From the course: Maya: Bifrost Extension

Prerequisites - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Bifrost Extension

Start my 1-month free trial

Prerequisites

- [Instructor] Before launching into Bifrost, let's briefly discuss the course prerequisites, or what you need to know. This is an intermediate course for Maya users. If you have no experience in Maya, you might have difficulty following some of the exercises. If you've got substantial experience in another package, such as 3ds Max, Blender or Houdini, that can be helpful, but if you've never used Maya, you may get lost. In that case, I recommend taking a look at George Maestri's courses here at LinkedIn Learning, such as Maya 2020 Essential Training. Bifrost is a general tool development framework. As we'll discuss later, Bifrost can apply to nearly any 3D production task, such as modeling and animation. You'll need to be fluent in core 3D concepts like polygon meshes and material shaders. Experience with dynamic simulations and volumetric rendering can help, because those are key features of this first release of the Bifrost Extension. Now let's talk about the technical requirements. Some of the exercises in the course are dynamic simulations, and to complete those lessons you'll need a computer that's up to the task. As a general rule, you'll want a fast central processing unit, sufficient random access memory, and lots of hard drive storage space. The CPU should be the equivalent of an Intel Core i5 or better. 16 GB of RAM or more is recommended to prevent slowdowns from virtual memory swapping. We'll be caching a simulation to disk, and that will eat up a considerable amount of hard drive space, about 10 GB. To be on the safe side, you should really have more like 20 GB available. The Bifrost Extension is available for Maya 2018, 2019, and 2020. This course is produced in Maya 2020, and the exercise files are saved in that format. But as long as you have Bifrost 2.0.4.0 or later installed, you should be able to open the exercise files in any of those Maya versions. To get the latest version of the Bifrost Extension, go to the Autodesk AREA website. The current web address of the download page is area.autodesk.com/bifrost/downloads/. Those are the prerequisites for this course.

Contents