You know the drill!

Another month has passed, which means it's time for another CG Recap.

Here's a rundown of some of the biggest news stories and best artwork from April 2012.

CG Recap - April 2012

See you next month!

For this month's final training series entry, we'll briefly touch on some of the techniques you can use to keep your Maya scenes organized.

Finished CG characters, scenes, or illustrations can contain hundreds of different polygon objects, so organization is crucial to your sanity.  By using groups, layers, and a few critical display options, working with complex scenes becomes a much more manageable task.

Here's the lesson:

Lesson 2.4 - Scene Organization

This will be the last "technical" lesson for awhile where our sole intention is to introduce new tools.  Expect a "hands on" tutorial next month where we'll tackle a basic modeling project step by step.

Using tools like bevel and extrude can occasionally leave us with irregularities in our model's topology or "edge flow."

In this next lesson we'll take a look at how we can use some of Maya's modeling tools to modify the topology of a 3D mesh.

We'll cover edge loops, combining objects, filling holes, and re-routing edges.

Maya Lesson 2.3 - Topology Tools

Hey folks!

We've got a few more lessons coming in the next few days to introduce some of the modeling tools we haven't gotten around to discussing, and then hopefully we'll be able to work on something a bit more "project oriented" next month.

In the meantime, here's a bit of introductory information on using Maya's extrude tool.

Pay close attention to this one, because the extrusion forms the core of just about every bit of modeling you'll do in Maya.  It's possible this  single most important technique in your workflow, so spend some extra time and make sure you know what's going on before moving on.

Here's the tutorial: Maya Lesson 2.2 - Extrusion