This movie will demonstrate some of the latest mental ray for Maya 2008 rendering effects—and how you can quickly and efficiently achieve them. You’ll see how improvements to the round corner shader make it even easier to create geometrically imperfect, or realistic, corners and learn how to take advantage of the tone mapping shader to convert a high-range image to a lower-range one. You’ll also learn how to use the new mental ray Sky Portal system—a workflow that simplifies the process of lighting indoor scenes with outdoor lighting. Finally, you’ll see how improvements to IPR—including a new snapshot feature—can help you fine-tune your scenes much faster.

This movie will show you how to take advantage of key Maya rendering workflow features to streamline common rendering tasks. The addition of containers to the Hypergraph and Hypershade, for example, helps you simplify the display of complex node hierarchies. This video will teach you how to publish attributes to containers from the Attribute Editor. You’ll also learn how to quickly and efficiently set up a skin shader and how to use the subdivision approximation node to produce Catmull-Clark polygon meshes.

This video introduces you to nCloth’s improved wind model, which now supports wind shadowing—the effect wherein cloth will not be blown by wind on the opposite side of the character, or when it is sheltered by another object. You’ll also see a demonstration of how to use the Air Push Distance feature and the new lift model.

As the first Maya module built on Autodesk’s new Nucleus technology, Maya nCloth lets you quickly direct and control your cloth and other material simulations in entirely new ways. In this video, you’ll see a demonstration of the improved dynamic wind features for Maya nCloth, including Wind Shadow Distance and Wind Noise. You’ll also get an overview of the time-saving nCloth presets new in Maya 2008.

Maya 2008 provides new and enhanced tools for both the high-level manipulation and component-level editing of polygon models. This video will introduce you to the software’s new Smooth Mesh workflow, which has been significantly streamlined thanks to new, high-performance preview capabilities. You’ll also learn how to take advantage of the new Slide Edge feature and become acquainted with the enhancements made to other polygon editing features such as Pick Walk (for edge loops) and the Poly Reduce