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This week’s recommended resource comes from Eric Luhta, and his ‘How to Cheat in Maya 2010‘.

Take your animations to the next level with this essential guide to Maya 2010. Packed with character animation techniques and the secrets of professional animators, How to Cheat in Maya 2010 provides the tips and tools to help you create high quality animation in the most efficient way possible. This comprehensive guide to animating with Maya contains gold-mine coverage, including animation techniques, using Maya’s tools with the 12 animation principles, working with constraints, and even foolproof lighting tricks to show off your work.

With this essential handbook, learn which circumstances call for which techniques, and how to get quality results fast. You will not only learn how to be productive in Maya, but also be given access under the hood to the actual scene files of a professional animator. Covering such topics such as pose to pose blocking, layered animation, fixing gimbal lock, facial animation, and much more, How to Cheat in Maya 2010 is an invaluable resource for artists and animators alike.

With Maya2011 around the corner, it can’t hurt to brush up on some of the lesser-used features of 2010 in preparation.  This book is available at Amazon and in the VizWorld.com Store.

Graphics feature, maya, resource of the week

Autodesk has just announced the newest version of the 3ds Max modeling and rendering package, 3ds Max 2011.  From the initial announcements, it sounds impressive:

“Our first priority with 3ds Max 2011 was to make artists more productive in common everyday workflows,” said Stig Gruman, Autodesk vice president of digital entertainment. “We have re-architected core parts of the software, introduced a much requested node based material editor streamlining workflows and added new features, like the painting tools and the Quicksilver hardware renderer, to help customers meet or beat their deadlines without compromising either creativity or quality.”

But that’s not all.  They also have just announced a new Maya 2011 to match:

“Maya continues to help artists set new standards in entertainment with credits such as ‘Avatar’ and ‘Uncharted 2: Among Thieves,’” said Stig Gruman, Autodesk vice president of digital entertainment. “The 2011 release is a key milestone for Maya. With a new customizable UI and a new graphics architecture, Maya strengthens its position as a foundation for modern film and game pipelines. The innovative 3D editorial timeline helps communicate and validate the creative vision behind a project and enables previs and virtual moviemaking workflows for users.”

Both products seem to share the always-present-and-frustrating UI redesign, as well as some other fantastic features like compositors, hardware renderers, and more.

Read the full releases for all the details.  Both products will be available in April.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, maya, software

VRay users can check out the new collection of shaders for Maya, created by Paul Markowski Dreisen and Oilver.  In addition to the shaders, you can download a MEL script that can convert 3dsMax materials into VRay Shaders suitable for Maya.

Check out sample renders of the shaders here.

Check out the MEL script here.

Vray For Maya Shaderlibrary | cgheute.

Graphics maya, shaders, vray

Autodesk has named the recipients of their prestigious Masters awards for 2009, handing out 15 awards to 3ds Max, Softimage, and Maya experts.

Over the past few months we’ve asked you, as a member of the 3D Community, to nominate talented artists for Autodesk Maya® Master, 3ds Max® Master, and Softimage® awards for 2009.

All of the talented people nominated were recognized as exceptional people doing exceptional things with—and for—3D CG through the work they produce, through mentoring, and for their contribution to advancing the Autodesk tools they use. Then we asked you, 3ds Max, Maya, and Softimage artists, to vote—and vote you did—by the thousands.

Congratulations to all the winners!

via The Area :: Autodesk Masters :: Autodesk® Masters 2009.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, maya, softimage

Illuminate Labs has just released a new version of their precomputing lighting texture baking tool Turtle for Autodesk’s Maya 2010, and updated their gallery to show its use in several new games.

Based on the same core lighting technology, LiquidLight®, as the world’s leading game lighting middleware, Beast™, the brand new Turtle 5.1 includes several new features boosting productivity as well as visual quality.

“Titles like Dante’s Inferno, Dragon Age: Origins, EVE Online and God of War III prove Turtle to be a lighting tool that any Maya game studio should consider.” says Magnus Wennerholm, CEO.

Be sure to hit their Gallery and see the screenshots for EVE Online, Army of Two: 40th Day, and WET.

via Turtle now supports Autodesk Maya 2010 — Illuminate Labs.

Graphics maya, software, texture, turtle

FurryBall, a GPU accelerated renderengine for Autodesk Maya boasts real-time simulation of lighting effects and physics inside the native Maya Environment.  From their website:
Have you ever dreamed of a 3D renderer implemented directly into Maya 3D that has the capacity to light, rotate, or change parameters  in real-time in scenes that contain textures, bump maps, soft shadows, reflections, refractions, and dynamic hair? (…)

Graphics furryball, maya, realtime, renderer

Montreal based “Artificial Mind and Movement” (A2M) recently released “WET”, their third-person mature shooter combining acrobatics and swordplay that uses an interesting dual-targeting mechanic.  Autodesk products were instrumental in the development of the game and a press release from Autodesk details how they used Maya, MotionBuilder, and Kynapse to pull it all together. (…)

Graphics a2m, autodesk, kynapse, maya, motionbuilder, videogame

Designorati’s Jeremy Schultz has a nice review up of the new Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2010, which includes Maya 2010, Mudbox 2010, MotionBuilder 2010, and more. (…)

Graphics autodesk, maya, motionbuilder, mudbox, review, software

Autodesk has published their Design Visualization Showreel 2009, showcasing some of the most amazing 3ds Max and Maya work I’ve ever seen.  Including automotive, architectural, environmental, and geospatial visualizations it encompasses stuff you’ve seen on Television and movies with stuff you’ve probably never even considered. (…)

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, maya, reel

Jan-Bart van Beek is Art Director at Guerrilla, the video game company responsible for the Killzone series popular on the Playstation.  In an interview with CGSociety, he gets into the details of how they built the characters for the new KILLZONE2 and the difficulties in modeling for real-time systems. (…)

Graphics guerrilla, interview, killzone, maya, video game

Christopher Adajar is the winner of the recent CGArena competition themed “Accident” in which he modeled an unfortunate biker crashing his Kawasaki at high-speed in what could only result in a wicked case of road rash.  He writes up his project for CGArena:
Maya 2008 was the primary software used for building the entire scene, Photoshop for painting textures, ZBrush for sculpting and After Effects for compositing. (…)

Graphics cgarena, contest, maya, zbrush

Imagi Studios invested $65 Million to create the CG Hit “Astro Boy”, and used Autodesk’s Maya along with a lot of proprietary software to bring it to the big screen. (…)

Graphics astroboy, autodesk, imagi, maya, movie, vfx

So you’ve just spent 100 hours making a fantastic model, complete with bumpmaps, lighting, environmental effects and high-resolution textures.  The next step is to present it in a fashion that accurately represents the work you put into it, and makes the best presentation possible.  A new tutorial on CGArena by Ashraf Aiad does just that. (…)

Graphics maya, modeling, photoshop, tutorial

Niklas Brandin has a new tutorial over at CGArena illustrating the use of Maya’s nParticles system to create snow on top of a model.
Making snow in maya 2010.

Graphics maya, tutorial

Over on YouTube is a video showing a new Maya deformer called “fStretch” that offers real-time interactive manipulation and recomputation of surfaces. (…)

Graphics fstretch, maya, plugin, software

EpochTimes has a great review of Autodesk’s Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2010 where they detail not only the new features available in Maya 2010, but also in MotionBuilder and Mudbox. (…)

Graphics autodesk, maya, mudbox, review, software

AMD just released a new plugin for Autodesk’s Maya for all of you Radeon owners, enabling the AMD Tessellation hardware in the popular modeling and rendering tool. (…)

Graphics amd, autodesk.plugin, maya, software, tessellation

An interesting new piece of freely available software allows you to load point clouds from Pixar’s Renderman into Maya for visualization.  You can download the source & binaries from their website. (…)

Graphics maya, pixar, renderman, software

“Defying Gravity” follows the lives of a small group of astronauts onboard an international spaceship in the year 2052, and obviously contains hundreds of special effects shots due to the environment.  Several of those shots were done by Stargate Studios, and fxguide sits down with visual effects supervisor Sam Nicholson about some of the more impressive effects. (…)

Graphics maya, stargate studios, television, vfx

Our good friend Eugene Liscio has spent some time trying out some fantastic point-cloud manipulation software from Alice Labs called “Studio Clouds”, and has written a great description and review of the system that we feature here. Also be sure to check out Eugene’s previous contributions.

3D scanning using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) also known as High Density Surveying (HDS) is a rapidly growing domain with applications spanning across many industries such as aerospace, architecture, film and television, archaeology and forensics. The ability to capture millions and even billions of 3D points means that a vast amount of information can be known about a particular object or landscape. However, all this data comes at a price. There are relatively few software solutions that can easily handle and process billions points on a PC.

Today, PC hardware has made great advances to close the processing power gap, however when it comes to point clouds, it is the software and visualization tools that are still playing “catch up”. There have been several software programs supplied by 3D scanning equipment manufacturers in order to assist in filling the void, but this has mainly been targeted at the surveying market and only recently have developments been made to provide better visualization tools for other sectors of industry such as Forensics and Gaming.

One company that has had an interesting approach to solving these issues is the Dutch based company, Alice Labs. Their product, Studio Clouds offers a different paradigm in preparing, analyzing and visualizing point clouds. Their efforts have been focused in areas where other technologies have been lacking. Studio Clouds can process billions of points of data on a standard 32 or 64 bit PC with ease and it can also allow the import of these massive point clouds in 3DS Max and Maya.

Read the rest after the break.

Read more…

Science 3dsmax, alice labs, feature, lidar, liscio, maya, software, studio clouds