I took some time over the last few months to rework a scene I had modeled last year. I've redone all the lighting and materials in Vray as opposed to Mental Ray. A big part of this project was crushing render times down while retaining quality in...
The models for everything in the scene were taken from 3DRender.com as part of their Lighting Challenge #1. I wanted to visit this challenge once more as a test of the free Renderman render plugin for Maya. The challenge is that you are given the...
I've started a new piece to ring in the new year and with it comes some fun stuff to learn. I was searching for a nice scene to model when I came across a shot (bottom of post) on Pinterest courtesy of https://ruffledblog.com/. Below are shots of...
Food is something I've wanted to render for a while. It seemed like a good rendering challenge given how familiar people are with the look of food. When I think of what really sells an object in a scene as "real" it's the surface detail. I could...
This post is a continuation of my last post here. In the first post I explained that I was trying to create a strand of chain that was dynamic, but pinned at both ends like a strand of Christmas garland. At the time I wasn't able to find any...
Rigging... It's not my favorite aspect of 3D, but that's probably because It's also my least practiced. What better way to learn though than to jump right into nHair and IK Splines, right 😀 ? My end goal with this rig is to have several strands of...
After finishing the fire effect for my project it's time to move onto the wind portion. To create a tornado the first thing I did was jump into Maya and start setting up emitters in a fluid container. Good lord was that a bad idea. The particle...
I've started a new project involving Maya and Zbrush and a big part of it is going to use simulation data from Maya. There are three parts, smoke, water, and fire. I haven't created a fluid effects fire in a while so I thought I would spend the...
After my work establishing a Phong model shader I wanted to incorporate cubemaps. Everything went fairly well. The next step is to combine this shader with my normal map shader. If all goes well I can get that done tonight. I'm having a lot of fun...
Whaa, hugh? What the heck is it? Well grey packing refers to creating textures in photoshop that in and of themselves are not particularly useful, but each channel of colour, and possibly even an extra alpha channel contain useful grey-scale...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSrcfr3f9c The above video is a slide show of viewport renders from a few evenings ago. I am working on a project that needs clouds and I thought I would give fluid container clouds a spin. Playing with clouds...
Yeah that's right... I've decided to finally check out VRay and I have to say that so far it's been a lot of fun to work with. I haven't gone through all the settings yet, but I'm trying to get through working on a piece while learning the suite....
I've wanted to try this tutorial for a while and now that I have I thought I would share it with you guys. Creating seamless textures is one thing, but tiling mesh surfaces isn't always as easy as it may seem. Osart has posted a tutorial on his...
