Found this nice little tutorial on realisticaly texturing a Mini using Maya and Mental Ray.

The end results are absolutely stunning, some nice ideas.

This article focuses on shading and texturing the Mini Cooper, I’ll talk a little about rendering with Mental Ray but I think other people have covered that in more depth elsewhere.

via Behind the scenes shading and rendering my Mini Cooper. | rethinkfx.

This is a really special short film but do your eyes a favour and visit Vimeo and watch the HD version.

I was in two minds as to whether I should link to this article, not that the article lacks interest only that the author has used JavaScript to try and block copying of text and images. Whilst I respect the rights of ownership of the author this behaviour goes against the principle of the WWW and the open dissemination of information. In the end I decided the WTF publish and be damned who is this guy Rupert Murdoch?

Anyway check out his overly (not really) protected site the guy has some nice articles on there shame about the paranoia.

Occlusion is a fast and simple method to simulate the effects of global illumination. Ambient occlusion is most often calculated by casting rays in every direction from the surface. Rays which reach the background or “sky” increase the brightness of the surface, whereas a ray which hits any other object contributes no illumination.

Ambient Occlusion – Using mib_amb_occlusion node – Crunks Blog.

Edit: Great guy with a sense of humour, not only that the JS is gone.