Easy Spiral stair case

Create stairs the thickness you'd like. then stack them like regular stairs putting the spacing between then to reach your desired height. then toss a bend deformer on them!

semi-transparent shadows.

in ray trace option turn down Shadow attenuation down to 0.
this explains it better

http://mayastation.typepad.com/maya-station/2009/07/semi-transparent-shadow-appear-at-render-time.html

Easy Ambient Occlusion on Fur In Maya

So easy you'll slap your head because YOU didn't think of it. This is really a cheat and not really an ambient occlusion, the results are similar so for the most part you'll be okay.

Go to your fur attributes

Drag down all the color sliders to black. The sharpness to 0

Then bring the Ambient Tip Color to white or even go to the choose color dialog box and put in a value higher than 1 in the V channel.

Only thing you should make sure is that the object your fur is on has an ambient occlusion shader on it as well.

How to set up an Ambient Occlusion from scratch.

First, you need Mental Ray. Open your Hypershade and have it show Mental Ray nodes. Scroll down to textures and middle mouse drag the "mib_amb_occlusion" shader to the black area on on the bottom of the Hypershade. Then go back to Maya nodes and drag out a surface shader to the black area. Connect the "mib_amb_occlusion" out color to the Surface shader's out color. Now it is just tweaking the spread and max distance. It will vary scene to scene so i'm not going through it for you.

one last tip is you want to make the camera environment white.

To do this select the camera you want to render from. Open the attribute editor and scroll down to environment. Open up the box there and slide the slider to the right.

The render setting are in the picture above.

This Blog

Is a random assortment of hints and tips that I use a lot. They are more my personal notes so I can know what to do later. If you have questions or comments be sure to ask. I'll try to awnser them. If I can't I'll find someone who can. Sometimes I'll just post a link to another site or the Maya help doc of stuff that I want to remember. So, enjoy.