Gravity vs Uniform / Using Per-Particle Mass

All fields in Maya are unique. A thorough understanding of each field's behavior is a crucial first step towards an artist's ability to efficiently and effectively design a dynamic effect. There are two fields, however, which are commonly thought to yield identical results: Gravity and Uniform. While similar, they have an important difference: how they deal with mass...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Transparency Shadows

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)...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Controlling Fog Density

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Spotlight Decay Regions

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. We are now going to focus on a particular situation where the finite origin of a spotlight becomes problematic...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Rendering in Passes and Layers

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Shader Glow Tips

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Light Linking in Heavy Scenes

A crucial technique to succesfull 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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Candle Flame

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Using Particle Speed

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Particle Emission when Objects Collide

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)...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Simple Fog

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...

Instructor:
Darrin KRUMWEIDE
Format: HTML
Software: Maya


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Some Fur Tips

Say you have a patch model with 200 patches and you want to use a 3D paint package to paint the fur color. Go ahead and load the surfaces into your paint package, paint color, and import them into Maya as your surface's color. This should create a switch node on the material's color to tell the material which surface gets which file texture...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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3D Paint Tip

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Multi-Patch Model Tesselation

When Maya renders a NURBS surface, the object is tesselated into triangles (polygons). Understanding tesselation is crucial to clean silhouettes and patch boundary relationships. There are several options for tesellation, but this quick tutorial is dealing with multi-patch models...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Arm set-up with IK/FK

This tutorial outlines a technique which is quite handy when setting up an arm. Very often I see work where the movement/rotations are incorrect at the wrist as people sometimes overlook how things actually work below the elbow. If you take a look at your own wrist and 'rotate' your hand around, it may seem that you are looking at a ball joint, but you aren't...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Custom Marking Menu for Selection Masks

If you have never made a hotkey driven custom marking menu, go to Options/Customize UI/Marking Menus. Hit 'Create Marking Menu'. You can then middle-mouse-button drag items from the shelf into one of the quadrants...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Custom Marking Menu for Key Tangents

When animating you may find yourself needing to switch the current setting for tangent types quite often. Whenever you use the 'S' hotkey to set a keyframe, Maya will use the tangent types you have specified in the Animation Preferences...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Understanding Continuity

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Dealing with Surface Parameterization

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...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Determining Texture Resolution

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. Well, the first thing to do is ignore dpi settings. All you care about is the pixel by pixel resolution of the image...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Spotlight Fog

Here's a common problem... you add fog to a spotlight, render an image and... no fog. The problem is simple and is inherit to how Maya calculates lightfog. The thing to notice is how once fog has been added to the light, a new conical object appears in the scene. This is a new shape node which is a child of the spotlight's transform node...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Maya



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Precise Rotation of Scanned Templates

When modeling, it is always wise to begin with orthographic reference which is scanned and placed in the front/side/top views of your 3D package. Nothing new to most of you, I'm sure, but this little Photoshop tip tends to fill people with a tingly warm all over feeling...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Photoshop®



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Creating Tileable Textures

When photographing or painting your own textures, it is sometimes desirable to be able to seamlessly tile the image over a surface...

Instructor: Alex ALVAREZ
Format: HTML
Software: Photoshop®



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