Models

The 3d Studio is a great place to get quality models at a decent price. A lot of the models are made by individuals and companies, and some are made by in-house modelers. 3d Studio is a great resource to have in your bookmarks.

Link;

Title; Maya Tip: Cut, Copy, & Paste

Unlike most Window applications, Maya doesn't access to Windows clipboard. It has its own clipboard in the temporary files. This is a Maya.mb file. All versions of Maya use the same file, so you can copy and paste files from and into different versions. In a lot of cases this will cause compatibility issues. When you close Maya, this clipboard itself and whats in it is never removed until something else replaces it.

New Tutorial

This tutorial is right in line with the holiday season. It will teach you how to use polygonal primitives to model an object. Click here to read more...

I am now writing Adobe Photoshop tutorials

I am now writing Adobe Photoshop tutorials for 3DTutorialZone.com. The first one on this site is Faking A Splash In Photoshop. Click here to read more.

If you have any suggestions for Adobe Photoshop tutorials, post a comment here:

Reference

When modeling a car, it's important to have good reference. The first place to go would be the manufacturers website. Most of them these days have 360 degree spins on their car's product description.

Ford

Chevy

Dodge



Another place to get good reference is the-blueprints.com. This site is just about the best website to get car blueprints from. Also, it's a great place to submit blueprints.

Maya Tip; Learn From Examples

Some people don't know this, but Maya comes with example files for fluids, hair, rigs, etc. To access these, go to window>general editor>visor. Now, just go to whatever example that you're looking for. Under ocean examples, try looking at Destroyer.ma and Rowboat.ma. The rowboat file shows a good example of lighting ocean effects and the destroyer shows a great example of fluids and ocean effects. To get around the visor, use the same controls you use to get around in the Maya scene.

New Tutorial! Creating A Simple IK Rig Part Two

It's important that you read the last tutorial because it gets you up to speed for this tutorial. In this tutorial, we'll teach you how to build realistic actuator movement.
Read more...

New Tutorial! Using The Outliner

The outliner lets you see a list of all the objects in the scene. No matter if they're hidden, templated, or anything at all they will appear in the outliner. Read more...

old version of Maya to open my new version's file

This is a commonly asked question on most forums; "How can I get my old version of Maya to open my new version's file?" Here's how you do this: in your new version, save the file as a .ma file. Now open up your file explorer. Find the file, right click on it and hit edit. This should open Notepad or Wordpad. Edit the top couple of lines.

requires maya ”your new version”;
currentUnit -l centimeter -a degree -t film;
fileInfo “application” “maya”;
fileInfo “product” “your new version”;
fileInfo “version” “your new version”;

to

requires maya “old file version”;
currentUnit -l centimeter -a degree -t film;
fileInfo “application” “maya”;
fileInfo “version” “Your old file version”;


Now save the file and you should be able to open the file in your old version of Maya. This does have limitations. This doesn't help if your new version has special features of plug-ins that the old version didn't have.

New Tutorial! Defining A Quick Select Set

This tutorial will teach you how to define a quick select set in Maya.

Read more.

Maya tip - Don't save your renderings as Jpegs.

JPEGs can be a great file format when space is limited, but there is a lot of date loss in the process. This can be fixed be adjusting the quality setting of a JEPG compressor. Sadly in Maya you can't edit this option. So, by default, it'll save it as a low quality JPEG. Try saving it as a Maya IFF instead.

New Tutorial! Modeling a Face

This tutorial covers creating good geometry for modeling a face. Read more...

Maya Tip - Freezing Transformation Before dynamics

Whenever applying dynamic simulations like rigid body dynamics to an object, you should freeze it's transformations because simulations like these use transformation information. Select the object and go to modify>freeze transformations. Now go to edit>delete by type>history, with the object selected. This tip is not relevant when working with nCloth because nCloth does not use an objects transformations.

New Blog

This blog will have tips and tricks and small tutorials for the 3dtutorialzone.com. Posts will be added daily, so remember to subscribe to keep up to date with all the latest posts.