Maya Tutorials

Rendering Realistic Dinosaurs Having many tons worth of digital prehistoric animals under our belt.  A number of  people have asked about my rendering set-up at dotnamestudios.  This tutorial is not about displacement maps or how to model but taken from the point after you have your model finali...

With the release of Maya 2009 the options available for render passes increased tremendously. This is usually a good thing. But in doing so, some of the easy methods for creating custom render passes, such as an Ambient Occlusion pass, no longer work as they did in Maya 2008. Apart from crea...

Compositing 101: The Black edge ----- The black edge...that faint line of premultiplied colour can be a devil if nobody has ever shown you how to get rid of it. Here is your frame turtle_0034 Here is your background sea footage: The problem is this horrible faint black edge that you ca...

Full video tutorial and resource file available here: Studio Lighting in Autodesk Maya 2009

Next-Gen Materials Cobblestone Written by Alex Schwartz - gtproductions.net WPI Game Development Club Foreword: Much nicer looking PDF located here: http://gtproductions.net/files/cobblestone_tutorial.pdf Introduction: This tutorial will guide you through the creation of a 3d mesh in Maya that ...

How to install Shader Library in Maya 8.5 Open Maya 8.5 DVD >Tutorials_and_Extras>ShaderLibrary>copy folder shaders to Installed destination in local Disk(C:)>Program files>Autodesk>Maya 8.5 Run Maya. Open Hypershade. H...

Batch Tool Tutorial I. What is the Batch Tool? The Batch Tool is a tool kit to do Maya rendering and batch processing for large amount of files. It serves as a bridge between Maya, operating system and local area network. The Batch Tool allows you to: *)Do Maya network r...

This tutorial will get you up to speed in setting up a simple Final Gather scene. Set-up These are some tips on using Mental Ray. - make sure your models are UV mapped before you render. Even if it's just a quick automatic mapping, this can prevent some errors. - keep your geometry quad or tr...

We begin with a model of an octopus type creature. You can download the source files here, Octopus.rar . The scene file already has the displacement nodes assigned to the geometry. There are two separate pieces to the model, the nautilus shell and the octopus's body. It has 8,382 total triangles...

Maya Optics DI He Introduction The term of optics can be largely related to many scientific fields, related the physical concept in Maya software are not very different, therefore lighting and shading processing in Maya is often hard and confusing. Especially for the users wh...

Often time I noticed guys creating a tree but the leaf doesnt look natural. So I thought of writing a tutorial, which will help you to make a realistic tree. Here is a picture I've downloaded from the net, If you see it carefully, you will notice that the tip of the leaves are not ...

Here is some tips for setting up mental ray standalone for maya users successfully. 1- After installing and licensing mental ray standalone, Start SPM service. (type: services.msc in command prompt, find SPM and start it). 2- Do not forget to set SPM_HOST in environment variables. -L...

Simple lighting effects that really look cool this is just a simple object with shadows and fog that just tend to look sweet. first, we will create the object that we will light and make look cool. 1) Create a cylinder with 0 caps, 50 sub axis, and 25 sub height. Make it have a radius o...

Depth of Field is one of those things that is more often than not, over used. However it does form an important role in generating realistic imagery in 3 dimensional environments. This tutorial does not discuss the correct use of DOF, but instead will show a simple but effective way to set-up a c...

Hi, my name is Massimo Righi and I am freelance CG artist form Italy. You can see more of my portfolio on highend3d gallery: What I'm going to do, is trying to show you the main steps of how I've made my "Male Green Frog". I've used Maya 8 for modelling, MentalRay for rendering and Photo...

A Designer's Tutorial in using Image Based Illumination and High Dynamic Range Imagery Brock J. Stearn Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design The Ohio State University Introduction This tutorial follows a pipeline using Image Based Illumination and High Dynamic...

First, go to your modelling toolset, polygons>tool options> and make sure keep faces together is checked. Also you will be needing an HDRI map for this tutorial, please e-mail me at bartonix@gmail.com and state in the subject of the e-mail APT_PROBE.HDR so I know which hdri map you're needi...

This is a basic modelling tutorial that will teach you how to make a screw-driver and render it with FG (Final Gather) With global illumination, HDRI (High dynamic ranged imagery) And DoF (Depth of field, optional). Let us begin shall we, open Maya, and go to the modelling section. Now cr...

Faking Global Illumination with point lights This handout will explain how to use point lights to light a scene and give it the same look as using global illumination. The overall quality is similar, it is easier to do, and best of all, it renders faster. I used a night time kitchen scene fr...

1. Turn on Raytracing (go to the Render Global window either from the Render View portal or under Window-> render globals) 1a. If you have objects in your scene that you'd like to be reflective you must set the Ray Tracing Reflections option to at least "2) 2. Create a scene to v...

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. Above we see a simple scene with a single spotlight. No fog added yet. The thing to notice is how once fog has been added to the ...

Wireframe Rendering in Maya This tutorial will show you how to create a shader that will render a wireframe of your model and not render the backfacing wireframes.  Before following the steps below, unwrap your mesh. 1.  Take a snapshot of your UVs. 2.  Create a shader node of your choice (I us...

THE PROBLEM: You need your animation rendered by the morning. You have 3 scenes to render each scene is saved in a different maya file and one of the scenes you have two cameras, you need both of them rendered and you are a tired artist not a programmer. THE SOLUTION: Open notepad type "render ...

Generating and using normal maps in Maya (some sample shaders and scenes) Faster, bigger, better! If you're familiar with normal maps check directly here for a faster application of the method described down here using my rayDisplace plugin : displacement_maps January 10, 2005 ...

Subsurface what?!? - Don't freak out! 'Subsurface scattering' is the term used in 3D graphics to describe the effect we see when, in the real world, light enters a surface (at least to some degree), bounces around a bit and is then either absorbed or reflected back out again. The e...