The AI.paint tool allows you to use Maya’s paint system to organize, create, position and modify large crowds of autonomous characters and other AI items. It is assumed that you are already familiar with basic Maya Paint concepts.
Through AI.paint, groups or layers of characters may be painted on surfaces while aligning with the curvature of the surface. Paint groups or layers allow you to manage and modify regions of your crowd while leaving inactive layers untouched. Layers of characters may then be modified to achieve interesting results quickly. For example a layer of proxy characters may be painted with various settings for crowd density, position, orientation, scale, and group color assignment. AI.paint allows you to paint on autonomous characters, behaviors, and all other AI objects. All AI object attributes can be modified using paint with interactive visual feedback for thousands of characters. The color feedback enables you to see what your characters are doing during the simulation. Perhaps the health of a few hundred characters is in question and needs to be verified. Maybe the first wave of warriors running down a hillside does not look quite right so the velocity of the characters could be painted. With the ability to modify so many attributes easily and interactively many more iterations of tests can be performed for refinement. (continue reading…)

This tutorial used Maya 8.5 for the modeling, MentalRay for rendering, Photoshop for creating the textures and Shave and HairCut for the fur of the head.

Greetings everyone. So I’ve had a number of people approach me here at school about a method I’ve been using to break my Miss_fast_skin_maya subsurface shader into render layers so I have near absolute control of it in compositing, so I though I’d write up a tutorial here to share.
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This tutorial for Maya presents a method for creating a low poly count 3d model of a concept car to be used in 3D games, starting from a sketch and without the use of reference material. (continue reading…)