HDRI 3D

With theater releases of Steamboy, Appleseed, and Innocence here in the States, it's no secret that Anime has finally reached the attention of your average movie-goer. Here are 20 quick tips that should help get you on the path to making your own CG Anime. 

Boaz explains how to render custom passes with mental ray and how to control the framebuffer. 

Creating blendshapes and controllers within Softimage|XSI using the advances made with v. 4.0 to create an economical and fast setup. Learn to create 3D control sliders to combine different shapes and the expressions needed to link these to the shapes. 

Often applying image maps to Hypervoxels leads to unwanted results when animated. By using LightWave's integrated Hypervoxels textures, you can achieve excellent results. 

Pixologic's ZBrush is starting to make a huge impact in the CG animation and modeling industry. This tutorial shows one of the many ways in which incorporating ZBrush into your Maya animation workflow can make an arduous task, such as creating blendshape targets for facial animation, easy and fast. 

Particles and collisions for bullet hits and the new gradient for Hypervoxels: Relative Particle Age. 

Part 3 of Peter Ratner's Setting Up the Human Model for Animation series. 

Create the illusion of tons of detail in realtime models while maintaining realistic polygon counts.

An introduction to programming with MEL in a way that makes it easy to learn, use, and debug.

By the time you're finished with this lesson, you will have mastered LightWave's Extender tool. 

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. 

How to quickly create a plugin so that every time a scene is loaded, a click of the button automatically adds a 3-point lighting setup. A great way to automate tasks!

An overview of how even those with only limited coding skills can leverage some of the power of mental ray to create basic tools to enhance their pipeline, using the example of a reflection shader with distance-based falloff. 

This article describes how to use Maestro to auto-rig and then animate your character. 

The Making of CG is on the Artist and Not the Software

Happiness and Anticipation

Graphics Cards and LCD Monitors 

Job Perspectives for Softimage|XSI Artists  

Pooping in the Ring