Category Archives: Maya

easy neon effect

here’s a tiny little tutorial to easily create a neon effect.

create a surface shader in the hypershade and assign it to the object of your preference.
set the out color attribute to a bright color.
set the out glow color to …

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two ways to squash a ball

the bouncing ball – a classic protagonist in animation. but how do you setup a good way to animate the ball jumping around including its squashing and stretching? here two basic setup proposals:

create a sphere and name it ball …

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a marking menu for selection masks

inspired by a gnomon tutorial lately i also wanted to set up my own selection mask hotbox. since i work with maya with a gui completely turned off, the usual selection masks aren’t accessible from the status line any …

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straighten out vertices or curve points

i just discovered that the same trick i use in 3ds max to straighten out vertices or curve points when they’re just slightly away from a prospective alignment, works in maya, too. just pick the vertices or curve points …

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undo accidental camera moves in maya

i just couldn’t believe that there’s no undo for camera movements so i digged a bit in the manuals and there we are: go to view > camera settings > undoable movement. from now on you can undo any …

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basic cartoon eyes setup

here’s a very basic cartoon eyes setup within maya aimed to be used in animation. basically this tutorial should help you getting you on the road for further development stages to simplify the control of a pair of eyes …

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unwanted distortion of children

i stumbled upon a common problem when parenting lately: the children are miraculously distorting when transforming (rotating). freezing transformations will fix your troubles. the following snapshot illustrates my problem:

create a simple setup with two cones and two cylinders; be …

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hole in a box: the right way

inspired by the tutorial of omno van braam i basically reproduced the same steps with maya: create a cube with subdivision width, height & depth 1, select one face and add divisions to the face (division levels = 2), …

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bottle cap: nurbs or polygons?

for my daily maya practice i tried to model a bottle cap, which sounds very simple but has some small and interesting details in both polygon and nurbs modelling approaches.

the nurbs way: create a circle which has 8 edit …

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backup my files, maya!

one feature i loved in 3ds max was the fact that you could save an additional file of your work by automatically increment a suffix number. this is a useful backup feature i really miss in maya; but there’s …

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