Author Archive
Adding a Reflection Map in Maya: Cinderella Castle
Posted by: Kakes on: May 14, 2012
- In: Maya | Rendering
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Below is a castle I modeled ‘loosely’ based around the Cinderella Castle. If you look at the windows, it doesn’t have any reflection on it because there is nothing in the scene to reflect. To make it have reflection without creating any more objects in the scene, I went to the Hypershade window and [...]
Maya Particles: Creating a flower field with particles
Posted by: Kakes on: January 8, 2012
Above is a flower field I created with flowers in the background made of particles. Particle sprites always face the camera, meaning they will face you regardless of camera movement or camera swap. To create particles, set your menu to Dynamics mode, and select Particles -> Particle Tool []. In the Particles tool settings, enter [...]
Kakes’ 3D Blog 2011 in review
Posted by: Kakes on: January 1, 2012
- In: Maya
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To kick off the new year, WordPress stats helper monkeys have been busy putting together a personalized report detailing how this blog did in 2011! Crunchy numbers The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 41,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney [...]
Rubicon 3D Irrigation Animation
Posted by: Kakes on: December 8, 2011
- In: Maya
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A 3D animation I made for Rubicon Water earlier this year (above) is now translated into Spanish and Chinese! Links below. Chinese: Spanish:
Creating and Blending Layered Textures in Maya
Posted by: Kakes on: November 7, 2011
- In: Maya | Rendering | Texturing
- 5 Comments
Below is a floating island I modeled. I wanted to tile the grass and rock textures, but have them blend into each other, rather than have a clear cut line between the two textures. First, I laid out the UVs so they are contained within the first quadrant with no overlapping UVs. Just like I [...]
Quick Realistic Grass in Maya
Posted by: Kakes on: November 5, 2011
- In: Maya | Rendering | Texturing
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When you just use a grass texture, it doesn’t look very realistic because the render looks flat like below. So here’s a quick way to make grass have some volume, without using fur or paint effects but, by using a displacement map. Open up the Hypershade window and right-click on your grass texture and select [...]
Phong Shading on loaded materials and Environment Mapping in Papervision3D
Posted by: Kakes on: September 11, 2011
- In: Flash | Maya | Papervision3D
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Using lights in Papervision3D to create objects having a Phong Shading on flat coloured materials are easy enough, but what about when you want dynamic highlights on jpg/png materials that you load in? After making a light like below… var light:PointLight3D = new PointLight3D(false, false); //(showlight, flipped) light.x = 0; light.y = 0; light.z = [...]
Embedding Collada and texture files to Papervision3D
Posted by: Kakes on: September 11, 2011
One bad thing about not embedding collada and texture files in your swf file is that it can take quite a while for flash to load in external files, even if they’re pretty small. To embed collada and material files, declare them as a class. The paths are relative to your flash src file, rather [...]
Baking lights and shadows in Maya using Mental Ray Renderer
Posted by: Kakes on: September 9, 2011
- In: Flash | Maya | Mental Ray | Papervision3D | Rendering
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I’ve written how to bake lights and shadows onto texture files using the Maya Software renderer before, but this post is for the more exciting Mental Ray renderer. (Yes, smooth shading, final gather, normal maps!) Here’s a simple scene set up with a few spheres and lights. This is the mental ray render that I [...]
Importing Maya 2012 models to Papervison3D
Posted by: Kakes on: September 4, 2011
- In: Flash | Maya | Papervision3D
- 5 Comments
Maya 2012 has a Collada exporter that enables you to export .dae files. But unfortunately it can’t be read by the Papervision3D Collada/Dae class as the tags don’t match up. I found that the best way to fix this problem is to use Autodesk’s standalone FBX 2011 Converter; Instead of Maya –> DAE, we need [...]
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