December 8, 2009

Aaron F. Ross, webmaster of Digital Arts Guild, has teamed up with lynda.com, the industry leader in online software training. Aaron’s first video training series for lynda.com is 3ds Max 2010 Lighting and Rendering with mental ray. Learn to make photorealistic renderings in 3ds Max!

This series, over five hours in length, explores one of the most powerful toolsets for photorealistic 3D image visualization: the mental ray renderer in 3ds Max. Aaron shows how to use mental ray’s combination of materials, lighting, and rendering to achieve a variety of effects, from glossy surfaces to reflections and transparency. He provides an in-depth review of photometrics and the tools used to adjust lighting in 3ds Max, including intensity, distribution, and color temperature, in a wide variety of lighting scenarios. Aaron also devotes time to getting the most out of mental ray’s powerful rendering engine and improving render efficiency. Exercise files are included with this course.

In this series of 14 free videos, we use various polygon tools to model a piece of furniture. Our design is inspired by reference images from the real world. Over the course of the two-hour series, we explore the following learning outcomes:

Project Folders
Scene Layout
Editable Spline
Extrude and Sweep Modifiers
Editable Poly
Loft Compound Object
Basic Materials

Maya is an incredibly powerful tool for the creation of moving images! If you are interested in character animation or visual effects, then Maya is a top-tier application in your industry.

Maya is a whole world unto itself, so it takes a while to get your bearings. In this two-hour video series, you get to explore the entire production workflow for animation. We use the classic bouncing ball exercise because it clearly illustrates how to achieve convincing animation, including position, rotation, and squash & stretch. Along the way, you also get to learn the basics of cameras, materials, lighting, and rendering. We finish up by converting our Maya image sequence to a movie with Quicktime Pro.

Some of the coolest ideas in 3D graphics have actually been around for a long time. The techniques of image-based modeling allow 3D objects to be synthesized from two or more photographs. This is a form of photogrammetry, which was invented by Edouard Deville in the late 1800s.

While at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Christian Greuel (President of Realtime Arts) had his face scanned by Dimensional Imaging. The resulting raw mesh was very “heavy” — it had a high polygon count. Greuel did a quick optimization on the model in 3ds Max and composited this image in Photoshop.

Digital Arts Guild is proud to present our first series of free video tutorials. With these new videos, you'll get up to speed in the interface of Maya or 3ds Max in no time! They're available as YouTube movies or downloadable Quicktime files.

The tutorials are written and presented by Aaron F. Ross, an Autodesk Certified Instructor with ten years of teaching experience. Our goal is to help you master the tools of the trade, so you can create new and wonderful games, films, and visualizations. If you like what you see here, let us know, and tell your friends!