SimplyMaya Rain & Snow Dynamics

Once again I've had the privilege of reviewing Simply Maya tutorials. This time there are two short tutorials centered around creating some precipitation effects, namely rain and snow. Each of these is quite short, but at the end of each you've got a pretty nice dynamics effect. This tutorial was created with Maya 2011, but I had no problems following along with 2009.

In the rain tutorial, like the previous tutorial I reviewed, the instructor moves quickly, so the effect takes shape quickly. If you're new to Maya, the speed of the tutorial is such that you'll get confused and will have to play it through several times, but if you're familiar moving around Maya and you want to get introduced to dynamics, this is a fun little adventure. It explores surprisingly many different aspects and features of the dynamics module including the collision events editor (new to me, I think) and per particle attributes such as lifespan and color. There's some nice tips that get mentioned as well as an introduction to the expression editor which I think is essential for a good understanding and use of dynamics. Adding believability with forces is well done in this tutorial, although the time isn't taken to really explain how the fields and their attributes work with the particles (air is an ambiguous field to start out with, and I'm still a bit confused as to what it really does). Another minor complaint I might have that prevents it from being a really polished tutorial is that the instructor doesn't really mention resetting tools and preparing the scene when users may have changed options and settings previously. For example I believe the timeline should be set to "Play every frame" when testing dynamics, but I'm not 100% sure if that's critical. The rendering, specifically using the hardware renderer, doesn't get adequately described in my opinion, which is why you'll probably want to go through both tutorials.

The snow tutorial starts out in much the same way as the rain tutorial, and one might think it would redundant to go through both. It's true there's some repeated information, however, there is plenty of new material here, and I'd encourage people to cover both to get a full introduction to both dynamics and weather effects. The intro to using sprites is great, and what many dynamics tutorials don't do, and what this one does, is actually get into how to create sprites with transparency in photoshop. I really liked that this was included. Also, the instructor goes into much more detail on rendering with the hardware and preparing the effect for compositing.

Overall, a couple of really nice introductions to dynamics, and a great refresher for those already somewhat familiar with this module of Maya.