New Fur Training Video at cmiVFX by Sebastian König
cmiVFX Have released another ‘Mammoth’ videotutorial by Sebastian König. Like his previous tutorials (Organic Modeling Techniques, Blender Unwrapping and Baking, and Blender Texturing) this one looks very impressive. It sells for $19.95.
Hey there!
I have finished a new tutorial for www.cmiVFX.com! This one is about creating and shading hair and fur in Blender. In about 1.5hrs I show you how to create, comb, shade and render realistic looking hair with Blender’s awesome particle-system. So head over to cmiVFX and learn how to grow all of your baldy kojak-models a nice and curly flowing hippie-mane!
:-)
Below you’ll find the official press-release-text.
Cheers
and
have fun!Sebastian
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!
Baldy times are over!
In this tutorial 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 nice and 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. And by making use of child-particles and a special way of rendering these strands you can keep render-times and memory-usage reasonable low.
HAIR SHADING
But of course without a decent shading and good materials even the best haircut will look like a pot spaghetti. This tutorial 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. 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.
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.
I had a look through the site, this is a modellers, blender learners dream come true. Any ideas about doing an animation lesson using the big guy? Most impressed.
It’s truly awesome, but 20$? C’mon… I’ll have to pass on that.
Its totally worth it…. Having seen Sebastian’s timelapse of modeling the fly, this purchase will be worth every penny. Thank you for your hard work Sebastian. :-)
@Nik – I have purchased all of Sebastian’s videos from CmiVfx and they are definitely worth the money. $20 too much? The description says it is about 1.5 hrs long. In contrast I recently bought a training dvd that was about 2 hours long and with shipping it cost me $70.
I think these images speak for themselves.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1486424
From what I can see, regardless of which application your weapon of choice is, $20 approx is the going rate for a premium training DVD. Good ones (like CMI’s) do give you a real full production level quality of training.
If you are able to do what the DVD trains you to do in your own work (being non-app specific here) you’ll very likely to be a bit closer to producing a piece of work which will very likely improve your reel enough to actually get you a job in the industry. (time, creative talent, motivation and ambition permitting of course).
I do wonder if there’s maybe going to be a series like this for the blender foundation site which can maybe be free to use and learn for version 2.5. We can’t expect this kind of great work to go un-rewarded but I think some official BF tutorials in a very similar vein (to CMI’s) could maybe tip the balance in making a showpiece easier to achieve by other freelancers who are tempted but hesitant to play with Blender seriously.
(My 2c and as you can understand, my personal opinion!)
Cool training video. But streaming video? I’ll pass.
I would LOVE to buy all that Sebastian videos (from modeling to hairs) but MOST DEFINITELY NOT ON STREAMING. I guess you guys have never been in southern Mexico where 2mbit is just as fast as it can be. I know you want to protect yourself from piracy but in this way you are loosing clients as well so.. well – suit yourself. Shame though.
Thank you all for your comments!
I can really understand that you want to download what you bought. But on the other hand, the whole youtube / vimeo stuff is just about streaming. Didn’t hear that much complaints about that yet… And the cmi online player is really good, scrub forwards, backward, no problem (unlike with vimeo).
I happen to live in an area where I too have only 1-2mbit, and for me it plays just fine. It also has advantages not to have to store gigabytes on your disk, and you can watch from any computer, at home, at work etc. so you’re not bound to take the tuts with you if you work abroad.
But let’s not argue on that topic.
Everyone who wants cmiVFX to change their policy can contact them. I’m just a tutor and making a living with these tuts. Which I probably couldn’t do if they would make their tutorials significantly cheaper, or get ripped of by piracy or would have to send dvds around the world…
But well, that’s none of my business, it’s totally up to cmiVFX. :-)
I think I shouldn’t even have replied here, because I really don’t want to take part in this discussion, but anyway…
Just my 2 cents.
Anyway,
cheers and happy blending!
seb
Sebastian – youre probably only person that makes me think seriously about Blender. Your work is an excellent example that in Blender can be done some serious looking, realistic creature not just funny, cartoon-like rabbits. Seriously – I love your work. If I will find a way to download that stuff (gotta be some way to do that) I will buy some of those. You mentioned youtube and vimeo – but from those I can download whole stuff easily.
Anyways – have fun! Thx for your efforts.
Wow, naag, that’s a really nice (and flattering) compliment! Thanks! :-)
And yes, please do think seriously about Blender! There is absolutely no reason not to use it professionally!
Cheers and happy [fill in your favorite tool]-ing.
And for all the others: happy blending!
:-)
seb
Aww too bad. I was about to buy it when I read it that this isn’t open content. I thought I would be buying CC content just as we do for Blender Foundation videos and dvds. I’m sorry Sebastian, your work does look great, I would love to give incentive to Blender artists and tutors. But I don’t want to give any further incentive to closed content.
Donde puedo descargar los tutoriales de Mammoth’ videotutorial
si alguien sabe por fa colabor ey publique :)
Me where I can download the tutorials from Mammoth ‘videotutorial
if anyone knows post fa e collabor