I am pleased that my Maya XGen tutorial is on the front page of the Autodesk Area website (although Im guessing its been pushed off the front by the time you read this :) )
Here is the direct link and here is a link to the render curves tutorial that was also picked up by the Area.
More XGen tutorials can be found here.
Unfortunately there is a maximum number of images I can display on my website gallery (50), so I will be saving all high resolution Arnold images to my OneDrive as I don’t have the time to put them anywhere else. They are rendered to at least 3k, in camera with no post-production involved (dirty). Feel free to peruse :o)
Issue 66 of 3D Artist magazine features a simple quick start tutorial for Arnold what I did wrote and stuff:
Inspired by the recent Lego movie (although I still haven’t watched it yet), I thought I would have a go at rendering some Lego models with Arnold for Maya.
There are a whole bunch of Lego models available here. However, they come in .ldr and .mpd file formats. To view and export them in a format that can be opened in Maya, you will need LDView.
LDView only exports in .3ds, .stl and .pov file formats. If you import the .stl using Maya’s Direct Connect plugin from the plug-in manager it will come in as one solid object with no separate materials.
Unfortunately the .3ds importer is not available with the Maya Bonus Tools anymore, so I had to open the .3ds files in Maya 2012 and save them out as a Maya file so that I could open it in Maya 2014.
I tried opening the .3ds file in 3ds Max but unfortunately 3ds Max crashed when doing so.
Ive since found out that the .3ds importer for Maya 2014 has been made available here.
The only problem is the polygons came in triangulated in Maya and the normals got screwed up in the process. The only way I managed to smooth the normals was by ‘averaging’ them. However, it was quite a slow and tedious process going through each piece of rounded geometry (although as you can see in the renders below I missed a few pieces, which will forever haunt me).
After ‘Average’ normals
After converting the Maya materials to Standard shaders and adding some lighting I rendered them out with Arnold:
It really is incredible how easy it is to create complex scenes with XGen in combination with Maya to Arnold. Here are a few tests that I have rendered recently using nothing but a beveled cube as the primitve archive. A tutorial that goes through the process can be found here. More info at 3dtotal.com.
I was having fun playing around with the new ShrinkWrap deformer in Maya 2015 and came up with this odd looking fella. Rendered with Arnold for Maya using the skin shader.
Here is an animation I did a while back. I decided to re-render it as a gif using the latest Arnold Skin shader for Maya.
The interesting thing that occurs when deforming geometry in Maya is that the normals get flipped. This creates quite an interesting effect when combined with the Arnold Skin shader which requires normals to be facing outwards. I used the default Skin settings except I increased the radius multiplier to get a softer ‘jelly’ look to the SSS and increased the Shallow Scatter to 1.
Some more tests with XGen archives and spheres. This time with a bit more color. A color texture map is connected to the length and color attributes of the XGen description. A beveled cube or sphere is used as the primitve archive which XGen then instances using the texture map as a reference. A tutorial that goes through the process can be found here. All of the images are rendered with Arnold for Maya.
Click here to view my initial tests without color. Click here to see more XGen tutorials that I have created.
Many thanks to Pedro Fernando Gómez for his assistance with XGen.
LESTERBANKS, CG RECORD, ronenbekerman, CGFeedback.
The interesting formations in the image below are formed from JPEG compression in the original image used to describe the ‘length’ of the cubes (a happy accident). If you look closely, you can see the square compression patterns in the base level of cubes. 
Very pleased that the Autodesk Area site has made me artist of the month:
I am pleased to see that my Autodesk MasterClass is now live:
http://area.autodesk.com/masterclasses/masterclass/2014_LeeGriggs_RenderingCurvesWithArnoldMaya
I was very pleased to see my work with XGen and Arnold featured on the Daily Planet Show.
The clip is here.
Many thanks to Blake Glasbergen (video Archivist for Discovery Channel Canada’s Daily Planet).
The tutorial Guide to Rendering with XGen and Arnold that Pedro Gomez and I worked on is available in issue 189 of 3D World magazine.
I thought I would have a go at testing the alLayer shader which is part of the alShaders by Anders Langland with Arnold for Maya.
So I used the alLayer shader to layer two alSurface shaders together using an image of the text connected to the Mix attribute of the alLayer shader. The Mix image acts as a mask between the two layers. Therefore, the text will use the dull rough specular of the alSurface shader and will appear as if its floating above the bright sharp specular of the other alSurface shader.
The nice thing about the alSurface shader is that it has two specular layers. This enabled me to add two specular effects on the pill. The first specular is sharp and the other has a higher roughness value to give a smoother hi-light.
I used Arial bold for the font and used the ‘Photocopy filter’ in photoshop to give the impression that it has been printed badly onto the pill as I liked the way it merges some of the text.
A 3d texture projection was used to precisely project the texture onto the pill. When I originally positioned and scaled the projection node it cut off the beginning of the Solid Angle text. I kept this effect as I noticed that the printing on pills isn’t perfect.
The scene is lit with a hdri connected to a skydome light with two long thin cylinder area lights to add specular reflections along the ‘hero’ pill.
Finally, thanks to a suggestion from Angel Jiminez, I thought I would have a go at mocking up a fake advert for Arnold.
Autodesk have done a feature video on my work with XGen and Arnold for Maya.
Many thanks to Judy Bayne – Learning Content Strategist at Autodesk.
Very pleased to see my artwork used by the group Kateboy for their new single Higher.
The image they used is from my series of portrait modeling experiments modeled with Maya and rendered with Arnold (of course).
I will be doing a workshop about my work with XGen and Arnold at FMX this year.
http://www.fmx.de/program2015/event/6015
