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* Trying to design "sideways"
* Materials and Tools
* Armature building
* Practical techniques and tips for sculpting in plastaline
* Creating the major sweep and flow in the forms, establishing attitude from the very beginning
* Making a strong design statement with silhouette
* Balancing extremes and subtleties in design
* Using pose to establish attitude and personality
* Using the lines defined by the edges of forms to affect how the viewer "reads" a character, thus giving it "punch"
* Methods to keep a fresh eye for your work
* Refining sculpture for the purposes of a quick concept maquette
* Finding inspiration in unexpected and/or forgotten sources

his class will cover the principles of good composition with a focus on lighting. Topics covered include 2D concepts of color keys and then proceed to techniques for lighting 3D illustrations as well as lighting character animation and film sequences. Jeremy will be using Autodesk Maya as his primary 3D tool, but this class is less about technical training so the principles should apply to any software you might use.

Gnomon Workshop Wood Planks & Panels Textures contains 305 high resolution textures for the creation of all kinds of man-made structured wooden surfaces. Included are photographs of boards, panels, planks and posts as well as specialty wood constructions.

In this DVD, Richard Smith guides you through modeling a Next-Gengame character. Richard starts with a rough concept design and then creates a low-res base mesh. From there he sculpts each part in ZBrush with special attention paid to creating realistic clothing folds. Once each part is completely sculpted Richard retopologizes it inside of Maya using a plug-in called Nex. Finally, using XNormal he creates the normal map and then sets everything up in Maya. This DVD is intended for artists with a basic understanding of polygon modeling in Maya, but the techniques he demonstrates could_be_applied using other 3D_modeling software.

In these series of videos we will be taking a look at how to use ZBrush as a 3D digital sculpting tool. We will cover everything from working with brushes, using masks, posing our creature with the transpose tool, and 3D layers. The base torso mesh will be provided as an obj and the final sculpt will be provided as a .ZTL

The Refinery Project is a four chapter tutorial that demonstrates, in real-time, how to bring a static image to life in seven hours. Starting with a static photo of an oil refinery, Alex integrates 2D and 3D elements using Maya, After Effects and Photoshop. In this final chapter, we begin by adding a new foreground shoreline and some rocks in the water. We pull elements from a photo using masking, fringe removal and warping. We then move to Maya to create a dynamic flock of birds that fly into frame. The bird effect is created from scratch including joints, skinning, looping animation, UVs, texturing, particle instancing, emitters, fields, expressions, lighting, rendering and the final composite of the Refinery Project.

The Refinery Project is a four chapter tutorial that demonstrates, in real-time, how to bring a static image to life in seven hours. Starting with a static photo of an oil refinery, Alex integrates 2D and 3D elements using Maya, After Effects and Photoshop.
In chapter three, animated fog is added to the Maya scene using volume emission, fields, sprites, expressions, disk caching, hardware rendering and motion blur. All necessary steps are discussed as we build the effect from scratch and integrate it into our composite. Final tweaks are added in After Effects including color correction, level adjustments, masking and movement.