With nCloth, Maya users finally have a simple method for handling falling leaves. One can also easily attach leaves to branches and have the attachments broken by windforces by using nCloth constraints with glue strength. The basic workflow is very simple. Make a paint effects tree, convert it to poly, select the leaves and make nCloth. What follows is a more detailed tutorial.
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.
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.
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 this tutorial I will show you how to create growing flowers from surface, the flowers will gradually randomly grow up and will retain their original status when they reach to growing limit.
Particles are one of the greatest features in Maya. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use the particle instancer to create a fleet of spaceships flying across the planes. Also I'm going to show you how to use events to crash the spaceship.
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.
Greetings everyone. So I've had a number of people approach me here at school about a method I've been using to break my Miss_fast_skin_maya subsurface shader into render layers so I have near absolute control of it in compositing, so I though I'd write up a tutorial here to share.
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.
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.
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 am going to show you two ways to do gears in MAya and folow me very carefull and you will see how easy it is.
What I'm going to do is try and show you the main steps of how I made my "Male Green Frog" image. I used Maya 8 for modelling, MentalRay for rendering and Photoshop for the textures.
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.
This tutorial covers the basics of how to setup and bake ambient occlusion maps in Maya 8 with a focus on game-art. The process is similar for previous versions of Maya only the menu names will be different.