Ngons - Eliminate them for Real-Time Engines and Renderings

Arvid Schneider talking a bit about N-Sided or multi-sided polygons that have more than 4 edges. Arvid shows that you can search for N-Sides in Maya by using selection constraints to easily search out, find and highlight the offending polygons.

Texturing Tips & Tricks for Newbies

Hey everyone, did you like last weeks post Modeling Tips & Tricks from Shaun Keenan?  This post is a followup of that posting and contains some equally awesome texturing tips. These tips are great one for beginners.

Maya Tutorial: Human Head UV Mapping

In this tutorial from ”Polygoncore“, you will learn How to UV mapping a female head in maya. This basic tutorial is good for beginners.

Export Maya Position & Normal Pass to Pixel Cloud for After Effects

In the following tutorial, the author, Michael of TheBlurrypixel, shows us how to use Maya to create a normal pass and postion pass to be used with Pixel Cloud plugin for After Effects.
He shows How to export the passes from Maya and what adjustmets you need to make after importing into After Effects.

Cartoony Wheel Rig v1 for Maya

In this video from Jorn-Harald Paulsen, He demonstrate how to use the Cartoony Wheel Rig v1, to create and rig wheels.  His requirements for the rig is to be clean, fast flexible and animation friendly.

This current version of the rig works, but can’t be pushed as far as he would like it to.  The current verison is basicly just a lattice of clusters and a nurbs-        
circle and all of the extra-controllers are connected to    the circle through MotionPath-nodes.

Create an “Explode Effect” using Transform Component in Maya

In this quick tip ” Hector Bermudez‘ will explain you, How to create an Explode effect using a simple tool in Maya the “Transform Component” without using any Dynamics.

Hector shows to use Extract Polygons in this video, however you can save a couple of steps by simply selecting vertices and choosing Detach Component which will separate all the faces but keep the faces under one shape node… which is the end result of Hector’s efforts in the video.

Quick Tip - Square Tubing made easy

Arvid Schneider shows a quick method for creating square tubing in Autodesk Maya, by using the Torus Primitive and setting the attributes in the channel box for it to come out square. Arvid also shows how to automate some of the settings here by creating a shelf button for this task.