Creating a falling piece of paper in Maya

This is a tutorial I wrote up a couple years ago when I had to create the illusion of a section of canvas tearing off of a painting.  I’m so glad I wrote it out since I’ve had to resort to using it every few months for a new effect.  Of course I didn’t discover the method on my own.  I had the help of several other tutorials available online.  It was a while ago so I can’t remember the original postings.  Anyways, thanks to those so generous to offer helpful hints online.  I hope this might help others as well.

For this purpose I used a Polygon for ease of texturing, though Nurbs tend to tessellate better for rendering…or something.

Create a polygon primitives>plane>□ and set the Width division to 5 and Height division to 6

Create a CV Curve along the path you would like the paper to travel.

Select the polygon plane and shift select the curve, go to Animate>Motion Paths>Attach to Motion Path □

Note: in this instance X is up and Z is the direction of the path I want to take.

Set Front axis:  X

Up axis:  Z

World up vector: 1.000  0.000  0.000

Apply

The plane will follow along the path

With the plane selected go to Animate>Motion Paths> Flow Path Object □

Divisions:Front 6  Up 2  Side 5

Lattice around Object

Check Local effect

Local effect: Front 6   Up 2   Side 5

This creates a lattice around the plane that follows the curvature of the path.  My preference is to select the object and scale it down slightly to make the lattice more visible. With the lattice selects I adjust it’s divisions

S Divisions 6

T Dicvisions 2

U Divisions 5

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Animation timing of the paper can be controlled by adding keys to the U Value on the motion path.  Select the motion path, or curve, and in the Channel Control/OUTPUTS motionPath1

Highlight U Value, right click and Key Selected

Double Sided Texturing can be created as follows

For this purpose, I’m going for the look of a piece of canvas with a painting on one side and a canvas back.

In the hypershade, Create Maya Nodes>Surface>Blinn and name it DSTexture

Next create a Blinn and name it front.  This will eventually have the texture added to it, but for now I made it red.  Create a Cloth node from 2D Textures. From General Utilities create a Condition.  This utility is used for making a two sided material.

Middle mouse drag the back node onto conditon1 and select colorIfFalse, from the pop up menu.. If it doesn’t appear than select Other…, for more options .

The Connection Editor opens up and from Outputs select outcolor and connect it to colorIfFalse in the Inputs.  Repeat the process for the front blinn, but this time connect the outcolor to colorIfTrue. What this does is create a condition that determines which texture is shown depending on the orientation of the object to the camera.  The connection should look like this.

From General Utilities create a Sampler Info.  Middle mouse drag the SamplerInfo1 node over the condition1 node.  In the Connection Editor attach the flippedNormal in Outputs to firstTerm in Inputs.

Middle mouse drag condition1 over DSTexture and connect the condition1.outColor to DSTexture.color, in the same manner the previous nodes were connected.

Select the polygon plane you’ve created and, in the Hypershade, right-click DSTexture and Assign Material To Selection.  When the plane is rendered both textures should be visible with the color red, from front1 (blinn) on one side and back (cloth) texture visible on the other side.

falling paper