BestGFX

In this DVD, Instructor Luiz Kruel guides you through writing your own shaders, primarily with the CGFX shader language in Maya. Luiz starts off with getting everything set up in Maya and then writes a simple Lambert shader from scratch. From there Luiz builds upon the Lambert to create a Fresnel and Phong shader. Once the Phong shader is defined, Luiz begins to add textures like diffuse, specular, normal, and cubemap. He then demonstrates how to manipulate UVs and even how to do vertex animation. Luiz then goes into such techniques as blending textures and colors, creating a car shader and pulling everything together to create a full character shader with SSS. Finally, Luiz demonstrates how to take what you have learned into UDK to create a custom shader using the standard material nodes.

In this class Wayne will be presenting three advanced fluid simulation and dynamic effects production techniques. The first technique will demonstrate how to set up a truly believable explosion. He will then move on to simulating a burning vehicle, introducing props and assets into the simulation. Lastly Wayne will show you how to correctly create composites for your fluid simulation by breaking them down into RGB passes.

Week 01: Introduction: Week one’s video is all about getting up to speed, so we’re covering the shaders, a quick brdf tour, projections and why we’re going linear with our colourspace. There’s also a lighter’s tour of Nuke, as we’ll be using it quite heavily and its important you know its main functionality.

al Cripps and Lori Smith are teaching the course, two Houdini fx artists who have worked on their share of fx for film. Val will be presenting the class, and Lori will be working with Val behind the scenes to get the material together.

In this DVD Michael Pavlovich starts off by taking up where the first DVD left off and covers the new features in ZBrush 3.5 R3. After the new features are covered he takes everything that you have learned up to this point and puts it into practice by creating an entire highres character right inside Zbrush. Many techniques are used during this character creation process that would benefit almost anyone.