Jeff is a self-taught freelance digital artist and has been freelancing for the past six years. In that time he has worked on many projects, a lot of which have been mechanical illustrations for companies like Johnson Controls, Trane, Carrier, and Honeywell. More recently he has spent some time teaching on-site mental ray classes, which he enjoys as it has allowed him to travel around the country and meet a lot of really great people.
Jeff is an active member of several online forums such as CGsocietey (CGtalk), the Vizdepot, and Autodesk s the AREA website where he often tries to assist users with their mental ray related questions. In addition, last year he teamed up with Russell Thomas, owner of 3dallusions.com, to help create mrmaterials.com which is a free material repository for the mental ray community.

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.