Justin's 3D Blog

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

Maya has a powerful modeling tool-set with dozens of different tools.

Although it'd be impossible (and unnecessary) to cover every single one of them, there are a handful of techniques that you'll use over, and over, and over in your modeling projects.

For the next three or four entries in the Maya training series, we'll begin introducing some of these tools and how you can use them to modify the shape and topology of your polygonal models.

We'll e kick things off by taking a look at the Insert Edge Loop Tool and the Bevel command.

Lesson 2.1 - Insert Edge Loop & Bevel

Another day, another bit of training!

For the final entry in Lesson 1, we're tackling Maya's selection and duplication options.

It's all fairly straightforward, but (for selection at least) there are quite a few keyboard commands to be memorized.

Be sure to spend some time practicing the concepts we introduce—repetition is the easiest way to learn this stuff!

Here's the lesson: Selection & Duplication Tools in Maya.

We've got another training series installment for you, and this time we'll finally start moving some objects around the Maya view-port.

In this lesson we'll begin exploring the three major object manipulation tools in Maya--translate, scale, and rotate--and discuss some of the specifics for each tool.

We'll also take another look at the channel box and how it can be used in cases where extra precision is desirable.

Here's the new material:

Maya Lesson 1.4 - Translate, Scale, and Rotate.

And if you missed the first couple lessons, here's a link to the beginning.

See you tomorrow with another entry!

Hello everyone! Awhile back we started our introductory crash course in Autodesk Maya, but it fell by the wayside while we worked on other things.

This month we made it our, and have begun working to make our Maya training series the best resource it can possible be.

There's still a ton of work to be done, but we're happy to say that we'll be adding new additions to the training series every day for the rest of the month!

Today's addition is Lesson 1.3, which focuses on Creating Primitive Objects in Maya.

Sitni Sati announced earlier today that version 3.0 of their wildly popular and endlessly impressive FumeFX plugin for 3ds Max is now available, sporting an enticing array of new features and workflow enhancements.

But the real news here is that they've also announced that they're working with Digic and Luma Pictures to develop a version of the plugin for Maya.

Maya already has an integrated simulation engine,  but it's notoriously slow to work with and computationally expensive.

For some time now, 3ds Max has been the sole beneficiary of some killer simulation plugins, namely FumeFX, Krakatoa, and Thinking Particles, while Maya's user base has been left out in the cold.

Now that Krakatoa is being released as a stand-alone app, and FumeFX is on the way for Maya, you can bet users will be chomping at the bits to try their hand at some explosive particle simulations.

Here's the PR, and here's a short YouTube clip if you want to see what FumeFX is all about

(Hint: really big explosions).

Want to see what a pro-level rig for facial animation looks like?

Check out the unbelievable rigging reel that Ozgur Aydogdu posted on Vimeo a few weeks ago for his character, "Cenk."

This is getting quite a response from the CG community, and deservedly so—the rig looks like it would be an absolute pleasure to animate with. No doubt we'll be seeing more of Ozgur's work in future feature animations (if we haven't already).