Lighting La Ruelle is an outdoor illumination eBook that focuses on lighting a base scene under very different atmospheric conditions. The tutorial covers how to build a light rig and set up the renderer to portray an environment, which includes fog/mist, sunrise/sunset, moonlight, midday sun and overcast.

Throughout the five chapters Andrew Finch provides a step-by-step account of how the scene can be transformed into one of the above environments, encompassing a range of techniques that will present a comprehensive insight into both lighting and rendering exterior scenes.

In this course we will cover tools and techniques for curve-based facial rigging in Maya.

We'll take the Facial Action Coding System approach of controls muscles to mold facial expressions. Step by step, we'll construct a facial control rig that is robust, sufficient, and animator-friendly. We'll learn everything from how to deform a mesh by a curve's shape, to creating controls for those curves that will provide the animator with the functionality they need to create entertaining facial animations. We'll also learn how utilize nodes and expressions to automate certain components of our control rig. By the end of this course, you'll have the fund of knowledge you need to create your own curve-based control rigs that produce natural and appealing facial expressions.

1. Introduction and Project Overview

2. Driving the New Mesh of the Animation Character

3. Setting up the Joints of the Facial Rig

4. Adding Tools to a Custom Shelf

5. Building the Curves that will Deform the Face

6. Adding the Facial Curves as Influence Objects

7. Wrapping up the Initial Weight Pass of the Facial Curves

8. Refining the Weights of the Brows and Orbicularis Curves

9. Fine-tuning the Deformations of the Mouth Curves

10. Finalizing the Weights of the Buccinators

11. Controlling the Facial Curves with Clusters

12. Mirroring Influence Weights/Setting up Brow Controls

13. Creating Controls for the Orbicular Curves

14. Building Controls for the Buccinators and Zygomatic Curves

15. Starting on the Lip Controls

16. Adding Clusters to the Driver Curve for the Lips

17. Creating Groups for the Lip Controls

18. Attaching the Lip Controls to the Driver Curve with an Expression

19. Finishing up the Connections of the Lip Controls and Driver Curve

20. Connecting the Zygomatic Controls to their Driver Curves

21. Correcting the Weights Around the Corners of the Mouth

22. Rigging the Nose

23. Creating a Jaw Control/Blocking in the Weights of the Jaw Bone

24. Automating the Corner Lip Controls to Follow the Jaw

25. Wrapping up the Automation of the Corner Lip Controls

26. Setting up the Lower Lip Controls to Move with the Jaw

27. Finishing the Connections Between the Lower Lip Controls and the Jaw

28. Refining the Deformations of the Jaw

29. Shifting the Lower Lip Controls as the Jaw Rotates in the Y Axis

30. Closing in the Gaps Around the Lips When the Mouth Closes

31. Setting up the Lip Rolls

32. Tweaking the Facial Rig

33. Creating the Tongue Bones/Binding the Tongue

34. Rigging the Tongue Controls

35. Stretching the Tongue

36. Tying the Facial Controls to the Control Rig

37. Connecting the Blend Shape Controls to the Animation Controls

38. Finishing the Setup of the Animation Facial Controls

39. Cleaning up the Scene

40. Creating a Sub Character Set for the Facial Controls

41. Exploring a Technique for Correcting Deformations in the Face

This five part series will focus on the topic of setting up a variety of lighting rigs that reflect natural lighting at different times of the day and manmade interior lighting. Each of the chapters will use the same base scene as a starting point, and will show a step by step guide to finding a lighting and rendering solution that best reflects the desired lighting situation.

The tutorials will explain the type of lights used and how to set up the parameters along with talking about the different methods of tackling the subject. The manipulation of textures may also be covered in order to turn a daylight scene into night scene for example. The artists will also look at some useful post production techniques in Photoshop in order to enhance a final still.

In this DVD, Michael Pavlovich takes up where he left off on the ZBrush 3.5 Comprehensive Video. With the release of ZBrush 4 comes many new amazing features and Michael explores them in detail. He first starts off with an overview and then goes straight into many new modifiers, from there he gets into the many new brushes and settings included. Michael then goes into the new subtool features, shadowbox, layers, and then an extremely detailed overview of spotlight. From there he goes into Timeline, UV Master, Transpose, Materials, and Rendering with BPR. Finally there is a bonus chapter included that goes over the creation of the characters body.

This DVD is perfect for those who want to get the most out of ZBrush 4's many new features and put them to use making amazing character right now.

About the Instructor:

Michael Pavlovich has been in the game industry since graduating from the Ringling School of Art and Design in 2005. Starting as an environment artist, Michael has worked on several titles for multiple platforms, at both Electronic Arts and Sony Online Entertainment. Michael is currently a Senior Character Artist at SOE, Austin.

In this series of lessons we will explore the various techniques and some helpful tips for setting up realistic lighting for an interior scene using V-Ray for Maya.

The ability to set up realistic lighting for an interior environment is a skill that is highly sought after in the CG industry. Problems to overcome, arise with every digital set. So we will be covering a lot of very common issues that you will want to be aware of such as using V-Ray lights to create physically-accurate light behavior, achieving realistic light bouncing in our scene, optimizing our render speed, using V-Ray materials to simulate a variety of surface types, using an external image-editing application to add some finishing touches to our renders, as well as many other tips, tricks, and techniques that will help you become a stronger, more effective rendering artist in V-Ray.

1. Introduction and project overview

2. Establishing proper scene scale when rendering

3. Setting up the primary light source for our scene

4. Adding secondary illumination sources to our scene

5. Finishing the rough lighting of our scene

6. Adding V-Ray materials to the floor and ceiling

7. Refining the V-Ray floor material for our room

8. Applying V-Ray materials to the chair in our scene

9. Creating materials and textures for the pillows

10. Adding materials to the rug and artwork in our room

11. Adding materials to the table in our room

12. Creating materials for the oranges in our room

13. Rendering Maya Smooth Mesh objects in V-Ray

14. Adding translucency to the curtains

15. Making final quality adjustments to our render

16. Using Photoshop to add final touches to our render

Maya 2011: Creating Textures and Shaders with Eric Keller shows how to create textures and materials, and then apply them to models to render realistic surfaces. The course covers working with the mental ray shading nodes, including the mental images architectural node, subsurface scattering nodes, occlusion, and car paint shaders, as well as how to incorporate these nodes into shading networks using the Hypershade editor. It also explores using textures, Maya software nodes, normal maps, and displacement maps for adding detail to models. Exercise files accompany the course.

* Understanding shading concepts

* Simulating the Fresnel effect for realistic reflections

* Rendering transparent and translucent surfaces

* Comparing mental ray and Maya standard shaders

* Introducing the mia_material

* Developing shader networks

* Using subsurface scattering shaders

* Mapping polygon UV coordinates

* Incorporating texture nodes into networks

* Improving skin detail with ambient occlusion

* Painting bump maps

* Creating normal and displacement maps

* Troubleshooting maps

Maya 2011 Lighting and Rendering in mental ray with Eric Keller shows how to master practical mental ray techniques for rendering models created in Maya. This course walks through the most efficient and innovative mental ray techniques, including direct versus indirect lighting methods, creating different types of shadows, using the new ShadowMap camera, and reusing shadow and final gathering maps. A chapter on optimizing render times and enhancing render quality is also included. Exercise files are included with the course.

* Understanding computer-generated lighting

* Creating depth map and ray traced shadows

* Softening and shaping shadows

* Working with global illumination

* Lighting with the caustic settings

* Applying physical and portal shaders

* Adding depth of field with the Bokeh shader

* Splitting a scene into render layers

* Comparing render passes and render layers

In this DVD, Instructor Tony Reynolds takes you through the process of creating and rendering out a portrait using Mental Ray in Maya 2011. Tony starts off by taking a previously sculpted head from ZBrush and shows you how to prepare and export the model for Maya. From there he goes into great detail on all the Maya setup and settings, lighting with Mental Ray, simple and advanced skin shader setup, skin textures, rendering eyes, rendering teeth, rendering a tongue, creating hair for the face and head, using render layers, and compositing the render layers in Photoshop.

About the Instructor:

Tony Reynolds has been training in the visual arts from a young age, and started his video game career in 2005. He has worked at Electronic Arts and Sony Online Entertainment, Austin, where he is currently the Lead Senior Character and Technical Artist.

Project Files: Included are the Maya files, ZBrush files, .obj files, renders, textures, and final .psd as shown in the DVD.

This is the physical DVD edition which will ship to your address, you may also be interested in the immediate download option.

Introduction to R12 is a complete starter course with 5 hours of tuition for anyone just starting with CINEMA 4D. Targetted towards someone who is currently using Photoshop or After Effects, or anyone currently using an old or low-end 3D application that is looking to move up to a professional piece of software.

Matthew takes you through everything from setting your projects up, adjusting preferences to make your life easier, through all the expected areas such as modelling, lighting, animation, texturing and rendering.

Everything is explained clearly and tips about common mistakes and misunderstandings are explained so that you don't get stuck. This DVD is suitable for all versions of CINEMA 4D R12 but does predominantly cover the features found in the Prime edition. Some extra pointers are mentioned though so that users of other versions such as Broadcast and Studio know where to look if they wish to read up on specific extra features which might help them.

* General application guide

* Modeling, from simple spline-based to full poly editing

* Animation

* Materials and textures

* Setting up renders

* Particle systems

* Easy object deformation

* Which buttons you shouldn't worry about

Dieses Video-Training ihr Reiseführer in das noch weithin unentdeckte Reich der Lab-Bildbearbeitung. Traditionell erfolgt die Bearbeitung von Bildern im RGB-Modus. Durch die Trennung von Helligkeits- und Farbkanälen bietet der Lab-Modus interessante Alternativen und oftmals überraschende Bearbeitungsmöglichkeiten.

Im ersten Block lernen Sie die Grundlagen kennen. Umwandlung in Lab, wie hell kann dass hellste Blau sein oder ist ein dunkles Grün in Lab noch zu erkennen? sind nur einige der Fragen, die beantwortet werden.

Der Erleichterung des Workflows ist ein weiteres Kapitel gewidmet, denn nur wenn ihre „Werkstatt“ gut eingerichtet ist, können Sie darin auch gut arbeiten. Mit eigenen Tastaturkürzeln und Aktionen richten Sie so Ihre persönliche Umgebung ein.

Die Füllmethoden stellen ein zentrales Element der Bearbeitung im Lab-Modus dar. Nach einer Präsentation der einzelnen Füllmethodengruppen mit ihrer Wirkungsweise stelle Ihnen Michael Jordan quasi als Zusammenfassung die von ihm entwickelte Füllmethodentafel vor. Sie kann Ihre Arbeit enorm erleichtern und liegt diesem Video-Training bei. Die Lektionen zu Bild- und Kanalberechnungen sowie den Fülloptionen runden diesen Teil ab.

Wie Sie mit der Gradationskurve oder der Tonwertkorrektur im Lab-Modus monochrome Bilder erzeugen oder tonen, eigene Bild-Looks gestalten, mit Ebenen und Bildberechnungen gezielt bestimmte Tonwertbereiche auswählen oder den Tiefen-Lichter Filter in Lab anwenden, sind weitere wichtige Themengebiete dieses Trainings. Die Strategien beim Schärfen - nicht nur in Lab - werden im letzten „Grundlagenkapitel“ besprochen.

Praktische Schritt-für-Schritt-Bearbeitungsbeispiele aus beliebten Themengebieten wie Architektur, Landschaft oder Porträt runden das Training ab. Dort finden die Techniken aus den Grundlagen in konzentrierter Form ihre Anwendung.

Aus dem Inhalt:

Grundlagen

Im ersten Kapitel bekommen Sie einen Überblick, wie Sie den Lab-Modus richtig nutzen und anwenden. Sie lernen die wichtigen Unterschiede der drei Farbmodi RGB, CMYK und Lab und einiges mehr.

Die Werkstatt einrichten

Um schneller ans Ziel zu gelangen, zeigt Ihnen Michael Jordan in diesem Kapitel, wie mit Tastaturkürzel und Aktionen gearbeitet wird.

Wahlfreiheit

Wie Sie ein Bild in den unterschiedlichsten Kanälen öffnen, ist Inhalt dieses Kapitels. Nutzen Sie alle zehn Kanäle, die ein Bild hat, um Ihre Aufnahmen zu optimieren!

Füllmethoden, Fülloptionen, Bild- und Kanalberechnungen

In der Einführung in die Füllmethoden lernen Sie die beiden ersten Methoden "Normal" und "Sprenkeln" kennen und widmen sich anschließend den unterschiedlichsten Bild- und Kanalberechnungen.

Schwarzweiß

Das Ein- bzw. das Umfärben ist Inhalt dieses Kapitels. Sehen Sie zunächst die Wandlung in Schwarzweiß und danach die Einfärbung mittels Tonwertkorrektur.

Spezielle Techniken

Spezielle Situationen erfordern angepasste Techniken: lassen Sie sich zeigen, was Sie mit Hilfe des Raw-Konverters und der Tonwertauswahl bewerkstelligen können, wie der Trick mit dem Gamma bei unterbelichteten Bildern Wunder wirkt, was bei missglückten Spitzlichtern hilft oder wie Farbstiche und Rauschen elegant in den Griff zu kriegen sind und noch viele andere Techniken mehr.

Kanalarbeit

Wie Ihnen die Kanäle hilfreich sein werden, demonstriert Ihnen Michael Jordan in den Filmen dieses Kapitels.

Lab in Landschafts-, Architektur- und Porträtfotografie

Wie sich der Lab-Modus bei Landschafts-, Architektur- und Porträtfotografie verhält und wie Sie mit seiner Hilfe spezifische Probleme bearbeiten, erfahren Sie im abschließenden Kapitel.

Drupal 7 Essential Training shows how to get the most out of Drupal, the content management system (CMS) that powers over a quarter million web sites. The course demonstrates how to download and install Drupal, add content and graphics to a site, change layout and design elements, control visitor interactions, and expand the site's capabilities beyond what’s available in Drupal core. Discussion of established best practices in each step to ensure that a site remains streamlined, secure, and up-to-date. Exercise files are included with the course.

Released on: 1/14/2011

For this installment of the First Look series, James Williamson reviews the current implementation and future direction of web fonts: downloadable font resources that can be retrieved with the CSS @font-face declaration. The course begins with the evolution of online typography and current CSS font capabilities, and then dives into the W3C CSS Fonts Module specification, showing how to utilize web fonts, ensure cross-browser consistency, and how to use CSS3 to enhance the styling of web fonts. Font hosting services and tools such as TypeKit and the Google Fonts API are demonstrated. Exercise files accompany the course.

* What are web fonts?

* Understanding the font stack

* Using @font-face

* Rendering basics

* Choosing a font hosting service

* Downloading licensed fonts

* Generating web fonts

* Font sizing

* Transforming text

* Creating special effects with text shadows

In this DVD, Joe Bentez unveils the secrets of drawing alluring comic book style pin-up characters. Sex appeal and allure is conveyed through many methods including stylized proportions, foreshortening, twists and curves. The importance of facial expression is also discussed in the context of conveying the right mood or emotion, along how this ties the character together.

* 3D Depth in 2D Space

* Conveying Sex Appeal

* "Posing" the Hair

* Finding Accurate Proportions

* Foreshortening

* Drawing Females vs. Drawing Males

* Expression and Emotion in the Face and Pose

* Classic Pin-Up Pose Breakdowns

* Twisting the Spine for more Dynamic Poses

* Keeping the Female Face Young

* Drawing the Face in Various Angles and Emotions

Great lighting is the key to getting professional-looking output from Maya and Mental Ray. Now, for the first time, Pixar Technical Director Jeremy Birn shares his secrets, his settings, and his Maya scenes, in a Maya-specific training DVD. This new DVD features over 3 hours of tightly edited demonstrations of professional lighting and rendering techniques using Maya and Mental Ray.

* Step-by-step lighting of full Maya scenes

* Simulated radiosity style lighting for realism and speed

* Every kind of Maya light and shadow explored in depth

* Hacks, tricks, cheats, and creative uses for light attributes

* Practical approaches to professional-looking color choices

* Ray-traced shadows: how to optimize them and control their appearance

* In-depth guide to fixing different kinds of shadow artifacts and light leaks

* Mental Ray controls in lights, shadows, shaders, and render settings

* Adjusting shadows in reflections, through transparency and fur, in real-time, and in other special cases

The DVD features 18 video lectures that you can play on your computer. The videos are high-resolution to show every pixel of the Maya interface in each demonstration. All the Maya scenes are included on the DVD as well, along with necessary textures, lights, and shaders to re-create each demonstration. Printable PDF course notes provide a quick reference guide to lighting and rendering functions in Maya.

In this series of lessons we will learn how Maya and RealFlow can be used together for our projects.

We will begin this course by learning how to import RealFlow meshes into Maya, and we will go step-by-step through the process of adding lights, materials and proper render settings to mimic appearance of realistic glass and liquid materials. From there, we will go deeper into the integration process, learning how to take geometry from Maya into RealFlow, using RealFlow's soft and rigid body dynamics to create moving objects, as well as understanding how scene scale plays a critical role in the behavior of our simulations. We will learn how to cache and re-use RealFlow simulation data and discuss many tips, tricks and techniques that you will be able to use in both the simulation and the rendering stages of your RealFlow projects.

1. Introduction and project overview

2. Exporting meshes from RealFlow into Maya

3. Applying Maya materials to RealFlow meshes

4. Adjusting raytrace settings in Maya

5. Adding colored shadows to dielectric materials

6. Adding caustic patterns to glass materials

7. Making final adjustments to render quality

8. Importing Maya geometry into RealFlow

9. Creating soft and rigid body objects in RealFlow

10. Adjusting soft body results in RealFlow

11. Caching soft body simulations from RealFlow

12. Adding detailed splashes to our RealFlow project

13. Adding RealWave surfaces to our scene

14. Generating meshes around RealFlow particles

15. Importing RealFlow objects into Maya

16. Setting up materials for the lemon geometry

17. Adding a reflective environment to our Maya scene

18. Increasing reflection and refraction rays in Maya

19. Adding soft shadows to our Maya scene

20. Fixing reflection and refraction errors

21. Blending RealFlow meshes together in Maya

22. Adding secondary illumination to the scene

23. Fixing artifacts in Maya Architectural Material

24. Using the RealFlow Melt Shader in Maya

25. Generating the RealFlow project files for this course

Fashion photographer Frank Doorhof takes viewers on location with two models to create this photo shoot for Kelby Training. During the videos, Frank talks about why he tries to shoot tethered all the time, the importance of using a color checker, how he directs his models, and how he controls lighting adjustments through the camera and the strobe.

1. Location Scouting and Gear (07:53)

2. Male Model in Sunlight (05:11)

3. Female Model in Sunlight with Strobes (05:47)

4. Golden Gown in Alleyway (05:43)

5. Positioning the Model and the Light (11:34)

6. High Contrast Look (07:54)

7. Always Shoot Tethered (10:37)

8. Single Light Indoors (08:23)

9. Multiple Lights on a Sofa (06:24)

10. Final Shot (02:24)

11. Conclusion (01:12)

12. Total: 01:13:02