3D pop up book - Please help

[dlbernst]

Hi everyone.

I want to create a pop up book in Maya which opens to reveal a simple scene. Could someone please give me some advice on how I can do this? Should it be a rig? Should I use blend shapes. I'm a bit new to all this, so any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
David.

[dlbernst]

Also, are there any tutorials you could lead me to ? Thanks.

[danlefeb]

Do you want the part that pops up to be animated? Or is it like the Shrek intros where it opens the book and zooms into it or something? A little more detail on exactly what you're looking for would be helpful. Just off the top of my head I would say to render your book and then render the scene seperately and composite the two together.

[dlbernst]

hey mate,

thanks for the reply..

I just want a pop up card really.. It's meant to be a Christmas pop up scene. But I am just gonna map a photoshop layer to a plane which i want to collapse into the card when it's closed and expand up as it opens. It's very basic.. but I just can't get anything to work. Could you please help me? I can't really do it seperately because I want the scene to cast a shadow on the card. Thanks again for the reply.

Regards,
David.

[laxman]

its an animation right, not the real thing? In that case, lets say you have a book you made in maya. So you have two covers. You can try making one curve and projecting it onto one cover, then another and project it onto the other cover. Then create another curve fo the part that sticks out, so its going to be inbetween the two covers and above the page. Then loft the three curves together, so you have an inverted V shape. Then you can use set driven keys to animate the posistion of the curves so what the book opens, the V goes from being flat to the inverted V sticking out of the page.

[danlefeb]

....I can't really do it seperately because I want the scene to cast a shadow on the card....

Once you get your animation done you can still render it seperately from the book with shadows and all -- I'd still advise this route as rendering in as many layers as possible (that makes sense, of course) is always easier later on when compositing.

[dlbernst]

Hey Guys.

Thanks for your help. I will give that a go and let u know if i'm successful. Thanks again.

[residentcoppa]

Trying the same effect here
Can some one maybe post a scene file ?