Archive

At Digital-Tutors, we've found that many people starting out creating models in 3ds Max have some difficulty in creating the specific vision they have. In many cases it's not necessarily a lack of knowledge of the tools as much as it is a lack of confidence and experience. So, to give you a head start on your modeling, we've put together a number of tips collected from production and from teaching students that will help you build the best models you can with minimal frustration.
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Lesson Outline (34 lessons)
This course will provide you with a foundation for rigging characters in Softimage.

We'll take a step-by-step approach, constructing a control rig that is solid and animator-friendly. We'll learn everything from proper bone placement and working with constraints, to learning how to utilize some of Softimage's robust skinning tools to remove the fear of painting weights. By the end of this course, you'll have the foundation you need to create your own rigs that produce character performances that are natural and entertaining.

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Lesson Outline (11 lessons)

In this series of lessons, we will be exploring some of the core rendering tools and features that every Softimage rendering artist needs to be familiar with.

This course is designed for users who are just getting started with rendering in Softimage, so we will not be focusing heavily on using lights, materials or recipes to give your render a specific look. Instead, our focus will be on helping you build a strong foundational knowledge of rendering in Softimage by talking about many of the key tools, features and concepts that every rendering artist in Softimage really needs to be familiar with. We will also learn how to resolve some rendering-related issues that you may encounter, and we will focus very heavily on helping you develop good habits and strong workflow practices that will be extremely beneficial to you as an emerging render artist.

In this collection of lessons we will learn about prop animation.

This course covers tools and techniques for animating props in Maya. We'll discuss methods that are animator-friendly for prop animation. We'll learn how to animate constrained objects, how to blend smoothly between our space-switches as we keyframe a constraint's weight, and we'll even explore at technique for switching between spaces with no offset. At the end of this course, you'll have the knowledge you need to overcome the challenges of prop animation.

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In this collection of lessons we will learn about the Animation Principle of Secondary Action.

This course will venture into the animation principle of Secondary Action in Maya. What is Secondary Action? Is it another way of describing Follow-through and Overlap, or is it much more? Throughout this course, we'’ll define Secondary Action and work through a variety exercises to help get the point across. By the end of this course, you'’ll understand what the principle of Secondary Action boils down to, which will help you enhance your animations by adding an extra level of realism to your characters.
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In this collection of lessons we will learn about the Animation Principle of Arcs.

This course will venture into the animation principle of Arcs in Maya. What are arcs? Why is this subject so vital in animation? These are but a few questions we'll answer as we learn techniques that will assist us in checking for and fixing arcs in our animations. By the end of this course, you'll know how to improve your arcs, which will help you become a stronger animator, as you use this principle to add an extra level of realism to your character's movements.
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In this collection of lessons we will be exploring several of the V-Ray rendering nodes that can be found in Maya's Hypershade.

These Hypershade nodes can be used to create a variety of effects and many of these nodes provide us a number of additional controls over our V-Ray renders. For example, we will be taking an in-depth look at a number of nodes that can be used individually or used together to create a variety of surface material types that obey real-world laws of optics. We will also learn a variety of methods for adding volumetric effects to our renders, creating subsurface scattering materials, using geometry as a direct illumination source, along with many other lessons dedicated to the various V-Ray nodes found in Maya's Hypershade.
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