Sensation Tectonics::Mayacasts

Quickly create beautiful drawings with Rhino's contour tool and Illustrator.  Plus a little peak at Rhino 5 beta's interface changes.  This is a great technique when working with dense poly meshes in rhino.  It gets beyond just the wire frame and lets you explore your models surface geometry, form and affect with a new set of parameters.  Direction, contour spacing, and line weight are the primary variable, but combined they create complex visual sensation with just a few quick steps.

Introduction to Maya's Lattice deformer.  A couple of common use cases and some tips to get you rolling.

Maya's nonlinear deformers.  They can animate the simulation of simple physical actions and combined with clever geometry, dynamic time, and a creative mind they can be very good modeling tools.  There are an infinite way to use these, and at first it can seem quite daunting...just keep practicing.

The one Maya Animation Deformer you need to know!!!  This video covers creating a "Dynamic Pillow" with nurbs surfaces & clusters with a dash of constraints garnished with some quality expressions.  Sure to please any computation based interactive design appetite.

More cool things you can do with Maya's Animation Constraints. 

Ever wondered how to make the really cools effect of a field of sunflowers following the sun?  This is a quick example to get you on your way using Maya's Aim Constraint,

An introduction to the Animation Constraint tools in maya, these make it possible to start developing connected behaviors across multiple objects.  PSEUDO DYNAMIC FUN!

Finally, what to do with those sweet organic polygons.  Get them our of Maya and pass them through Rhino to create amazing drawings or send them to the 3D printer.

This one is more awesome techniques for making drawings from Nurbs in Rhino

Now that we have seen some Rhino, lets figure out how to get our sexy nurbs forms out of Maya and into Rhino.  Then we can make some beautiful drawing fast.  Its all about understanding the workflow, so you can really focus on the work.

A quick intro to Rhino, just a short walk through the interface and some tips for quickly getting acclimated if you are an autocad user.

Ever wanted to make an awesome organic tessellated mesh.  Here is your chance.  Some fancy tips on using maya to generate interesting tessellation patterns and how you can control them.  This is some top notch poly fun.

Another approach to modelling the hammer, with some advanced polygon tools.

Just in case it has always been your fantasy to model a hammer.  Here is a little clip about getting started with polygons.  It also feature several tips for working with the basics of box modelling.

A bit longer video covering most of the surface creation tools from the Surfaces/surface menu.  This one touches on just about everything.

The Mobius Strip.  An oldie but goodie.  Learn to use Maya's powerful animation tool set to help us model a tricky math problem.  Keep special attention to the "Normal" direction of your surface.