In this tutorial we will learn about the process of creating concept art for a transforming robot within a production pipeline. To get started, you should know that this course will focus on providing you with a high level glimpse at my thought process in designing our robot. While we won't focus on painting every brush stroke, I will be walking you through each step, demonstrating techniques as well as providing insight into the process. First, we'll jump in and knock out some quick silhouette options to establish our robots form and pose. After spending some time roughing in possible details for our silhouette, we will begin refining forms in grayscale. We will then learn about the coloring process for this project from base color all the way through finishing details. We'll wrap things up by learning about some final steps that were taken before handing our artwork to the next artist in the pipeline. After completing this course, you'll not only know how the concept art was painted but also understand the design decisions were made leading up to our finished concept.

In this Citizen video for 3ds max, we’ll explore more FumeFX, and this time we’ll take a look at how to use it with deforming objects as an animatre character. We’ll pick the Dragon sample scene that can be found in the Sample DVD of 3ds max installation, and we’ll try to create an FX shot with a fire dragon emitting flames, smoke, dust, ashes, etc etc...

When creating procedural models you want to keep the controls simple, but as powerful as possible. Learn how to build the basic shapes for the road using the tools of Houdini and how to maintain procedural control over them. Reconstruct the shapes to get clean geometry. Proper measurement of shapes is really important but can hinder you in your modeling process. We'll guide you through the normalization of shapes to keep the procedural control of measurement, so it is easy to redefine the dimension of your shapes. We show how to use variables in combination with transformation tools to automate that important process. Use the powerful preset option in the nodes to dramatically speed up your productivity in Houdini.

This tutorial is a look into visual effects from a motion-graphics artists' perspective. The goal is to learn the basics of using image-based, projected textures with projection man, combined with creating a basic explosion and crumbling sequence that does not require a team of people, or weeks to put together.

Upon general request, CmiVFX is proud announce its two first volumes of new series of Houdini videos about VEX and VOPs. VEX is one of these things that makes Houdini really unique. Initially designed to be a powerful shading language, its paradigm has been extended to enable users to create new custom operators (like new SOPs, POPs, CHOPs). With the Houdini visual programming philosophy, VEX comes as a new dedicated context: VOPS where the data flow of your program is represented by custom nodes that wrap mathematical functions. VEX programming is so immense of a field that you could recreate almost half of the nodSOP context, maybe the easiest one to master: this means you'll learn how to create new surface operators, new modeling tools, new deformers with VEX/VOPs. It is at the same time an introduction to VEX concepts that are shared among all the various contexts, that we will reuse in our videos about rendering and shader development, or in videos about particle animation .Seashells, global deformers, water ripples... while being a language reference, these videos are intended to be a great cookbook for useful mathematical formulas.

This 8 and a half hour video will show you how I approach material creation in V-Ray. It’s fully narrated and I try to explain everything I’m doing. I’ll show you how to create more than 70 materials, which can be further modified to make countless variations. The techniques I’m using can be mixed and matched, or used to create completely different materials. This video will show you some tricks you can apply to your own work in more than one way. The tutorial is made using 3Ds MAX 2012 and Vray 2.2, but 99% of the techniques are applicable to earlier versions.