Creature Modelling

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Ok… I've put this off for a long time, so I've finally decided to sit down and write a tutorial on modeling. After going through tutorial after tutorial on modeling in poly's/sub-d's, I've come up with a workflow that works very well for me and hopefully you too. My co-workers jokingly call it "the Dave Way" .

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Creating a Detail Modelling a character

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Hello there, Welcome to my second tutorial. This one I will be sort of a guide how I go about modeling a head, I'm not sure if I will be covering anything new seeing as there's all ready so many great modeling tutorials out there.

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How to resolve an issue where smoothing a polygon mesh is giving unexpected result

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In this video we’re going to look at a question from one of our users, kohrtoons, on how we can resolve an issue where smoothing a polygon mesh is giving unexpected results.

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Create Awesome Cloth Simulations using nDynamics

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Final Result

 
Dynamics simulations can be a powerful tool when trying to generate realistic looking effects that would be very difficult to achieve manually. In this tutorial you will learn how to use nDynamics’ passive colliders and ncloth objects, in conjunction with fields like air and gravity, to easily simulate realistic dynamic objects such as a windy flag or a water container.

Step 1

Go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Plane”.



Step 2

Create a plane that matches the size of a flag and rotate it by ’90′ degrees.



Step 3

Open the Attributes Editor for the plane, name it, and increase the “Subdivisions Width” to ’30′, and the “Subdivisions Height” to ’50′.



Step 4

Your plane should now look like this:



Step 5

Go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder”



Step 6

Position the cylinder, and scale it to match the size of a flag pole.



Step 7

Select all the top faces of the pole.



Step 8

With the faces still selected, got to “Polygons > Edit Mesh > Extrude”.



Step 9

Extrude those faces until you get a nice pole shape.



Step 10

Select the top vertex of the pole.



Step 11

Use the move tool to position the vertex.



Step 12

Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade”.



Step 13

With “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.



Step 14

Open the Attributes Editor of the material you just created, name it, select the preset called “Copper”, and adjust the “Diffuse” and “Reflection” colors accordingly.



Step 15

Apply the material to the pole.



Step 16

Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade” again.



Step 17

With “Create mental ray Nodes active”, create a new “mia_material_x”.



Step 18

Go to the Attributes Editor of the material, name it, and decrease the “Reflectivity” value to ’0′.



Step 19

Click on the checkerboard button, to the right of the “Diffuse” color value, to open the “File” browser window.



Step 20

The Attributes Editor should now change. Select the image you want to use to texture the flag.



Step 21

Apply the material to the flag, and with the flag selected go to “Create UV´s > Planar Mapping”.



Step 22

Select the option highlighted below so you can see if the texture looks good.



Step 23

If your texture looks bad like mine, go to “Create UV´s > Planar Mapping (settings)”.



Step 24

This will open a new window where you can change the projection axis to whatever works for your scene, and then click “Project”.



Step 25

Your flag should now display the texture correctly.



Step 26

Select the flag, and in the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nMesh > Create nCloth”.



Step 27

Increase the number of frames of the animation.



Step 28

If you play the animation now, you will see that the flag just falls down. This is because the flag is not attached to the pole.



Step 29

Rewind the animation.



Step 30

Select the flag, and in the “Window” menu, go to “Show > Isolate Select > View Selected”.



Step 31

You should now only see the flag, which will make it easier to work with.



Step 32

Select all of the vertexes that you want to be attached to the pole.



Step 33

In the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nConstraint > Transform”.



Step 34

Select the flag, and in the “Window” menu go to “Show > Isolate Select > View Selected” this will make everything visible again.



Step 35

Select the pole.



Step 36

In the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nMesh > Create Passive Collider”.



Step 37

If you play the animation, you should now see the flag hanging from the pole. This is realistic, but an unmoving flag is not very dynamic, so let’s add some wind.



Step 38

Go to the Attributes Editor of the flag´s “nucleus1”, and in the “Gravity and Wind” section, change the following values:
Air Density = 10.000
Wind Speed = 8.000
Wind Direction = – 1.000 z axis



Step 39

If you play the animation now, it should look pretty good. All you need to do is smooth the polygons by pressing ’3′ on the keyboard (with the flag selected).



Step 40

Perfect! We are done with the first section of this tutorial, just don´t forget to save your scene!

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Floral Animation Paint Effects

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Final Product

 In today’s quicktip tutorial, Abed L. Ibrahim walks us through how to create impressive floral animations that grow gradually over time, using Maya Paint Effects. Let’s take a look!

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How to Create a Simple Crowd

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Introduction
To execute this tutorial you must download and install CrowdMaker 0.5 (or higher).
You can download the file at this link: web.tiscali.it/maya_tutorial.
The "CrowdMaker 0.5.rar" contains some scripts, a text file with an installation guide and sample scenes. On the next pages you can see the procedure to create a scene and the available functions to control the scripts. We limit the simulation to only 15 particles, the script work with a maximum of 1000 (visible in the next image).

Before beginning make sure to have a simple 3D model of a human and some animation clips. You can find on the web many pages that provides free Motion Capture material

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Create an Awesome Fire Effect

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In this tutorial you will learn how to create a fire animation inside Maya, and adjust the settings for your own projects. We will create the fire from scratch using Maya Dynamics and Fluids. The fire animation we will create can be rendered using both Maya software and Mental Ray.

Final Effect Preview

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Maya Essentials 6: Lights and Rendering (2013) - Preciux

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Level: Beginner 
Duration: 1h 52m 
Size: 207 MB 
Required Software: Maya 2013

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Maya Essentials 5: Animation Tools (2013) - Preciux

Level: Beginner 

Duration: 1h 21m 

Size: 228 MB 

Required Software: Maya 2013

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Maya Essentials 4: Creating Textures and Materials (2013) - Preciux

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Level: Beginner
Duration: 1h 51m
Size: 247 MB 
Required Software: Maya 2013

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Maya Essentials 3: NURBS Modeling Techniques (2013) - Preciux

Level: Beginner
Duration: 2h 18m 
Size: 358 MB 
Required Software: Maya 2013

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Maya Essentials 2: Polygonal Modeling Techniques (2013) - Preciux

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Level: Beginner 
Duration: 2h 17m 
Size: 318 MB 
Required Software: Maya 2013

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Maya Essentials 1: Interface and Organization(2013)

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Level: Beginner 
Duration: 1h 35m 
Size: 225 MB 
Required Software: Maya 2013.

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