Duncan's Corner
Creating a sphere with very uniform triangles
After some experimentation I realized that my last tutorial on this topic creates a sphere that is not as uniform as one might wish. Here is a better solution to the problem of creating a sphere with a uniform triangle distribution.
Creating a Toon Ocean
One of the more difficult things to toon shade is water. A difficulty with the Maya Toon feature is that currently it does not work with the Maya Ocean feature, or for that matter, displacement mapping in general. One can convert the displacement to polygons, but for an ocean one needs the animation and displacement to poly does not support history. One workaround is to create several blendshapes and animate between them, but this is tedious. The following tutorial takes advantage of the ability of the toon shader to create an interactive displacement mapped mesh.
Rendering Thick Cloth Objects
With nCloth it is simple to give the cloth a specific thickness for simulation. However one may also wish to render the cloth showing the thickness. In general it is much preferable to simulate on a simple flat cloth object with thickness then add construction history downstream to turn the flat cloth into a thick 3d object.The following technique can be used not only to add thickness to garments, but also to create more complex 3d objects, thick rubber slabs and gumby-like characters.
Creating a sphere with uniform triangle size
The default poly sphere primitives in Maya have poles at the top and bottom. There is a simple technique to create a sphere with uniform distribution of triangles with no poles. This is especially useful for dynamics applications, such as with nCloth.
A very simple nCloth flag
Here is a very basic workflow for creating a flag using the new nCloth in Maya8.5.
Nucleus and nCloth in Maya8.5
Now that Maya 8.5 is out I finally have an opportunity to update this blog. I have been working on the nCloth feature and now that it is in user hands I hope people will have fun with it. NCloth is the first thing in Maya to use our new Nucleus solver framework. Over the next few weeks I hope to populate this blog with several tutorials on nCloth.
Creating a dynamic telephone cord
This post shows a simple and fast method for creating a dynamic phone cord using Maya Hair.
Forest Road using Paint Effects
This example scene shows Paint Effects trees and grass used to create a forest along with some fog. In order to get the lighting in the clearing the way I wanted I used several very bright spotlights with fairly high resolution shadow maps. The leaves and branches are animated using the built in turbulence on the pfx brushes. I used translucence on the leaves so they would back light and as well edited the shadow color on some lights to allow more light to penetrate through the leaves, simulating scattering a bit.
A Fast and Simple Planetary Atmosphere
I'm not sure what Pluto's tenuous atmosphere looks like, but to mark the occasion of its fall from planethood to planetoid here is a mini tutorial on creating an atmosphere using Maya fluids. This tutorial uses fluids not for dynamic behavior, but rather its volume rendering. The fluid node has the most accurate volume render integration of any volume shading in Maya. However if one doesn't have Maya unlimited volume primitives can be used.
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