Learn Blender for concept art with this 4.5-hour workshop designed to help you accelerate the detailing process of environment concepts using 3D assets. Starting with the creation of loose 2D sketches, Jonas Hassibi shares how to get initial ideas down quickly before deciding on a sketch to block out in Blender. By zooming in on the elements of the design that are required for the piece, you’ll discover how to start creating your own 3D kitbash library and successfully bring 2D and 3D elements together for efficient environment detailing. This workshop is intended for beginner to immediate-level concept artists who have taken their first steps in Blender and those who are more advanced and want to build on top of their knowledge. Jonas covers the very basics of Blender, including navigation and modeling, and also delves into some more advanced plugins like Hardops, BoxCutter, and so on. In addition to Jonas’s demonstrations, he offers industry insights from his own career history, including what to expect when you are a young artist trying to get into the industry. He also offers his personal tips for staying motivated when for those already in the industry who may be feeling a little stuck. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have developed the skills needed to convert a 2D sketch into a 3D scene by creating 3D assets to speed up the process efficiently. Jonas’s Blender scene file and Photoshop file are included with this workshop to provide full visibility into how the final scene was created.

Successful head sculpture begins with understanding where the vertical/horizontal planes and facets are, and the fundamental relationship the features have with them. In this tutorial, figurative artist and educator John Brown breaks down the life-size male head into a series of planes and facets, establishes the facial feature land marks, discusses depth, creating shadows and shares valuable techniques for sculpting the best head possible. John also demonstrates how to use templates, translate a 2D drawing to 3D, symmetry tricks, how to model a hard surface, and create a light-weight full-scale armature. As supplementary featurettes, we visit 3DScanLA and demonstrate the process of creating a digital model through Photogrammetry scanning, how to import into ZBrush, and the basics of cleaning up scanned data to create a 3D print ready model.

Learn how to translate a 2D concept into a 3D miniature using ZBrush and KeyShot in this 4-hour workshop by Digital Sculptor Francesco Orru. This tutorial is intended for artists who already have some knowledge of digital sculpting in ZBrush and are ready to delve into the world of creating miniatures from concept art. The workshop covers the entire process of sculpting for miniatures, from considering the initial scales to using DynaMesh, ZRemesher, Transpose Master, ZModeller, and lastly, KeyShot for rendering. When resin printing miniatures, consideration needs to be given to the level of detail to be included in the model, which all depends on the scale, proportions, volumes, the interpretation of shapes — and you need to know which liberties you can take while sculpting. As well as sharing his workflow, Francesco discusses how to optimize your work to save time when sculpting, and shares his tips for developing good communication with art directors in order to receive feedback early on during the process. He talks about how to work under certain limits including time and resources, and stresses why it’s important to be open to reworking models — and never falling in love with your first attempts. By completing this workshop, you’ll have a solid understanding of the full pipeline when working from a 2D concept to create a 3D miniature using ZBrush. You’ll also discover how to present your work to an art director. The final prototype featured in this workshop was printed by Valkyrx Gaming in the UK. Provided as a downloadable resource with this workshop are the STL of the decimated high poly model, the ZTL of the T-pose with all the Subtools, plus the ZTL of the final posed model with Subtools.

Join us on Thursday, March 9th for an exciting presentation from Senior Character and Creature Designer Ehsan Bigloo!

Learn to create photorealistic procedural shaders with Arnold and take advantage of the procedural nature of Houdini with this workshop by Wojtek Piwowarczyk, Environment Generalist TD for film, animation, and game cinematics. During the course of 8.5 hours, Wojtek reveals his personal collection of techniques used in production and developed over several years while creating visual effects for a variety of entertainment projects. He covers not only detailed methods for creating procedural shaders but also discusses how Houdini’s procedural nature can be used to full effect. You’ll learn several techniques for extracting information from source geometry to create effective shaders — and because it’s procedural, you’ll be able to apply them to any models, and even reuse them entirely, or in parts, on future projects. Wojtek’s ultimate goal for this workshop is to give viewers a solid foundation for procedural shading and an understanding of look development for surfaces. The robust methods he demonstrates for building shaders are techniques that are universal and will remain useful regardless of software, meaning your skills will stay relevant in the ever-evolving world of computer graphics. By completing this workshop, you should have developed the confidence to create any type of surface for any project. ZBrush and Photoshop are also used in this workshop as part of the workflow. Project files include a complete Houdini scene with final processed objects, lighting, and shaders to assist with learning, as well as a breakdown of all the steps and shading techniques presented in the tutorial. The package also contains 3D models, ZBrush files, and baked displacement textures for relevant objects plus proxies for the Megascans textures used. This complete set allows you to recreate the scene from the tutorial and will serve as a base for your own look-development experiments.

Whether it’s in movies, TV shows, music videos, or video games, digital humans are everywhere. This comprehensive workshop by Sefki Ibrahim demonstrates how he approaches the look development of a digital double, and covers his complete process for lighting, shading, and rendering using Maya and Arnold.  Starting in Maya, Sefki shares his techniques to light the character model, utilizing area lights, HDRI maps, and light blockers to establish the right mood before adjusting the camera to achieve the very best likeness of his digi-double.  The look-dev process begins with the set up of the shaders for the eye geometries, including the sclera, iris, pupil, caruncle, and meniscus, using the Arnold Standard Surface shader. Once the eyes are in place, Sefki demonstrates how to set up the skin shader, plugging in texture maps and fine-tuning values for a photorealistic finish.  The workshop advances from there into some procedural techniques that will push the look of the skin using specific nodes in the Hypershade window. Finally, the tutorial concludes with shading the hair groom using the Arnold Standard Hair shader, as well as setting up a leather and cotton material for the clothing. 

Capture and create your own 3D props for production using photogrammetry with this comprehensive guide for Modo, Marmoset, Photoshop, Agisoft, Lightroom, and ZBrush. In this 4-hour workshop, John William Crossland, a Lead Principal Artist at Remedy Entertainment, sheds a light on the entire process for those looking to get started with photogrammetry on a small scale. He details several ways to achieve low, medium, and high-range scans and explains how to produce a decent-quality scan that can be used as a baseline for a production asset. John walks through the entire process of creating a mountain boot asset using his tried-and-tested production workflow, from initial capture through topology clean-up, hard-surface modeling, and applying materials, before tackling the final renders. Throughout the demonstration, he shows various techniques to process scan data and how to create a clean, high-poly sculpt, as well as a low-poly mesh with UVs ready for texturing in Marmoset. This photogrammetry workshop is designed to help those with limited experience to successfully produce a scan to be proud of. His pragmatic guide to photogrammetry goes through all the steps needed to process your scan data and take it all the way through to a final sculpt, including baking and materials. Upon completing this workshop, you’ll have gained many practical insights into the photogrammetry process and will have a solid guideline for starting your own projects with minimal setup needs. The workshop is intended for you to sculpt along with John. His ZBrush ZTL file is provided with all the working steps, along with his Modo file (scene supplied with .obj) and the final Photoshop composite. The Marmoset scene file is also included with this workshop for subscribers to access and utilize.

In this workshop, Concept and Character Artist Pablo Munoz Gomez shares his workflow for generating an original and appealing creature concept from an arrangement of abstract 3D shapes. The process covers everything from the initial idea, explaining the methodology and core concepts of the technique, all the way to the final render and composite. The steps to achieve figurative forms may seem counterintuitive, but producing quick variations early on is crucial for the development of a solid and convincing design. Throughout this workshop, Pablo emphasizes the importance of the iterative process and the exploration of ideas, sharing practical advice and tools to refine the abstract forms into a concept with a more cohesive visual language. Although the subject of this workshop is the concept of a creature, the workflows and application of the 2D and 3D tools are not specific to creature design. The techniques that Pablo shares are segmented in clear steps that can be applied to any type of project. The first steps introduce the technique of creating thumbnails using Photoshop, Krita and ZBrush, before then moving into 3D space to build custom assets. The 3D assets will then be used to create an abstract ‘cluster’ as a base to further explore the design. The second stage of the process consists of developing variations of the cluster and to identify suggestions of a more figurative creature. In the third and final stage, the creature is defined, detailed, textured with polypaint, posed, rendered with Keyshot and finalized in Photoshop. For those looking to explore new forms and shape language with their designs, this title offers insight into an effective and practical workflow.

Learning ZBrush at your own pace has never been easier. This detailed guide by Madeleine Scott-Spencer will take you from the bare basics of ZBrush through a full ZBrush sculpting workflow. You’ll follow along with Maddie’s chapters in an organic, hands-on manner, gaining confidence with ZBrush’s unique interface and powerful tools at every step of the way. Beginning with a quickstart chapter that shows how to sculpt a detailed creature bust, Maddie continues with in-depth dives into ZBrush’s key features. She demystifies the ZBrush interface, menus, and windows to remove any intimidation factors early on. Explaining the logic behind the program’s UI as well as what the tools do, you’ll quickly learn how to work quickly in ZBrush and how to take advantage of custom hotkeys for even greater efficiency. The full ZBrush Brush system is explained in this workshop, including 3D Alphas, VDM brushes, IMM, and even how to create your own custom brushes. You will learn how to sculpt a full body using DynaMesh and explore the importance of Subdivision levels in creating accurate anatomical forms. Alphas and detailing for fine pores and wrinkles — and even how to paint skin textures from scratch — are also covered in great detail for your educational benefit. Maddie also covers how to get your work outside of the program by exploring ZBrush’s retopology and UV tools, as well as how to export Color, Normal, and Displacement maps for rendering in Maya, 3ds Max, Unreal Engine, and any other rendering tool you prefer. For those interested in 3D printing, this workshop includes a look at Decimation Master and 3D Print Exporter for you. The intention of this comprehensive workshop is to help you become a confident intermediate ZBrush artist that is ready to tackle the creation of 3D creatures, characters, props, and more. Topics covered include how to create complex models with Subtools, managing Polygroups for more accurate modeling, sculpting and painting in layers, modeling with ZSpheres, posing figures, and much more. Extensive downloadable project files are available with this workshop to help you follow along with many of the important lessons covered.

In the third and final volume of Eric Keller’s Introduction to Maya 2023, you’ll learn all the fundamental concepts of shading, lighting, cameras, and rendering, focusing on using the Arnold render plug-in and associated interfaces. This introductory series gives a comprehensive overview of the Maya interfaces you'll work with to shade, light, and render your scenes. In the finale of this beginner-level Introduction to Maya series, Eric demonstrates the different types of lights available, how to set up rendering cameras, and how to use the render preview windows to fine-tune your images. Eric details how to work with the Hypershade interface; how to create render nodes, such as file textures, and how to connect them to your materials; how to create Standard shaders; and how to create and apply material presets. The detailed instructional videos also show the process for setting up AOVs, render layers, and how to work with UDIMs when applying file textures to models. You'll learn how to work with file references and alembic caches, as well as how to use references and MASH networks together when setting up environments. You'll also learn how to set up a batch render to create an image sequence of your scenes using the Arnold plug-in. This third volume concludes with an overview of using the Game Exporter interface to export models and animation clips from Maya into Unreal Engine 5. Example files for all chapters are available to download as Project Files with this workshop. The goal is to get you up and running quickly, so you know where to find the tools you need and how to use them. By building a foundation and giving yourself a roadmap, you can then go on to explore some of the more in-depth and advanced series available on rendering in Maya with Arnold available at The Gnomon Workshop. Watch Introduction to Maya 2023: Volume 1 Watch Introduction to Maya 2023: Volume 2

Eric Keller returns with the second volume in our Introduction to Maya 2023 series. Following on from Introduction to Maya 2023: Volume 1, Volume 2 consists of 14 short chapters which focus on introducing the primary tools that you'll be using to build and animate models in Maya.  The goal of this workshop is to help you establish a foundation of understanding of the Maya polygon workflow and the various approaches to animating your models. You'll learn about the Modeling toolkit, the UV toolkit, the GraphEditor, improvements to deformers, and animation visualization tools and animation layers. The skills that you develop in this workshop will help you tackle many of the more intermediate and advanced tutorials available at The Gnomon Workshop. A number of helpful assets are available to download as project files with this workshop to help you with examples and to follow along with the workshop. Plus, a bonus chapter describes some of the new tools and updates recently released in Maya 2023. If you haven’t watched Volume 1, be sure to take a comprehensive tour of the Maya interface, covering navigation along with the many editors that you'll need to use when building 3D models and scenes in preparation for this second volume. In Volume 3, Eric will introduce lighting shading and reveal how to export assets for use in real-time game-editing software, like the Unreal Engine development kit.

Get up and running quickly in Maya 2023 with this beginner’s guide tutorial by one of our most-watched instructors, Eric Keller. Introduction to Maya 2023: Volume 1 is comprised of 12 chapters that take you on a comprehensive tour of the Maya interface, covering navigation along with the many editors that you'll need to use when building 3D models and scenes. Eric then walks through the creation of a Maya scene using a network of interconnected nodes. The relationships between these nodes define the shapes of your virtual objects, the shaders that determine the material qualities of those objects, the animation that moves them, and the lights and cameras that turn your creations into cinematic elements, game assets, scientific visualizations — or whatever you need to bring your digital art to life! A number of helpful assets are available to download as project files with this workshop to help you with examples and to follow along with the workshop. In Volume 2, you will explore the modeling and animation tools. In Volume 3, Eric will introduce lighting shading and reveal how to export assets for use in real-time game-editing software, like the Unreal Engine development kit.

This three-hour workshop teaches how to create a creature design with the kind of character and personality traits that can evolve with a story throughout a movie or game. With over 15 years of industry experience designing characters and creatures for Marvel Studios and many more, Ian Joyner presents his complete design workflow with a focus on the importance of believable anatomy, history, and story. The class begins with the all-important reference-gathering stage using the free online tool, PureRef, as well as how to create a character synopsis that can help focus and guide efforts. Deciding on a space-pirate, bounty-hunter-style character for this workshop, Ian kicks off the sculpting in ZBrush, working from a simple sphere. Fusing animal and human elements as he sculpts, Ian discusses his most-trusted tools and brushes, and shares notes and industry tips as he builds out the character’s head and torso into a fully realized model. Moving into Photoshop next, Ian shows how costume designs can be explored in 2D before sculpting them in 3D. Using masking techniques in ZBrush, Ian builds up armor over the character as one piece. He also details how KeyShot can be used as part of the pipeline to render images that can be painted over in Photoshop for further design and color exploration. Blender is then taught as the main tool for retopologizing the hard-surface armor parts as well as how to use ZBrush’s own retopology tools. Once satisfied with the final pass on the sculpt, KeyShot is used to render out the character before taking it into Photoshop for the last time. Here, the final paint-over takes the design through to a film- or game-ready concept ready to present to a client or director.

In this course, students learn the fundamentals of creating 3D models with polygon geometry. Lectures delve into the various production techniques of asset creation through the exploration of polygonal modeling and the preparation of constructed models for texturing. The basic toolset in Autodesk Maya will be covered, and students will benefit from lectures about the technical and aesthetic issues that professional modelers face while modeling environments and man-made objects. Students will create weekly models throughout the term and the class will culminate in a final project consisting of building an intermediate to complex model like a vehicle, robot, or prop.

Procedurally generated terrains that can be art-directed — or even combined with real-world satellite data — are an important cornerstone of CG production. Gaea is an exciting new tool for developing photorealistic environments and has been quickly adopted by the industry. In this 4.5-hour workshop, Dax Pandhi, creator of Gaea and Co-Founder of QuadSpinner, provides a thorough look at all the essentials you need to know to create realistic, high-definition terrains using a procedural methodology. Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a 3D hobbyist, this workshop will help you get up to speed quickly in terrain-generation techniques being used in the real world. In this comprehensive crash course for Gaea, Dax shares techniques that have been used on high-budget productions to create a multitude of photorealistic environments, including an overview of how to use real-world satellite data and Dax’s personal techniques for “bulking up” and eroding terrains for naturalistic results. As the workshop progresses, you’ll learn how to create even more sophisticated terrains for very high-quality and photorealistic results that follow the laws of nature. Dax shares a variety of texture setups — all driven procedurally using the Texture and Satmaps nodes to give you complex color maps to colorize your terrains. As well as demonstrating standard Mountain and Erosion nodes, you’ll also see how other nodes including Anastomosis, Snowfall, Canyonizer, Fold, RockMap, Stacks, Shear, Carver, Surface, and Shatter can be utilized to achieve very specific looks and terrain shapes — particularly helpful when exploring look-dev options. Gaea project files are included with this workshop.

When it comes to designing an enemy boss character for a game, where do you begin? For J.P. Targete, the answers lie in the process itself. In this 4-hour workshop, J.P. explores, discusses, and demonstrates how to design an enemy/boss creature design, from ideation sketch through to the finished concept design using Photoshop. In FLESH-TEK — Vol. 1, you will learn all the essential elements of design that you need to know to move forward with your preliminary ideations through to a final colored 2D concept. Throughout this workshop, you’ll discover J.P.'s thought process and see how he iterates from one idea to the next to create variants of a design. You will also develop some easy-to-follow Photoshop techniques that J.P. has been using throughout the years to great success. J.P. is a highly accomplished freelance concept artist and illustrator with 25 years of experience creating illustrations and concepts for the publishing and entertainment industries. In this thorough workshop, he intentionally uses simple-yet-key descriptions throughout to make his process accessible to all levels of artists. The workshop is aimed at artists with some prior working knowledge of Photoshop, and standard drawing and digital painting skills are expected.  Project files supplied with this workshop include J.P.’s ideation design and final concept design Photoshop files for your reference.  Coming Soon: In FLESH-TEK — Vol. 2, J.P. will take the completed 2D enemy boss concept design and create a fully painted 3D sculpt in 3D-Coat. The forthcoming workshop will walk through all of the key tools that 3D-Coat offers, and discusses how beneficial and powerful they can be to add realism and depth to your designs.

A key to being a successful concept artist is the ability to express a believable and unique design clearly. Explore the various ways you can think about vehicle designs to ensure arriving at a distinctive and creative end product. This 2-hour workshop by Senior Concept Artist, Jose Borges, is intended for intermediate Photoshop artists with a basic grasp of concept design and digital painting techniques. This workshop aims to focus on understanding design direction, how to use key reference information to inform designs, as well as developing strong narratives to give your ideas a strong foundation. By learning how to balance the detail in your designs, you’ll discover the art of creating recognizable and memorable vehicles for digital production. This video tutorial aims to support both working professional artists as well as those seeking to break into the field. Jose shares how to improve your creative thought process to bring stronger ideas to the table, which can elevate any project and make you a vital team member. Jose’s tutorial is handled entirely in Photoshop; his final PSD and JPG versions of the design files are provided as a download for subscribers who want to study them more closely.

This creature design workshop by Wētā FX Lead 3D Modeler, Pascal Raimbault, covers his complete pipeline for concepting unique characters for production. Starting from the 2D design in Krita, Pascal moves on to progressively build a 3D model that is truthful to the original concept, using Maya and ZBrush. This comprehensive workshop details some of Pascal’s favorite skin-sculpting techniques in ZBrush. He explains how he makes his models production-friendly, including how to rework the topology and handle the UVs in Maya. Pascal also covers creating additional elements, such as hard-surface costume pieces detailed in ZBrush, making extensive use of ZBrush’s powerful Polygroups. The texturing portion is all handled using Substance Painter and covers a variety of materials. The look-dev and turntable setup is then explained in Houdini using Solaris, and finally, the model is rigged in Maya to be posed and rendered in Karma. The result of this workshop is a final asset suitable for any department in a studio environment to take over, whether to use the asset for a visual effects production or in a game cinematic. To finish off, Pascal shows his high-res renders produced using some basic compositing tricks in Houdini. Project files include the ZBrush 2022 tool file, which includes the high-resolution skin sculpt and an early WIP version of the costume model, for your reference.

In this workshop Ara goes through his workflow and creative techniques for ideation, concepting and designing a mech for a film, videogame, or VR project. As visual demands continue to escalate and project timelines shrink, the concept design phase in production has shifted to using 3D tools. Ara goes through a 3D workflow using various tools and VR to sketch, refine, model and render a piloted combat mech used for personnel insertion or extraction, the MP9 PIX mech. The workflow begins with exploration and research of the specifications and designs for the mech and obtaining an overall vision 3D sketch. After getting approval of this milestone, the mech is then divided into functional parts and broken out into projects for each part, then the entire model is combined, and further detail is added. The model is then taken into Substance Painter and textured. Then the mech is rendered into compositions and delivered to the production teams for design review and iteration if needed. Software and techniques used by Ara include block-out sculpting in Oculus Medium, Modeling sculpting and retopology in ZBrush, utilizing 3D Kitbash libraries to add detail. Finally, the model is rendered in Keyshot and color corrected and composited in Photoshop.

Learn how to create a believable 3D aircraft concept from initial sketch to final render using Photoshop, Blender, and 3D-Coat. Nikolai Razuev, a Senior Concept Artist at DNEG, shares his tried-and-tested techniques, starting with his tricks for sketching concepts in Photoshop and discussing the basic design principles that he follows when designing for the entertainment industry. Throughout 6 chapters, Nikolai details the efficient techniques for designing, modeling, and texturing realistic flying vehicles using 3D-Coat and Blender, from shape design and shading the initial 2D sketch to rough modeling in 3D-Coat, and applying realistic shaders using 3D-Coat, Nikolai uncovers his complete process for detailing a believable concept. He finishes with some photo-bashing using Photoshop over the top of his 3D render. This workshop is designed for intermediate artists and concept designers, particularly for those looking to learn some time-saving tips and tricks to speed up workflow and make things more efficient without sacrificing realism in your work. Nikolai’s production-proven designs boast the illusion of complexity and yet are created from scratch in a reasonable amount of time. Nikolai’s PSD file is included as a downloadable resource with this workshop, along with a PSD file of the texture and decals used, plus his Blender file containing the model, textures, and HDRi.

Gino Acevedo, Creative Art Director at Weta Digital, shares his personal approach to “hand-painting” creature designs in Photoshop. Widely known in the industry for his special FX airbrushing techniques on blockbuster movie prosthetics and puppets, Gino reveals how he now uses traditional-inspired techniques — similar to those used on silicone models — to achieve the ultimate translucent skin for convincing creature designs. Starting in Photoshop, the workshop begins with an introduction to the color palette Gino uses for painting flesh tones. He also explains the importance of his selections and what they’re used for when building up realistic skin tones. His lecture then moves into ZBrush for two chapters, allowing you to follow along as he sculpts his very own creature concept from scratch. Starting with a basic skull, he builds out a demon-like design while showing the timelapse of his complete sculpting process, with tips, tricks, favorite tools, and industry insights given along the way. After rendering in KeyShot, the final render is taken back into Photoshop for the final painting work. Beginning with the ear as his starting point, Gino demonstrates how to effectively paint the many layers of translucent skin, using the previously established color palette. Paying close attention to details, the workshop showcases how to paint realistic freckles, veins, mottling effects, and much more. The final segment of the workshop covers the painting of the full creature head for a final illustration.

When you’re tasked with creating keyframe concept art for the art department of a feature film or video game, you’re more than likely going to need to bring a scene to life quickly, and with photorealistic results. Sebastien Hue is a Concept Illustrator with credits including Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, who shares his complete workflow across 5 hours, from developing an initial idea to creating an establishing shot that’s worthy of inclusion in a sci-fi movie or game cinematic. This workshop details Sebastien’s entire pipeline for creating keyframe concept art and focuses on efficiency throughout. He shares how Cinema 4D can be used alongside Photoshop to speed up the design process and help with achieving cinematic results. Knowledge of Photoshop is recommended since this video tutorial takes an intermediate-level approach with more of a focus on artistic exploration, covering the fundamentals of composition, depth, mood, lighting, and industrial design. While Cinema 4D is Sebastien’s 3D software of choice, any 3D software can be used to follow along.

Art Director and Visual Development Artist, Francesco Guarini, details the art of visual storytelling for production and shares how to create successful cinematic compositions. He walks through the theory behind great shots in cinema and discusses the importance of lighting, including its effect on an audience. Francesco also teaches how to develop your ideas, transforming them into production-ready black-and-white visual development paintings. Throughout this workshop, you’ll learn about the fundamental compositional influencers, including how to recognize them and how to use them to tell your stories most effectively. You will also gain an understanding of the importance of balance and tonal values in composition, as well as how they all come together in a successful image. Following Francesco's workflow and thought processes, you will discover how to use the power of Photoshop and Blender combined to produce highly detailed paintings in a short amount of time. Starting from a blank canvas, you’ll follow Francesco through the production of a variety of ideas before moving into Blender, where he shares how to create basic blockings of those ideas. In Blender, he continues experimenting with lights and cameras, before jumping back into Photoshop where he discusses his rendering process, step by step. This workshop is suitable for any artist level working, or aiming to work, in the entertainment industry, from beginners looking to understand what composition is all about to professionals looking to strengthen their knowledge. Project files provided with this workshop include JPG sheets of all his steps, from rough sketches to the final paintings.

Discover how to build a game environment in Unreal Engine 5 using assets created in Maya and ZBrush. Senior Environment Artist Giovani Magana shares various techniques from his professional workflow, focusing on efficiently building assets and architecture for game environments using an essential modular approach. This workshop is intended for intermediate-level artists with some prior knowledge of working with Maya, ZBrush, and Unreal Engine assumed. Giovani begins by sketching initial ideas in Photoshop before building a modular asset kit in Maya. He discusses his approach to creating tiles, trim sheets, tileable textures, and tileable meshes and then demonstrates how to create other assets, such as rocks and props, using ZBrush. To conclude this workshop, Giovani builds the final house and environment in Unreal Engine 5. He also assembles a corner of the environment to demonstrate his full process for creating organic landscapes, providing tips for finishing up a full environment using Unreal Engine. The workshop focuses primarily on making the assets needed to build a game environment; Giovani’s Substance Designer and Unreal material graphs are shown in the workshop but are not detailed step by step.

Join Adrien Paguet-Brunella, Senior Environment Artist, as he takes you on a comprehensive journey through the complete process of creating assets for a game environment biome collection. In this step-by-step workshop, you'll gain valuable insights into using SpeedTree, Blender, and Photogrammetry techniques to bring your natural environments to life. Designed for intermediate-to-advanced artists with prior knowledge of SpeedTree, Blender, and Unreal Engine, this workshop provides a complete overview of asset creation. Using photogrammetry and photometric stereo captures, Adrien dives into meticulously creating high-resolution leaves, branches, and flowers, ensuring every detail is carefully crafted. Adrien demonstrates how to create a hero tree, which serves as a blueprint for creating variations of trees. You'll also learn how to process scanned grounds and rocks and how to transform them into tileable landscape materials, along with some general photogrammetry tips. In addition to asset creation, Adrien shares valuable AAA production tips for building collections for natural environments. To conclude the workshop, he demonstrates how to seamlessly weave together all the assets created, resulting in an immersive and realistic scene plus dioramas. Project files available with this workshop include SpeedTree files for the hero tree, the tree variations, 3 bark texture sets, and photogrammetry data for the hero trunk and ground.

Learn how to create a sci-fi pistol for game production. Sean Marino, Associate Art Director at Riot Games, shares his workflow for modeling a weapon asset for games, starting from an initial concept and working in references of classic shooters to establish a general style target for the model. The work begins in Maya, where Sean demonstrates how to create a rough block-out of the weapon, using the concept as a starting guide and taking artistic liberties to adjust the model where needed. The model is then taken into ZBrush, where some hard-surface sculpting work is applied to create a final high-poly model. With the high-res model ready, Sean takes everything into Rizom UV Layout to unwrap and unpack the UVs and bake everything using Marmoset Toolbag. As the final step of the process, Sean opens up Substance Painter to cover the helpful basics of creating a master material template before diving deep into the detailing work to generate the final look of the weapon. With over a decade of experience focused on hard-surface and weapon design, Sean’s workshop aims to share his professional, tried-and-tested approach to modeling weapons for production. While his workflow does use specific software, the decision-making and workflow he shares can be applied to the software of your choice. By completing the workshop, you will have the knowledge to create highly detailed weapons for first or third-person games. The concept art featured in this workshop is by Eldar Safi , used with permission from Forgeborne Games LLC for the board gameTerminus Frontier.

In this 3.5-hour workshop, Dominique Buttiens teaches modern texturing techniques inside Unreal Engine 5 and demonstrates how to create shaders with speed, quality, and efficiency. This workshop details the entire creation process of a sci-fi hallway, including the initial concepting and modeling in Blender, all the way through to the final lighting setup and visual development stages.  Dominique, a Principal Environment Artist, breaks down his AAA industry-level thought processes for texturing pipelines and instructs on how you can set up your own workflow for both solo and team projects. His workshop is aimed at artists with a basic understanding of modeling, texturing, and Unreal Engine. Dominique offers best practices for industry artists and tech artists alike and provides useful tips and workflows for indie teams, solo projects, and hobbyists. The software used for this project includes Unreal Engine 5, Blender, and Substance Painter; however, the skills and knowledge are transferable to other tools and game engines. While Dominique’s Texturing Pipeline Practices are demonstrated using the example of a sci-fi hallway, the ultimate goal is for the techniques to be applied to any project of your choosing.

This 3.5-hour workshop shares the complete character creation process of a humanoid 3D character, from 2D concept, through ZBrush, Maya, and Mari to the final render using V-Ray. Revealing his entire thought process and 3D workflow, Babak Bina, a Character & Creature Design Lead at Zoic Studios, begins from a 2D concept that he takes into ZBrush to explore design possibilities, searching for interesting ways to execute and enhance the concept art while visualizing the character in 3D. Once satisfied with the character model, Babak shows how to create a generic UV using ZBrush’s automated system, UV Master, which can be taken into Maya to prepare it for a multi-tiled workflow. The texturing also begins in ZBrush, where Babak discusses how to harness the strength of masks combined with Polypainting to maintain all your sculpted details. With the base Polypaint created in ZBrush, the textures are then ready to export into Mari, where Babak walks through his tried-and-tested methods for creating different channels in Mari based on the Polypaint and displacement exported out of ZBrush. In the final portion of the workshop, Babak investigates the most effective lighting setup for the final render and walks through the shaders he creates in V-Ray. This intermediate-level workshop assumes some working knowledge of the listed software and is aimed at sharing the industry standard practices, tips, and tricks Babak has learned and gathered throughout his years working as a character artist in the film industry.

Turn your ideas into fully realized 3D illustrations with these workflow tips and tricks by industry VFX artist, Babak Bina. With over a decade of experience working in film and TV and credits including Avengers Infinity War, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Game of Thrones, Babak’s workshop offers workflow insights and industry techniques that will help you create your own fantasy characters and creatures — from sketch to final render. The 5-hour workshop begins with a sketch — in this case, a concept based on macro photography of a silkworm. The drawing is taken as a rough idea for a 3D model into ZBrush, where all further design decisions are made. Babak reveals some of his favorite ZBrush tools that help him divide up models and maximize efficiency, and he discusses his decision-making and design choices throughout the process. With the ZBrush model complete, Babak shares his ZBrush PolyPainting techniques and the process of exporting maps for further texturing work in the industry-favorite 3D painting tool, Mari. He discusses the other maps required for shading and reveals how they are generated and facilitate more shading possibilities. In the final stage of the 3D creature creation pipeline, Babak takes the painted creature into Maya to set up an effective lighting environment. He shares his V-Ray shading network and discusses the power of RGB masks, and reveals how lighting can dramatically enhance the sculpted details of 3D models. He also shares a simple fur workflow before rendering out the final result using V-Ray for Maya. The videos in this workshop have been sped up to cover a vast amount of material, with the goal to share industry-preferred workflows, methods, and techniques for creating 3D creatures. However, the workshop is also suitable for anyone — at any skill level — to discover new ideas and see the complete creation of a 3D creature from start to finish. If you’re new to 3D character creation, be sure to watch Maddie Spencer’s Introduction to ZBrush 2020 workshop and Eric Keller’s Introduction to Maya 2019 workshop.

Discover how to build a fully functional waterwheel with an integrated fluid simulation in this comprehensive 4-hour Houdini video tutorial. Whether you’re just starting out in Houdini or are an experienced user, this helpful tutorial by VFX artist David Silberbauer is packed with tips and tricks that will be enjoyable for all experience levels. This detailed Houdini workshop showing how to build a completely procedural waterwheel system covers numerous procedural techniques for manipulating geometry and simulations. He explains how to randomize attributes to create realistic and believable results as well as how to customize velocities for creating robust fluid simulations. The workshop also details how to use vorticity for meshing and white water, and shows how to turn your setups into Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs). David’s complete process is detailed through easy-to-digest chapters, along with his thought process along the way, to help guide you to making more effective and efficient choices when working in Houdini. By following this workshop, you’ll learn how to be more productive in your Houdini scenes and explore how working in a procedural way will save time and allow you to be more efficient at iterating production shots. You’ll finish this workshop feeling confident in planning and building your own procedural systems going forward. Provided with this workshop is a Houdini apprentice file with the procedural waterwheel asset.