CG Education

Sept 1st 2008
Added a new lesson called Towels, Carpet Or Grass Material Using Displacement.

Aug 16th 2008
Added a new lesson called Ambient Occlusion Rust.

Aug 15th 2008
First off, a huge thanks to everyone who came to my Shading & Texturing class at Siggraph. I really appreciate the support, and hopefully the information I presented will be useful to you. I certainly learned a few new tricks. Also, I have a chapter in the new book Digital Art Masters Volume 3 discussing how I went about creating my "Mouths To Feed III" image. To purchase the book (and get a preview) go here.

June 28th 2008
Added some new info to Reducing Memory Usage To Render A Memory Hungry Scene.

May 6th 2008
Added a new lesson called Worn Edges Using A Distorted Vertex Map.

Mar 22nd 2008
I will be doing a 90min presentation at this year's Los Angeles Siggraph 2008 as part of the Autodesk MasterClasses on Wed, August 13th. The course is called "Shading & Texturing Sets, Props and Vehicles". In the class, I will be showing off a pipeline for efficiently adding shading and textures to anything non organic, whether it be for a set, a vehicle, props or a giant evil fighting robot. I'll go over some basics, and then delve into a number of more advanced tricks that I use shade fast, including a number of tools I've written. The course stresses that these techniques can be used no matter what software or renderer you choose to use, so example files will be done in Brazil, scanline and mentalray for 3dsmax, but even maya users can walk away from this course with some useful theory. The course is for intermediate users, so there's material in here that should be useful to people just starting out, people with a decent working knowledge of max, and super users who want some advanced tips and tricks to help speed up their workflow. Go here for information on getting tickets and for more information on the course. And feel free to email me if you have any specific questions about the topics I'll be covering. Thanks.

Mar 13th 2008
Added a new lesson on creating a Dust Material. Added some mental ray info on the Brushed Metal Material lesson. Added more info to my Rounding The Edges, Chamfers And Fillets lesson about EdgeChEx. Added some info in the Additive Mode In Photoshop lesson about the Fill property of a layer.

Jan 27th 2008
Added more info to my Rounding The Edges, Chamfers And Fillets lesson.

Jan 21st 2008
Added a lot more info to my Reducing Memory Usage To Render A Memory Hungry Scene Lesson. Added a few extra methods for Rounding The Edges, Chamfers And Fillets.

Nov 13th 2007
Complete redid my Anisotropic Highlights tutorial with tons of new information, including updated Brazil info, and a section on Maya's Anisotropic shader.

Oct 17th 2007
Added a recommendation in the Converting A Mudbox Model To 3DSMax lesson to use turbosmooth. Added a few more tips to Reducing Memory Usage To Render A Memory Hungry Scene. Added a new lesson, Texturing For Extreme Zooms. Added a new lesson on making a Gold Material as a companion to my Chrome Material lesson.

Aug 13th 2007
Added a tiny bit of extra info to Metals and Reflections. Added a new lesson called Overbright Cards in Reflections. Renamed my High Pass Filter To Make Tileable Textures lesson to Removing Brightness Variation To Make Tileable Textures, and added a new technique to the lesson. Added a better displacement example to Converting A Mudbox Model To 3DSMax, and added a few more useful tips

May 16th 2007
The latest mudbox has a slighty different Baking interface, so I updated the figure in my Converting A Mudbox Model To 3DSMax Lesson.