CGI

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.

This advanced 2-hour workshop covers the Unreal Engine 5 lighting workflows that Naughty Dog Lighting Artist, Ted Mebratu, uses to achieve cinematic results. Unreal’s Lumen is a very powerful Global Illumination system. However, when comparing it to static/baked methods, it can take some of the artistic control that Lightmaps make available to lighting artists. In addition, due to performance constraints of current hardware, there’s a limitation to how many runtime light sources you can place within a given scene using Lumen. With Lightmaps, however, this budget is practically infinite. This workshop teaches both workflows to arm you with the skills that make the most sense for you. Starting with Lightmaps, the first portion of this video guide details the process of lighting an environment for two different scenarios — night and day — using baked/static Lightmaps (GPU Lightmass). Through these first chapters, Ted covers the different tricks and techniques he uses to craft baked direct and indirect lighting. He explains how to effectively use reflection probes to achieve believable results and walks through how to achieve realistic fog and atmospheric effects using static volumetric fog. The workshop then dives into the process of creating a full multi-camera cinematic using Unreal 5’s Sequencer tool. Demonstrating using an ornate cathedral in Unreal, Ted showcases different techniques for shot lighting a cinematic sequence utilizing Lumen’s real-time GI system. He reveals how to create a full master cinematic sequence from scratch, featuring his top techniques for arranging and editing cinematic shots. You’ll also discover Ted’s approach to achieving dramatic compositions. By completing this workshop, you should gain a solid insight into lighting in Unreal Engine 5 and understand how to create cinematics using UE5. There are many helpful takeaways from Ted’s workflow shared throughout that you can incorporate into your own projects.

Sharpen your scripting skills as we delve into modular rigging with Python in this 3-hour workshop created for riggers and aspiring coders. The objective is to create a one-click solution for rigging bipeds, with the potential for customization to suit other types of characters, pipelines, and project requirements. Nick Miller, Creature Supervisor at DNEG, introduces a comprehensive library of code and explores the moderate-to-complex components of Python, Object Oriented Programming, and rigging. Building your own modular rigging system gives you several advantages; not only does it save you significant time, but it also enhances your problem-solving skills and prepares you to contribute to a company's rigging toolset. Watch as Nick leverages Maya's standardized human IK skeleton as a template by using it as a foundation to build rigs. This technique helps you to incorporate motion-capture data to drive your rigs. To showcase the system, Nick utilizes a downloadable character from Mixamo and then applies his tools to generate a fully functional rig before applying motion capture as keyframes onto the rig's controls. Additionally, Nick instructs how to organize rigs in a game-engine-friendly manner, allowing for easy export of the skeleton and character mesh. Upon completing this workshop, subscribers will have learned essential rigging techniques, including building a modular rigging system with Python, the basics of Maya's human IK skeleton, how to apply motion-capture data, and how to export rigs for game engines. Project files provided with this workshop give students a reference or guideline to follow. The downloadable project files include Nick’s asset build folders for three characters, including models, guides, textures, scripts, weights, and controls, as well as his modular rigging package (nmrig and grig).

Adrian Vallecilla’s 5-hour workshop details a complete workflow for integrating hero assets into backplates with photorealistic results. Using a classic technique in visual effects production, Adrien reveals how to transform a 3D scan of a train into a production-ready asset using Maya, discussing the important hard-surface modeling theories while demonstrating the process. The texturing portion includes how to clean up textures from the 3D scan and project them back onto a clean 3D asset using Mari — a standard practice that ensures the CG asset is usable in VFX production. Back in Maya, the look-dev, lighting, and rendering is handled with V-Ray. Adrien discusses the importance of matching the lighting of the plate with the 3D asset being integrated for truly realistic results and demonstrates how to recreate the correct lighting scenario. Using Maya's render setup tools, Adrien shows how to export all the necessary lighting passes required for professional compositing in Nuke. As well as detailing the process, he also discusses what to look out for when creating realistic CG integrations using Nuke. Provided with this workshop is Adrien’s low-res model of the environment and camera (.mb file for Maya) used for the shot, which you can download and use with your own assets. An HDR image and backplate courtesy of HDRI Haven is also included from their free collection. Be sure to check out Adrien’s other workshops detailing Exterior Scene Development and Creating a Photoreal Interior.

This course is the final part in the Look Development with Maya, V-Ray and Nuke trilogy and covers the final compositing of the shot.

This course, taught by Amid Rajabi, is the second of a three part course covering integrating the car from VRY203 into a live action plate. The focus in this part is on rigging, animating, lighting, and rendering.

This course, taught by Amid Rajabi, covers integrating the car model and textures from VRY203 into a live action plate. This offering, the first of three parts, focuses on prepping the scene in Nuke by looking at color management, camera tracking, and generating geo with point clouds.

This in-depth course covers how to create photoreal textured 3D environments, props, and scenes using photography and two software packages. Agisoft Photoscan is 3D reconstruction software and Pixologic Zbrush is high end 3D sculpting software. By the end of this course, you'll be armed with the knowledge to recreate all kinds of different and challenging objects including rocks, trees, roots, and large ground surfaces as well as entire environments as photoreal photo-scanned assets.

Unreal Engine Bootcamp, Part 2 gives a broad and detailed introduction to using Unreal Engine to create cinematic photoreal scenes for cinematics. It is especially tailored for VFX artists wanting to take their first steps in Unreal Engine and apply their knowledge to an advanced realtime game engine. It is the followup to Unreal Engine Bootcamp, Part 2 which was previously released

This 200-level course is created to teach visual effects artists how to use components of Unreal Engine 5 to create photorealistic worlds for projects. Key theory behind how Unreal Engine fits into the VFX pipeline and which DCC application assets can be imported into Unreal Engine will be covered in detail. The classes will cover the creation of photorealistic DEM landscapes, foliage and tree creation and systems, hard surface models and surfacing, material editing in UE5, character authoring and import using MetaHuman Creator, Sky atmosphere and lighting system in Lumin, water and ocean plugin for UE5, megascans assets for closeup details and Nanite virtual geometry system, post process fx and cinematic camera settings. Liam is an Australian based Senior VFX artist, who has been in the 3D industry since 2003. He has worked on various projects over the past 18 years including most recently the photorealistic canyon environments for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney Plus, and the hollow earth environments for Godzilla vs Kong, as well as VFX work on other upcoming high profile feature films and episodic series.

This is the first of a two-part course, which teaches how to use Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine 5 to create a photorealistic cinematic short of a Ford Mustang in an urban city environment. The course covers material authoring, look development, lighting, virtual cinematography, and high-quality render settings in Unreal Engine.

This course covers how to create a highly detailed photoreal real-time environment using World Creator, Quixel Bridge, and Unreal Engine 5.

Professor Michela Ledwidge has designed this course to teach you how to build on your traditional film/TV skills and apply them in the creation of a realtime short film. Using the Unreal Engine, Michela provides a detailed overview of concepts every artist should know about designing, building and re-purposing assets for realtime use, as well as setting up a pipeline for publishing desktop, mobile, and VR experience.

In this course, Hugo Léveillé shows various tips and tricks to build a VFX pipeline. You will see how to build various pipeline tools using a variety of software. In this first part, you will learn how to manage Python modules with the virtual environment and PIP. Next, you'll learn how build a database system from scratch so that you can save our project information inside it, which will be the foundation of what will be built in future courses.

In this advanced course, Victor Wolansky will share advanced techniques on how to use survey information for a variety of purposes. This includes how to match cameras to real world coordinates, cross link tracking points from multiple cameras for better precision, and using survey data from Survey Stations. This is information which is very precise, so much so that you can force SynthEyes to constrain to those points to even solve shots without any motion.

This course will be no exception to Victor Wolansky's other offerings, with wicked shots as long and as complicated as they can get. But it's not tricks without a reason, as he will examine many of the new improvements of Syntheyes 1212 (yes, 1212 is the version). The release creates significant changes in the workflow compared to previous versions, especially a good introduction to the new

This course, taught by Katie Morris, consists of seven classes with four diverse and complex shots that explore various manual and procedural painting techniques and workflows.

In our new course, taught by Katie Morris, you will learn the fundamentals of Silhouette Paint. The course begins with an introduction of the paint interface and an overview of the Paint Tools and Auto Paint. The subsequent five classes focus on two shots, one a facial dot marker removal shot and the other a wire removal and plate reconstruction shot.

In this course, you will learn everything from spline types to manual roto to fully automated workflows, showcasing Silhouette and its comprehensive roto module. In addition, the Mocha Pro plug-in will be incorporated into a class to demonstrate its beneficial tools available to artists.