BestGFX

Ben Mauro is a US born concept designer and digital sculptor. He studied industrial design and entertainment design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He has been working in Wellington, New Zealand at Weta Workshop since 2009 and over the past few years has contributed to a vast array of Film, Television and Videogame projects such as ‘The Hobbit Trilogy’, ‘Elysium’ and ‘Valerian’ among many others. Before coming to Weta he worked as a freelancer for various clients including LucasFilm, Rhythm & Hues, Activision, EuropaCorp, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, Insomniac Games, Design Studio Press and Vishwa Robotics. While most of his time is taken up by his duties at Weta, he continues to offer his design services to clients around the world.

In this Maya tutorial we will learn about joint-based facial rigging in Maya. Throughout these lessons we will go over using joints instead of the traditional approach of using blend shapes.
We will be using locators and offset joints to attach to NURBs curves. These curves will be the foundation of how the rig works. It's very simple, and very effective. Once the rig is created the rig is re-usable on many different types of meshes.

Stephen Wells covers his process of sculpting, poly painting, and baking normal maps step-by-step for this Next-Gen Orc Head model. You will learn about various tools and workflow aspects of ZBrush and work your way through the sculpting process and become more familiar with the ZBrush interface and the use of its more powerful features.

In this video we’ll take a look at two different topics introducing this new series related to particles. First excercise will be really simple.. We’ll use PFlow to simulate a complex abstract structure created with tiny boxes, in this way using a boxed emitter and a procedural map, we’ll simulate a volume made of little geometric voxel units as you can see in the tutorial sample image.

Throughout thee lessons we will learn how to create hot and cold smoke effects with FumeFX, also we will learn about different types of smoke and how to make them look more realistic.

Welcome to the spherevfx video series on arnold for maya. The purpose of this series is to get you confident with using arnold, and have a firm grounding in all it has to offer as a feature film, production render engine. We are going to spend our time going through arnold from top to bottom looking at all the key features of the render engine.

In this Blender 2.5 training course, we take you through the complete process of modeling a hard-surface, highly detailed M4 assault rifle. You will learn how to model each and every part, in real time.

We will cover many techniques for hard surface modeling in ZBrush, sculpting mechanical details, and painting lights and other effects on the model in Photoshop. Finally, we will composite the model into a scene realistically, while adding some final post production effects.

Stephen Wells covers his process of sculpting, poly painting, and baking normal maps step-by-step for this Next-Gen Orc Head model. You will learn about various tools and workflow aspects of ZBrush and work your way through the sculpting process and become more familiar with the ZBrush interface and the use of its more powerful features.

BEHIND THE SCENES (BTS) is a new and exciting DVD series developed to showcase the creation of a game cinematic sequence. The series follows a team of artists as they demonstrate their production techniques from concept phase to final rendered animation. This chapter in the series focuses on the creation of the character Geo, a seasoned veteran of numerous infiltration missions. Cajun Hylton takes the viewer step-by-step through the 3D modeling process, from simple proxy to final model using Maya and ZBrush. The viewer also gets to go behind the scenes and witness actual production meetings that discuss the design and creation of the character.

Continuing his Tethered Islands series, Aaron Sims shares his techniques for building a creature in ZBrush. Using ZSpheres to design the initial body structure, Aaron develops the character from scratch. He then demonstrates how to skin the ZSpheres and add details, color and lighting. In XSI, Aaron discusses the basics of rigging, weighting, and animating the imported creature from ZBrush. Finally he covers how to pose, light, and render the creature in an XSI scene.

In this new tutorial series focused on product modeling and rendering, we'll create the Tassimo T-65 Home Brewing Station from Bosch. Starting in 3d Studio Max we'll use a few simple blueprint images to do a block-out of the base, and then begin the process of breaking down and refining the model using more advanced poly modeling techniques to create the final High-res asset .

Ever wanted to automate some or all of your SolidWorks workflow? CADSharp.com offers beginner-friendly yet in-depth training tutorials for learning the SolidWorks API.

In this course, Justin Harrison walks us through the various methods of creating cloth elements for real-time game environments! He will be covering topics such as 'fake' bone-driven simulations inside of Maya, interactive real-time cloth using UDK's cloth properties, as well as real-time cloth on animated characters using the APEX clothing feature inside of Maya and UDK!

Learn to render realistic bodies of water such as ponds and oceans and underwater shots with Maya—essential skills in a visual effects artist's toolkit. In this course, Aaron F. Ross shows how to work with the Fluid node attributes, control the simulation quality, make collisions that mimic surface wake or waves, float objects, and improve the realism of your scenes with shaders and reflectivity.

Bring scenes to life by building realistic fluid simulations in Autodesk Maya. In this advanced course for visual effects designers and animators, author Aaron F. Ross shows you how to simulate foam and bubbles, liquid being poured, and volumetric liquid in a 3D container. Techniques include rendering particles with the Fluid shader, colliding particle fluids with polygons, storing simulations with disk caches, converting particles and fluids to smoothed polygons, and texturing 3D fluids.