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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.
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 - 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 - 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.
Bump Mapping	Bump Mapping is a technique where you apply a texture map to a model like a color map. The difference is: bump map is usually black and white and it gives a object "bumps" instead of "colors" like a color map does. And the bump map is applied to Bump Channel instead of Color Channel.
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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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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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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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.
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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.
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 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 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.
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/).
Motion Blur	How to to Add Motion Blur to your 3D Animation in Post Production by Creating 2D Motion Vectors in Maya. This is a four-part tutorial about adding motion blur to a Maya render by first creating a 2D motion vector sequence and then using it with ReelSmart Motion Blur in post production. I’ll be covering Maya 2009’s 2D motion vector pass as well as installation and use of the lm_2DMV shader for earlier Maya versions. Once this technique is part of your pipeline, it can be a tremendous time saver compared with creating (and waiting for) motion blur from within Maya. It also provides the flexibility of applying any amount of motion blur without having to re-render.
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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.
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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 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.
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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 - 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 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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). .
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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.
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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.
VFX Supervision	Note: Not a Maya Tutorial but, useful to Maya users. This is an attempt to explain the live action shooting process for VFX supervisors. Many people trained in 3D and Compositing have never stepped foot onto a tv or film set and it can be quite unnerving. Whilst there’s nothing like experience I hope this guide can help smooth out some of the jargon and complexities.
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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.
Wire Tool	The Wire Tool can be a very useful tool for creating things like landscapes, mountain ranges, and the like. It could also be used creatively to create things like scars or something on characters. However, know that for the Wire Tool to be most effective, a good amount of geometry needs to be present. Too less, and the effect won't be that apparent.
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Zombie Bunny	In this Video Tutorail you will learn how to model a Zombie Bunny a cool character check it out and it's Free