Digital-Tutors – Professional Series – Texturing Military Vehicles in MAR

1 hrs. 18 min. |Released on September 1, 2011 |Project Files Included (552 MB)

Required Software: MARI 1.3v2

In this course we will talk about important concepts and workflow ideas to keep in mind as you create vehicle textures in MARI.

Welcome to the Professional Series for Texturing Military Vehicles in MARI, an advanced learning guide for skilled artists brought to you by Digital-Tutors, the world’s largest online CG training library. This course was designed to help develop your MARI workflows, and give you some concepts to keep in mind as you go through the process of painting texture maps for your military vehicles. The objectives for this fast-paced course include looking at several different workflows and techniques for texturing a military transport. These concepts include using a layer-based approach to add flexibility to your textures and using snapshots to create variation. We won’t be going step by step through an entire project, but rather talk in broad terms about some of the best ways to work and options you have for dealing with issues that may come up. Before we start, I recommend you have experience using MARI as we cover a lot of information in a shorter span of time. If you’re an artist new to MARI, I recommend you check out Establishing a Solid Foundation in MARI first. From there you can look at the intermediate step-by-step project based courses that will take you through the entire process.

Digital-Tutors – Creating Caricatures in Mudbox 2012
Intermediate | 2h 52m | Released on 9/1/2011 | 1.37 GB | Project Files 487 MB | Required Software: Mudbox 2012, Maya 2012

In this course we will learn to use Mudbox to sculpt and paint exaggerated caricatures from start to finish.

Caricature, as an art form has been around for many years. Typically they are 2d drawings that really capture the essence of a real person through exaggeration and emphasis on specific features. With Mudbox, we can easily take this process into the 3d realm and create fun 3d caricatures complete with textures. We’ll start by building up some base geometry in Maya and then begin shaping and sculpting our character bust. We’ll use a variety of sculpting tools to create some exaggerated features for our character. We’ll make use of the close integration between Mudbox and Maya to build accessories for our bust and assemble everything in Mudbox. We’ll then talk about preparing the meshes for texturing and we’ll paint maps for all of the different pieces. In the end, you’ll have a finished caricature bust, but you’ll also have the skills you need to start creating your own custom caricatures.

 

In this collection of lessons, we will explore the process of creating and using shading networks within 3ds Max.

Understanding how to create and modify shading networks is an important skill - one that is essential for recreating the various materials and the different types of surfaces found in the real world. This course will explore topics such as using maps to control transparency, bump, and displacement effects, understanding mapping coordinates to control texture placement, applying textures to particles, combining and layering details from multiple textures, and many other topics that are designed to help you become a stronger, more efficient 3ds Max artist.

 

In this series of lessons we’ll learn how to use Sculptris to really quickly and dynamically sculpt models in a very artist-friendly way.

When getting into digital sculpting, some of the applications can seem a little daunting. There is a lot to think about, and much of it has to do with the technical aspects that allow the sculpts to be used in a production pipeline. Sculptris removes a lot of those technical concerns and really allows artists to concentrate on the sculpting. Using a really innovative feature called dynamic tessellation, it allows us to not have to worry if we have enough polygons or what level we need to be on to get a particular detail. In this course we'll cover the sculpting functionality, how dynamic tessellation works, and modifying the resolution manually. We'll also cover the painting functionality and how Sculptris works with ZBrush.

14 videos in this course

1. Introduction and project overview
2. Interface overview
3. Using the sculpting brushes
4. Using rotate, scale, and grab
5. Using dynamic tessellation
6. Modifying the resolution
7. Working with symmetry
8. Working with multiple objects
9. Working between Sculptris and ZBrush
10. Painting in Sculptris
11. Painting with textures and brush masks
12. Using multiple materials
13. Painting bump maps
14. Exporting data from Sculptris

Creating a Fantasy Landscape is a tutorial that contains a lot of NURBS modeling so you will learn how to work with isoparms, hulls, CV's, lofting surfaces and Maya's curve tools. This is a fast way to generate a lot of geometry in a scene which is then converted to polygons for adding details and refining the models.

We'll create mountain terrain, windmills, mushroom shaped houses, clouds and rope bridges, all these techniques are important when modeling fantasy or realistic exteriors in Maya. You'll see how the sculpt geometry tool can be used to sculpt ground based terrain and work with the split poly tool to cut out irregular shapes in landscape modeling.

The project continues with texturing where you'll lay out UV's for the environment and you'll get some good tips and tricks on how to fix some of the common problems that might occur during the UV mapping
process. We'll then bring it into Photoshop for texture painting rock, wood and many other things during which you'll get some good practice at using smudge tools and blending colors. As well we'll create bump maps using procedural textures and to get some color variation in our final scene we will work with ramp textures.

Finally we'll create a complete sky environment with clouds and look at how to add your own custom background images in Maya and render with depth of field to add another dimension to our final result. This environment can further be used to place your own animated characters in.

creativeLIVE HDDSLR Filmmaking with Gale Tattersall
English | m4v | 950 x 538 | h264 549 Kbps | 15 fps | aac stereo 44.1 KHz | 4.53 GB
Genre: Video training
For the first time in history a camera that costs roughly 2,500 can shoot material good enough to hold its own weight on the highest professional levels. Gale Tattersall, renowned Director of Photography, has been at the forefront of pushing HDDSLRs in Hollywood. He shot the season finale of House entirely on a Canon 5DMII last year.

CgTuts :  Maya Exterior Environment Creation
eLearning | 1.23 GB
Maya Exterior Environment Creation – Day 1

Today we are happy to release the first ‘day’ of a new multi-part tutorial series by Cgtuts+ regular Ivan Krushkov. This in-depth series focuses on the creation of an exterior scene in Maya. In day 1 we’ll start the project off by modeling our environment from the ground up, exploring the many different modeling tools and techniques Maya has to offer!

Digital Tutors : Light and Color Study - Multiple Colored Light Sources
English | Duration: 1h 47m | VP6F | 1280x720 15fps 600Kbps | MP3 44.1KHz 96Kbps | 608MB
Genre: eLearning
In this collection of lessons we will study how multiple colored light sources react when illuminating a subject.
To get things started we will learn about an alternate workflow in digital painting which separates value decisions from color decisions. Using this workflow we will first learn how to apply a quick base color to our value study using color layers. Initially the colors we choose will be simple and based on a neutrally lit environment however over the course of the next few lessons we will learn how to bring in two different colored light sources to illuminate our subject. Throughout this process we will learn how the color of each light changes based on the area it is illuminating. Along the way we’ll also learn some tips for using various blend modes as well as incorporating textures into our image. After finishing completing this course, you will have a good understanding of how multiple colored light sources work together to influence how we see color.

The official training course on handling Digital Photo Capture One version 6 of the developer.