There has been discussion again on Maya highend3d mailing list about the UV distortion caused by polygon smoothing in Maya. I have been working on this problem and devising solutions for a recent production, and as it's hard to explain verbally in a reasonably short email I thought it would be best to sum it up in some tutorial.
The Uninstancer allows you to bake particle instances into geometry, animation, and blendshapes that can be modified and updated without messing around with dynamics and expressions.
Photography has always inspired me, especially shots of nature and wildlife from the National Geographic magazines. I decided to use the American alligator as the subject for my project, perhaps because I’ve always been fascinated by reptiles (this species in particular has truly brilliant colors) and I really wanted to enjoy the modeling process.
Once I have a rough idea of the technical specification and limits I start creating the main body of the character. In the case of this particular model, I created the body and head to start with. I kept the head as a separate model so that I could easily work on it separately and later export it separately for bakin
Sprite - Based Particle Tree's offer a much better looking tree in today's real time games. I would personally not normally recommend these types of trees' as 'overall' coverage in your real time game, but when used in conjunction with the normal cross-sectional type tree, can be used to great effect.
in 3d Max can be simple if you know what modifier to use in a particular mapping situation. Here at Neoscape we receive lots of source images of materials that are going to be used in the construction of a building and its site. We have to accurately interpret these materials from the swatches we receive into the final render. In this tutorial I will walk through common mapping problems, how to...
This tutorial explains the process of creating a diamond model in 3d. The software used is Maya. But you can use any 3d applications to follow the steps.
I created this tutorial for use in my classes and most of my students found them to be helpful. I now decided to submit it to be published on the web hoping it can help others as well.
Imagine this -- you are doing a shot for a film, for example, a cyber cityscape. And you use many lights, glows, fog, crafts … and of course, you turn on some form of GI or ambient occlusion. And when you press render it takes hours to render, but it looks really great. And then your director comes, looks at the render and says, "Wow that is really great!".
I would like to share my method on rendering z-depth images. In this tutorial you will learn to render z-depth image directly in the renderview in an easy and fast manner.
Contrary to other classic 3d package, Maya has not dedicated tools to spread objects and it is often asked how to indeed. Placing each objects would be stupid and exhausting. In this article, I demonstrate five methods from my own experience/analysis and some talking boards threads.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a rocket using NURBS, and then animate its movement using path curve. I'll also show how to make a simple smoke trail.
Glowing materials are very useful to create light effects. For example a neon-light effect. This kind of material is a light-emitting material. It will create light and shadows like an Omni Light.
In this tutorial I want to show the making of the image "time is running", made with 3ds max 2008 and rendered with vray 1.50.SP1.
I will summarize the workflow I used for one of my characters with lots of images and some print-screens directly from the applications used (Maya/Mudbox/Photoshop, etc ...), also at the end I will provide some info about tangent space normal maps so you could think of this tutorial as primarily normal mapping related stuff.