Interior Vertex has Valence two, locating vertex with only two edges. (Mudbox and Maya)

This is a bizarre little issue that I had never run into before. Hopefully if some of you run into it this will save you the time it took me to figure out. I was recently using Mudbox and when I imported my low res model from Maya I got this message "Interior Vertex has Valence two" in Mudbox. The solution is to locate the offending Vertex in Maya and get rid of it/them! Read on to find out how.

Simple displacement mapping in V-ray for Maya

This is not that difficult but there just doesn't seem to be that much information out there for Maya on this so I thought I would post a quick tutorial to help you out.

NEW UPDATE: If you are just trying to paint a simple greyscale displacement map in photoshop to place on your model this tutorial will show you how to do it, HOWEVER!

You will have far more CONTROL if you paint and export a floating point EXR displacement map in a program like Mudbox. This is because with floating point the displacement map's pixel values correspond directly to your 3D package's scene units. So a pixel value of 1.0 will displace your mesh by 1.0 scene units. A pixel value of 0.5 displaces your mesh by 0.5 scene units. And a pixel value of 0.0 doesn't displace your mesh at all.  Further because the displacement map's pixel values are stored in floating-point format, they can contain pixel values far above 1.0, and negative pixel values far below 0.0. It's a great way to store precise displacement information. 

A normal 16 bit image painted in photoshop doesn't have this ability so the tutorial below is limited. You may find yourself playing with the "displacement shift" and "displacement amount" settings trying to get perfect results because we aren't creating a floating point image. I have written a tutorial on using Ptex from Mudbox for displacement using V-ray for Maya here. 

Join the v-ray for Maya Facebook page!

Press the LIKE button to join the growing v-ray for Maya Facebook community! Share links, tips, your project etc.! 

V-ray Maya Adaptive sampling/antialiasing tid bits

This was gleaned off a forum and posted by a user called PerfectLine. There is some very useful information in here if you are trying to figure out the DMC and Adaptive DMC sampling in v-ray for Maya.

Creating realistic grass in v-ray Maya using fur

Once again there are tons of tutorials for Max but not Maya about this kind of thing. Here is a quick tutorial which should give you a starting place for creating realistic grass in V-ray for Maya.

Let's get started! First, Create a new plane primitive.

Paint normal maps in photoshop! FREE plugin nDo

Man this week i'm just finding all kinds of little helpful tools I never knew existed. This tool let's you paint normal maps in Adobe photoshop directly! It's called nDo. This powerful tool has been released FREE!

Download nDo

Author Website Link

Here is the Polycount thread about it.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=77272

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