Beer glass scene creation
This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.
# 1 01-05-2012 , 01:15 PM
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Floor object in Maya?

Is there any way to create an infinite floor in Maya? either by rendering the grid or something similar?

thnx

# 2 01-05-2012 , 03:19 PM
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Not as such.

With Mental Ray physical sun and sky you get a horizon line and I believe vray has something similar.

You can use this in conjunction with a background material node which is invisible but displays shadows. You put this on a poly plane under the objects in your scene.

Otherwise, you are just going to have to make a very large poly plane.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 01-05-2012 at 03:48 PM.
# 3 02-05-2012 , 10:25 PM
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Is there any way to create an infinite floor in Maya? either by rendering the grid or something similar?

thnx

'Create' or you mean 'render'?

# 4 05-05-2012 , 01:01 PM
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'Create' or you mean 'render'?

just render will do...dynamics collisions a plus

# 5 05-05-2012 , 02:30 PM
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For collision you can make a plane, apply a background material to it. The plane with a background material will not render but will receive shadows and can be used with dynamics as a passive rigid body.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
# 6 05-05-2012 , 03:46 PM
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For collision you can make a plane, apply a background material to it. The plane with a background material will not render but will receive shadows and can be used with dynamics as a passive rigid body.

does it make the plane infinite?

# 7 05-05-2012 , 05:03 PM
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Try to make a plane and make the attributes really high user added image

# 8 05-05-2012 , 06:40 PM
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does it make the plane infinite?

Like I said in the earlier post there is no infinite plane in Maya. You can use the render horizon plus an invisible plane (with a background material on it under your scene objects to catch shadows and as a rigid body).

Otherwise you just have to use a very large plane.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
# 9 05-05-2012 , 11:44 PM
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come on man..I thought Maya was 'infinitely customizable'...am I honestly the first to need an infinite floor which renders and does dynamics?

surely there must be a mel script solution

# 10 06-05-2012 , 12:30 AM
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infinite is a hard thing to program without crashing everything. You know the camera has a far clip plane, why does the plane have to extend beyond that?

# 11 06-05-2012 , 02:19 AM
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come on man..I thought Maya was 'infinitely customizable'...am I honestly the first to need an infinite floor which renders and does dynamics?

surely there must be a mel script solution

I doubt you are the only one that has asked this, but we have given you suggestions that will simulate an infinite plane. You can use a poly plane and background material to BOTH catch shadows AND be used with dynamics as a rigid body. You then composite into a photo background plate.

See this free Friday tutorial for tips...

https://simplymaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34936


Perhaps if you explain exactly what you are trying to do that requires an infinite physical ground plane someone can give you a way to SIMULATE it. Because if you have to have an infinite physical ground plane I am afraid that is not available.

A possible solution is that you could script a plane with a background material to an objects (x,z) position such that the ground plane moves with the object and stays under it so you could essentially bounce a ball off to infinity (which would be the far clipping plane) with a finite ground plane that just moves in the (x,z) plane and stays under the moving ball..

So there may well be some creative way to accomplish what you need. But we need to know what you are trying to accomplish.

By the way any software that claims to have an infinite ground plane I can pretty much guarantee is using some similar trick to the one I describe above because computers have finite and discrete memory and so there is no such thing as "infinite".


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 06-05-2012 at 04:37 AM.
# 12 06-05-2012 , 03:08 AM
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# 13 07-05-2012 , 04:47 PM
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ok thanks for the cool ideas..

@ctbram Cinema 4D has managed to do it, it renders infinite and collides too, really useful

only problem is you can't add deformers like noise etc..

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