When Using Mental-ray, your materials could disappear from your imported assets. Thankfully, just deleting namespaces can fix this issue This addresses an issue that I started noticing in Maya when using Mental ray . I noticed that when importing geo files with materials assigned to them ( .fbx or . ma) I was loosing access to my shading groups through the attribute editor. which meant I couldn't directly select my material in the Attribute Editor after grabbing my object in the Viewport. I knew the materials were still assigned. When I rendered the scene , the information was still there. When I went to the hypershade, I was was able to right-click on a material and choose " Select Objects with Material" and the objects with the Material would light up in my view-port. The material was still attached so why could't I edit it in my attribute editor?! It turns out that there is a very simple solution to this. While I can't give a definitive explanati...

As promise to myself, I have decided to begin publishing my Work-in-progress pieces on my blog . I hope that by doing this, I can push my self to continue developing my portfolio outside of work and to also get some useful critique and pointers from others. I spent about 7 hours this week, upgrading my elegant seahorse concept. Before I began working on it, the creature looked like this : After 7 hours, I was able to base-block the scales on the upper body and play with mid-range details. After a lot of messing around, I decided that hand-sculpting in the scales would be the best route for this project. Since the seahorse is already posed and asymmetrical, I felt as if hand sculpting vs, using alphas wouldn't be that much of a difference, since I could't lay out alphas on the symmetry line and since the scales needed to flow with the form. My hope is that by next week, I will have most of the mid level details done on the seahorse body so that I c...