Double sided shader is little tricky in Maya but it is not difficult, here in this tutorial I show you how to create that one with the use of some Maya utilities.
I take a example of Playing card and create texture for it one is for front and another for back side. When you apply this texture to your object then only one texture will appear, so to make both side different texture I use sampler info and condition utility with both texture front and back side.
You need to drag sampler info to condition with middle mouse button and then connect flipped normal to first term – by connecting this way sampler info tells condition which side of the object is with normal and which side does not have normal, if side is with normal then give value 1 or it return 0 if side is without normal.
Condition then use this value to compare with second term which has 0 value, so now if object has normal on that side then value of first term is 1 , so equation is first term = second term (True or false) so 1 = 0 answer is false so texture with false will apply to that side.
This is how double sided texture create in Maya.

Ambient occlusion in maya

you can get high res video here

In this video tutorial I try to show how to create ambient occlusion in 3ds max. I use max 9. First change render setting to mental ray then apply mental ray shader to all object this can be done by material override setting in render setting. In mental ray shader apply ambient occlusion texture and adjust its value to get final output, remember to change background color also.

To understand how ambient occlusion work visit this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion

High res video is here

What is Normal mapping, How it works, where this Normal Mapping is used .... and lot more question about Normal mapping is answerd in this link this is very good article on Normal mapping from Wikipedia.

Their is also very good explaintion of Normal mapping on this site

you will also find some info from this site as well

For maya people how to use Normal Mapping is available here and for 3ds max here is tutorial.

Have fun with normal mapping

for futher information on Normal mapping look for other article in this blog

Did you ever face problem in opening UV of your 3d object, or you want to know what UV is in 3dsMax then this tutorial is for you, this deals with how to handle UV in 3dsMax.
I found this tutorial is good for Intermediate level. Here you take small project and open UV of that, file is provide with tutorial for practice

Unwrap is the modifier which we use to open UV, you can select some face or full object then apply planer mapping to it. Then in edit adjust it UV coordinate and take snapshot of your UV. This snapshot can be use for making detail texture in Photoshop or any other image editing software.

Plz click here for tutorial.