Archive

This^class will demonstrate a technique that will encourage the artist to pursue three-hour figure gesture paintings in 3D. These 3D gesture paintings allow the artist to experiment and avoid being consumed with the detail work ordinarily associated with the medium^of 3D. While a photograph is used for the purposes of this class, all^techniques are perfectly applicable to working in front of a live model.

“At Weta Workshop we are often asked to help create a fantastical and original world that still has the cultural and historical believability of our own. In this workshop I will be sharing how many of the principles and techniques we employ as world designers can be applied to figurative illustration to give greater depth, detail and meaning to your work. This workshop will cover my conceptual and technical process behind an illustration produced for Coilhouse Magazine, Sherlock Holmes vs The White Fox Woman – a brief History of Chinese Pulp (2010).”

This course^ covering the design and construction of digital characters will focus on motion; primarily skeletal animation and surface deformation. Rick^Grandy will discuss the biomechanics of real animals, taking the knowledge learned from nature and using it to help create creatures^ that move in a ^believable way. He'll also discuss when to break the rules, and how to improve the performance of your characters.

Award-winning^ independent director Greg^Jonkajtys shares his^experience designing and executing the visual effects for his new live-action short film The 3rd Letter. Topics will include storyboards and animatics, shooting with the^Canon 5D Mark II DSLR camera, blending computer generated effects^with real props, and^extending live-action sets with CG.

In this class, David Meng^ shares his thoughts on how he includes personality and expression in a character bust, striving to avoid anything innocuous or generic but still keeping subtlety in the sculpture. The practical aspects of working with^ plastaline and armatures will be addressed, as well as the subjective aspect of creative influences and the challenges involved in creating something that will^ entertain and surprise viewers.

This ^series introduces the essential techniques for creating digital sets and backgrounds, an area of visual effects growing in prominence. In this third disc of a series of three, visual effects designer Eric Hanson begins with rendering a Maya scene into layers and passes, then leads into the various approaches for professionally compositing and integrating a digital set into a live-action background. He examines the main composite tree in Shake, illustrating the use of the various render passes including diffuse, specular, reflection, shadow, z-depth, effects and ambient occlusion. ^Throughout the disc, Eric uses a^ sample scene of an urban environment to highlight all essential steps. This series is designed~ for all advancing intermediate Maya artists.

This set shows and teaches you how to model in Maya using high polygon techniques in order to create complex hard surface models. In this tutorial you are shown how to create a science fiction carrier ship, Ultimax Apocolypse. During this tutorial you are shown the techniques of creating high polygon models, application of detail and use of subdivision and smoothing techniques in order to create the finished model that you see below. Following creation of the piece, smaller fighter ships are created and then the scene is rendered and composited onto a backplate created in Photoshop.

In Maya 2011: Creating Natural Environments, author Aaron F. Ross demystifies a common challenge of 3D modeling: fashioning realistic natural environments such as landscapes, atmospheres, and foliage. Starting with flat terrain, Aaron shows how to sculpt various types of geometry and smooth out jagged, polygonal edges. The course also covers creating convincing backgrounds and clouds, populating a scene with foliage using 3D Paint Effects, and incorporating natural light.

In this lecture, Vitaly Bulgarov shows his process of creating a fully rendered 3D design for production-oriented pipelines. Using the example of an alien bust, Vitaly goes through the main steps of creating a sci-fi character design from scratch.

In this video Jeff Patton takes an in-depth look at how to create a realistic render of a vehicle in 3DS max using Mental Ray.