In Maya 2011: Creating Natural Environments, author Aaron F. Ross demystifies a common challenge of 3D modeling: fashioning realistic natural environments such as landscapes, atmospheres, and foliage. Starting with flat terrain, Aaron shows how to sculpt various types of geometry and smooth out jagged, polygonal edges. The course also covers creating convincing backgrounds and clouds, populating a scene with foliage using 3D Paint Effects, and incorporating natural light.

In this series of lessons we will learn how to gain a very high level of control over our final renders by taking advantage of Render Elements in V-Ray for Maya.
Using Render Elements, we can quickly render our scenes out in multiple passes, which can be re-assembled in an external compositing application. The advantage to rendering in multiple passes is that we gain a much greater level of control over the final image result. This course will teach you how to fully utilize many of the Render Elements available in V-Ray, such as the separation lights, shadows, reflections and highlights into individual passes, as well as how to properly reassemble your passes in an external compositing application. We will also learn how to render specific materials and textures out to their own Render Elements as well as many other topics and workflows designed to help you become a stronger, more efficient rendering artist with V-Ray.

In this collection of lessons we will learn about a wide variety of useful techniques for rigging game characters.
In this course, we will rig a character for a game in Maya. We will cover techniques like setting up our joints to have a consistent orientation throughout the entire skeleton, we will build a twist rig to fix deformations that collapse in animation, we will learn how to create a foot rig with more banking control, and even cover creating a robust and flexible spine rig with advanced twisting. We will also discuss weight painting techniques that help to speed up that process, making it less intimidating and instead more of an enjoyable experience. By the end of this course you will learn rigging techniques that can be applied to any rig you build.

In this collection of lessons we will learn about a wide variety of useful techniques for animating game characters.
In this course, we will animate a character for a game in Maya. We will explain workflow techniques that will help us to not only save time with our animations, but at the same time capture a fitting and entertaining personality through the gestures of our character that an audience will enjoy. By the end of this course, you will learn animation techniques that can be applied to any character you may animate in the future.

Great lighting is the key to getting professional-looking output from Maya and Mental Ray. Now, for the first time, Pixar Technical Director Jeremy Birn shares his secrets, his settings, and his Maya scenes, in a Maya-specific training DVD. This new DVD features over 3 hours of tightly edited demonstrations of professional lighting and rendering techniques using Maya and Mental Ray.

A compilation of key chapters from the top Focal game art books available today - in the areas of Max, Maya, Photoshop, and ZBrush. The chapters provide the CG Artist with an excellent sampling of essential techniques that every 3D artist needs to create stunning game art.

Game artists will be able to master the modeling, rendering, rigging, and texturing techniques they need - with advice from Focal's best and brightest authors. Artists can learn hundreds of tips, tricks and shortcuts in Max, Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush - all within the covers of one complete, inspiring reference.