Aliasing Artifacts in Maya: a Technical Overview
You will learn how to look for some of the causes of aliasing then address these issues while maintaining good aliasing and faster rendering times.

Arm Set-Up in Maya
When setting up a character's arm in Alias|Wavefront Maya, people often overlook how things actually work below the elbow

Arm set-up with IK/FK
This tutorial outlines a technique which is quite handy when setting up an arm. Very often I see work where the movement/rotations

Basic Steps for Using the Connection Editor
In this editor, you could make connection between all components of Maya, you will learn to make connection between two o more objects.

Benelux MAYA Users Ring
Modeling the Figure by Peter Ratner; Completing the Human Figure by Peter Ratner; The Structure of the Head and Features

Building Leg Skeletons in Maya Using Detached Foot
Several different techniques exist for creating a controlled leg skeleton in Maya, and all of the best ones address the issue of animating the foot

Changing Frame Rate Without Changing Keyframes
Let's say you start working on an animation for video. After doing some work, you realize you had left your Units-Time preference

Character Modeling and Animation
The following collection of exercises explore the process of creating and animating a character in Alias Power Animator.

Completing the Human Figure
A few relevant details could be modeled before moving to the next level. Some of these are hair, eyelashes and clothes.

Creating a Cord Attached to Something on Each End
Start off by drawing the curve (Create -> CV curve tool), snapping the cv's to the grid one unit at a time along the

Creating Comments for MEL buttons
One of Maya's outstanding cababilities is MEL - Maya's scripting language. A very handy feature that goes with it is the ability to cut

Creating Softbodies in Character Animations
This lesson will demonstrate how to use softbodies for character animation purposes. You will also learn to use a lot of other tools and Maya

Creating Text and Materials
This tutorial will give you a little insigt into Maya, and will teach you how to create text, make a material with a texture and assigning it to the text

Data Visualizer Tutorial
This is a quickie tutorial of Wavefront's Data Visualizer. It is not meant to be a full, comprehensive tutorial, but merely an aid

Dealing with Surface Parameterization
If your somewhat new to texture mapping, you should read up a little on parameterization as it often causes a bit of confusion.

Display Resolution or Film Gate
It's important to know where the edge of frame is... but a bug and some unclear documentation has caused some confusion for us. Look at

Expressing Emotion
When animating emotion, a reliance on only facial animation will have little substance if it is not combined with the relevant posture of the body.

Facial and Head Modeling for Animation
The head on the left was modeled in PowerAnimator. It was designed for animation. While there is no right or wrong way to model a head,

How to Animate a Polygonal Tree with Particle System
For the following example a polyganal tree generated with Amap is use. The object is to use particle system to manage the orientation of

How to Animate Camera Cuts
When animating, you may want to be able to cut between several cameras that look at your scene from different points of view.

How to Animate Texture Files
This lesson will demonstrate how to use a numbered sequence of images as a texture map. There are basically two methods to achieve

How to Build a Head
This is a head I modelled in the spring of 1996. The grid shows the UV paramaterization of the NURBS surface. Follow the steps below if

How to Build a Level Using File Referencing
In this lesson, you will learn how to build a level using existing assets and referencing them into your scene.

How to Build a Polygonal Gear
In this lesson, you will learn how to build a gear by starting with a polygonal cylinder then pulling vertices

How to Build a Spiral Staircase
In this lesson, you will learn how to build a spiral staircase using polygon booleans and a bend deformer.

How to Combine Bump & Displacement Maps
In this lesson, you will learn how to combine a displacement map and bump map to create a brick texture. You will also learn how to use the

How to Create 3D Text from Vector Art
In this lesson you will learn how to create 3D text using curves imported from an EPS file.

How to Create a Ball ENV Reflection Map
In Maya, reflections can be achieved in one of two ways. You can either raytrace the scene or you can map the reflected color

How to Create a Double-sided Shader
In this lesson, you will learn how to create a two-sided shading group where you have one material node on one side and a different

How to Create a Pumpkin Face
Let's create Jack, the devilish pumpkin! Start with a new scene and create a NURBS sphere; rename it Pumpkin.

How to Create a Ghost Shader
In this lesson, you will learn how to create a shading network that has a soft, fuzzy look. You will be using the SamplerInfo utility nod

How to Create a Hand Controller
In this tutorial you will learn how to make controllers to better animate a hand. This method can be use with any set of joints.

How to Create a Light Gobo with Barn Doors
In this lesson, you will learn how to simulate the shadow coming from a window with blinds using a light gobo.

How to Create a Moving Tentacle
Stage 1: Creating the Tentacle animation. Go into the side view and create a curve. Rebuild the curve with more CV's

How to Create a Realistic Sky with the EnvSky Texture
The environment sky is a powerful procedural texture that you can quickly and easily add to your scene to give the appearance of a sky overhead.

How to Create a Realistic Shadow with EnvSky
In this lesson you will use your environment sky texture from the last lesson and link a directional light to the elevation and azimuth that

How to Create a Soft Spotlight
In this lesson, you will learn how to create a spot light with soft lighting and shadows. This will involve the setting of several light attributes

How to Create a Volume Filled Uniformly with Particles
What I`ll try to explain here is my solution to fill a closed volume uniformly with particles.

How to Create Bevel Text with Nurbs
Select the inside curve of the first O and go again to the options of the bevel. Make sure this time you change the Bevel Width has to be to -0.1

How to Create Mechanical Stairs
This tutorial is about creating a set of mechanical stairs, like the ones in shopping centres, undergrounds, and so on.

How to Create Real Smoke using Software Render
Make a Nurbs Plane and Change plane scale to 4 in all axis. Add an emiter to it. Open the attribute editor of the Plane and Change Emiter Rate

How to Create Realistic Glass
In this lesson, you will learn how to create a glass shader that uses a samplerInfo node and several blendColor nodes to add more realism

How to Create Square Surfaces
In this lesson, you will build two surfaces using the Square tool. You will learn how to create a square surface using four boundary

How to Make a Cartoon Shader
In this lesson, you will learn how to create a cartoon shader. By combining several utility nodes to remap a Blinn material node using

How to Make a Chicken
I modeled this chicken over the course of a couple of evenings. I needed a character that would offset my last one, the Rabbit of the Apocalypse.

How to Make Natural Clouds
In this lesson you will learn how to create fly-through, shadowable clouds. To achieve this result, you will create a shading network

How to Make Water Ripple
In this lesson you will learn how to create ripples on water that appear to cross over and float through each other.

How to Model a FLEXO with Maya
This is a tutorial to create and make fully operative, with Maya, a Flexo-type arm like those used to hold lights.

How to Prelight a Scene
In this lesson, you will use the PRELIGHT operation to prelight a scene. This will store the lighting and shadow information

How to Set Up Raytraced Reflections and Refractions
In this lesson, you will learn how to set up a scene for reflections and refractions. Both of these effects require Raytracing

How to Share Texture Nodes
In this lesson, you will learn how to use the same ramp texture node to define the transparency, specular color and bump maps.

How to Show a Node Buried in the Hypergraph
In a complex scene, the display of nodes in the hypergraph can become large, and it can become difficult to find a specific node.

How to Use Animated Sweep and Snapshot
In this lesson, you will learn how to use animated snapshot and animated sweep to create a spiral staircase.

How to Use 'Center of Interest' with Depth of Field
So you've spent days setting up your scene, models, animation, lights, and textures. You're now ready to hit the render button

How to Use Depth of Field
This tutorial will teach you how to use Depth of Field in Maya to help add some realism of your renderings and animations.

How to Use Multi-texturing
In this lesson, you will learn how to use layered textures as well as creating multiple UV sets.

How to Use the "bevelCaps" MEL Script
In this lesson you will learn how to use the bevelCaps.mel script. This script will add planar surfaces to the top and bottom of the selected

How to Use the Two Bone IK Solver
In this lesson, you will learn how to set-up and use the two bone IK solver. This solver is ideal in setting up characters for use in a Real

How to Work with NURBS Booleans
In this lesson you will learn how to create shapes using NURBS booleans. A NURBS boolean operation treats two or more surfaces like solids

Introduction to Wavefront
This document outlines the use of the basic features of Wavefront, a modeling, rendering, and animation package from Wavefront

Jakes' Alias Bible
Don't forget to hit reload to see what's new. Any questions or additions? Please contact me, Jake Morrison Care to check out the

Learning to use SVE for Virtual Environments
This document is intended to help you begin to use the tools available at Georgia Tech for creating interactive, real-time virtual

Making an Advanced Arm Skeleton
In this tutorial we'll tackle how to utilize and combine particles and dynamics in a skeleton setup.

Making an Advanced Leg Skeleton
In this tutorial I tried to explain my solution to make an easy to animate leg skeleton approach.

Mapping objects in Maya using Alpha maps
A lot of people using Maya has been asking about proper mapping for polygons and I find alpha maps the most

Maya 4.0 Reference Guide
A complete Reference guide to Maya 4.0. Advanced Align curves, manipulator tool and channel box Cloth, creating cloth objects

Maya Software Rendering: a Technical Overview
This document describes some of the technical details of the Maya 1.0 Software Renderer. It assumes some technical knowledge

MEL Scripting in Maya
Scripting. The mere mention of it is enough to make most 3D artists break out in a cold sweat. But while any animators do their best

Modeling a Cartoon Bird
Every project starts from sketches. I do lots of skeches before starting modeling - it helps to visualize

Modeling a Head with Subdivision Emulation in Maya
This tutorial explores the process of modeling a 3D character head in Maya Complete using subdivision emulation. This technique is faster,

Modeling a Human Ear
I'm doing this tutorial because there seems to be a lack of ear tutorials on the web. At least it seems that way to me.

Modeling a Human Figure
The following instructions illustrate this method. I have adapted this technique to modeling a male body.

Modeling a NURBS Head UPDATED
There are many approaches to modeling the human head. Most of these methods were designed to accomplish specific

Modeling a Shampoo Bottle
I am gonna try to hold your hand as much as possible, because that is the way I like it You will get discouraged

Modeling a Ship in Alias|Wavefront's Maya 2.0
One crucial thing to do before modeling is to do research. I searched the web and found images of cruise ships.

Model an Alien in Maya
Thanks to a vast array of modelling tools, you can create this fearsome intergalactic creature in Maya by following our walkthrough...

Organic Modeling and Animation in Maya Part 1
As a character designer and animator, I have struggled for the past five years with software which kept me from incorporating

Organic Modeling and Animation in Maya Part 2
In this month's article I will be concentrating on kinematic set-up and workflow for my character Lanker, with whom I wanted

Organic Modeling and Animation in Maya Part 3
Maya's toolset for high-res character deformation and animation offers great precision, flexibility and intuitiveness.

Particle Runtime Rules
If you write runtime rules for particles, you often will need to be aware of the dynamics oversampling rate.

Putting a Label on a Bottle
Please note that the modelling is very basic and is only used here to support the shading. It is very similar to the glass

Seamless Texturing
I'm sure that some of you were confronted to the Non-seamless texture maps in there every day work in 3D.

Shader transparency from image file alpha channel
We often create image files with an associated alpha channel, then we want to use the rgb as a color texture and the alpha

Text Out of Polygons
Maya provides tools to build geometry out of NURBS or polygons. I've noticed that which is the better tool is sometimes

Texture Resolution
A common question when new to texture mapping, is what resolution should textures be? This is assuming that you are going

Top Ten Maya Tips and Tricks
First, a note about this list. It is not a list of incredibly complex recipes for never-before-seen effects.

Turn auto exposure off for glows in animations
If you use shader glows or any of the optical fx features, things will look great on your test images, but when you render

Turning Depth Map Auto Focus Off
When using depth map shadows, the map resolution is very important to the quality of the shadow