Anim Bizz

LOVIN THE "3" KEY It's just a matter of time before Maya takes the cool things from other packages and implements them. One of the things I liked about Lightwave's modeller was the ability to sub-d preview and render objects at render time by pressing TAB (I think it was). I was playing around with maya 2009 and it seems that by pressing the 3 key and rendering with MR.....bamM!!! smoothed sub-d proxies woot! And if you want to 'freeze' the object into a high poly version, just Modify/Convert/Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons

FREE KNOWLEDGE Here is a website by an artist called Neil Blevins. Although 3dMax centric, there is a lot of information about taking real world properties and translating them into 3D. Very good stuff. http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/cg_education.htm

Fresnelly Reflections. I couldn't remember the old trick to input a sampler node's facing ratio into a ramp for fresnel relfections. I'm working on a project with a lot of anistropic shaders and in my opinion, the MIA material X is lacking in specular highlight control. Found the ol' trick over here.... http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=350691&highlight=fresnel