Paint in Maya

An extremely powerful feature in Autodesk ® Maya ® is the ability to paint. Maya's paint tools work like paint brushes, providing you with an intuitive, efficient way to change the properties of your objects or create various effects. There are three types of paint tools in Maya:

• Artisan™ paint tools
• Maya 2D Paint Effects tools
• Maya 3D Paint Effects, a hybrid of Artisan™ and 2d Paint Effects

To open Paint tools:

• For 2D painting, from the Panels menu, select Panels > Panel > Paint Effects
• For 3D painting, choose Paint Effects from the Modeling menu set in the Generate menu
• For Artisan paint tools, choose Modify > Paint Attributes Tool

Paint Effects

Paint Effects goes beyond traditional painting—you can paint entire particle effects on your canvas or scene with a single brush stroke. On a 2D canvas a single brush stroke can produce complex images, for example trees or flowers. In your scene, that same brush stroke produces these entities three-dimensionally. Imagine being able to paint an orchard in your scene where the painted trees exist as objects that your characters can move around. You can also apply dynamic forces to the effects you paint in your scenes and animate the display and movement of the effects. For example, you can make plants grow, make long hair blow in the wind, or make a river flow.

Choose from one of the many preset brushes and paint realistic effects like plants, hair, fire, feathers, oil paints, pastels, and watercolors, or blend the preset brushes to create custom effects. Create your own brushes by setting shading, illumination, shadow, glow, tube, gap, and flow animation attributes or by modifying the attributes for the preset brushes.

You can get immediate high-quality feedback by rendering brush strokes while you paint. Paint Effects strokes render seamlessly with the rest of your scene during a post process in the final render.

See Paint in 2D and Paint in 3D for more on using Paint Effects.

Artisan

Autodesk Artisan ^™ is an intuitive paint and sculpting-based interface that delivers high quality, complex results in minimal time. Many brush tools in Maya use the Artisan interface. These tools are called Artisan ^™ tools .

Artisan tools let you manipulate your geometry in a more artistic manner by allowing you to paint their values and properties with the brush tool.

See Artisan for more information.