3D paint effect such as a field of grass, with flowers and a wind-blown tree—all at the drag of your mouse or tablet pen.
• Paint Effects comes with a suite of preset brushes to enable you to create many types of 2D and 3D effects.

With 3D paint, you can paint and modify textures directly onto 3D surfaces using both the Artisan and Paint Effects tools. You can paint texture attributes such as color, transparency, and bump, to name but a few.

As you have already gained some experience with the Artisan brush tools, this chapter focuses on Paint Effects and 3D Paint. It includes the following lessons:

• Lesson 1 Painting in 2D using Paint Effects: Introduction
• Lesson 2 Painting in 3D using Paint Effects: Introduction
• Lesson 3 Painting textures on surfaces: Introduction