This application agnostic class will cover matte painting techniques for digital and traditional artists. Professor Xue jun Shan is based in Shanghai, China and creates concept art and digital matte paintings for films and games. We met him at a conference in Shanghai and were immediately impressed with his talent, enlisting him to take part in our Background Fundamentals course for an episode. Based upon the positive response from fxphd postgrads, we've brought him on for an entire term. Starting out covering a history of the matte painting   art, the course quickly dives into analyzing shots where matte paintings are needed, concept design (including composition, lighting and color), software choices, and building several matte paintings. The Matte Painting course is one of the courses which will be collaboratively working on the Zombie project, creating the designs for the compound and distant ruined city.

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.

Asilefx advanced production techniques | 865.3 Mb

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A quality character rig is a must for any successful animation production. The rig must be stable, and have the controls and flexibility needed for an animator to tell their story. In addition the rigger must be able to make changes quickly. In this set of lectures, Axel will effectively demystify the “art” of character rigging as well as provide a production-like set of scripted tools to work with. Using the provided scripted tools, Axel demonstrates the benefits of a multi-pose approach to skeleton setup.

This course will teach techniques and concepts for rendering realistic, physically based CG elements in a visual effects context (i.e. for integration into live action shots). As it is a hands-on course in using Mental Ray to do these things, it will start with a fundamental treatment of everything from light and pixels through to cameras, response curves and compositing, as well as "learning to see". The course will be performed using the 3ds Max application, but most things apply to Maya and Softimage as well.

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.

In this DVD, Laurent reveals his techniques for creating the textures and shaders for the final stage of the creature modeling and texturing pipeline. Laurent shows how to create texture maps from scratch using a small library of different concrete and plaster textures. Using BodyPaint, he takes the cavity map from ZBrush and uses it as a guide to create the other maps for the creature. Laurent demonstrates how he experiments with one area of the body and then brings it to a near final stage before duplicating the maps and shaders for the rest of the creature using Photoshop? and Max. He then shows how to use BodyPaint to paint over the seams and finalize the textures. Finally, Laurent renders out separate passes and composites them together in Digital Fusion, discussing how this process allows better control of the final image and enables him to test the shaders for scene assembly and lighting.