All Courses

Bring scenes to life by building realistic fluid simulations in Maya, including foam and bubbles, liquid being poured, and volumetric liquid in a container.

Learn to render realistic bodies of water such as ponds and oceans and underwater shots with Maya—essential skills in a visual effects artist's toolkit.

Dive deep into the Hypershade window and shader creation with Maya and the mental ray rendering engine.

Introduces the viewer to the complete range of options available in the 3ds Max MassFX (also known as PhysX) toolset.

Demonstrates how to light an object onto a live-action still plate, using Maya, Nuke, and Photoshop.

Covers the basics of the classic dynamics engine, showing how to build a simulation with passive and active rigid bodies, add attributes like bounce and friction, integrate keyframes, and apply constraints.

Take an in-depth look at nCloth, Maya's toolkit for simulating high-resolution mesh cloth for 3D characters and animations.

Discover an alternative to the traditional character rigging workflow with the Character Animation Toolkit (CAT) toolset for 3ds Max, which offers quick preset character rigs as well as custom tools for creating a rig from scratch.

Discover how to create render passes in Maya, recombine the passes in After Effects, and motion track the passes to live-action video footage that contains a moving camera or a moving character.

Shows how to generate stunning special effects simulations in Maya, including exploding fireworks, tumbling snowflakes, and burning flames.

Create realistic simulations and collision detection effects that can emulate breaking objects, soft body dynamics, cloth simulations, rippling water, and more in 3ds Max animation projects.

Shows how to create realistic landscapes, atmospheres, and natural light effects in Maya 2011.

Create dynamic, randomly generated particle effects that can emulate snow, rain, steam, explosions, and more in 3ds Max animation projects.

Highlights some Maya features including how to reuse MEL expressions as well as how to manipulate paint effects to give particles a final look and feel.