Complete Guide to Maya 2024

Master display layers and visibility to manage complex scenes, then build and mirror a hammer head in Maya using cylinders, bevels, edge loops, and precise pivot control.

Apply curve modeling and revolve workflows to shape a king chess piece in Maya, refining silhouettes with control vertex, mirroring, extruding, and loft while cleaning topology and preparing a chessboard.

Learn to block an environment in Maya by establishing real-world scale, using basic shapes, and aligning grid and image plane to build a fantasy door with animation-ready mechanisms.

Master torso modeling in maya 2024 by starting with a cube, smoothing to a sphere, and refining quad topology with symmetry, cut tools, and soft selection for clean deformation.

Learn to create complex shapes in Maya using sweep mesh along curves, adjust profiles, close geometry, and sculpt a robust mouth loop with tongue and teeth.

In this lesson, you build the monster's UV maps using camera-based projection, 3D cuts, unfolding, and topology-aware joins to prep textures and udims for the door.

Master udim textures for door UVs to overcome 1-to-1 limits and boost resolution on large surfaces. Learn camera-based projection, 3D cut, and preparing assets for Substance Painter.

Texture a Maya export to Substance Painter using FBX and PBR metallic roughness with 2k maps, bake mesh maps, and layer wood and iron with masks.

Texture a hammer in Maya 2024 by exporting, baking maps, and building wood, leather, metal, and rock materials using groups, masks, and tiling with triplanar projection in Substance Painter.

Learn rigging fundamentals in Maya by building a door rig with groups and transforms, creating a hierarchy for independent controls like the handle and lock.

Master Maya animation fundamentals with a bouncing-ball exercise that demonstrates the 12 principles, including timing and squash and stretch, plus keyframes and graph tweaks at 24 frames per second.

Explore squash and stretch in animation, showing how a sphere’s volume changes with gravity using careful scaling and rotation across frames, plus practical rig duplication and real-time viewport previews.

Learn to use playblast for fast 24 fps previews, exporting via avi or image sequence, and apply a QuickTime h264 workaround for mp4 previews before final renders.

learn to build animation with key poses using post to post workflow, planning the flour sack jump from pose to pose and refining with in-betweens.

Master timing in Maya 2024 by adjusting frame ranges, curving keyframes, and using overshoot and exaggeration to create snappy, believable animation with follow-through.

Master timing in character animation by planning slow-to-fast transitions between poses, using preparation and exaggeration to heighten the surprise, and refining keyframes with snapping and frame scaling in Maya.

Explore building a Mash secondary system in Maya 2024, forming a ring of cubes with a radial mesh network, applying randomization and falloff for a dynamic sci-fi look.

Explore XGen curves to generate hair guides, convert curves to guides with hair descriptions, and refine density and noise for a realistic grooming workflow in Maya.

Explore how to light a chess scene in Maya using Arnold, employing Skydome light, HDR, and color temperature to craft cinematic shadows, bounce light, and depth of field.

Learn to create realistic glass in Maya by tinting, adjusting depth, roughness, and index of refraction, and boosting ray depth and sampling for accurate reflections in a glass chess set.

Learn to create realistic displacement maps in Maya 2024, connecting diffuse, ambient occlusion, roughness, and displacement shader to Poly Haven textures for ground and wall surfaces. Render-time subdivision adds detail.