| F |
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 |
| G |
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. |
| H |
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. |
