HDRI 3D

Learn tips and tricks to apply this new lighting/surfacing technique in your own scenes to achieve quicker renders with a global illumination look. 

Learn how to create independent motion modules that can be mixed and matched to create different motion sequences.

Motion Capture is quickly becoming the go-to method for creating quick, realistic animation in the gaming industry, so where does this leave the animator's job? This article tackles the issue of how animators can approach using motion capture and its strengths to attain aesthetically pleasing, diverse results, while still enjoying their job. 

This article is about Character Technical Director work and mastering deformations on characters using an elbow as an example. Simply using enveloping (skinning) on a skeleton and doing some weight painting is not enough to simulate the behavior of skin, fat, and muscles, and the deformations will never be good enough. This technique uses helper objects to increase control and effectiveness of enveloping, it describes how to build a Deformer Objects System and envelope (skinning) on top of that. 

Learn how to extract the basic surface maps from digital RAW photo textures. Use RGB color channels to produce the color, bump, specular, and diffuse surface channels. 

As the popularity of using digital images for surface mapping is increasing, many don 't realize how much shadow, mid-tone and highlight detail is lost once an image is converted from a camera 's native RAW format into a format that can be read by programs like Photoshop. This first of a two-part series using digital texture photos taken at the Cabrillo Monument shows you how to preview and control those details before they 're lost in conversion. 

Explore the flexibility we have when working with layers produced from any favorite 3D application in order to deliver a better final version of our creative vision. 

Two tutorials in one! A side-by-side comparison of the same techniques done in both Maya and LightWave. 

Visual FX are all just a trick of the eye. Take a simple cylinder and turn it into a magical portal to another dimension.