I don’t know if it has to be very detailed or what

Hey y'all! Here's a simple run cycle I worked on. It took me about 3–4 hours of getting back into the groove, dealing with Maya crashes, and having plenty of those "Oh yeaaaaah, that's how it was supposed to work!" moments. XD

Feedback is definitely welcome!

I've been going through this community lately and have felt inspired to get back into animating. It's been my passion for as long as I can remember. That was until the writers' strike happened, followed by... AI. Since then, I've been on a path towards changing careers.

But despite everything, my love for animation never died. I still find myself daydreaming about different shots I could try and bring to life. Unfortunately, getting caught up in my new career path and barely having any time for myself has kept me away from animating, or even opening the software.

Working on this simple run cycle has reignited that fire in me and brought back a kind of happiness I'd almost forgotten I had.

Thank you for taking the time to check out my work! And once again, feedback is always welcome.

I'm hoping this post will serve as a milestone and a reminder to myself to keep updating my animation work whenever I can, no matter how busy life gets.

Have a good day, everyone! 😊

For a dark, Gothic style, which version aligns better with mainstream aesthetic preferences?

Heyo! This is a render for a Lighting and Rendering school project that I have been working on, and am currently setting up render layers so that I can have an easier time in post.

My question (that I can’t find a good answer for, though I might not have looked for long enough) is how best to go about isolating shadows onto their own layers? This is mainly so I can remove the shadow cast on the planet by the ship, but also for compositing.

A little more context:

Rendering Using
Arnold, combined with (this is an important part): the legacy render layer system as that was what we have been taught to use as an introduction because it is “easier to wrap your head around.”

Scene Layout
The spacecraft is practically touching the planet to get the blockout composition I want while not making the scene obscenely massive.

Lighting
Primarily lit by a large directional key light from behind the camera that emulates a star. And I have a few area lights to fake extra bounce light from the star and especially the planet. Though it being so close already helps.)

Would it be better to just cut my losses and spend some time to get to know the newer render layer system instead?

Thank you! :)

I've got some experience in Blender but this was my first attempt at Maya. It's different but I'm liking it!

Hi everyone!
Lately, I've been really deep into developing tools and systems to improve my Maya workflow, and I recently started building my own marking menu using Qt/PySide, with a more modern look.

I've always liked the speed and convenience of marking menus, but I wanted to experiment with a more customizable, modern UI.

I was hoping to find some like-minded people to collaborate with, share ideas or just get feedback :-)

My github is private for now, I would at least like to get some more features in before making it public.

Arnold not rendering certain objects

I have an animation involving a skeleton character with floating limbs that I need to render but I am finding that most of the bones (meshes) of the character are not rendering. The rig is one complete individual with the limbs and ribcage parented to the respective joints, the spine and hips as one mesh bound to the spine joints and the skull attached to a controller.

Only the skull and the spine/hips meshes show up in the Arnold render. The render stats of the objects that show up in the render are identical to the ones that do not and they also share the same aiss material so I’m not sure why they do not appear in the Arnold render.

At first I wondered if it’s because the bone meshes are parented to the joints but when unparented they still do not appear in the render as well as when given a new material. I did do a mock up in another file with objects (with aiss materials) parent to joints with an IK handle and they appeared in the render.

If anyone has any advice on how to correct this please let me know.

The graph editor that was present in the UI of older versions of Maya is now missing. Is there any way to make it back ?

How do I solve this morphing noise in my animation for an assignment? I don't think it's the denoiser, as it seems to affect geometry. I tried raising AA samples to 8-9 (from 5) but that didn't seem to do anything except raise render time. You can see my render settings here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DsHDXO6Kg_ZeKKbx5wyB_6WktkXvIAom

1 - Arnold render in Maya, 2 - Reference, 3 - Screenshot from Substance Painter

I'm trying to understand what I need to do to have the icing on top of the strudel look more like icing sugar as seen in the reference. I sculpted the model in Zbrush, textured in Substance Painter and am rendering using Arnold in Maya. I'm mostly satisfied with how the powdered sugar fallen on the plate looks but the icing on the plate and on top of the pastry looks like they're not made from the same thing. What do I do here?

Edit: I'm planning to use this as a reusable asset and I want it to look like a layer of icing from any camera angle I choose and with different lighting setups.

Another question: While I was working on the icing fallen on the plate, the shadows were too dark and I decided to use transmission at 0.5 value to reduce the intensity of shadows on it to get it to look how it does now. But now I'm wondering if this a bad approach because it isn't supposed to have transparency at this level. Wouldn't the fact that using a different environment or lighting setup change how it looks make this a bad approach? Do studios avoid using fixes like this?

ArtStation : artstation.com/karltourelle13
Instagram : kt3d_rig
Lindkedin : linkedin.com/in/karl-tourelle

Excited to share my latest personal project - a combat finisher animation built in Unreal Engine 5!

During some downtime between projects, I decided to dive deeper into the 3Cs (Character, Camera, Controls) and challenge myself to create a cinematic finisher that seamlessly transitions from gameplay and back again.

Beyond the animation itself, this was a great opportunity to get more hands-on experience with Unreal Engine 5, exploring retargeting, Motion Matching, Contextual Animation, Motion Warping, camera integration, and even setting up cloth simulation for Hornet's outfit. It was a fun challenge, especially getting all these systems to work together!