damn i love the community here when i was a complete noob i once posted a render here and this is the response i got "your work has improved but your models need to be cleaned up abit c&c......."
at cgtalk: "good render but very bad model"

it took me a whole year before i felt confident to post anything there again

i owe my skills to this site and the community and ill be a member for life

Hi murambi
I do not want to lose that part of SM, but the site is looking tied it needs a update to encurage people to stick around, I personaly do not think it would be a good idear to merge lightwave and max with us I was thinking more like genny said about are boards. When I talk about tutorial its what the work flow is a this moment, most of us use photoshop to texture, if you are modelling organics you are most likly using zbrush and if you are doing animation you are going to use another to bring it together, I think most of us use more than one programme to do are stuff..........dave

Edit:dont wait till the ship sinks do something about it.

alright if merging is a bad idea, then there definitely needs to be more tutorials involving all aspects of maya.

Lighting, indoors and outdoors, natural, and artificial, morning, noon, evening and night.
Animation, rigging, skinning, painting weights, 2 legged, and 4 legged creatures, so we get the idea for both.
Dynamics, fluids, fields, soft/rigid bodies, effects, solvers, hair
Rendering, mainly mental ray since that seems to be the high end rendering that everyone does.
nDynamics, nCloth, nParticles, nConstraint

Like I've said if simplymaya had these kinds of tutorials I'd gladly spend my money here. I'd rather spend it here than some other sites I've been to. Rather support a community I really enjoy than a community I'm not even a part of, and don't really want to be a part of.

if there's no merging then tutorials should go beyond just the modeling that we see here all the time. Maybe if there is more modeling tutorials they can get into city scenes with sky scrapers, or houses. Scenes of fields and mountains, river beds and so on.

I don't know I usually follow a tutorial to figure out how to do what I'm making and use the tutorial as a reference... I only need so many "How to model a cartoon person" tutorials.

This is a site for maya lets try to get deeper into maya, explore the magic it can produce.

I'd love to help make tutorials but I wouldn't want them so badly if I already knew how to do them. I'm sure there are people here who can help with that, and make these.


As far as competitions go, last one I was in that I really liked and am going to visit my old project, was the Rube Goldberg comp. That was so much fun using dynamics and physics to make it work, with no actual animation.
I enjoyed watching the comp. of the dam breaking but had no idea how to tackle that one or how to even get started, couldn't find tutorials on how to even get started with a project like that.

These are ideas that I've been thinking about for quite a while with this site and would love to see them implemented.

Hi Rhetoric Camel
I like some of your thinking but it is not for me to deside if Lightwave or Max are merged, you can do a lot in maya but you need other progammes to support it, I like your idea for a challange to have a dam burst...............dave

The dam breaking challenge has already happened, it was a while back, RageCG (I believe that's who it was) was running comps for a couple months while Mike was out. He did the dam breaking comp which had some nice results, using the effects in maya and a plate of a dam. Like I said I didn't know much about how to do that so I just sat back and watched.
He also did the Rube Goldberg challenge which I decided to join in, not knowing anything. I learned a few things but was unable to finish the comp due to personal issues at the time. It was a lot of fun though.

Merging wasn't that big of a deal, I just thought it would be possible but I saw some of the negatives of doing that and I agree, it would be a pain to keep organized and so on.

I definitely feel there needs to be some of the tutorials I mentioned above though. It could really help this site a lot. Lot's of people look for tutorials covering such subjects and end up at either Digital Tutors or Gnomon, I know I did.

The dam breaking challenge didn't go that well because a lot of people didn't really know how to do that kind of thing.

And only two people finished the Rube Goldberg one (myself being one of them). It was good fun though....

if this site offered tutorials on these subjects though then I would have definitely bought the tutorials to learn from so I could have done the challenge with a little more knowledge.

I don't even know who's in charge of simply maya but it would be great to hear from them and see what's going on. They have a bunch of people with ideas, and I'm sure a few on this site that are willing to help turn the ideas into something real.

No stwert the logo is fine BUT a change is good as a holiday.

I dont see why it has to be a PS??? Why not a small 3D??? It could be simple gster and have restrivtions like poly count or whatever.

I agree murambi, getting good crits here is wonderful, it encourages and NOT puts you down like some other sites I have flicked through. I will be a member too for life!!!!

We DO need more tuts, I reckon there should as Rhet has said more variety in other aspects of maya. Go to the main index and have a look, there are only 3 for render and 5 for effects, so this needs attention.

For instance I only see 1 bike, 2 cars, no ships or real human etc. One thing I havent seen (I may be wrong) is no landscapes??? There was someone asking about crits on one the other day....that is something I can do easily but need a lift up.

gster Im with dave!! I will glady donate 50 points towards something simple..not a problem.

cheers bullet

Edit: I agree with Rhet...keep it Maya!!!! If other apps are involved keep them minimal..Maya has plenty to offer and learn about

What you guys are asking for here is probably never going to happen for a variety of reasons. Most notably, all of this stuff takes a ridiculously large amount of time. That being a problem as, as far as I know, this isn't a full time job for anyone. For example, a video tutorial that's 5 hours long, takes about 15 to record due to technical issues, mistakes, etc. That's not even counting the amount of time for preparation and research. Plus there's also the issue of payment to the artist for their effort. For web design, it means making new images, layouts, code, and then testing and releasing. (Plus, even if people are willing to help; the admins aren't going to give root access to the site's repository) It's a huge amount of work. And if it's not broken, why fix it?

thats true to some level but that only serves to producing ordinary work not great work

How did all those tutorials get on this site? some one did them? are you now saying that that is not possible..........dave

Edit: the only reason I started this thread was to try and increase people taking part in this site(if there was alot of activaty on this site I would not have posted this thread, there would have been no purpose, but activaty is dying} how do we increase this? life is all about change, I am old anought to understand that now. thing do not stand bye waiting for us, they just move past those who stand still.

Yes, but in the past, it was run by two people full-time. David and Kevin. The also had a web hosting business which brought in extra cash; which allowed them to do things like free tutorials and update the site. That's not the case now, which means that the options for the admins are limited.

As soon as the Admins and i can catch up we're going to talk about another tut or three or four or however many. Its just hard to work out the time frames of discussing the jobs since there is a 7 hour time difference between them and i, and We learned before i did the New tie Fighter that these discussions arn't for e-mail.
The admin's of the site have all of this in mind to address, and are planning to address most of it, it is just going to take time and patience on behalf of the community.

For instance there was discussion of a nice long tutorial from me planned in the future, ( along the length lines of the Apache ) but it has been put off in lew of trying to do more shorter tutorials, to bring more content to the site faster instead of something very long, but 2-3 months from now before release.

I've provided an outline for a long dynamics series also covering everything from the basics of particle physics all the way to advanced uses of constraints and dynamic simulations. There are things in the works and being discussed you just again, have to be patient and wait for them to come about, and show support for the site, so taht the admins are aware that their efforts will not come to fruition only to be wasted.

I also volunteered to assist with some new site layouts if The admins want to put them up, though i haven't heard about that, most likely these would only be limited to new color schemes though, not total site transformations If that were discussed further in the future.



I hope this alleviates some of the concerns ..
G-man