On Site Tutorials

• "Maya fluid Liquid Generation" by Ajiesh Thuvanoor
  Fluid dynamics is a branch of physics that uses mathematical equations to describe how things flow.  In Fluid Effects, dynamicfluid effects simulate fluid motion by solving fluid dynamics equations at each step of time.  The more you increase the container’s resolution, the better, but make sure that there are some logical proportions between your container’s resolution and the container size.  (Please see below for the proportional values induced).
  
  

• "Command Line Rendering" by Peter Stratton
  This tutorial is geared towards Maya users with little or no experience working in the Windows Shell.  It was written to help students in a class I was in to help them better understand how to launch batch renders from the command line, and how to create batch scripts to execute a number of separate file renders automatically. 
  
  

• "Next Gen Vehicle Creation" by Valentin Nadolu
  This tutorial is intended to present a method of creating a next gen vehicle asset.  The difficulty level is medium, so to better understand and use this tutorial, the reader needs to have a basic understanding of the processes involved in modelling and texturing an object in Maya.  The asset presented here will be a generic vehicle with a low poly count that has diffuse, specular and normal map textures.
  
  

• "Basic Maya Lighting Tutorial" by Sean Hewitt
  This is hopefully a tutorial covering some basics of lighting in Maya, utilising Mental Ray.  I made this tutorial for someone in a forum and tried to replicate their scene to better show them how to control their lighting.  So while I wish I had some more detailed models in there to demonstrate with, such as the head, I used what I could find that was shaped most like the stuff in their scene, rather than what looked best.
  
  

• "Modelling a Volleyball" by Ali Reza Einollahi
  I’m sure you guys have all learned various techniques of creating a ball in the past, but in this beginner’s tutorial
  we will learn another technique for modelling a ball: we’re going to model a volleyball!
  
  

• "Creating a Wilting Leaf" by Helen Hyung Choi
  In this tutorial I will show you how I created this really cool wilting leaf effect using Maya and Photoshop.
  

• "ZDepth & Height Greyscale Representation" by Nakhle Georges
  This tutorial shows 3 different methods to create height and depth grayscale representations of a maya scene,
  which may be useful in many cases such as adding depth of field or fog in post production.
  
  

• "Camera Shake without keyframing" by Jatin Soni
  Hi, this is Jatin Soni from digitalglow.net . In this tutorial you will learn how to animate camera shaking effect
  without keyframing the camera....
  
  

• "Dynamic Piston Tutorial" by James Lemaster
  Ok, so here is out basic hydraulic cylinder, all of the parts are combined onto one piece of mesh witch is 556 faces. 
  The rig that we will be setting up will allow the piston to extend indefinitely without coming apart. There are two attachments on the mesh for hoses, but we will not be getting into that in this tutorial, there might be on in the future
  for weighted hoses.
  
  

• "Using subsitute geometry in Maya" by Guru Vaidya
  Substitute Geometry allows an artist to replace a rigged and animated Low – Poly mesh with a final high resolution
  or mid resolution mesh....
  
  

• "Advanced Baking - Baking Next-Gen lighting with Turtle" by Illuminate Labs
  In this tutorial we are going to check out all the new light baking tools in Turtle 4.
  
  The Illuminate Labs Team has been working hard on this new release in order to get you the most advanced
  lighting techniques available at your fingertips....
  
  

• "Low Poly Game Character Hair" by Paul Tosca
  This is not a step by step tutorial. I will nail down the main stages for creating hair for game characters using
  lots of images and some print-screens directly from the application used (Maya/Photoshop etc...). The idea for
  this tutorial came from the Polycount forums; for the Dominance War II contest I joined Polycount team...
  
  

• "DGS Exploited" by Florian Wild
  When MentalRay users talk about 'physical correctness', in most of the cases the usage of DGS (diffuse, glossy, specular) shaders is discussed. Some people say you should use them at least as photon shaders, just because they're fast and, yes, physically plausible. But how do they act differently than the Maya base shaders? If you ever
  used dgs shaders, you probably asked.....
  

• "Mental Ray Tutorial" by Florian Wild
  Many people keep asking if anyone got the custom mentalray bump nodes to work. Because many people think
  custom mentalray bump nodes are waaay better than the maya's default bump2d nodes. Let's have a look...
  
  

• "Physical Light Exploited" by Florian Wild
  I know many people are using the physical_light. Usually they use it with the intention, well, to obtain physical
  correct renderings. I'm sure most of them don't know that sometimes they put the fox in charge of the hen house
  this way. Why this?
  
  

• "Dome based lighting" by Aziz Khan
  Welcome to my tutorial on how to produce a dome based lighting efect. In this tutorial I will show you how to light
  up your scene using dome based lighting in Maya 8.0. I Iove this technique, because it's very fast when it comes to rendering and can save you alot of time when using this method.
  
  

• "Hand Modelling" by Sean Hewitt
  n this tutorial we will cover some of the methods I use to model a hand. A lot of the knowledge you need to do this
  is anatomy and observation. I’ll cover some of the tools I use and more importantly the patterns I implement.
  
  

• "Dynamic Suspension Rig" by Sean Hewitt
  I had had to make a rig for an underwater vehicle with some fly by wire parts coming off of it. We wanted to have
  control over them, and be able to position them by hand, but seeing as how everything was supposed to be under
  the sea, we really didn’t want to have to animate all the bobbing and swaying from the sea currents.
  
  

• "Simple Game Rig" by Sean Hewitt
  This tutorial is for people that already know a little about rigging. I won’t cover everything here.The goal of this tutorial
  is to show you how to make the most simple of simple game rigs. This set up is by no means perfect. What it is
  though is very simple to make, and it will cover the basics for those of you not completely familiar with rigging just
  yet. In making rigs your goal is rarely .....
  
  

• "Melting Text" by Aziz Khan
  And welcome to the wonderful world of fluids, My name is Aziz Khan and I will be your guide through this tutorial
  and I hope you all will enjoy doing this. In this tutorial we will explore some of the tools and options of fluid to create melting text effect like smoke. This tutorial is very handy for those of you who are looking to add something
  different and rather cool to your short movies or demo reel headers and intros.
  
  

• "How to render in less time" by Jaime Casanova
  There are many ways for decreasing the render time of project, this tutorial will explain how I've textured, lit,
  rendered and composited my projects. This will be very useful for people who don't have powerful computers
  and also people that do....
  
  

• "Smoothing groups in Maya" by Derek Smart
  Anyone who has used 3d Studio Max and then switched to Maya has always missed the use of Smoothing Groups.
  While Maya doesn't have Smoothing Groups, with a little bit of planning and work, we can achieve the same result
  for our low polygon models. We're gonna start off by modeling.....
  
  
  

• "Human Anatomy UV Coordinates Setup for Texturing" by Dylan Swan
  If you want to put textures on to your polygonal 3D model, then you need to create a UV texture map to make sure
  the textures line up correctly, otherwise they will appear stretched and blurred. It is fundamentally important because
  you will use the same map for colour....
  
  
  
• "Modelling a Plam Tree" by Derek Smart
  Welcome to the first part of this tutorial about how to create a palm tree.
  
  
  
• "Paint effect animation in Maya" by Isidro Fernandez
  Hi, welcome to the second part of the series of Paint Effects Articles. My name is Isidro Fernandez, and I want to say thanks to all of you for the comments I received from a lot of people who want to learn a little more. I'm really satisfied with the comments...
  
  
  
• "Realistic Grass in Maya" by Isidro Fernandez
  In this tutorial, I will describe how to create realistic 3d grass using Maya's Paint Effects.  Here is the final
  image that we will create...
  
  
  
• "mel ShapeEditor" by Martion Andersson
  In this tutorial I will go through how I created the final3 multiple shapeEditor. warning: this tutorial will be
  extremely long because I skip lines when I show examples. Experienced MEL scripters can skip a lot of this, but
  for an unexperienced one it will benefit them to have it listed like this.
  
  
  
• "Making of Beanpod Blooming" Wang Xiaoyu
  In China, there’s an ancient saying “a woman looks prettier when she looks back back over her shoulder with a smile. So, I chose this pose for this still.
  
  
  
• "Making of Skullhead Mobster" by Harshdeep Borah
  Hello My name is Harshdeep Borah. I'm originally from India, but did my CG studies from Vancouver, Canada. I am sharing my knowledge of how I made my latest character SKULLHEAD MOBSTER. I don't intend this to be an indepth tutorial, but more over a 'Making Of'. And I assume you have a good knowledge of your favorite 3d or 2d software.
  
  
  
• "Making of Zhou Zhaung" by Xu Fei
  Though I haven't been to Zhou Zhuang, I was attracted by the worn-out wall and the winding bridge when I saw the
  scene first time. Therefore I found some reference pictures from the network.
  
  
  
• "Creating Hydraulics in Maya" by Vishal Kawji
  This tutorial will cover the basics of creating a hydraulic arm.....