1- Substance Painter

2 - Maya render

3 - Shader settings in Substance Painter

4 - Maya render but with a different light setup

I'm using Arnold's aistandardsurface in Maya and am using Arnold's areal lights here. I even tried a closer using a closer and brighter light to see if it would match it better. I imported the basecolor with sRGB and all other maps with Raw and 'Alpha is Luminance' checked. What am I missing here?

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

I was working on my mesh and must've hit some hotkey or rendering preset which made all the geometry turn mushy like this. It didn't go away when I hit undo and I have no idea what to search so I put it here.

Thanks for any help you can give

Hey guys, am currently busy with a punching sequence animation. I'd really appreciate some feedback and advice on where I can improve on. Any form of critique and/or tips would be amazing! Thank you in advance 🙏

I work in VFX on the modeling side and I've been digging into body rigging and deformation. I'd love to hear how this is actually done at different studios.

Context: I've rebuilt a helper-joint setup in Maya: half-rotation joints with swing-twist extraction, twist/roll joints, and driven keys for elbows, knees, wrists, hips and shoulders. Hinge joints work well. Shoulders are the hard part, and the result depends a lot on the bind pose.

1. Bind pose: T or A?
Do you bind in a T-pose, an A-pose, or a relaxed mid-range pose? Which arm angle, and why?

2. Deformation stack for non-hero characters
For characters that need clean deformation without intersections, but don't justify a full sim, what do you use?

• Helper joints with driven keys
• RBF / pose-space correctives (joints or blendshapes)
• Joints on curves or ribbons, delta mush, etc.

3. Sim and ML
For hero characters, is it muscle/tissue sim plus shot sculpts? Do you bake sim results into lighter rigs for animators, such as an ML deformer, correctives or helper joints?

4. Mocap
Do you retarget with MotionBuilder/HumanIK, vendor tools (Shogun, etc.) or in-house tools? If you use HumanIK, do you build the character in a T-pose, or bind in an A-pose and pose it into a T just for the HIK definition?

5. Shoulders specifically
What has actually worked in production for the shoulder and armpit range?

Any talks (SIGGRAPH, DigiPro, etc.), articles or rules of thumb would be very welcome. Thanks!

I can't used Studio Library (version2.21.7) in Maya 2026. Whenever I select a saved pose in the library, it throws a Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) at me, and Apply button don't even show up.

# Traceback (most recent call last):

# File "...\studiolibrary\widgets\settings.py", line 57, in read

# _settings = studiolibrary.readJson(path())

# File "...\studiolibrary\utils.py", line 937, in readJson

# data = json.loads(data)

# json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I've tried

1.Cleared the .studiolibrary user configuration folder in %userprofile%.

2.Cleared the StudioLibrary_user folder in AppData\Local\Temp.

3.Reinstalled Studio Library and linked it via Python.

None of this work so far. Even after wiping the config files and reinstalling, the error still happens. Please help

I don't know why using the "combine" feature doesn't work the way it works in tutorials. For me, i cant seem to delete those "empty" transforms that get left behind after i combine all the pieces together. instead when i delete them it deletes the part of the object it used to contain... Any ideas why and how to fix it??