Here is an annotated list of technical resources that I find useful for my work. Currently, they are in no particular order and all are in the realm of high-end 3D computer graphics software, specifically Autodesk Maya and mental images mental ray. I first prepared this list for my students in the Visual Effects Department of the School of Film, Digital Media and Performing Arts at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Dave Johnson’s blog has very good material regarding mental ray, character technical direction and MEL:

http://www.djx.com.au/blog/

Zap Andersson is an engineer with mental images who worked on the fast skin material. His blog is a great resource for mental ray information:

http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

The Los Angeles mental ray User Group has all sorts of mentral ray-related goodies:

http://www.lamrug.org/

mymentalray.com is a growing resource for the mental ray community:

http://www.mymentalray.com/

A personal favorite is the page explaining sampling in mental ray, a good thing to understand for high-quality and efficient renderings:

http://www.lamrug.org/resources/samplestips.html

Eric Pavey’s MEL Wiki is an excellent aggregation of information for Maya’s built-in scripting language, MEL:

http://mayamel.tiddlyspot.com/

There’s always Duncan Brinsmead’s blog…recently showing some fun with Maya’s nCloth for non-cloth simulations:

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_duncan/blog_list/

Here is a very good Maya Wiki:

http://www.tokeru.com/t

I will update this post as things change or as I come across additional resource.

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