Maya: Tutorials and Assets
Subsurfacing Sushi
Procedural Fish and Rice, or Finally, a Use for Maya Wood
Weekly Walkthroughs provide a complete project, including geometry, file textures, shading networks, environment maps, gobos, and lighting rigs. The aim is to teach through deconstruction of a ful...
Software Rendering Particles
Blobby Particles, Part One
The Blobby particle render type is a software render method that allows particles to be assigned standard Maya shaders. The particles are rendered with a hard edge as if each particle is a sphere. ...
Image Sequence to Quicktime
Converting Anims to .MOV files with After Effects
When rendering animations from Maya, Max or any other 3D application, it is common practice to render them out as image sequences (image.001.tga, image.002.tga, etc.). These sequences, however, can...
Setting Up Orthographic Images
Preparing Orthos in Photoshop and Aligning in Maya
While it is common for modelers to only have 3/4 perspective design drawings to work from, the ideal situation is to be provided with orthographic (front/side/top/back) reference to guide the model...
Creating Tileable Textures
Using Photoshop to Eliminate Seams
When texturing objects in a 3D application, it is often necessary to use a texture that can be tiled. This means that when the image repeats there is no visible seam. For example, when mapping an i...
Bullets, Dust Hits and Debris
Multi-Chapter Tutorial
When objects impact the ground, such as bullets or footsteps, one often expects to see an effect such as a puff of dust (dust hit) or a burst of debris. This four part tutorial demonstrates how to...
Light Linking in Heavy Scenes
How to Quickly Manage Light/Object Connections
Successfull lighting requires the simulation of reflected light. While Global Illumination is a possible approach to automate the process, this can be expensive in terms of render time. The direct ...
Outdoor Lighting
Multi-Chapter Tutorial
This tutorial provides a detailed demonstration of how to approach outdoor lighting for any time of day. We begin by discussing the nature of outdoor light, the sun, the sky, shadows and the use of...
Rendering Zbrush Displacement Maps
Using 32 bit Displacement Maps in Mental Ray
This tutorial gives a detailed walkthrough of using ZBrush 3.1 to extract a 32bit floating point displacement map from the Stingerhead ZTool (also available on Gnomonology). Once the maps and geome...
The Making of 'Smile'
Multi-Chapter Tutorial
This 'making of' demonstration and lecture began with the decision to create a new still image and record the entire process. Using Maya, UVlayout, Zbrush and Photoshop, 'Smile' was created in eigh...
