In this tutorial I take a quick overview on a mechanical creature I rigged. It has 4 legs. In general I talk about how to approch a rigging project. But I also cover these topics:

• – I look at how I rigged the pistons on the legs.
• – How I rigged the backlegs which needed to be on the same rotation plane.
• – How I did the tubes going into the stomach (With a ribbon rig).

2. 3D Character Rigging – Setting Up The Skeleton

This is the first look into character rigging. Rigging is such a wide area, so these tutorials are going to be uploaded in parts. The first part is: – Setting up the skeleton.

3. 3D Character Rigging – The Arm

In this tutorial we look at how to make a arm rig. Both the FK and the IK, with a Switch between them.

4. 3D Character Rigging – The Spine

In this tutorial we look at how to setup the spine for a character. We will be using multiply/devide notes for that. But dont worry it is easy. We will be setting up: – Controllers – Constraints

5. The Leg – 3D Character Rigging

This is the second tutorial in a series on how to make a character rig. In this tutorial we look into: – Controllers – IK Handles – Control Joints – Rubberhose

6. Character Rigging In Maya

we’ll all have a completed rig for a biped character and a better understanding of the whole process in general, albeit aimed at beginners, I intend to get quite in depth later on, although like I said before, I will be explaining everything I can as I go along to help the understanding of why and what is going on in each section. In most cases, these tutorials I create start out as being a collection of notes and findings of my own research, which, in turn, just so ‘I’ can understand the processes become easy to read notes, and then develop into my own tutorial on the subject matter, in this case, character rigging. I will also delve a little into blend shapes, and also how to set up low-poly ‘stand in’ object for animating with, and how to export and import animation from the low-res version to the high-res version.

7. Character Setup by Imanishi

you should setup the skeleton and make the objects skinned. In this tutorial, I am going to explain how to construct joints and how to bind the objects to the skeleton.

8. Movable Pivot Control in Maya

Animating a character flipping or spinning around can be a hurdle in 3d. A character will forward flip over a different center of gravity then if it were to spin around 180 degrees on its right heel. Typically the solution is to set up a hierarchy of groups with pivots at different locations in which the animator can choose to rotate individually as needed. The problem with this solution, besides the redundancy of having so many group nodes to dig through, is that it takes a heavy amount of preplanning to pull it off cleanly. The idea here is to make one control that will easily move around the character’s center of gravity in order to rotate the character as a whole around that center.

9. STRETCHY ARM SKELETON by Bora Dayioglu

10. [Video]Maya Rigging Examples and Tutorial

Maya Rigging Examples and Tutorial from Chris Burns in Melbourne Australia.

11. Maya Tutorial Muscle Rigging Tutorial

Currently working as a Lead Character TD at Disney Feature Animation. I’ve also taught part-time which has lead to my desire to start an online CG tutorial company called Fahrenheit Digital.

12. Maya Tutorial: The Making of Mafia Wars 3D

In this tutorial I’m going to explain how I made this “Mafia wars” picture.
This image was modelled in Maya 2008 and rendered in Mental Ray.
Textures made with Photoshop CS2.

13. Rigging a ball with Cartoon Funtionality

In this four part video we discuss the process of making a squishy squashy bouncing ball rig. The topics cover adding deformers such as lattices and clusters with custom controls, attributes, and hierarchy. We go through using measuring tools to control deformation and break down the process of normalizing values to make our rigs scale properly. We also look at how to use the connection editor to make direct links between attributes from node to node. The techniques involved can be used for many rigging solutions beyond a simple bouncing ball.

14. Making of the Alien Nature

Here is a making that I have been writing to explain a little bit about my workflow to create the picture called “Alien Nature”.

Here is the first step of the design process. I like to paint my designs first in 2d and forget about any 3d limitations.. freedom!!!! I am basically painting rough shapes in Corel Painter to get the proper profile without paying attention to any kind of details. Then I add outlines to get a more defined profile.

15. Making of the Rider by Christopher Adajar, France

This is the 5th challenge that I joined and my first artwork which was a grand winner. I am really happy to say that with all the efforts and hard work I did, it is really worth.

With my previous challenges I can compare and see how my skills improved a lot, I know that I am still far away to be considered as good but I believe I am moving forward and hopefully it won’t stop here.

16. Making the Digital Portrait of Mr. Obama by Anto Juričić Toni, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Base Mesh – Hi my name is Toni and I am going to walk you through the process of making digital portrait. Making a digital portrait can be very difficult task if not prepared well, so my first advice will be to get a lot of references for your project. Since my project was related to well known public person, finding good references was easy task but it was impossible to find images that could be useful for assembling good image plains so I relied mostly on eyeballing techniques.

17. Making of Kid by Rakesh Sandhu

I was looking for a character to do for my reel and so I started looking on the net. Normally I have no idea what I want so I just look in flickr or other photo sites for good images. I found the image of “Roney“ which was taken by carf, HERE. And I really liked it as an image and to show my skills as a 3d artist..So I searched more of his images (roney) which ever I can find. After gathering all of them I started to see If I can get a side view as well which helps me in modeling.

The post 17 Advance Character Tutorials For Maya appeared first on ENFEW.

For beginners, UV mapping has always been a challenging part of the modeling/texturing process. Although the theory is rather simple (think of how you would ‘unwrap’ the earth to create a flat map of it) it seems that no software package offers an ideal intuitive solution to performing UV mapping. For definitions I suggest you refer to the 3D glossary provided and also it would be useful to read two articles written by Steve Theodore for GDMag (June/July 2004 and September 2004): Maps and legends and Stitch, Cut and Relax.

The ultimate goal of this tutorial is to complement the class and the textbook (which is rather weak in its presentation of such an important subject as UV mapping). We will work with the model of a spaceship provided here. When you are working with your own model you need to make sure that: your model is clean (ie no hidden faces) and that you have deleted the history.

2. Basic Example of UVAutoRatio Pro Maya Plugin

A Basic tutorial showing how to use UVAutoRatio Pro. Sorry about the video quality – we’ll upload a high quality version in a few days.

3. 3D Cloud shader

Maya fluids are amazing but expensive to use, So here is an old trick which will help you to create low cost but very realistic clouds.

4. Photographing for Textures

Lately Ive stumbled across self-made textures of a dedicated hobbyist photographer. Most of his textures lacked the features a good diffuse texture has. So I decided to make a tutorial for everybody out there whos interested in how to photograph usable diffuse textures.

If you are quite inexperienced in photography or dont understand some of the technical terms I am talking about visit this site for a very good introduction to the topic with pictures.

5. Texturing Resolution Tips

A common question when new to texture mapping, is what resolution should textures be? This is assuming that you are going to be making your own in a 2D package, such as Photoshop, either from scratch or from a scan. Well, the first thing to do is ignore dpi settings. All you care about is the pixel by pixel resolution of the image. If you are scanning an image, most scan software will have you specify dpi. A 4″x5″ photo scanned at 300dpi will yield a 5MB 1200×1500 pixel image. But once the image is scanned, you will no longer concern yourself with it’s dpi setting. So lets say we did scan the aforementioned image and now have a 1200×1500 pixel document. This is going to be much larger than necessary for most applications. And using textures which are too big simply slows down your render time and gives your scene a bigger memory footprint. (meaning the amount of RAM needed on the machine to render the scene). If your memory footprint is bigger than the amount of RAM on the system, the machine will need to use space on your hard drive, known as ‘swap’ space, and when you begin swapping, things really slow down… and then you’re on the verge on not being able to render the scene at all… not a good thing.

6. stool-polygon texturing

This tutorial goes through in detail the UV texture mapping process in maya

7. Raytrace Shadows with Transparent Texture Files

Raytrace Shadows with Transparent Texture Files

8. Creating Clouds in Maya using Particle Clouds

Creating Clouds in Maya using Particle Clouds

9. Normal Mapping: Theory and Practice

This tutorial is intended to describe some basic ideas about normal mapping and how to implement this technique in Maya.

10. Texturing Polygons

UV Mapping and using Photoshop to create textures. Some excerpts and definitions used were taken from the help section in Maya.

12. Layered Texture Tutorial

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the alpha channel of your projected image to “stencil” your image over/under other images on your geometry with the use of a layered shader.

13. How to create a realistic looking turtle

With the second part of the tutorial (the first one was about the modelling) I will explain how to make a seamless texture map using a marvellous tool that you can find in Maya: the Convert to File Texture (Convert to Solid Texture in Maya 2.5).

14. Unreal Tournament Skinning

What you need:
1. Unreal Tournament + latest patches
2. UED (UnrealTournament/system/UnrealED.exe)
3. Photoshop and preferably Painter3D or something like it
4. A texteditor
5. Patience
6. A p3d object model with texture tif for Painter3D (download here tiff )

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