Category: Tutorials

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VFX Tips For Indie Film Making

Writing scenes for VFX can be hard. This is especially true if you’re not a VFX artist yourself and there’s a limited budget.

As an artist I’ve been fortunate enough to create VFX for everything from micro budget short films to some of the biggest super hero movies in history. Over time I’ve noticed some common mistakes by film makers as well as some decisions that result in success.

Read on for tips and pitfalls to avoid when developing your indie film for VFX

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New UV Tutorials

I’ve always used the standalone version of Unfold 3d for UV work but I’ve recently switched to staying in Maya for UVs. Unfold 3D is an awesome program that makes UVing fast and fun, but it has the disadvantage of being external which requires the extra time and hassle of export/import. Working on UVs in maya does require a lot of tips and tricks so I’ve put together a video series.

Here’s a quick start video explaining how to UV any object quickly and easily:

This video goes into more detail on how to UV an object with multiple parts:

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Small Dragon

This is a tiny dragon done as a personal project over the course of a weekend. Look for a tutorial coming soon! This will focus on teaching the skills necessary to create fast concept designs for a hero character that can be approved by a client or supervisor and then finalized for production.

It will cover:

  • Initial ZBrush sculpt using zspheres and dynamesh
  • Quick retopology in ZBrush and cleanup in Maya
  • UVs in unfold 3D
  • UV shell layout for multiple UV tiles
  • Fast texture painting in Mari using baked utility maps such as AO and Curvature and custom tiled textures
  • Fast texture painting in Mari using baked utility maps such as AO and Curvature and custom tiled textures
  • Lighting and Rendering in Redshift
  • Skin shader setup using shallow, mid and deep layers
  • Compositing in nuke

    • Continue reading “Small Dragon”

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    UV Mapping Textures

    A custom texture can be extremely useful for the UV layout stage of modeling. In addition to checking for distortion or warping these images allow an artist to check for the appropriate texture resolution by previewing and checking for blurriness. They can also be used to make sure UVs are not flipped or rotated in the wrong direction and to compare the UV space used by different models or chunks of geometry.

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