We wanted to lay out the game ahead in more detail than we ever have before – since people have asked for a tad more of an idea of the direction and focus of the future Background Fundaments. Based upon feedback from students, this new term and the following term’s Background Fundamentals will concentrate on the visual effects knowledge and tasks that artists run into on a daily basis – focused on method and theory not individual applications.

In today’s tutorial I’m going to go through the entire process of creating an animation from a sketch on paper to the final render. I’ll specifically be going through the workflow I used for my animation ‘Nothing To Fear’. Let’s jump in!

In this installment of the Photoshop Lightroom 4 Essentials series, author and teacher Chris Orwig guides photographers through the process of improving images with creative color, sharpening, and other effects in the Lightroom Develop module. The course covers each of the tools and features in the Develop module, and shows how to perform basic adjustments, such as exposure enhancement; how to improve image quality through noise reduction and clarity adjustments; how to apply creative effects, such as split toning and vignettes; and how to perform advanced tasks, such as correcting for lens distortion. Exercise files are included with the course.

Continuing the Lord of the Rings series we will be creating the Eye of Sauron with
fractal noise, vector blurs and CG fire. This will then be exported into Maya and composited back in after effects with the CG tower, lighting and background HDRI.

WordPress Essential Training shows how to get the most out of the self-hosted version of WordPress and create feature-rich blogs and web sites. Author Morten Rand-Hendriksen explains how to get a web host, set up a domain, and download, configure, and upload WordPress to your newly hosted site. The course then dives fully into the tools in WordPress, demonstrating how to set up your profile and create content to share with your web audience. The course also includes tutorials on everything from adding images, video, formatting, and links that make posts pop, to installing plug-ins, creating custom themes, and attracting readers with permalinks, social sharing, and more.

Over the course of this 3ds Max tutorial we will look at the efficient application of the various modifiers that are available in 3ds Max and how we can use them to speed up a hard surface modeling workflow. Throughout these lessons we will discover ways of troubleshooting problem topology and learn how to reproduce a 3D model from a perspective reference illustration. By the end of this tutorial you will have learned efficient modeling workflows in 3ds Max.