Well, I promised two posts this week so with this one I am filling my self-imposed quota.  My general goal is to post something substantive once or twice a week, but since this is on top of my day job, once a week might be more realistic.  I've only been blogging for 5 weeks so we'll just have to see how it goes.

On a side note...  I just noticed today that my colleague Louis Marcoux got  40k hits on his last 3DsMax blog post in less than a week.  Yes, you read that right... 40,000!  My first thought was...  holy #@$% that's a lot of people!  My second thought was...   wow, I seriously need to get on the ball and put on a show.  I was thinking maybe a song and dance routine, but I'm not sure how that would play out on a blog.  So I guess I'll just stick to Maya for now.  But I reserve the right to sing and/or dance in future video posts  :)

So about Maya Assets...  they were introduced in Maya2009, but the concept of Containers which Assets are based on has been around since 8.5.  In a nutshell, Assets are used to simplify complex node structures such as animation rigs and shading networks.  They can be used purely for organizational purposes, or they can also be used to streamline or simplify something on the surface that is otherwise complicated under the hood.  Assets also work with file referencing.  All of this will be discussed in a series of 3 demo movies.  Part 1 will cover the basics.  I'll explain what an Asset is by showing a simple example of how to create an Asset.

Check back next week for Part 2, where I'll discuss how Assets can be used with file referencing.

Quick credit...  Thanks to Shawn McClellan (Maya Product Designer Dude) and Craig Barr (Technical Marketing Guy) who both helped me with these demos.

You can see part 2 here....

Maya Assets (Part 2 : Working With Existing Assets)