Update

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Maya 2012 Dynamics Shattering tutorial

Basic steps followed by guiding snapshots for creating a shattering object using Autodesk Maya 2012. Click on images for larger version.

• maya preferences set to cm
• time scale to 500
• create a plane polygon
• width=200 height = 200
• go to dynamic menu
• select pPlane1
• select soft/rigid bodies, create passive rigid body
• select plane, go to attributes and set Collison layer to -1 not the default 0
• create a polygon sphere
• Radius=20, translaye in Y direction to 100, in x and z set to 0
• select pSphere1, edit menu, delete by type, history [very important]
• go to dynamics menu
• select pSphere1, go to effects menu, create shatter, options, set as shown below, click apply
• you should see a solidshatter1 node under pSphere1
• select with shift , shard1 to shard20
• go to fields menu, select gravity
• Click play and the shattered sphere parts should drop and tumble to the floor.
• experiment and make changes, render, playblast etc.
• 
  

Lighting Styles Renders

Various lighting styles - daylight, sunlight, nighttime, light from tv etc renders using Mental Ray based on an article by Luciano Iurina, using models by artist Viktor Fretyan.
 These renders took approximately 30mins each for 1000 x 468 render output image size on my workstation.

Photon Illumination Test

Setup:

CPU and memory load while rendering

Render output

Click here to download the large 1280x700 TIFF 16 bit output file

Maya Future City

Below is a render using Mental Ray in Maya of a futuristic city, from a 3D magazine article. This 3000 x 5000 render took a lot of time, about 2 hours l think on my workstation.
Click on image for a larger version.

Autodesk Maya Workstation

Below is the specifications of the current workstation l built for primary CG work. I have 32Gb RAM installed 2 x 1Tb WD Black Caviar hard drives, 1 x Corsair SSD 240Gb drive

I also use a lenovo ideapad Y500 with 8Gb, Windows 7 and a GT650M 2Gb Nvidia graphics card.

Autodesk Maya - Exploring Physical Sun

Expanding on a tutorial l found online, and using Maya 2012, below is the first render after adding mental ray as the renderer and physical sun with the rays going through the roof opening on top.

Below is my basic setup from the Left hand side viewport

Then the render

Then with an area light added, scaled exactly to match the top opening, we render and get below

Enabling final gather and adding the settings below:

We get this render output

Enable jitter setting and increasing the max sample level from default 2 to 4 we get

And this is the render output (takes time)

CPU and memory load during render is shown below

Click here for link to original reference article