Autodesk have announced Maya 8.5. It hasn't been long since Maya 8; just what new functionality have they added?

As an update to a previous tutorial, I will show alternative methods of HDR based lighting, and also how to build your own HDR image maps for lighting your scenes.

The Mech Collection is a group of three models built in early 2003. They are designed to be low-poly, fully animatiable models and were built using traditional polygon-modeling techniques in Maya.

There are plenty of Maya HDR (High Dynamic Range) tutorials and resources floating around, but here's a quick, definitive guide to setting up a Maya scene for mentalRay/HDR rendering.

If I'm NURBS modeling I'll use Rhino3D because I find it incredibly quick and simple to make complex structures. But I render in Maya, which won't read Rhino files natively. Here's one way to bridge the gap.