Falling Dice in Maya - Rigid Bodies Tutorial

Falling Dice - FX tutorials in Maya

In this short beginners' tutorial in Maya, students learn how to animate dice falling and bouncing onto a hard surface.  

The tutorial uses Active and Passive Rigid Bodies in Autodesk Maya, and shows how physics can be used to speed up the animation process.  

This tutorial is part of our FX tutorials in Maya - which you can find at our Vimeo Tutorial Channel, available for all our students (and recent Escapees) at Escape Studios.

Falling Dice in Maya Tutorial

Falling Dice Tutorial - Active and Passive Rigid Bodies in Maya

Learn to Animate Falling Dice

To follow the tutorial manually, take a look at the lesson plan below.

Falling Dice – Hard and Soft Rigid bodies

Goal:
Learn how to apply simple textures to a cube to create a die, animate the dice falling on a hard surface.

What You Will Learn
By the end of this exercise you should be able to:
1. Create a basic model, and assign a Material.
2. Apply a simple image-based texture to an object.
3. Use the UV Editor to adjust the UVs
4. Use the FX tools in Maya (hard and soft rigid bodies) to create animation.

Work Method

Part One - Modeling
1. Create a project, name it Dice and set to it.
2. Create a simple cube with just one face on each side.
3. Right click on the die and select edge mode. Drag select all the edges around the die and use the bevel tool to add a bevel to the edge of the die.
4. In the attribute editor, adjust the size of the bevel. Now if you press render you should get a nice soft edge to the die.

Part Two - Texturing

1. Select your die. Press 6 for texture mode.
2. Create a material. Hold down RMB. Assign new material/Lambert. Name it DiceMaterial.
3. Select the two-way-split panel. Persp view on the right, UV texture Editor on the left. You will see the cube has already been auto-unwrapped in the UV Editor. It looks like this.
4. Now open a browser and search Google for “Dice Texture Map”. We want a texture map that looks exactly like this – else we will have problems. Select a good texture map, download it and save it to your Source Images folder in Maya as “DiceTextureMap”. Save it as a JPEG not a PNG (why? The PNG contains a transparency Alpha channel)
5. Select DiceMaterial and click on the square checkerboard next to the colour tab. A render node window will open up. Click on The 4th item down, which is file. A little yellow folder will appear in your Attribute Editor – click on it, navigate to your Source Images folder, select the die texture map, and click apply.
6. If there is a transparency (ie the dice appears translucent), you will have to go into the diceMaterial tab, find the Transparency slider, right click on the word Transparency and select Break Connection.
7. In your perspective window, press 6 for Texture mode. You will likely see there is a problem with the texture, which we must now fix.
8. In the UV Editor, you should see DiceTextureMap appear. Right click and select vertex mode, select the UV map, and move it so it is perfectly aligned with DiceTextureMap. This may work perfectly.
9. If it doesn’t, we may have to adjust the UV map. To do this properly, you should export a UV snapshot from the UV Editor to Photoshop and then adjust your texture map. But here is a quick-and-dirty method which keeps you in Maya: Select your die (object mode), RMB and select Face mode. Select the face you want to fix.
10. Back in the UV texture editor, click on the separate the selected UV button. You can now manipulate the UV independently. Use the move and scale tool to adjust the uv so the texture map sits correctly on the die.
11. Select the next face, and do the same thing.
12. Do all the faces on the die, manipulating each one until it looks pretty.
13. Edit/delete all by type/history.


Part Two (b) – Create a Bump Map.
1. You can use the same texture map to create a bump map. To do this, find the dieMaterial in the Attribute editor and under the Common Material Attributes tab find Bump Mapping. Search for DiceTextureMap and assign it as a bump map.
2. Now do a quick render – you should have a bump map. Adjust the bump map settings in the channel box to get a nice look.


Part Three - Dynamics – Animate the Dice Falling and Rolling.

Why not have red dice?

1. Let’s make two dice. Contrl D duplicate the die. Name them die1 and die2
2. Create a ground plane and name it MonopolyBoard. Apply a Lambert, and find a monopoly texture map and apply it.
3. In the Maya DropDown Menu (top left) set to FX
4. Select the ground plane. Go to Fields/Solvers and create a passive rigid body for the floor. (Why? Because we want the floor to influence, but not be influenced by, the animation of the dice)
5. Select the dice, create Active Rigid Body.
6. Add Fields/gravity.
7. Move the dice above the ground plane and pose them.
8. Press play. The dice should now fall to the ground and bounce.
9. If the dice fall too slow, try scaling down your objects. If they fall too fast, try scaling the objects up.
10. Set the animation time line to 100 frames.
11. Try adjusting the position of the dice at the start of the shot so that the dice fall differently.
12. To adjust the bounciness of the dice, select a die, go to the Channel Box, scroll down until you get to rigid body (under die shape). Find the bounciness tab and set to 1.
13. Bake out your curves. Select each die. Edit/keys/bake simulation
14. Edit/delete by type/rigid bodies. This gets rid of the rigid body.
15. Now you have keyframes in the Graph Editor – we can edit the keys!

Vimeo Tutorial Channel

Vimeo Tutorial Channel

Escape Studios Vimeo Tutorial Channel supports our students with online resources for their studies, including Technical Animation such as nCloth, Muscle Systems, Dynamics, Simulations and Hair.

Vimeo Tutorial Channel - FX Tutorials
Our Vimeo Tutorial Channel is our central hub for our animation and VFX video tutorials. Follow this link for more FX Tutorials. 

The Escape Studios Animation Blog offers a personal view on the art of animation and visual effects. To find out more about our BA/MArt, follow this link.   To apply, visit the official page here.