Paint Effects is Maya’s flexible system for interactively painting brush strokes and particle effects on a 2D canvas or on 3D geometry. Preset brushes such as plants, hair, fire, feathers, and others can be used to get amazing effects quickly. This tutorial explains how to create a Maya logo out of growing grass. The focus is on setting and animating the Paint Effects brush and strokes.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial will teach you how to model a snowman and animated it using Maya’s most basic tools.
Setting up Maya for the Tutorial
Before you begin this tutorial, it is recommended that you reset Maya to its default preferences. Please go to Maya’s Main Menu > Window > Settings and Preferences > Preferences. This will open up Maya’s Preference Window. In the Preference Window, go to the Edit menu and select “Restore Default Settings”.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial covers the basics of how to setup and bake ambient occlusion maps in Maya8. The process is similar for previous versions of Maya only the menu names will be different. As with most things in Maya there are probably many different ways to do this but this method works well for me and is reasonably quick to setup.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Using After Effects to composite image sequences rendered from Maya opens up a large number of possibilities and offers flexibility that is hard to achieve using Maya alone. While on the one hand a little extra work, foresight, and some knowledge of After Effects is required, the payoff for the additional effort is usually worth it. You don’t need to master every aspect of After Effects to take advantage of this workflow. A few simple tricks and techniques can add a lot of life and character to your animation. The techniques described in this tutorial are the same techniques used in design houses when creating animations for the entertainment industry.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial is a continuation of the “VIllus Capillary” tutorial where you went through the basics of creating a Maya scene from A-to-Z. You’re now ready to stitch together a final movie from the individual sequences of images that were rendered in Maya. In addition to simply ‘stitching’ the sequences together, we will explore a few different compositing tasks as well. For example, there are benefits to rendering a single image/shot into multiple ‘render passes’ where different elements of the scene are separated out onto different layers and rendered independently with an alpha channel (i.e. transparency information).
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Creating a basic hairstyle Introduction Lesson setup Creating hair on a surface Styling the hair Setting up hair collisions Rendering the hair Modifying hair attributes Setting up shadowing on hair Beyond the lesson Getting Started with Maya Unlimited 3 s Lesson 2 Creating a dynamic non-hair simulation Introduction Lesson setup Setting up the curtain scene Making the hair collide with another object Assigning a Paint Effects brush to the hair Setting up constraints Rendering the curtain scene Beyond the lesson 3 Fluid Effects Introduction Preparing for the lessons Lesson 1 Creating a dynamic 2D fluid effect Introduction Creating a two-dimensional fluid container Adding a fluid emitter to a container Changing the behavior of a fluid Combining colors in a fluid Colliding a fluid with an object Beyond the lesson Lesson 2 Creating a non-dynamic 3D fluid effect Introduction Creating a 3D fluid container Adding fluid to a container Defining shader attributes for a fluid.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments