We will start by discussing the foundational skills and vocabulary that will be essential as you begin your Maya learning. From there we will move directly into modeling, where we will begin building the vehicle that will be used for the duration of this course. Once the vehicle is built we will move into texturing, rigging, animation, dynamics, and we will finish up with the lighting and rendering of our final animation.

We will start off by learning the basic approach to rendering anything in Maxwell Render, and some important concepts to be aware of whenever starting out with Maxwell. We will then learn how to control the amount of render time that goes into our scenes, we will discuss the Maxwell camera attributes, which play a critical role in the appearance of our rendered images, we will learn how to begin using the physically-correct Maxwell materials to help push our renders to deeper levels of realism, we will discuss the process of creating and controlling light sources, as well as many additional topics and workflows that will help you to get started with Maxwell Render.

These lessons will guide you through lighting for sets and characters in two scenes: one interior and one exterior. Lighting and rendering are often the biggest bottleneck for student and independent productions and can grind a project to a halt. In these lessons we'll focus on the tools and techniques that will help your lighting stay lean without sacrificing quality. Along the way we'll learn about the tools, techniques, and terminology used in character lighting.

In Volume 9 of this 'Transforming Robot Production Pipeline' series, we will discuss the techniques that were used and some of the issues that were encountered during the lighting and rendering of this transforming robot project. We will look at how we went about matching the lighting between our CG and live-action elements, setting up our materials and textures, and rendering all of the passes and other information that our compositing artists will be using during Volume 10 of this series.

We will begin the tutorial by learning the importance of a proper linear workflow whenever dealing with lighting scenarios where realism is of the utmost importance. We will learn how to set up and place light sources within our scene, we will discuss concepts regarding real-world light behavior, and how those principles become very important during the lighting of our scene, as well as many additional topics, tips and techniques that you can put to immediate use in your own studio lighting scenarios.

Throughout these lessons we'll create a shot that resembles realistic-looking video footage that would otherwise be difficult to shoot. This tutorial offers an overview of key moments from the production that can inspire. Its lessons cover everything from initial analysis, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering to final comp using primarily modo and Fusion. The discussed techniques are, however, easily applicable to other mainstream applications.

These videos will walk through the essential tools for creating photorealistic materials. We'll start with establishing our shading toolkit through the various models of simulating real-world light interactions. Then we'll jump into a series of challenging material types, and develop the basic shading networks required to make them happen.

Throughout this tutorial we are going to talk about the core feaures of RealFlow. Starting with the basics, we'll discuss the fundamental parameters of a standard SPH system as well as looking at the Hybrido solver. We'll also cover some meshing techniques using the RenderKit particle mesher to avoid flickering issues. Then we'll look at how to render our mesh in V-Ray for Maya and finally how to composite our passes in NUKE. After completing this tutorial, we'll have a much better understanding of the entire process to make a realistic and believable fluid.

Displacement maps are especially practical for users of ZBrush or Mudbox, who want to render their highly detailed creations in Maya with the utmost speed and efficiency. We will begin this tutorial by learning the basic steps of connecting your displacement maps and controlling the strength of your rendered displacement effects. From there, we will learn about Approximations, and the critically-important role they play in controlling the speed and quality of our rendered displacement effects. Along the way, we will help you identify and work through a number of common displacement-related issues that you may encounter when working on your own projects.

From a reference picture to the finished shader, these videos will show how to choose the shading models and surface parametrizations to use. We will go over the math and physics involved and how to derive a shader implementation. We will address the issues caused by using raytracing as well as animation whithin the shader and support for use of the shader with Maya's particle system.

We will begin the tutorial by learning how to set up a realistic outdoor illumination source, and how to simulate physically-accurate light behavior within our scene. We will then discuss the importance of incorporating a proper linear workflow into our pipeline, which includes using gamma-correction on our textures and materials within Maya. We will also see how we can use a post application like Photoshop to add some finishing touches to our final render with a minimal amount of effort. By the time you complete this course, you will be much better prepared to overcome many of the common challenges faces when rendering an outdoor environment in Maya.

We will begin these lessons with the final result from the Creative Development: Modeling a Cowgirl Character in Maya and Silo with Antony Ward tutorial. We will continue on with our cowgirl character and take her to the next level. By adding color, light and texture we will bring her to life all while sharing some essential time-saving tips. Starting in Maya, we will explore how to light the scene before we apply and adjust a series of shaders to add a splash of color. We will then output the various render passes we need to move into Photoshop and enhance the overall image. Finally, we will work in some finer details as we apply layers of texture before we complete her look by painting in her hair and adding a background. By the end of this tutorial you will have a good understanding of lighting and rendering in Maya, along with working with render passes and image-based lighting. You will also be confident in taking a render into Photoshop to enhance its look without the use of UVs or complex shaders.

Throughout the tutorial, we'll cover all of the hidden details that are needed to use HDR imagery for lighting in Maya. We'll start with physically based lighting, world scene scale, color management, proper render preview and verification of valid floating point linear color images. Once the rules for using HDR images are clearly laid out, we will take a look at how you can create your own HDR images at home using a DSLR camera, tripod, nodal head and software. Lastly, we'll go over examples of using and editing these images for a variety of indoor and outdoor lighting situations as well as covering light extraction and making HDR kooks from an HDR photo of a light.

We will begin with an explanation of the linear workflow process, and help to clarify exactly why a linear workflow is needed is order to get lighting results that are much more realistic. From there, we will learn the various steps for setting up a linear workflow in Maya, including the use of Maya's Color Management features, gamma-correcting images and textures to be rendered and displayed correctly, maintaining a proper linear workflow during the compositing phase, and many additional tips and techniques that will help you get much more realistic lighting results with significantly less effort.

Throughout these lessons we'll delve into the animated growth of a tree branch as a time-lapse video. We'll learn everything from modeling, texturing and shading to the animation and final compositing. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a better understanding of how you can employ efficient and productive techniques for a time-lapse video that can be used when up against a tight deadline.

We will begin this tutorial with the simulation of our RealFlow assets, and discuss some important RealFlow settings to keep in mind as we prepare our assets to be used within Maya. Once we bring our RealFlow assets into Maya, we will explore topics that include setting up shaders and materials for realistic water, controlling the rendered appearance of RealFlow splash particles, rendering Hybrido foam and whitecaps in Maya, incorporating mist into our renders, and we will learn how all of these things can be accomplished without having to rely on the RealFlow RenderKit for Maya. By the time you complete this tutorial, you will have a better understanding of how to render your own Hybrido simulations using Maya.

While this series of tutorials is not a step-by-step guide, they instead offer an in-depth look at the key aspects of production that goes into creating realistic-looking shots that would otherwise be difficult to shoot without the aid of computer graphics. These tutorials will cover everything from the concept sketches and visualization to modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering and final compositing of the photorealistic shots. While the tools used in this series of tutorials are primarily Maya and modo, the techniques discussed are easily applicable to other mainstream applications.

We're going to be covering many topics, such as why we break Maya scenes into layers, getting the most information out of Maya for high dynamic range composites and how to process EXRs for much faster interaction in NUKE. From there we'll examine some render pass and layer workflows that will eliminate errors and give us much more flexibility in NUKE. Finally we'll jump completely into NUKE and look at some compositing techniques for CG renders and finally unravel the proper premultiply workflow.

Over the tutorial we will learn how to efficiently model by only modeling what we need and how to reuse basic base meshes as starting points. Then we will look at how to efficiently UV map, looking at techniques to quickly produce distortion free UVs. Then using Ambient Occlusion bakes as starting points for our textures we will look at a efficient and repeatable texturing process. We will then look at how to pose our characters, setup shaders to replicate advanced effects such as refraction and sub-surface scattering, before setting up render passes and layers for compositing. Finally we will bring it all together in Photoshop using our layers to composite and adjust our image before looking at some final techniques to complete our 3D Illustration.

We’ll begin this project by creating a procedural dirt shader for our ground cover. Then we'll hop into Photoshop to create a photographic texture for our road. We'll then add some detail using more procedural textures to break up the edges of the road and create a broken concrete feel. From there we will set up a particle system for our tires and create render layers and passes. Finally we will composite our shot using the Maya Precomp feature and Maya Composite. We'll learn how to color correct our passes, add various blurs and composite everything together into an integrated shot.

Intended for small-scale productions, this tutorial walks through one lighting and rendering workflow that introduces new tools, techniques, and workarounds. We will exploit the environment-sampling power of portal lights, build a fake GI solution with projected light fields, and use MEL scripts to automate tedious tasks. These methods won't work for every scenario, but they can be very useful tools for the guerrilla CG filmmaker.

Understanding how the various lighting tools in Maya work and behave is a very important skill for anyone who is getting started with this 3D application. In this Maya lighting tutorial, we will discuss the different types of 3D lights found in Maya, and methods for easily aiming and controlling your lights. We will also explore some of the specialized attributes found in certain light types, we will discuss the different types of shadows available in Maya, we will see how we can add depth and mood to our scenes though the use of volumetric light rays, as well as many other lighting tools and concepts that will help you establish a solid foundation in Maya.

Shading networks can be used in many different aspects of Maya including material and texture creation, lighting, special effects, and rigging just to name a few. Because these networks are widely used throughout Maya, this is one aspect of the application that nearly all Maya artists should be familiar with. This course will explore topics such as using various render nodes to create complex material and texture effects, building shading networks to simulate atmospheric effects, using shading networks for lighting purposes, and many other topics that will allow you to become a stronger, more efficient Maya artist.

The ability to realistically light an interior environment is a skill that is highly sought after in the CG industry. It is a skill that is used very heavily in areas such as feature films, games, and architectural visualizations. This course will explore the entire, step-by-step process of lighting your scenes. We will start by learning how to make sure that our lights are behaving in a way that is physically accurate by utilizing real-world light data in our scenes. From there, we will learn how to incorporate realistic secondary illumination into our scenes, learn how to create physically-accurate materials in Maya, and explore many techniques and workflows designed to help you overcome many of the common issues that you are likely to encounter in your own scenes.

We will start off by learning how to navigate through the Maya interface, and moving the Maya virtual cameras. We will then explore many critical aspects of Maya, such as creating and manipulating primitive objects, understanding the various components of Maya geometry, animating objects in Maya, working with lights and shadows, adding materials and textures to our scenes, rendering out animated sequences, and many other concepts that will help you get a solid foundational understanding of Maya and it's capabilities.

Using Render Elements, we can quickly render our scenes out in multiple passes, which can be re-assembled in an external compositing application. The advantage to rendering in multiple passes is that we gain a much greater level of control over the final image result. This course will teach you how to fully utilize many of the Render Elements available in V-Ray, such as the separation lights, shadows, reflections and highlights into individual passes, as well as how to properly reassemble your passes in an external compositing application. We will also learn how to render specific materials and textures out to their own Render Elements as well as many other topics and workflows designed to help you become a stronger, more efficient rendering artist with V-Ray.

The ability to set up realistic lighting for an interior environment is a skill that is highly sought after in the CG industry. Problems to overcome, arise with every digital set. So we will be covering a lot of very common issues that you will want to be aware of such as using V-Ray lights to create physically-accurate light behavior, achieving realistic light bouncing in our scene, optimizing our render speed, using V-Ray materials to simulate a variety of surface types, using an external image-editing application to add some finishing touches to our renders, as well as many other tips, tricks, and techniques that will help you become a stronger, more effective rendering artist in V-Ray.

These Hypershade nodes can be used to create a variety of effects and many of these nodes provide us a number of additional controls over our V-Ray renders. For example, we will be taking an in-depth look at a number of nodes that can be used individually or used together to create a variety of surface material types that obey real-world laws of optics. We will also learn a variety of methods for adding volumetric effects to our renders, creating subsurface scattering materials, using geometry as a direct illumination source, along with many other lessons dedicated to the various V-Ray nodes found in Maya's Hypershade.

We'll begin this project by learning about the theories behind camera projection what makes a good image to project. We'll then set-up our camera in Maya for match moving and look at a technique to get our camera in the correct position. Once we've set our camera, we'll create the projection shader. We'll then model the rest of our building and animate a new camera. We'll then look at various techniques of completing our scene and adding a sky dome. We'll finish by taking the extra step of adding reflective geometry for increased realism.

We'll begin the tutorial by learning about the theories behind camera projection what makes a good image to project. We'll then set-up our camera in Maya for match moving and look at a technique to get our camera in the correct position. We'll then model the our buildings and animate a new camera. Then we'll export our Maya data and bring it in to NUKE's 3D toolset and set-up our projections. We'll finish the scene in NUKE by creating a sky dome and using it's 2d tools to create appealing effects. Finally, we'll use Maya's mental ray renderer to create realistic reflections and composite them on top of our NUKE projections to create our final composite.

We will begin this course by learning how to import RealFlow meshes into Maya, and we will go step-by-step through the process of adding lights, materials and proper render settings to mimic appearance of realistic glass and liquid materials. From there, we will go deeper into the integration process, learning how to take geometry from Maya into RealFlow, using RealFlow's soft and rigid body dynamics to create moving objects, as well as understanding how scene scale plays a critical role in the behavior of our simulations. We will learn how to cache and re-use RealFlow simulation data and discuss many tips, tricks and techniques that you will be able to use in both the simulation and the rendering stages of your RealFlow projects.

The RealFlow RenderKit is an extremely powerful set of tools for rendering RealFlow particle data directly within our primary 3D application. With the RealFlow RenderKit, we have the ability to control the size and shape of our rendered particles, we can increase or decrease the number of particles that are rendered, and we can also shade our particles based on RealFlow magnitude data. Using the RealFlow RenderKit, we can also generate meshes around our particles at render time, eliminating the need to mesh our particles inside of RealFlow. During this course, we will also discuss how RealFlow particles can be rendered as volumetric clouds, as well as learning how to import RealFlow displacement map sequences into Maya for Rendering.

This tutorial is designed for users who are just getting started with rendering in Maya, so we will not be focusing heavily on using lights, materials or recipes to give your render a specific look. Instead, our focus will be on helping you build a strong foundational knowledge of rendering in Maya by talking about many of the key tools, features and concepts that every rendering artist in Maya really needs to be familiar with. In this tutorial, we will also learn how to resolve some rendering-related issues that you may encounter, and we will focus very heavily on helping you develop good habits and strong workflow practices that will be extremely beneficial to you as an emerging render artist.

The process of creating polygonal hair is particularly useful when creating characters for use in a real-time game engine, where it's not effective to utilize a true hair dynamics system. The focus of this training is going to be on creating polygonal hair which is simple enough to be used inside of a game engine but still has the visual appearance of something that is much more complex. We will start this course by exploring some techniques for creating polygonal hair and styling the hair to have the look we want. From there, we will jump into Adobe® Photoshop® and create a series of color maps and transparency maps which will give our hair geometry the realism and complexity we need. Finally in the tutorial, we will learn how we can incorporate some subtle shadowing from the hair into our character's face, allowing for a more realistic end result.

We will begin by learning how we can optimize our high-resolution geometry to use our system memory more effectively. This will allow for more efficient, stable rendering, especially if you are working on a 32-bit system with limited resources. From there, we will take some time to set up materials for the various portions of our 'Infiltrator' spider and then we will begin the lighting setup. We will use an image-based-lighting approach to achieve a high level of realism and to ensure that the lighting on the CG spider matches the live-action plate. Finally, we will learn how to use Render Passes and Render Layers to output our final renders in a way that will give us a tremendous amount of control over the final result whenever we get into our final compositing phase.

Throughout these lessons we will learn how to use lights and shading network modifications to create the appearance of real light sources, as well as using lights to call attention to particular areas of our scene. This course will be placing emphasis on efficient rendering practices, and some guidelines that you can use in your day-to-day work to help your renders proceed as quickly as possible. We will also take some time to learn how volume primitives and 3D textures in Maya can be used to create complex volumetric effects within our scene.

While Maya may not have the capability to simulate a true diffraction grating, we can create a shading network that can very closely mimic the effect. We will learn how to use ramps, layered shaders, anisotropic materials, texture placement nodes, and specular lights to create a realistic rendered CD.

We will be using a series of displacement maps, bump maps, specular maps and diffuse maps to create a rendered car tire that looks very believable.

We will discuss the critical attributes that control the translucency result, as well as controlling the shadows cast by translucent surfaces.

Getting clean, high-resolution wireframe renders from Maya has always been a challenge. However, by using Maya Toon, we can easily render out wireframes with a variety of styles and appearances.

We will begin this course in Maya, where we will learn how to set up an image-based lighting environment in preparation for rendering. From there, we will jump into HDR Light Studio, which will allow us to easily create high dynamic range images which can mimic realistic studio lighting. We will learn how to control the appearance of synthetic lights within HDR Light Studio, as well as discussing many techniques which can dramatically increase the efficiency of your lighting workflow in both Maya and HDR Light Studio.

This course will explore the various attributes found in the mental ray architectural material which can simulate brushed metal surfaces, as well as exploring alternative methods using the Maya materials.

We will begin by exploring caustic photons in mental ray, and how they can realistically interact with a water surface to create refracted bands of light. From there, we will explore an alternative method for simulating caustics which is much more efficient, especially when working with large, open bodies of water.

When trying to create highly realistic, lifelike characters, the importance of the eyes is often understated. In fact, the eyes are one of the most important aspects to consider when creating characters that truly look and feel alive. During this course, we will learn how to create highly realistic eye textures from scratch using Photoshop, and in a way that gives us a high degree of flexibility and control over the textures' color variations and other details. Once the texturing has been completed, we will jump into Maya, where we will discuss shading and rendering techniques that can give the eye a highly realistic final look. Along the way we will be exploring many additional tips, tricks, and workflows that you will be able to use both in Photoshop and in Maya to help create more believable, realistic eyes for your characters.

These lessons include using the Displacement node to create displacement-mapping effects, using the Layered Texture node to create complex multi-layered textures, using the Optical FX node to add realistic lens flares to Maya lights, using the different Switch Utility nodes in order to add realistic variation between many objects using the same shading network, plus several other useful Hypershade nodes.