When it comes to 3d design and animation, few names come before Autodesks Maya. A tool of choice for the biggest hollywood studios, Maya can be a very daunting piece of software. But make no mistake, there is a reason why it has such a great reputation. It's incredibly powerful and has some awesome built in tools like Paint Effects that allows you to paint organically on your models or paint forests and mountains instead of having to model them. Now before you get all these Avatar ideas in your head, go through these tutorials to get yourself competent in using this awesome 3d package. And then head over to our forums to compete in some of the 3d challenges.

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Imagine doing some 3D in a program only known for its 2D prowess, that is what you get when you dive into Adobe's Advanced 3D techniques.

"Create realistic 3D images by using the Scene, Mesh, Materials, and Lights tabs in the 3D panel. Animate properties of 3D objects.

To complete the tasks demonstrated in this tutorial, you need the following software and files:

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended

Sample files

lrvid4004_ps.zip (ZIP, 22MB)

Prerequisite knowledge

Intermediate knowledge of creating 3D compositions in Photoshop

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Hi there, have you ever wanted to create a realistic Gold material. Well in this tutorial you will learn how to make realistic Gold Material in 3ds max using a simple technique with 4 easy steps. lets start straight away.

Step 1:
Go to material editor or press M on keyboard to open material editor. Select any material slot and name it Gold

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Step 2:
In the shader basic parameters rollout of gold Material select Multi-Layer. In Multi-Layer Basic Parameters make diffuse color to intense dark brown color.
Put these values in diffuse color Red 26, Green 18, Blue 4.
set value =30 in Diffuse level just under the diffuse color box.

It is YafaRay again! Well you could say so and YES, I agree. I like it, the results always impressive and yet seemingly faster than any other external renderer known to exist.

Ok, here is the deal. You are a 3D artist and your boss wants you to make a visualization of a simple interior for his clients. You have used blender and things looked like they were fine until now?! What happened? Well you saw some cool interiors done by professionals on www.yafaray.org and thought that perhaps its high time you ventured into photo realism. But you are stuck with the settings because they are so different from the blender internal settings. So I found this cool tutorial that teaches about interior render settings for YafaRay and am certain your boss will smile at you after mastering this tutorial.

"In this tutorial, we will see different possibilities to light objects in a room, a closed environment. Which lamps to work with, the different light rigs, and effects such as reflections, caustics, Depth of Field or volumetrics to enhance the quality of your work."

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For a while I have been looking for some sort of help with yafaray materials for differents object types. For instance, car paint would definitely be different from wall paint. What makes the difference is in the way they reflect light, diffuse or not, e.t.c. I found this great site where one tried to come up with a list of his own material shaders for different object types. I think its amazing and you should try it out.

Read his article here:

Aha there fellow blender users, rejoice and again I say rejoice! For a long time I have been looking for a reputable tutorial on external render settings for YafaRay. Most of the known tutorials have been about rendering internal scenes but now we have one with a simple but clear external scene. In this tutorial you will learn how to use pathtracing (for those who are not familiar with YafaRay) please click here before going on to the tutorial.

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This tutorial covers some very important topics on LANDSCAPE MODELING in Blender 3D. Blender is a very powerful 3D tool and its functionality keeps widening over time because as an open source software it has a big group of developers all dedicating to it voluntarily. In this tutorial, it is assumed that you have a basic understanding of using Blender 3D (how to add/remove a mesh, how to change views, etc...). If you don't please first read through here. In the first part of this tutorial, you will learn how to bump up your Mesh to create mountains, then in the second part you will learn how to use stencils to texture your landscape into what it would look like in a real world environment.

Stencil is one of the most useful tip when you want to control finely the way the shader changes from one texture to another, on the same object, and with the use of a single material index. For those not familiar with the use of stencils please read here before you proceed.

I personally read through this tutorial and this is what I was able to do:

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One of the most important components of any 3D artwork or rather CGI is the use of textures. Without textures, your renders will basically look obviously 3D. But today the essence unless required for the purpose of the project, is to create realistic looking 3D elements. Proper textures will leave your clients in a state of AWE... as the artist you will be wondering why they are wondering...that is your secret, so keep it. I found a site with free textures and all you have to do is register, which is also free.                       

Here is a very good collection of ABSOLUTELY FREE textures for both 2D and 3D artwork. 

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Camera placement and settings for the depth of field in 3D programs can prove to be very frustrating, most especially if you are just a 3D artist and not a professional photographer. Even then most professional photographers have a lot to learn about the behavior of the CAMERA. Get this indepth tutorial with some mathematical insight to help you get your pictures right, be it 3D or real - world photography.

In optics, particularly as relates to film and photography, the depth of field (DOF) is the portion of a scene that appears sharp in the image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on either side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions.

For some images, such as landscapes, a large DOF may be appropriate, while for others, such as portraits, a small DOF may be more effective. In cinematography, a large DOF is often called deep focus, and a small DOF is often called shallow focus.

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I always love those very cool 3D renders we see, having nice effects or very close to real or even more real than real world scenes. How do they do it? Well, there are several ways but one of the ways is irrefutably HDRI. I found this site with loads of free .hdr images for your 3D scenes and the best part is that they are not as heavy. So let's say they may not give you a 90% perfection but at least you will strike a 60% which to me is a lot more than just good.

Check them out here: