How-to's

Learn how to use mental ray® software: Materials, Shaders, and Global Illumination

By the time you finish this article, you will have the Autodesk® VIZ skills you need to make a wide variety of attractive, fast-rendering cloth objects.

This article reviews modifier stack fundamentals, including applying and removing modifiers from objects, and covers some of this tool’s more complex capabilities.

Many designers who use Autodesk® VIZ to render environments subsequently edit their images and animations in applications like Adobe® Premiere® and Photoshop®. This article explains how to achieve many of the same effects using VIZ, which can save you time on every project.

Most of the objects you render in Autodesk® VIZ 4 are mesh objects. In this article, you learn how to use the Edit Mesh modifier to change these objects.

This tutorial will show you how to use the Track View interface to create, modify, and delete animation information for objects in your scene.

Even though 3D Studio VIZ® software provides an extremely sophisticated 3D modeling environment, every user must first master creating and editing 2D shapes in order to get the most out of the product's 3D capabilities.

In this project we review some specific techniques that will help you reduce file size, increase the speed at which they render, and make them easier to modify-without sacrificing the realism and quality that 3D Studio VIZ software has made possible.

By the time you complete this article you will have acquired skills that will make creating and maintaining your 3D Studio VIZ designs significantly easier.

This tutorial will show you how use the Align and Normal Align to create 3D models quickly.

In this article you learn how to use each of these methods to define a NURBS model. By the time you complete the article, you should feel comfortable creating most objects using NURBS modeling commands.

Much of architectural design depends on designing and presenting elegant structures within and around buildings. In this article you learn how to create 3D frameworks using the Lattice modifier in 3D Studio VIZ® software.

In this article you become familiar with patch grids. You learn how to create and edit them and have a chance to discover what makes them so different from other modeling tools you may have used.

In this tutorial you'll explore dragging and dropping materials onto objects and creating a material based on a scanned image.

In this article you master combustion and lens effects. By the time you finish it, you will know how to make a variety of visible light sources.

This article reviews how to apply materials to objects using the UVW Map Modifier, the most commonly used tool for controlling how materials are applied to objects in 3D Studio VIZ. By the time you finish reading this article, you will have the skills required to control the materials applied to most of the objects in your designs.

If you're ready, today you'll learn how to create walkthrough animations, make objects follow paths, and animate objects with forward and inverse kinematics.

Just when you think you have Autodesk® VIZ all figured out, you discover it has another trick up its sleeve. You may know how to create omni lights, point lights, and area lights, but did you know that you can turn any object into a light source? By the time you complete this article, you will know how to create objects that don't just accept illumination, but actually emit light that illuminates other elements in a scene.