Join us for two weeks of exclusive classes in an interactive, online event. Each 2-hour class focuses on a different element of the visual effects and games industries.

Each class is offered online in a private forum, allowing you to participate in discussion with the instructor and other students. All instructional videos are HD and can be accessed any time during the event, as often as you'd like.

This is a great opportunity to learn from the industry's masters and gain insight into their technique, thought process and workflow. Get a massive dose of inspiration, motivation and education while sharing the experience with peers from around the world.
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The Making of "Dirge"
Instructor: Alex Alvarez
In this master class, Alex Alvarez will discuss the creation of Dirge, his hellish new animated personal image. Created as an animated loop at 2560x1600 for viewing on a 30" framed display, Dirge was created using Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, After Effects and Mental Ray. The entire workflow will be explored, including character and environment design, effects, animation, lighting and compositing.


Creating Realistic Skin with Mari
Instructor: Gareth Jensen
This class will focus on painting high-resolution organic texture maps for film industry production, utilizing the remarkably powerful and versatile texture painting software Mari. Gareth will demonstrate a range of tricks and techniques that he often utilizes to create the various qualities of lifelike and believable skin.
Gareth will take a sculpted bust by character designer Scott Spencer from start to finished render. In addition to demonstrating the tools and his workflow, Gareth will be covering topics such as the importance of reference and the qualities of different regions of skin.


3D Design for Production
Instructor: Vitaly Bulgarov
In this lecture, Vitaly Bulgarov shows his process of creating a fully rendered 3D design for production-oriented pipelines. Using the example of an alien bust, Vitaly goes through the main steps of creating a sci-fi character design from scratch.
He begins by making a quick bust sketch in ZBrush. He then creates a detailed suit design in XSI using the block-out as a guideline for the proportions of the alien bust. By doing this, Vitaly shows the techniques and tools he uses to create complicated surfaces like multi-layered metal plates, rubber pads, tubes, and attachments. Solving design on the fly, without making any preliminary sketches, he builds a fully detailed mesh for the helmet and suit, explaining why certain design decisions are made.
Once the model is complete, Vitaly takes it into Keyshot for raytrace rendering and then brings the renders to Photoshop to finalize the design, push the overall look and bring more personality to the character by adding final textures and detail enhancements.


A Pungent Character: Getting Grit into Imaginary Faces
Instructor: David Meng
In this class, David Meng shares his thoughts on how he includes personality and expression in a character bust, striving to avoid anything innocuous or generic but still keeping subtlety in the sculpture. The practical aspects of working with plastaline and armatures will be addressed, as well as the subjective aspect of creative influences and the challenges involved in creating something that will entertain and surprise viewers.


Independent Dystopia
Instructor: Grzegorz Jonkajtys
Award-winning independent director Greg Jonkajtys shares his experience designing and executing the visual effects for his new live-action short film The 3rd Letter. Topics will include storyboards and animatics, shooting with the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR camera, blending computer generated effects with real props, and extending live-action sets with CG.


Digital Character Physiology
Instructor: Rick Grandy
This course covering the design and construction of digital characters will focus on motion; primarily skeletal animation and surface deformation. Rick Grandy will discuss the biomechanics of real animals, taking the knowledge learned from nature and using it to help create creatures that move in a believable way. He'll also discuss when to break the rules, and how to improve the performance of your characters.


Three-Hour 3D Figure Study
Instructor: Jeremy Engleman
This class will demonstrate a technique that will encourage the artist to pursue three-hour figure gesture paintings in 3D. These 3D gesture paintings allow the artist to experiment and avoid being consumed with the detail work ordinarily associated with the medium of 3D. While a photograph is used for the purposes of this class, all techniques are perfectly applicable to working in front of a live model.
Techniques will be demonstrated for the three phases of creating a quick study; modeling, texturing and lighting. Each of the phases will be built from the ground up, and the purpose of each component will be described. This technique can easily serve as a foundational "underpaint" for a more polished, realized work. When this underpaint is solid, finished work is solely a matter of adding additional layers and filling in details.


Character Design for Illustration
Instructor: Paul Tobin
"At Weta Workshop we are often asked to help create a fantastical and original world that still has the cultural and historical believability of our own. In this workshop I will be sharing how many of the principles and techniques we employ as world designers can be applied to figurative illustration to give greater depth, detail and meaning to your work. This workshop will cover my conceptual and technical process behind an illustration produced for Coilhouse Magazine, Sherlock Holmes vs The White Fox Woman - a brief History of Chinese Pulp (2010)."


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