[Bf-education] Off Topic: another blender training video

Chris Maynard wavesmack at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 13 14:29:38 CEST 2009


cmiVFX Launches New Blender Training Video for the new cmiDirect short video initiative
Watch High Definition Training Videos For The Visual Effects Industry Instantly From Anywhere In The World.

Curitiba, PR, Brazil October 10th, 2009 — cmiVFX | cmiStudios launches a brand new way of delivering videos for its fast growing user base. This new series of training videos is called cmiDirect. Why "direct"?  The videos are DIRECT to the point and focus on one topic at the time. This will enable artists all over the world to have access to the information they need immediately without sorting through longer feature length videos. These videos explain all the information you need in depth and to the topics extent.  We will also be including discount bundles of our videos in the future to help save additional money. When it comes to high end CG and VFX training, there is only once choice... cmiVFX!

Blender Shading and Fur
http://www.cmivfx.com/Blender3D_Training_Tutorials/shading_and_fur/default.aspx

That's right, we found the cure for baldness!  (Among digital creatures anyway)
In this training video you will learn how to create, comb, shade and render realistic looking hair by making use of Blender’s often underestimated, yet extremely powerful particle-system. With Blender’s hair-creating capabilities, you can take your creatures to the next level… because even the best model will look dull without some decent fur. This tutorial will explain the essential tools and settings that you need to cover our mammoth with some dirty, woolly, fuzzy fur. 

EDIT HAIRS
Blender provides you with a variety of tools to create and edit realistic looking hair. Blender’s weight-painting-tools give you a lot of flexibility to limit the fur to certain areas and control its roughness, length or density with different vertex-groups. After you’ve setup the base for the fur, you enter particle-mode and become a real CG-hairstylist! Comb the hair, add more particles, change the length or cut them in an intuitive and easy way. Also, by making use of child-particles in a unique way, you can keep render-times and memory-usage reasonablylow.

HAIR SHADING
But of course, without decent shading and realistic materials, even the best haircut will look like of pot spaghetti. This portion of the video shows you how to setup your materials to achieve natural looking fur. Map gradients along the strands, use stencil-maps to map different textures to different areas and setup textures to control the particle-properties.You’ll also learn how to give the fur some roughness, make it clump together and even add braiding to the hairs. And of course all these properties can be controlled by vertex-groups and/or textures.

CHILD SIMPLIFICATION 
If you want to render a flock of mammoths or any other crowd of hairy things then you can easily run out of memory if you don’t use a way to optimize your scene. Especially if you have some furry creatures in the background, then you really don’t need to render every very strand, because as they get smaller on the screen, you wouldn’t see them anyway. In some realms of visual effects, they refer to this as LOD or Level Of Detail. In this scenario, its privileged to Blender on sorting out this management appropriately. This tutorial shows you how to easily get rid of unneeded particles by using “child-simplification” to optimize your scene. 


This video is available today at the cmiVFX store. cmiVFX Video Player Online Store http://cmivfx.com/store/Browse.aspx?Category=6

About the Author:
Sebastian König is a german 3D-artist who is working as a freelancer and CG-instructor for several years now. During his studies for Education of Art he discovered the joy of modeling and creating 3D-Animations with Blender and hasn’t stopped ever since. Being a passionate Blender-User he has been teaching Blender at the University of Art and Design Halle/Germany and is also giving online-classes.  He has been working for various studios and companies as a 3D-Artist and freelancer. During the dozens of projects and jobs he completed with Blender he got a profound knowledge of almost every aspect of this great Open-Source 3D-application.

About cmiVFX
cmiVFX is the leader in High Definition Video Training for the Visual Effects Community. To test drive the new cmiVFX TVOD © system, visit http://www.cmivfx.com/cmi_vod.html For additional information about cmiVFX, visit www.cmivfx.com.
© 2009 cmiVFX | cmiStudios.  All rights reserved.




      



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