Introduction

 
 
 

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:

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.

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:

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