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3D Paint Tip |
3D Paint Tip by Alex Alvarez. Ok, this drove me nuts for a good week...
If you are using a 3D paint package to paint texture channels of a multi-patch
NURBS model, you may find that when you import your textures, your edges
display artifacts when rendered. Make sure that Wrap U and Wrap V are
off for all of the 2DPlacement nodes in your scene. If you are painting
Bump, make sure that Adjust edges is turned on for the Bump2D node. |
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Animation - Flipping a Bottle Cap |
Flipping Sosro Crown (Flipping a Bottle Cap) by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a
misterdi. This tutorial will discuss on several issues, how to build the
geometry for the crown, how to bake rigidBody simulation, and how to adjust
the result. Modeling, UV texturing and animating. |
Animating Clothing |
When you animate your character, the cloth solver calculates the collisions
and motion of the cloth. Before you begin animating your character, you
need to move the character from the dress-up pose to the animation start
pose. If want to drape the garment about the character in a particular
way, you can use the drag control to adjust the garment. |
Animating a Domino Effect |
Domino effect animation. This tutorial will discuss on several issues,
how to setup the geometry and how to apply passive to active key switch
among them. |
Animation - Body Language |
The intention of this research was to take a close look at some animations
and see if I could identify the gestures and expressions used to give
character to the models. I started off by looking at some standard body
language cues from a non-verbal dictionary on the web. |
Animating Layered Bump Maps |
This tutorial is for anyone who would like to know an easy to animate
a layered bump map. I will be making veins on a head look as though they
are pumping. This method will allow for certain parts of your bump map
to be affected while the other parts stay the same. |
Animation - Lead & Follow |
The Zen of Lead & Follow
The Context of Animating Forces Instead of Forms
Keith Lango 8-25-04You guys ever play Follow the Leader when you were kids? One kid does
something, the other kids follow along? The leader kid goes out into the
yard and the rest tag after him like a conga line. At the foundation of
good animation is a bit of this Follow the Leader thing. Problem is a
lot of us don't see it and it shows in our work. Follow along as I unfold
the tale.... |
Animating Piano Keys |
Animating Piano Keys with Rigid Body by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a misterdi.
As we already have a lot of headache animating the piano player, now there
is another challenge, how we animate the piano keys following the player?.
Animating Piano Key with Rigid Body
by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a misterdi It is possible to do a key-frame for
each single touch of the finger, but it is a pain in the arse when they
ask to change the piano player animation. So, we need to find out a system
that each key knows when they are pressed by the finger and relax back
to the rest position when the finger is lifted. To make live easier, we
could use a rigidbody rig to do the task. Here is the setup and work flow. |
Animation Principles |
Principles of Animation: Toy Story. The intention of this research was
to closely analyze a few scenes from Pixars "Toy Story" to see
how they were using the principles of animation. The principles of animation
I've listed in this page is not restricted to the ones outlined in "the
illusion of life". I went through a few other books and articles
to come up with this list of principles an animator has to look out for
while animating. So I've included blinks, dialog anticipation/follow-through
and some other issues which has to be kept in mind while animating. Also,
while analyzing the scenes from "Toy Story" I realized that
its not a good idea to try to use all these principles in each and every
scene in your animation. |
Animation - Mouth Shapes |
Preston Blair phoneme series. I've often looked for good examples of
3D phoneme mouth shapes; but there isn't that much material available
out there publicly - It's about time someone uploaded some. So, here goes
:o) Extended
Preston Blair phoneme series. |
Animation - Pickup |
Easy Object Pickup, How to have characters easily grab objects and keep
them in their hand. |
Animation - Rigid Body Collision Detection |
This tutorial shows you how to detect collisions between rigid bodies
and how to use the data to drive your animations - welcome to the land
of rule based animation. I'll assume you are familiar with the basics
of rigid body dynamics (setup, attachment to fields etc.) - if not, please
consult the manuals |
Animation - Rolling Ellipse |
Rolling Ellipse PT.1
This tutorial shows you how to roll an ellipse on the floor, using Maya
expressions. Have no fear, I won't go too much into mathematical details
here, but will provide you with ready to use expressions for copy and
paste. If you really want to dive into the wonders of elliptical calculus,
you'll find the links to sites I used to obtain the mathematical background
information at the end of this tutorial. I'll assume you are familiar
with basic Maya workflow (expression editing, geometry creation, etc.)
and some basic math, your angular unit should be "degrees". |
Animation - Rolling Ellipse Pt.2 |
Rolling Ellipse PT.2 - Wacky Vehicle
While you have learned in the rolling ellipse tutorial how to roll an
ellipse on the floor, we will now use this expression to build a funny
moving vehicle. As I am no artist I won't focus on modelling issues, but
on the math to make this little thingy move. |
Animation - Rolling Tire |
Rolling Tire with Stationary Bulges. |
Animation - Yoyo |
This tutorial was written by Chas Jarret and invloves animating a yoyo
with the attached string wrapping around the fingers of a deforming hand.
It contains some interesting techniques for solving the problem of realistic
string movement between the hand and yoyo and also, an ingenious solution
for getting the string to seemingly twist and wrap around the cg fingers. |
API - Maya Help Page |
Maya API Help Page by Michael B. Comet. This page is for use with people
interested in developing Maya Plugins. It has some basic information and
sample code for the Maya SDK that may be of use to C++ programmers. |
API - Maya How To |
Long list of tutorials on Maya API by Bryan Ewert. |
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Breath Vapor Simulation |
More and more, cold weather scenes are being shot in mild climates,
or in enclosed studios for budgetary, temporal and comfort reasons. Since
the climate on these shoots is not cold, we lose the little natural nuances
of reality. Therefore, it becomes incumbent on the special effects department
to add these little nuances to add to the scene’s overall believability.
One major nuance to contend with in such a shoot is the visibility of
breath vapor when an actor or animal exhales in the cold climate. To that
end, it has become the job of the soda caffeine-addled animator to add
digitally created breath vapor to these actors or animals to further the
illusion need for the scene. |
Bug Surfacing |
Tutorial for speech animation. This page is intended to help people
that are trying to learn the process of surfacing a model in Autodesk
that will eventually be used as a "patch" model, or converted
cleanly into polygons. People would create a model like this for several
reasons. These reasons would include that need to export a model to "Flesh",
or "Amazon Paint". The model that is shown is one of the head
from the ride film "A Bug's Life". The process shown here, if
followed with persistence, should be able to produce 2 models. One model
will be a morph base, the other, a morph target. |
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Camera Setup - Dynamic |
Dynamic Camera Setup by Mads Tuxen. 2003. This is a setup to create
a dynamic camera. 3d movements are often too perfect and lacks noise and
jitters from the real world. There are several ways that you can add noise
to the movements. This one is really fast and allows you to make changes
quickly. |
Cigarette Smoke |
Begin creating an emitter by going to the Dynamics module of Maya, and
then selecting Particles>Create Emitter. By using a directional emitter,
he’ll be able to control the direction of the particles and their
cone of emission. He sets the direction to 0,1,0 so the particles will
be emitted up, in the Y direction. |
Clouds |
The intent of my tutorial is to give users a basic approach on how to
create realistic procedural clouds within Maya 3.0 using particle clouds,at
affordable rendering times. I added some possible variations to the main
look and some Photoshop/AfterEffects compositing tips at the end of the
document. I based the tutorial on a default Maya project. I added some
extra notes for beginners anywhere I found it helpful. |
Cloth - Demystifying Cloth |
Demystifying Cloth in Maya by Brian J. Immel. An in depth shirt tutorial |
Cloth Manual Online |
Online Manual - Maya Cloth-innovative software for creating and animating
realistic animated cloth. This book, Using Maya Cloth, assumes you have
experience using Maya and using all the basic Maya tools. This preface
introduces the Maya Cloth documentation. |
Cloth - Pants |
In this lesson, you'll make a pair of pants in Maya. |
Cloth - Shirt |
Kurt takes us though this tutorial covering cloth. You will make a shirt
for your character and learn many of the basic functions. A great video
for anyone wishing to explore cloth. |
Compositing Backlighting |
First of all, the composition will need an alpha channel or a key. Since
Hank was done in 3D, the raw untouched render and the alpha channel are
easily separated by rendering with an alpha (RGBA).
This could have been footage from a camera as well with the alpha obtained
by keying out the background through using a luma, chroma, or bluescreen
such as Ultimatte or Primatte keys which speed up the process quite a
bit. |
Cooper |
This article focuses on shading and texturing the Mini Cooper, I’ll
talk a little about rendering with Mental Ray but I think other people
have covered that in more depth elsewhere. |
Crowd Maker |
Crowd Simulation. To execute this tutorial you must download and install
CrowdMaker 0.5 (or higher). You can download the file at this link: web.tiscali.it/maya_tutorial.
The "CrowdMaker 0.5.rar" contains some scripts, a text file
with an installation guide and sample scenes. On the next pages you can
see the procedure to create a scene and the avaible functions to control
the scripts. We limit the simulation to only 15 particles, the script
work with a maximum of 1000 (visible in the next image). |
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DOF Lens Shader |
DOF (Depth Of Field) Lens Shader The following tutorial shows the use
lens shaders with Mental Ray for Maya. |
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Environment Mapping without Raytracing |
Environment Mapping Without Raytracing by Brian Immel. Raytraced renders
may look nice and add another level of realism but they can kill your
render time. Here are a few techniques that will help ease your render
times. Environment map are mapped to the reflected color attribute. Procedural
maps created in maya: Chrome and Sky. |
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Final Gather |
All of these tutorials require that you are using Maya 5 or greater.
For those that have upgraded to Maya 5.01, most of these new attributes
are now in the Render Globals, they aren't hidden as suggested in this
tutorial! |
Flaming Candle |
By Alex Alvarez. To generate a realistic candle flame, the first thing
to do, of course, is to light a candle and stare at it. What should become
evident are some of the behavioral and visual elements which define its
appearance. In terms of Maya lingo, a flame looks more like a transparent,
incandescent surface than a nebulous object made out of thousands of particles.
Flames have feathered yet hard edges, a very smoothly gradated interior,
varying transparency and fluid behavior more akin to liquid or fabric
than gas. |
Fluid and Particle Dynamics |
Combining Fluid and Particle Dynamics by Zhang Jian. Rising smoke, clouds,
nuclear blast, nebulous gas are common examples of volumetric effects.
There already exist many production-proved models, such as using lots
of planes and spheres with projected textures, to render the look of these
fluid-like effects. But it is still extremely difficult to achieve realistic
fluid dynamics with the common technique of adding together force fields
to drive the motion of passive unconnected particles. |
Fog |
Simple Fog, by Darrin Krumweide. Simple fog is the basic environment
fog settings used when creating fog effects in Maya. As with any environment
fog type, Maya creates a volumetric material. In the case of simple fog
attributes, the clipping distance can be adjusted as well as the height,
saturation point and color. |
Fog Density |
Controlling Fog Density, by Alex Alvarez. Fog is a term often used to
represent a variety of natural phenomenon within a 3D renderer. In nature,
fog consists of water vapor yet in Maya you may use 'fog' to also represent
dust, smoke, air, smog, plasma, nebulae or even magical glows and spells.
To be able to yield such a variety of effects from fog, one must have
a clear understanding of the volume shader associated with it. Specifically,
our focus in this discussion is 'light fog', not volume primitives or
environment fog. These are related topics, yet they use different nodes
and are for another discussion. |
Fur Tutorial |
Basic Procedure: 1) Prepare the scene 2) Create and attach fur to models
3) Modify fur attributes 4) If you are animating the scene, animate fur
attributes 5) If you are animating the scene, add movement to fur 6) Set
up fur shading effects 7) Render the scene (Good luck!) 8) Refine settings
9) Render again |
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Glass Bottle |
A step by step video tutorial by 2keen where you will learn how to make
a bottle from start (using Illustrator) to end (using Mental Ray) with
Maya. |
Global Illumination - Advanced |
In this tutorial I will show you how you can use an image to create
the environment illumination of our scene using Monte Carlo’s Global
Illumination with Blue Moon. |
Global Illumination Faked |
I had spent two days trying to light this thing, using preposterous
light arrays (10x10x10 attenuated omnis), domelights, whatever. But I
found that the following method works well, simply because it gives you
precise control over every surface. It's a bit more tedious, but it works. |
Global Illumination Tweaking Guide |
Global Illumination Tweaking Guide 1 Rather than starting off with a
scene and tweaking until we have a nice look, I will start with a scene
that is as good as I can get it, then I will experiment with changing
some of the settings. The errors / artifacts introduced will hopefully
help you when you see them, you'll know what's causing them and know what
options to change. |
Gravity vs. Uniform |
While Gravity and Uniform have different default attribute settings,
they can yield identical behavior with a couple attribute changes. Gravity,
by default, accelerates particles along the negative Y-axis. The field
also has the same effect on particles anywhere in worldSpace, regardless
of the location of the field. Uniform, on the other hand, accelerates
particles along the positive X-axis. Particles which are closer to the
field accelerate faster than those which are further away. |
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HDR Environment Map |
Create your own HDR environment map in Maya/Mental Ray for image based
lighting. |
HDRI - Creating a Light Probe |
A light probe is an omni-directional (360° panoramic) high-dynamic
range image. Because they 'see' in all directions and can record actual
light levels, light probes are useful for providing measurements of the
incident illumination. As such they can be used to provide interesting
and realistic lighting environments and backgrounds for rendered graphics.
This tutorial describes how to create a light probe using HDRShop. |
High Dynamic Range Radiance Maps from Photographs |
Film cameras were developed in order to record light so that it could
be reproduced on photographic paper; digital cameras so that it could
be reproduced on a computer screen. Neither computer screens nor paper
can display nearly the dynamic range (ratio between dark and bright regions)
as what is present in the real world, and as a result cameras are not
designed to capture even close to such a range. However, by taking a series
of pictures with different exposure settings the range can be covered.
With this technique such a series of images can be combined into a single
high dynamic range image called a radiance map. |
HDRI with RenderMan (BMRT) |
What is a High Dynamic Range Radiance Imaging? Computer graphics has long
been concerned with recreating reality. To this end renderers have been
developed to perform algorithms to emulate the way real light behaves.
The most complex interaction happens at surfaces and is a combination
of the surface properties (the BRDF - bi-directional reflection distribution
function) and the nature of the light illuminating the surface (the luminance
the surface recieves). To recreate this mathematically takes much computational
time or artistic skill in setting up basic point lights and phong surfaces |
HDRI Tweaking |
Tweak your hdrs / Synthesised hdrs. It's always the question how good
a hdri is and if you can use it in a smart way in your 3D app. At the
moment everyone want very high sized hdrs which can be used as a BG image
of a rendering too, but IMHO it's better using a smaller hdr which uses
less memory and use a high size and easy to create LDR image for BG images.
I also think that blurring a hdr is a good way to reduce flickering in
animations. |
Head Modeling (Polygon) |
My favorite head modeling tutorial... By Dave Komorowski. First off
you should have a side and front view of the object (sometimes top too,
but I don't need one in this case because most of my detail can be defined
in the front and side). When creating these pictures it's a good idea
to use graphpaper so that you can make sure your detail is lined up horizontally. |
| I |
Instancing Animated Geometry to Particles |
Maya's particle instancing feature saves you time when you need to animate
many identical objects in a scene. For example, suppose you want to create
a group of flying bugs where only the placement and orientation of the
bugs differ. With Maya, you can animate a single bug, then create instances
of the bugs that move with the position and orientation of animated particles. |
Instancing without Instance |
Instancing without instance by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a misterdi. This
tutorial will discuss on how to instance geometry without using instance,
how to implement the concept in making connection for a blendshape target.
The case: * I need to create several objects that have almost the same
geometry, so when I modify the master all duplicates will reflect the
changes too. But, I also need to have freedom to tweak the duplicates
independently.
* If I use duplicate instance, if I select a component in the model with
show affected region on, it also shows it in all other duplicates, and
it is a bit annoying.
* After creating a blendshape, I can not tweak the model. As soon as I
move the blendshape slider all the tweaks that I have made are overwritten
by the other blendshape target. I need to tweak all my blendshape targets
to match the tweak that I want since I have to use several blendshape
slider at once. |
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Light - A Detailed Tutorial |
Having never found a detailed article about light on the internet I
decided to write this one. Most of what I say here is based on my own
observations, so there may be the odd inaccuracy. It may be that this
stuff is so obvious that it doesn't need explaining, however that does
seem unlikely to me since careful observation of the world around is required
you to realise exactly how light behaves in different situations. |
Lights - Angle-Based Hue Falloff |
Angle-based Hue Falloff for Maya Lights. Most CG lights only lose luminosity
as they fall off. This can look dull. If you can calculate what amounts
to the light's facing ratio with respect to objects, you can use it to
drive ramp-based color on the light itself.
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Light Linking |
Light Linking in Heavy Scenes, by Alex Alvarez. A crucial technique
to successful lighting is the process of light linking. The process of
simulating reflected light is very much achieved by exclusively associating
lights with objects. Yet new lights are automatically linked to all surfaces
in the scene. |
Light Linking |
Light Linking using three point lighting: Light linking is the art of
using multiple lights to create the illusion of one. I normally start
with a three point lighting scheme (which I will cover later) and then
add lights were needed. Linking a light to an object or objects will allow
you to control what that light affects. This sounds complex but will make
more sense as we get into it later. |
Lighting - Advanced Lighting Techniques Part 1 |
If you wish to only use standard lights, the following method is necessary
to make the scene look more realistic and detailed. In this tutorial I
will show several examples to guide you though the process of simulating
advanced realistic lighting. The most important thing however is to first
make your own observations of lighting in photographs. Advanced
Lighting Techniques Part 2. |
Lighting |
The overall thrust of this writing is to produce photo-realistic images
by applying good lighting techniques. I will use Lightwave 3D to demonstrate
the lighting techniques used, but these techniques can be applied in any
3D software. |
Lighting with Final Gathering |
Mental Ray's Final Gathering feature illuminates your scene by taking
samples of light from nearby surfaces and the environment. When used alone
(ie no GI) it achieves the same type of effect as the skylight in the
Brazil renderer, and produces the now-quite-common 'GI look' that people
use to show off their models. Here's an example rendered in Mental Ray
with no lights, Final Gathering is taking samples from the environment
for lighting (click on the images for the full-sized version): |
Lighting Flat Objects |
You'll need Mark Davies rayDiffuse plugin to generate the self shading
maps (I think it's more or less ambient occlusion maps?). The use of normal
maps is nothing new, but the use of rayDiffuse and « cubic ambient
occlusion maps » adds a nice touch. |
Lighting In Layers |
Lighting In Layers - By Jeremy Birn. The color and shading of the backdrop
is very important to the perceived look of the ant in the final rendering.
Even without the ant appearing in this rendering, you can already get
a sense that it is going to be red and translucent. |
Lighting -Semi-Outdoor Lighting |
The semi-outdoor lighting uses a similar technique to the interior lighting
in my previous tutorial. The semi-outdoor is slightly different in that
the opening is bigger and divided by columns. |
Lighting - Three-Point Lighting |
Three lights: the Key Light, Fill Light, and Back Light, are adjusted
to achieve the classic Hollywood lighting scheme called three-point lighting |
Lipsync |
dreamLipSync is a trade mark of dreamslab.com, but it is also a lipsync
software, as you maybe already understood. So don’t loose time in
unusefull words and get in the software. |
Low Poly Hair |
Creating low poly hair for game characters using lots of images and some printscreens directly from the application used ( Maya, Photoshop etc...). The idea for this tutorial came from the polycount forums; for the Dominance War II contest i joined Polycount team and the folks there asked me if i can make a little tutorial about Varga's hair so here it is... |
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MEL How-To |
Extensitve list of Maya Embeded Language (MEL) how to's and how do I's
by Bryan Ewert. |
MEL Recipe |
MEL Recipe by Zhang Jian. These notes are intended to explain the basic
ideas about MEL scripting by providing a series of examples, giving a
recipe for MEL scripting that you can refer to. |
Mental Ray - Caustics |
This tutorial will cover how to create simple reflective caustics in
Maya using the mental ray renderer.
Reflection caustics are caused when light strikes a shiny/reflective surface
and is reflected off the surface and in turn strikes another surface,
causing a specific light pattern to appear on the surface. |
Mental Ray - Depth of Field |
Mental Ray for Maya's depth of field is very easy to use and produces
a very nice effect. |
Mental Ray - Final Gather |
Maya 5 included three new FG features that can both increase FG speed
and improve the render quality! Some of you may be wondering why you haven't
found any of these 'new cool features' yourself? Well, it's basically
because they're in a really un-obvious place. Autodesk must not have had
time to add them to the Render Globals or something. |
Mental Ray - Glossy/Blurry Reflections |
In real life, not all reflections are crystal clear. Glossy surfaces
have reflections that blur the deeper they get. Reflections in 3D rendered
images are typically clear, sharp and... unrealistic for a lot of surface
types. Fortunately these days a lot of renderers now have the ability
to produce blurry/glossy reflections, which can really add a lot of realism
to surfaces that should have them, as in real life. Now that Maya has
Mental Ray, glossy reflections are quite easy to achieve without the use
of plugins. |
Mental Ray Shaders Tab |
Adding the Mental Ray shaders tab. Mental Ray for Maya comes with quite
a lot of Mental Ray specific shaders, that give you the ability to use
more of Mental Ray's functionality and features. By default, those shaders
are not available in Maya even with Mental Ray loaded (probably because
some of them aren't completely finished yet). |
Mental Ray Volume Scattering
(Ray Marching) |
The method to generate this image is called volume scattering, or ray
marching. This can be seen in real life when light beams hit dusty or
smokey volumes of air. For example light beams coming through a window
into a dusty room, or the beams of lights at a concert, as they pass through
the smokey atmosphere. The light hits the dust or smoke particles, and
is scattered in various directions. |
Mental Ray Volume Scattering
Through Colored Materials |
This tutorial is a follow up of my frirst volume scattering tutorial but
with a slight addition. Basically we're going to simulate the same effect,
but this time the light will be entering our smokey room through a stained
glass window (or simply put a coloured, transparent surface). |
Modeling a Beast Horn |
The purpose of this tutorial is to guide you through the process of
modeling in Maya. It illustrates some of the modeling techniques used
in Maya that some of us might have forgotten about. Then we are going
to export our model to Zbrush for details. Once the Zbrush phase is done,
we are going to export the details as Displacement map and apply it into
Maya. ZBrush
Portion of tutorial. |
Modeling a Car (Ford Focus) |
Tutorial series by Alex. A very in depth tutorial on car modeling. Pt
. Set up the image planes for good reference. Pt 2. Create the wheels
for the car Pt 3. Start making the low polygon model of the car Pt 4.
Convert the car to Sub-D.
* This is the Tutorial that I used to build my 1970
Mustang Mach 1. |
Modeling an Eye (Realistic) |
In this tutorial we will create a 3D Eye utilising Maya's Nurbs Technology.
I will be showing you some extra tips and techniques that aren't usually
shown when creating an eye, these tips will make sure that your images
stand out better than anyone else's due to the 'thinking' behind them. Texturing
the Eye. |
Modelling - Female Character (Comic) |
This approach can also be adopted when creating subdivision surface
models. Start with good reference material and use as much as you can.
Using your reference as an image plane, block out the rough shape of the
character using cylinders. When adding finer details make sure to follow
the muscle lines strictly. You must end up with a nice clean model, symmetrical
where possible. Try and keep to a grid system, this will give you a neat
model to work with, and result in better deformation. Do not put polygons
where they are not needed, even if this is to be a high-resolution model. |
Modeling a Giraffe |
Model a Giraffe from a Polygonal Cube. In this tutorial you will learn
how to start from a polygonal cube using Maya, and extrude the faces to
create a giraffe, you will use the Append to poygon to re-create deleted
faces, and Subdivide and Split tools to split a face into more faces,
and more... The tools are fairly simple, and the tutorial is great for
beginners... |
Modeling Kreacher |
I'm not sure if you can call this a tutorial as I will just be showing
different stages in the building of a character called Kreacher. Kreacher
is a house elf character taken from the harry potter books. But, first
I will be showing the modeling of is the house elf Dobby |
Modelling - Male Character |
This is an overview of creating high polygon highly realistic 3D characters.
There are different surface types available to us achieve a high resolution
model. Most of the time, I use smoothed polygons as opposed to true hierarchical
subdivision surfaces. With true SubD's you wont see any faceting associated
with traditional polygonal geometry, since a subdivision surface is the
result of an infinite mathematical refinement process to ‘smooth'
a model at render time. 1. Model 2. UV map and texture 3. Rig 4. Pose/Animate
5. Apply polygon smooth node 6. Render. |
Modeling - Continuity |
What is Continuity? by Alex Alvarez. Continuity applies to both curves
and surfaces. It simply refers to how two curves meet at a point, or how
surfaces meet at an edge. When using a patch-modeling approach, where
a character, vehicle or whatever are modeled from a series of patches,
like a quilt, one wants to avoid visible seams between the individual
patches. |
Modeling a Cartoon Dog |
Kurt shows you how to create this cool looking cartoon dog - Starting
with the image planes and moving onto the modeling which covers nurbs,
polygons and sub divs. |
Modeling a Dragon (Nurbs) |
This piece of article will show you step by step of how the dragon is
created using Maya. There are three type of modeling method in Maya, NURBS
modeling, Subdivision modeling and Polygon modeling, each of them have
their advantages and disadvantages. However we will build the dragon using
patch NURBS surface techniques. The tools that I use to model this dragon
are Birail tools, NURBS primitive, Fillet Blend Tools and etc. Texture
Mapping the Dragon. |
Modeling an Ear |
It's always a good idea to have good reference material. I recommend
Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist. It's a great resource for all your
human modeling… Anyhow, there are basically four major areas to the
ear. The outer helix: the outer rim, the antihelix: the top curls of the
inner area, the lobe and the ear hole area. (My simple explanation.. heh)
If you look at it, there is basically a single line that follows the outline
of the ear, then moves inside and branches into two areas. Keep those
curves in mind when you model. |
Modeling a Foot |
Modeling a foot in Maya by Steven Stahlberg. I won't explain every detail
in the beginning, you can get to the state in the next image several different
ways. For example like this: polygonal box modeling. (This isn't meant
to be a step-by-step cloning; it's more of a general workflow thing.) |
Modeling a Head (Polygon) |
*My favorite head modeling tutorial... By Dave Komorowski. First off
you should have a side and front view of the object (sometimes top too,
but I don't need one in this case because most of my detail can be defined
in the front and side). When creating these pictures it's a good idea
to use graphpaper so that you can make sure your detail is lined up horizontally. |
Modeling a Head (Polygon) |
Although polygons have some disadvantages, they also have some compelling
advantages. One of the main ones is that extra polys can be inserted into
areas that require more detail. NURBS and splines, on the other hand,
run throughout the mesh. When one inserts extra isoparms, these will appear
from the beginning to the end of the mesh. In other words, if an isoparm
is inserted at the eyelid, then this extra curve will flow all the way
down to the base of the neck. If your software is capable of modeling
with hierarchical b-splines (h-splines), then this will not be a problem.
H-splines allow you to have one mesh with varying levels of detail in
it. |
Modeling a Head (Subdivision) |
In this tutorial I will show you how to create a human head using Maya's
subdivision surface. |
Modeling a Head (Subdivision) |
Perhaps I should preface this tutorial by acknowledging that many different
methods exist for creating 3D characters for broadcast. To date, probably
the most popular method has, in my estimation, also been the most complex
one - that is, modeling with the use of NURBS surfaces. In the past, NURBS
modeling was generally credited with many distinct advantages over polygonal
modeling. Specifically, its advocates appreciate the excellent performance
of NURBS geometry in wireframe mode, the ability to easily modify organic
shapes with a minimal number of CVs while retaining a smooth surface continuity,
a virtually infinite degree of control over the tessellation of the model
at rendering time, the ability to easily add detail to a NURBS surface
without changing the topology of the piece (through the insertion of isoparms
at specified locations), and in some cases an added level of control over
texture application because of the inherent UV directionality that is
associated with NURBS and patch surfaces. |
Modeling an Island |
Modeling an Island beach sceene. Complete with beach sand and Palm trees.
By Brian J. Immel. |
Molecular Data in Maya |
This tutorial is broken down into several mini-tutorials designed to
give you some techniques to build on when bringing macromolecular data
into Maya. Specifically, we'll be working with the ever-popular, and often
misrepresented, DNA. Of course these techniques can also be used on any
of the thousands of molecules and proteins whose structure is freely available
online at the Protein Data Bank website (www.rcsb.org/pdb/). |
| N |
Non-Linear Animation in Production |
Essentially, non-linear animation is a method of placing and manipulating
animation from separate sources. The "non-linear" in NLA comes
from the film/video editing world. Packages such as Avid MediaComposer
and Adobe Premiere are examples of Non-Linear Editors; they allow easy
ways to edit, blend and reposition clips of footage together on a timeline.
Substitute footage with animation, and you have NLA: a way to edit, blend
and reposition clips of animation (a walk cycle, run, or other behaviors)
from separate sources. |
| O |
Object Pickup |
Easy Object Pickup animation, How to have characters easily grab objects
and keep them in their hand. |
| P |
Paint Effects - Hair |
So why Paint Effects? Pfx is a very effective tool suited for creating
hair, it gives you ultimate control on exactly how you shape your hair,
with no texture painting/alpha maps and requires less time to setup than
other methods. Changing the looks of your hair can be done on the fly
with instant feed back. It is very faster to render, takes very little
memory. The render that appears on the above image will take no more than
30 seconds on a 1Ghz machine. |
Paint Effects - Hair |
In this tutorial I'll discuss two methods used in "Emeila"
for making long hair for the characters. The first is based on guide curves
that determine the basic shape and flow of the haircut. Paint Effects
hair is then interpolated between the guide curves. It sounds complicated,
but really it's pretty simple. I'll walk you through the basics here. |
Paint Effects - Hair Dynamics |
"In this tutorial I create the hair from pulling splines off a
nurbs surface and use the history on the surface to control the shape
of the hair. I create my hair this way because I've found it to be the
best way to style the hair and have the most control over it (constraints
and simulations are so tedious for basic styling). If i have enough time
at some point and enough people are interested, I'll cover rest curves
and constraints and the true 'dynamics' of hair but, not in this tutorial.
Once the style has been created, simulations can be run for whatever animation
purposes." ---- Mike Fudge |
Particle Collisions |
Interparticle Collisions in Maya by Jared Martin. Ok, this tutoral on
'interparticle collisions' (particles from the same emitter colliding)
and particle - particle collisions (particles from different emitters
colliding) is fairly simple. Anyone who is comfortable with using emitters
and the Dynamic Relationships Editor will be able to follow it easily
(I hope). There are no scipts, plugins or expressions used, so don't worry. |
Particle Emission when Objects Collide |
By Alex Alvarez. A commonly needed effect is the emission of particles
at the exact location of object collision. For example, as a sword scrapes
along a wall we may need sparks; As a boulder rolls down a mountainside
we may need smaller instanced rocks and pebbles to appear; As a character
walks along a dirt road we would expect dust to appear at his feet. |
Particle Shading Script |
Björn Henriksson and I have written a small but neat MEL script
that hooks your particle system up with a camera automatically, resulting
in a z-depth/focus depth/height/age/etc shader, that can be used to render
images meant to serve as an aid during compositing. This way you can e.g.
render out hardware particles' depth channel with motion blur. The script
has been tested on Maya version 5.0 and 6.5 and is available for download |
Particle Speed |
Using Particle Speed, by Alex Alvarez. There are situations where a
phenomenon's velocity or speed is related to it's behavior or appearance.
Perhaps the incandecence increases as a particle moves faster... or the
color changes from blue to red. Perhaps some dust is resting on an object,
but once it gets blown away it also begins to dissipate and fade. These
effects can be achieved by understanding how to reference particle speed,
which is not a default particle attribute. |
| Q |
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| R |
Rendering in Passes |
Rendering in Passes and Layers by Alex Alvarez. An issue which is often
overlooked or avoided by individuals new to 3D is the necessity of fine-tuning
projects in conjunction with a compositing package. Yet the level of interactive
flexibility available within just about any 2D application can save precious
time. While it is possible when working on full CG projects to render
the final image directly from the 3D rendering engine, this methodology
is rarely utilized in production environments. |
RenderMan - MAYA to RenderMan |
Here we're going to load the MAYA to RenderMan (MTOR) plug-in for MAYA
and render out a quick scene. Load up MAYA and let's get going! Keep in
mind - RENDERMAN HAS ITS OWN SHADER SYSTEM! Don't think your pretty MAYA
scene with all of its fancy shader trees and nifty texture maps is going
to port over to RM and look even better... it won't. More than likely
it will look like a beat up Ford from North Pole - Primer Grey and full
of Bond-O. RenderMan has a shader system that, while similar to MAYA and
often able to interpret MAYA shaders, does not directly translate. |
Rigging - Creating Character Sets After Setting Animation Curves |
This tutorial will show us how to create character sets to skeletons
with animation already in place. As a standard operating procedure (SOP),
usually we create these character sets before we set keys for animation
but for those who forgot this workflow this is what we can do. |
Rigging - Curve on Poly |
Curves with History on Polygons. The trick I use is to attach models
to a path curve derived by extracting curves with construction history
from deforming nurb models. Very simple and useful expecially if you forget
to bind obj detail, like some buttons, to a deforming character, or if
you want to avoid some tedious cv weighting for small added elements,
while in a deadline crunch. |
Rigging - Indirect Rigid Binding Using Animated Lattices |
Animating the waist can be a taunting task when one considers all the
nasty folds of the legs and buttocks. Here is a simple tutorial for a
better binding method for those love handles. |
Rigging - Inverse Foot Setup |
The purpose of this tutorial is to achieve a better functioning Inverse
Foot setup. The Inverse Foot structure is built to give your character
a better tool to avoid the foot from slipping on a ground plane and also
to improve the basic controls of your foot's joints rotations. We will
achieve this by upgrading the basic foot chain to support a more functional
toe control and by changing some of the default constrain types. The basic
idea is to switch the required orient constraints with aim constraints,
then add an extra controller to the aiming of the original foot's ball
joint |
Rigging - Tricycle Pedal Setup |
In one of my first projects i Maya i wanted to take a chick for a ride
on a tricycle. Thats a noble idea if you ever had any doubts about it!
It was simple to make the feet follow the the rotation of the wheel just
using ikhandles parented to the pedals. What caused me the greatest deal
of trouble was to make the pedals follow the feet. That is: they are constrained
to follow the weels as the frontwheel rotates in two axis, but they are
also constrained by the foot that rests on them. I guess you can say that
it all boils down to making a "hinge-aim-constraint". |
Rigging a Vehicle |
I recently spent a lot of time rigging various vehicles for animation
and came up with a few tricks. One of the main differences with vehicles
instead of characters is that you don’t have to worry about binding
a mesh to a skeleton. You still, however, have to make a control system
that is easy to use and flexible to cover most situations. One of the
cool things about Maya is the ability to add attributes to objects. One
trick is to use a curve as a control object and then add custom attributes
to that curve. If you want to get fancy, you can make a curve in Illustrator
and import it into Maya. |
| S |
Shader Glow |
It is important to remember that specularity is a reflection of a lightsource.
Therefore, if a light is bright enough to create an optical effect, a
specular highlight from that light should also create an optical effect.
Maya allows for this via the use of Shader Glow. |
Shaders - Using Animation Curves in Shading-Networks |
In this tutorial you will learn how to use animation curves as a general
functioncurve allowing you to set up relationships between nodes and modify
them in the graph-editor. I will show an example where the animationcurve
is used in a shading network to create the "curves-function"
from photoshop, but it is a workflow that you can use in a lot of different
set-ups. |
Shading Alien Skin |
This tutorial shows how to use a mix20layer material to render passes
with mental ray. There are a few advantages of rendering passes instead
of the whole image. One of them, is the ability to make changes to specific
parts of the image (and save time). Only a few shading components require
raytracing. |
Shading Human Skin |
By Steven Stahlberg. This could be the single biggest hurdle in realistic
cg since Gouraud shading... :)
...as for me, I've been wrestling with this since -95. Like many others,
I've been extremely frustrated by it, mainly cause until about -00 very
few knew much about it, and no one could answer my questions. So -99 I
found my own home-made method, a pragmatic approach that sidesteps simulation.
(When we have the software and the power to do nice simulating, of course
we should, but until then this kind of 'kludgy' approach might serve ok.)
My terminology is astronomy-based, because it's clearer and more concise:
Dayside = Where light hits. Nightside = Where light doesn't reach. Terminator
= The transitional zone between night and day. |
Shading Switch in Hypershade |
Using Shading Switch in Hypershade. by Daniel Harjanto a.k.a misterdi.
One of the most useful things when dealing with a lot of variation in
surface color is using a switch node. Maya comes with 3 kind (4 kind in
Maya 5.0) switch node, all are located as utility node in Create Bar.It has: * single shading switch * double shading switch * triple shading
switch * quad shading switch (in Maya 5.0 only)What makes the different is the output of the node. With single shading
switch, the output will be a scalar, while other will be a compound value
of 2, 3, and 4 respectively. |
Shelf Customizing for Polygonal Modeling |
SubD-modeling is the same as polygon-modeling in Maya, workflow-wise.
But polygon-modeling in Maya is trickier than in some other packages,
here are a few tips that may make it easier. We want to create a special
shelf for the tools we use the most, we want to keep it fairly clean and
not over-crowd it, so we can find the items quickly, and have a small
learning curve. |
Skeleton Basics |
In this tutorial Kevin shows you the set up a a simple dog skeleton.
You will cover: * Joint Tool. * Remove Joint Tool. * Add Joint Tool. *
Edit Joints. * Set rotation Limits and more... Dog scene file included,
thx to Kurt for the model. |
Spotlight Decay |
All lights in Maya (area light excluded) emanate light from a finite
point in space. This is completely unnatural as all lights in nature have
a measurable size. The effect that light size has in nature is found in
the shadow and specular qualities present. Simulating this issue in a
render is for a separate discussion, as we are now going to focus on a
particular situation where the finite origin of a spotlight becomes problematic...
not in how objects receive light, but how one controls the origin of light. |
Subdivision Modeling a Human |
Subdivision modeling is a procedure for creating smooth mod- els while
keeping the total polygon count at a low level. Point counts are small
so that the sculpting process is less confusing. New software developments,
such as those in Maya and XSI, offer more robust subdivision modeling
tools, an improved interface, and the ability to render objects without
converting them to high polygon models. This makes a compelling argument
for implementing subdivision modeling.This tutorial will take you through the process of creating a human
model. The software that was used was Lightwave 3D but it should work
with any program that has subdivision modeling. |
Simulating - Subsurface Scattering |
Simulating Subsurface-Scattering with Maya/Mental Ray. First of all
I have to say that there are two ways (or maybe even more !) to simulate
Subsurface scattering. You could use a real material-volume-shader and
a few sampler/light-info nodes and a lot of time for tweaking and tuning!
Pros: maybe a better look. Cons: very slow, new calculation for each frame,
complex setup. So.... 'I did it my way!' and this one is pretty fast and
easy to setup! |
Subsurface Scattering |
Subsurface Scattering: Using the Misss_Fast_Simple_Maya shader. Subsurface
scattering is the term used in 3D graphics to describe the effect we see
when, in the real world, light enters a surface (at least to some degree),
bounces around a bit and is then either absorbed or reflected back out
again. The effect is usually associated with soft/organic surfaces like
skin or wax, and is a major factor in the look of those materials. How
can we demostrate this effect in an obvious way? Well, I'm sure most people
have seen that if you hold a torch up to the back of your hand, you can
see a red glow that spreads all the way through to your palm. Some of
the light has travelled through the inner (subsurface) layers of your
hand, picked up the reddish colour of your blood/tissue and made it all
the way out through the other side. |
Sword - Active Sword |
Simple Collisions - This tutorial/recipe is about how to make a sword
that causes multiple victims to "bleed" anytime it strikes them.
The logic is to make the sword have particles that can collide with the
victims and have a particle collision event cause the bleeding. P.S. There
are better ways of doing this -- particularly through MEL Scripts. But
this tutorial was written originally in mind for those not savvy with
MEL. |
| T |
Tentacle Animation |
How to create a moving Tentacle using Procedural animation. |
Tessellation |
Tessellation by Alex Alvarez. When Maya renders a NURBS surface, the
object is tessellated into triangles (polygons). Understanding tessellation
is crucial to clean silhouettes and patch boundary relationships. There
are several options for tessellation, but this quick tutorial is dealing
with multi-patch models. |
Texturing for Dummies |
Photorealistic Texturing For Dummies (1.5Mb PDF Document, includes images)
Highly recommended!
A series of basic articles aimed at introducing the fundamentals of texturing,
covering the various aspects of surface (colour, diffuse, reflection,
bump, etc) and giving some advice for getting started as a texturing artist.
A little out of date, but hopefully still somewhat useful. |
Texturing - Realistic Skin |
Realistic skin is hard to fake because it’s both an artistic and
a technical challenge. It’s artistic because you can almost feel
a character’s personality through the look of its skin; its wrinkles,
colours and beauty spots. But it’s also a technical test, because
skin isn’t like a homogeneous material that has simple physical properties
– it’s composed of several different layers. However, we always
model it as a perfectly even thin surface, which is why it’s so hard
to get good results. |
Texturing - (Realistic) |
Texturing tutorial by Julian Jeremy Johnson-Mortimer. In this one I
will be texturing the head of the character I made in my modeling tutorial.
I will be working in Photoshop, I should first say that for a good texture,
you need a good UV map with a minimum amount of stretching. |
Texturing an Eye (Realistic) |
First off, we shall start with the easiest parts first, the cornea and
the iris. Select the Cornea object and hide all the other layers, the
cornea should be transparent, but not fully, and we will be faking a reflection
within the material, this is because I have done various test's within
Maya's render pipeline involving the correct refraction and reflection
values and I've gotten nothing but render artifacts when doing so, so
I will be using this method, so surface your cornea using these values... Modeling
the Eye. |
Texture Map a Nurbs Dragon |
In this section, I would like to use Deep Paint 3D to help me to indicate
the location of UV on the NURBS surfaces. But 3D Paint package only recognizes
polygons with UV. So, we need to convert NURBS to polygon, then export
the polygons to 3D paint program. First, I will create bump map in 3D-paint
program, and then I will use PhotoShop to define the bump map. Modeling
a NURBS Dragon. |
Texture Mapping - Dealing with Surface Parameterization |
Dealing with Surface Parameterization by Alex Alvarez. If your somewhat
new to texture mapping, you should read up a little on parameterization
as it often causes a bit of confusion. Basically, remember this: just
because two surfaces look identical in regards to the number and placement
of spans in u and v, it does not mean that a texture map will wrap itself
around the surfaces in the same way. |
Texture Resolution |
Texture Resolution by Alex Alvarez. A common question when new to texture
mapping, is what resolution should textures be? This is assuming that
you are going to be making your own in a 2D package, such as Photoshop,
either from scratch or from a scan. |
Textures - Sky Maps |
1000 Skies... Not a tutorial but, a site filled with high resolution
full 360 degree skies up to 14,000 pixels wide for Broadcasters, Architectural
Renderers, Illustrators, Animators and Photographers. Seamless, panorama
domes big enough for high resolution output. |
Transparency Shadows |
The proceeding animation shows the result of animating a searchlight
sweeping in front of a blasted wall. Light rays enter the room as shadows
are cast into the fog volume. Be aware that volume shadow occlusion only
works with depth-map shadows. This creates problems if you have transparency
mapped objects, as is the case with the wall. So how can we get an object
with a transparency map to cast accurate shadows without raytracing? (i.e.
depth-map shadows). . |
| U |
UV Smoothing |
Why does Maya create ugly UV distortions when smoothing polygons? When
you apply a polySmooth in Maya, new vertices will be created, as well
as new UV coordinates for these vertices. Both the space coordinates and
the UV coordinates of these new vertices will be derived from the old
vertices (the original or « low res » mesh). The problem is
whereas new vertices position are obtained through smooth interpolation,
the new UV coordinates are obtained through simple linear interpolation.
This is the cause of disrependancies between these new vertices space
coordinates and UV coordinates and thus, map distortion. |
| V |
Venetian Blinds |
This tutorial demonstrates a technique using a basic MEL (Maya Embedded
Language) script to easily control a number of objects in a Maya scene.
An example Maya scene file is included. Maya is built on the concept of
interconnected "nodes" of data. The reason for this is for flexibility
and adaptability. In Maya's node architecture there are what we call attributes.
If a node is to be useful in this system it needs to have compatible attributes
with other nodes so they can share information down the (node) chain. |
| W |
Walk with Expression |
This database derives from a personal experiment using expressions.
I was looking for a cycling mathematical equation that could allow me
to develop almost any cycling actions in human characters and four legs
animals. This tutorial is divided into two parts: the first one is a little
math lesson; the second is the database tutorial that will teach you to
use the skeleton for almost any human cycling actions I'll explain the
expression procedure that to give you a better understanding of the math
involved so that you will be able to produce similar or more advanced
expressions in Maya. |
Water |
For this tutorial, I'm going to go over creating a certain type of water
effect. No two effects are the same, so you may need to modify your own
scenes to show how you want the water to look. For my scene, I'm going
to simulate a large gush of water emitting from some sort of tube like
you'd see in a sewer or something. The water will then hit the ground
and accumulate in a corner. |
Wireframe Rendering |
This tutorial will show you how to render your Maya objects in wireframe
mode, without seeing the backface wires. This tutorial uses no plugins
or scripts, and only knowledge of the May |
