January 22, 2011

In this hour-long series of eight free videos, you’ll learn how to simulate the movement and collision of objects. Maya’s Rigid Body dynamics engine calculates the physics to save you time! We explore the entire Rigid Body workflow, including:

Project Setup and Scene Layout
Active and Passive Rigid Bodies
Rigid Body attributes such as Mass and Friction
Dynamic Constraints
Global Solver settings
Bake Simulation to convert dynamics to keyframes

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Aaron F. Ross, webmaster of Digital Arts Guild, has authored another series of training videos for lynda.com.

In 3ds Max 2011 Essential Training, Aaron demonstrates how to use this top-tier application for digital content creation, widely adopted in diverse industries such as architecture, industrial design, motion pictures, and games and virtual worlds. This course covers modeling with polygons, curves, and subdivision surfaces, defining surface properties with materials and maps, setting up cameras and lights, animating objects, and final output rendering. Exercise files accompany the course.

Topics include:

Getting familiar with the 3ds Max interface
Creating shapes and splines
Modeling Loft objects
Creating motion graphics
Modeling with polygons and subdivisions
Modeling with NURBS
Shading objects with materials and maps
Setting up camera and scene layout
Lighting basic scenes
Animating objects with keyframes
Editing keyframes in the Curve Editor
Constructing and animating hierarchies
Using animation Constraints
Animating particle systems
Rendering animations to disk

Aaron F. Ross, webmaster of Digital Arts Guild, has teamed up with lynda.com, the industry leader in online software training. Aaron’s first video training series for lynda.com is 3ds Max 2010 Lighting and Rendering with mental ray. Learn to make photorealistic renderings in 3ds Max!

This series, over five hours in length, explores one of the most powerful toolsets for photorealistic 3D image visualization: the mental ray renderer in 3ds Max. Aaron shows how to use mental ray’s combination of materials, lighting, and rendering to achieve a variety of effects, from glossy surfaces to reflections and transparency. He provides an in-depth review of photometrics and the tools used to adjust lighting in 3ds Max, including intensity, distribution, and color temperature, in a wide variety of lighting scenarios. Aaron also devotes time to getting the most out of mental ray’s powerful rendering engine and improving render efficiency. Exercise files are included with this course.