For those of you who don’t own Mudbox or 3DCoat but would like to, at the very least preview your model in a smooth shaded view. This quick tip will not only help you achieve that goal but will also give you a little insight to a button known as ‘Quick’.

Unfortunately you will not be able to sculpt with this feature disabled with relative ease, but nevertheless you will still have the opportunity to preview what you model will look like in low resolutions in your current 3d package.

Zbrush Smooth Poly Preview from Andrew on Vimeo.

This video was made in association with cgPipeline.

Hope this helps.

-andrew

Arstechnica has a great article that concisely breaks down doing video post-production “at home”. The article covers aspects of codecs, compressions (4:4:4, 4:4:2, etc.), editing and audio.

A definite worthwhile read.

Big kudos to 3D World magazine for releasing the Tim Clapham mograph video. Asset files and tutorial are available.

Download link.

3D World from Tim Clapham on Vimeo.

A great post at AE Tuts, presents 42 VFX breakdowns. Head on over and have a look!

NurbsAndPolys.com has republished the original subdivision modeling primer originated by Glen Southern and is open for viewing at NaP wiki. As a wiki resource, this publication should flourish and be maintained with current techniques.

http://wiki.nurbsandpolys.com

In the previous segment I outlined the issues that we are faced with moving geometry from a CAD application to a rendering application. In this segment, I am going to cover the topics related to preparing your CAD models to be export ready for a rendering application.

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There’s no question, talent is like getting a kickstart ahead of the rest you are competing with. However, I feel that talent is only one small ingredient to your prowess as a graphic artist.

In fact, talent has a diminishing return to the length one practices their craft, and I do believe that eventually, we all hit a limit that can only be overcome by hard work, experimentation and patience.

And yet, for those that believe they have no talent take heart because even those people with talent end up falling into a working method paradigm that anyone can follow and use to gain experience. While one might think the following post is obvious, it is often the situation that the answers or points of interest are staring us straight in the face.
Thus, I present the 7 habits of high effect junior designers. No, talent isn’t everything.

Rendering is pretty straight forward, you pick a resolution and make your textures and render. Voila it looks great on the screen. Heck you may even take your masterpiece and print it on your inkjet on some photo paper and it still looks great. For the most part, rendering is done for the screen and in a lot of cases printing looks after itself by the inherent nature that rendering to 2K (2000 pixel, or 2K x 2K) is pretty typical, but what do you do when you actually have a client that needs your artwork printed big… I mean big like 10 feet big (or bigger)?

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I do have two articles in the draft that are coming, but in the interim I had to pass this along. My good friend Andy (Phrenzy84) is blogging the progress of modeling and simulating a bee (fur and all, and I suspect it will be done in Houdini). Check this out, and be sure to hit up his blog.

Evolution of the Bee from Andrew on Vimeo.

While, it is usually better buying the DVD/BluRay discs for the special features, AWNtv.com has a growing selection of VFX breakdown videos that could prove useful.