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Bonyface - A ready 3dsmax 2012 plugin for facial animation
BonyFace is a complex facial animation system, was written on MAXScript, works in 3ds max 2008 and above. It consists of tools for rigging, skinning and animating facial expressions on 3D-Faces with ease and flexibility.
Advanced Rotoscoping Techniques for Adobe After Effects
Let's face it: rotoscoping is a drag. You can put countless hours of work into cutting elements out from even a few seconds of your footage, and it comes out badly more often than it doesn't. You want to scream and rip out your hair, not to mention kill the guy who shot the footage and said "We'll fix it in post."
But don't sweat it. We've got you covered! VFX and compositing expert Pete O'Connell shows you advanced techniques for rotoscoping in After Effects that will change the way you think about one of the most challenging tasks for any compositor. Pete uses his unique style to show you the tricks he's picked up and created for big-budget Hollywood features including Stranger Than Fiction, The Fountain, Just Like Heaven, Across the Universe, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, and the highly acclaimed Transporter 2.
Over the course of over 2 hours, you'll learn how to use the entire AE toolset in a whole new way. When it's over, you'll wonder why roto work ever gave you the night sweats.
You'll learn advanced rotoscoping but you don't have to be an advanced AE user to learn these techniques. Pete will show you how to let AE's motion tracker do much of the work for you, how maximize results with expressions, how to set up your comps for the most accurate track, how to find and correct bad roto while you work, how to integrate your masks into your primary footage, and much more.
Beyond roto, you'll learn advanced techniques for precomposition, tracking and stabilization, project organization and keyboard shortcuts to dramatically speed up your work.
Chapter Listing
But don't sweat it. We've got you covered! VFX and compositing expert Pete O'Connell shows you advanced techniques for rotoscoping in After Effects that will change the way you think about one of the most challenging tasks for any compositor. Pete uses his unique style to show you the tricks he's picked up and created for big-budget Hollywood features including Stranger Than Fiction, The Fountain, Just Like Heaven, Across the Universe, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, and the highly acclaimed Transporter 2.
Over the course of over 2 hours, you'll learn how to use the entire AE toolset in a whole new way. When it's over, you'll wonder why roto work ever gave you the night sweats.
You'll learn advanced rotoscoping but you don't have to be an advanced AE user to learn these techniques. Pete will show you how to let AE's motion tracker do much of the work for you, how maximize results with expressions, how to set up your comps for the most accurate track, how to find and correct bad roto while you work, how to integrate your masks into your primary footage, and much more.
Beyond roto, you'll learn advanced techniques for precomposition, tracking and stabilization, project organization and keyboard shortcuts to dramatically speed up your work.
Chapter Listing
- The basic steps used to set up a roto comp in AE. Useful keyboard shortcuts.
- Preference settings. Moving mask points using the keyboard. Moving groups of points using the transform box.
- The advantages and disadvantages of having your mask layer's visibility turned either off or on.
- Tracking Fundamentals: how to motion track and what to watch out for.
- How to set up your tracking comp to get the most accurate track. Precomposing and color correcting.
- Examples of motion tracking a few points, from easy ones to difficult hand tracks.
- Stabilizing foreground objects for easier roto.
- Rotoscoping accurately with a minimum of keyframes.
- Matching roto masks with the original footage.
- Choosing good track points. Applying transforms to a solid.
- Making a shape to follow motion, without applying keyframes.
- Adding basic detail to roto masks.
- Using keyboard shortcuts to speed up the roto process.
- Finessing and finishing the roto mask.
- Incorporating the new right arm mask into the main matte comp.
- Bad roto alert!
- Using multiple masks and the transform box to roto out a complex object.
- Preparing to rotoscope by stabilizing the footage rather than the masked solid
- Inverting stabilization to align a mask with the original footage
- Using a secondary solid to avoid scaling distortion.
- Rotoscoping details.
- Using a secondary solid to avoid composition bounds problems.
- Rotoscoping using a 2 point track.
- Setting up an expression for 4 point cornerpin based roto.
- Using a 4 point cornerpin track.
- Saving mask shapes and transform keyframes as a consolidated .ffx file
Motiva COLIMO 1.2! Fast Overview
Motiva COLIMO, a realtime postproduction tool that allows change materials over prerendered images,
taking in account physical accurate reflections, refractions and GI bleeding.
CHANGES FROM PREVIOUS (1.1!) VERSION:
- Thea render integrated workflow support.
- Image sequence support.
- New fle format that allows easier connection to third party software.
- InteliThread upgraded that makes user experience smoother and allows faster changes over the colors and textures.
- Better texture fltering.
- Color picker is now applied to the objects in realtime.
- Better lights support.
- Improved viewport control.
- Supersampling feature.
- Alpha support on saving.
- Better memory footprint.
- Faster project loading.
- Faster viewport resizing.
- Samples included.
- Jpg quality selector on export to web.
- New versions of Max2Colimo and Modo2Colimo.
- Minor bugs fxed...
More Info...
Link : http://www.motivacg.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=172
Link : http://www.motivacg.com/
Vimeo Link : http://vimeo.com/motiva
Fast Rendering of Visualizations with Lumion (TM)
Stunning visualizations in seconds! Lumion uses real-time 3D technology for rendering.This amazing technology of Lumion renders images in a fraction of a second. The aim of of the software is to create a lightning fast workflow between packages like Autocad or Sketchup and stunning visualizations.
Lumion uses real-time 3D technology for rendering.
This amazing technology of Lumion renders images in a fraction of a second.
Stunning visualizations in secondsLumion uses real-time 3D technology for rendering. This amazing technology of Lumion renders images in afraction of a second.
Lumion offers what architects could only dream about for years!
If you are an Architect or 3D artist you will be pleased to discover what you can achieve with Lumion.Visualization software should not feel like an extra job, it should just be there for you when you need it and it needs to deliver results without effort.We provided Lumion with a user interface that is designed around you.
Complex tasks look easy with Lumion. The most important goal of Lumion is to let you do jobs yourself which usually require expensive specialists. That is amazing by itself but on top of that Lumion renders in real-time, meaning you can view the end result instantly.
Lumion supports models created in Sketch-up, 3DS Max, Maya and most other 3D design software. You can run Lumion next to your existing software. Just fire it up and have an image or movie of your work in 5 minutes.
A different kind of software
Lumion redefines how you use software. Regardless of the difficulty of the task at hand Lumion makes it feel easy. Extensive user testing combined with GPU technology was used to create a new level of usability.
The graphics engine is designed for instant visualization. Just import your models and Lumion makes them look good. No effort. No waiting. Lumion’s “theater mode“ allows you to us it as a 3D viewer for easy flytroughs of complex 3D models in real-time.
Lumion includes a stunning arsenal of high quality content. A huge library of plants, trees, people, cars, animals, landscapes, buildings, materials and more provides you with everything you need to make movies and images stand out.
Materials and lights
Lumion comes with a extensive material library to quickly provide your models with realistic appearances. Need changes in your model? Update your model with a single click in Lumion and all materials are automatically applied to the updated model.
Lumion materials combine perfectly with the sophisticated lighting system. This system simulates daylight, fog and sky color. Creating good looking images was never this easy.
Recommended System
Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7
2GB system memory
1GB Graphics memory
NVIDIA GeForce 260 or equal performing 3D card
Supported file formats
Textures: BMP, DDS, PSD, PNG, TGA
Models: MAX(Requires 3DS Max installation), DAE, FAB,
FBX, OBJ, 3DS, DXF
Most tools such as Sketch-up and Maya allow exporting to one of these formats
Supported output format
MP4, BMP, JPG
Included content
Lumion includes a very large library of materials, people, animals, trees, plants, buildings, street furniture, landscapes, cars, boats, roads and more.
Tutorials and Demo Version can be found on Lumion Website
Working With Symbols in Adobe Illustrator
A symbol is an art object that you can store in a document, and reuse multiple times in your artwork. Using symbols can save time and greatly reduce the size of your files. Here’s a quick overview of how they work..
Working With Symbols in Adobe Illustrator
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Got Minutes? Lets go to the Museums of the World ! online...
Artists out there.. Ever wished going to a Museum for a while and get inspired by the art created centuries before... or probably go to 2 museums and see the details on the paintings... details so detailed that you could actually see the slightest brush stroke or cracks in a painting... here's a short talk about Google's Amit Sood of why he created the Art Project and allowed us to see the many artworks in the greatest museums around the world...
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Quick Tip: How to Draw an Infinite Clock with Art Brushes
Follow this tutorial and you will find out how to draw a clock that goes round and round to the infinite with the help of Adobe Illustrator’s Art Brushes. You will also learn some tricks on how to make all the hours and the divisions to fit perfectly.
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Step 1
Start by opening a new web document then draw a 500 x 400 px Rectangle that will define your working space. Now take the Spiral Tool and draw the first spiral like the pink one in the image. While drawing the spiral press the Up Arrow key on the keyboard to create more segments. When you are done draw two more spirals or just scale the first one and make sure they are centered at the end.
Step 2
To create the Spiral Art Brush first take the Star Tool and draw a small black triangle. Rotate it -90 degrees and using the Selection Tool (V) drag the right side to make it longer like below. Drag the obtained shape into the Brushes Panel and choose New Art Brush. Use it to stroke the first spiral made.
Step 3
Next you need to divide the spirals and to do that first draw with the Pen Tool (P) a straight vertical path that will define the 12-6 direction through the middle of the clock. Take the Add Anchor Point Tool (Plus Symbol) and starting from the top click on each spiral to add a point where each spiral intersects this path. Zoom as much as needed and do this until you arrive at the other end of the spirals, all the way in the middle not only on the shown point in the image. When you are done take the Scissors Tool (C) and click on all these added points to cut and obtain the half segments.
Step 4
Take the Type Tool (T) and type the hours from 6 to 12 first. The font I used is Algerian, 105 pt. Go to the Object menu and Expand then scale each hour like shown above each one. Now you need to place them at equal distance from each other and this is an important step otherwise the hours and the divisions won’t fit. Take a look at the X and Y values in the Transform Panel. Keep the same Y value for all hours and at the X value starting from 6 keep adding 100 px for each hour according to the previous one. Repeat this step for the 12 to 6 hours.
Step 5
Drag the 6 to12 and 12 to 6 hours into the Brushes Panel and choose New Art Brush. From now on I will refer to them as 6-12 Art Brush and 12-6 Art Brush. Stroke the first segment of the third spiral, the black one, using the 6-12 Art Brush and as you can see the straight path drawn at the step 3 doesn’t go through the middle of 6 and 12 as it should. Here is the trick to fix that. Drag the art brush back into your working area from the Brushes Panel and there will be a rectangle in the group. Select it and drag the left side in the middle of 6 and the right side in the middle of 12 like you see in the image. Do the same for the 12-6 Art Brush then drag them both back into the Brushes Panel. Now stroke the segment using the new brush and this time it fits perfectly.
Step 6
Double click on Stroke in the Appearance Panel to open the Stroke Options window. Here you can change the Size value if you think the hours are too big and if they are flipped or upside down check the Flip Along and Flip Across options. Also check Proportional. Continue to stroke the other segments all the way and use the 12 or 6 hours from the previous segment as reference to adjust the Size value as you go. After expanding you can delete the duplicated hours.
Step 7
To create the Divisions Art Brush first draw a triangle shape and the four lines having a 1.5 pt black Stroke. Copy and Paste them five times and arrange them in a row then place one more triangle at the end. Scale each one of them from 100% up to 70% for the last triangle. Also use again the same method from the step 4 to make sure all the divisions are perfectly aligned and at equal distance. Keep the same Y value for each division and to the X value this time add only 10 px starting from the first triangle. This step will take some time but otherwise the divisions won’t fit with the hours.
When you are done take the Delete Anchor Point Tool and delete the points from the left side of the first triangle and the points from the right side of the last triangle. This is another trick to know otherwise after you define the brush you will have to drag it back into your working area to move the sides of the rectangle in the middle of the first and the last triangle, like you did for the 6-12 and 12-6 Art Brushes at the step 5. Now you don’t need to because you already obtained the halves.
Step 8
Stroke the first segment of the blue spiral using this Divisions Art Brush defined earlier. I changed the Width value to 70% because I thought the divisions were too big but in your case it’s up to you. Continue to stroke the rest of the segments and use the last half triangle from the previous segment as reference to scale the next segment as much as needed so they fit perfectly like shown in the close up. For example, in my case a 75% Width value was just right for the second segment then 80% for the third one, 85% for the fourth one and so on. As long as you zoom enough to see each pair of halves and you set the right Size value all the Divisions stroked segments will fit properly. You can also make further adjustments using the Direct Selection Tool (A) after expanding.
Step 9
Next select the pink spiral, go to the Object menu and Expand Appearance. The colors used for the gradient are: blue (R=84,G=159,B=215), dark blue (R=0,G=86,B=120), orange (R=208,G=155,B=39), yellow (R=243,G=232,B=92), brown (R=122,G=117,B=99), green (R=98,G=138,B=102), again dark blue (R=0,G=86,B=120), again blue (R=84,G=159,B=215) and light blue (R=188,G=217,B=242). Set the angle value to 10 degrees. Copy and Paste in front this spiral shape, keep the same gradient just change the angle value to 90 degrees and set the Blending mode to Color Burn.
Step 10
Let’s add some shadows. Select the first group of hours (the 12 is missing because I said you need to delete the 12 and 6 hours that are duplicates) then go to Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow and set the values like in the image. Do the same for the next four hour groups not for all of them because the rest of the hours are too small and there is no need.
Step 11
Fill the 500×400 px rectangle in back from the beginning with a linear gradient called Purple, Yellow that you can find in the Swatch Libraries menu under Gradients > Color Combinations. Change the angle value to 180 degrees. Duplicate this rectangle, delete the fill and use it to mask the clock. To do that select all the clock shapes made so far and also the empty rectangle, that must be in front of them and go to Object > Clipping Mask > Make.
Step 12
All that is left to do is to select the spiral shape in back (there are two) and go to Effect > Stylize > Outer Glow. Set the values like in the image and the color used is black (R=0,G=0,B=0).
Final Image
Here is the final image of the infinite clock, play around with the settings to see what you can come up with. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
Tutorial by, Diana Toma
ROUGH WOOD PLANKS TUTORIAL
A tutorial for,How you can create a rough wood texture using Zbrush, 3DS Max and Photoshop. This can be interesting if you want to make a totally handpainted texture as well. There are just a couple of layers you can make differently to create a more stylized handpainted texture.All that is included in the .PSD at the bottom of this page.
This is a very rough type of wood and I would usually not bother going into Zbrush to create a smoother type of wood surface.
As with all material types there are a lot of different types of wood, for instance you could have a painted wood with thick layers of paint where the normal and specular/glossiness is very important, or you can have a very smooth polished type of wood where you almost have a glass like surface. In this tutorial I did not even bother to create a separate glossiness map as it would have been very matte (dark) anyhow I though I would not gain too much on using that. I also used some color in my specular map, only some engines have support for this but it can definitely help making your material more interesting.
HIGHPOLY
So I decided to create two different planks where I go through each side in Zbrush, I will then place them out in 3DS Max one by one and rotate them so I get a unique side for each plank.
It is important to try and have an even tesselation on this to make the details come out as good as possible in the sculpting process. This was really easy on these two planks, I could just split them up in perfectly square faces.
Then I tesselated them a fair bit, around 70000 triangles for each plank. You can of course do this in Zbrush if you prefer.
I did tesselate them a bit more in Zbrush as I noticed they would need more detail, so here I am working with about 2 million triangles, which is really pretty overkill for the end resolution I am going to use.
There is a great feature in Zbrush that lets you hide selections you make. You can hide whole objects or even just parts you select. Press "shift+ctrl" and drag a selection over whichever part you want to hide, if you release shift you will hide everything BUT your selection. To unhide everything again just hold down "ctrl" and click outside the canvas.
If you have read any of my other Zbrush material tutorials you will be pretty familiar with the "Mallet Fast Brush" probably. I use this brush for almost everything since it is a really quick way to deforme some edges.
So here I start draging a few brush strokes on the edges. Imagine a very old wood beam here, perhaps something used on an old wooden ship or similar. Try to use a pretty high intensity and a low focal shift while sculpting this.
Next up is to get some actual wood grain cracks in here. I find the easiest way of doing this is to use the "Projection Master". I then use a "Free Hand Brush" and while using a low focal shift I mix using ZAdd and ZSub settings on my brush strokes.
I drag out long brush strokes over the whole plank pretty slowly while trying to go a bit up or down when close to the edges, if you are a bit careful here you will start getting some nice cracks out naturally when draging brush stroke on top on brush stroke and repeating that.
Once you feel happy with the previous step we will need some finer wood grain as well (this is of course if you are going for that style, some more soft handmade wood style would probably benefit from just moving on from the previous step and import that right into 3DS Max). I use the same technique here as above, just using smaller brushes with a lower intensity. Remember you can exit the Projection Master any time and add as many layers as you want with it (but be a bit careful, sometimes it can "damage" your previous details if you go on too strong in the Projection Master).
After the above steps I import the exported file from Zbrush into 3DS Max (you may want to optimize it before importing it to 3DS Max tho, a great tool I usually use for this is Meshlab, Then, I make duplicates of my two planks using "Instance" and rotate them so no two planks are the same. After that I rotate and offset each plank a bit to help add some more depth.
TEXTURE MAPSI start off with a very simple base where I just draw out the edges of the planks and vary up each plank a bit.
I rendered out an ambient occlusion map from the highpoly in 3DS Max at the same time as I baked out the normal map.
I also used xNormal's "Normals2Cavity" function on a copy of my baked out normal map, OR you can use the "Cavity from normal" action in my Photoshop actions pack (big thanks to Teddy Bergsman for creating that particular action), it will give you a very similar result. Just run the action on a copy of your baked out normal map.
I did blur and edit my result a little bit by hand as well, just making certain areas a bit stronger and some more subtle. When done put your ambient occlusion map to multiply blending and the cavity map to overlay blending.
Here I made a mask out of my ambient occlusion map, however I inverted it so I basically masked out the egdes a bit. As you can see I used a photo overlay here but on the next step I show that you could just replace this step with a handpainted base.
Here is an alternative way, I simply picked a few different colors and painted some long brush strokes using a fairly sharp brush with a pretty low opacity. Of course you can take this really far if you want to add some knots and details like that in your diffuse.
When the other layers (except any photo layers) are applied the end result feel pretty stylized.
Moving over to the specular I did decide to use some color in this specular and I find some subtle blue green can work for a rough and weathered type of planks.
I am using very subtle colors here, and usually I find that if you do not have support for specular color in your engine, perhaps there is support for tinting the whole black and white specular, and you can get really far with that.
Where it really makes a difference is on materials such as bronze and gold tho, but for general metal it can be a very welcome addition as well.
The biggest downside is that you will need all your RGB channels for a color specular, while if you were going for black and white specular maps you can add a glossiness map in one of the channels and have the specular in one and then even have one channel free for other funky stuff you can think of.
So as an example you could have the specular intensity in the green channel, the glossiness in the red channel and a cube reflection map, emissive map, detail map or anything else you may need for this particular material in the blue channel.
At last we have the normal map left. I did generate some high frequency details using the nVidia Photoshop filter from the photo overlay I was using before. Again, if you are going for a more soft handpainted look you may want to skip this one all together.
The last thing I add to get some more interesting depth when the material is lit is to add a subtle roundness to the planks. You can vary this a lot, but I find having an outgoing bevel like this work for most type of planks, you just make it more or less subtle. I generated this using the nVidia filter again on a base that looks like the black and white part in the image below, where I just made a small selection of a black and white gradient and copied it up 8 times and use a pretty high filter type in the nVidia filter (something like 7x7 or 9x9).
Finally, the finished texture maps. As I mentioned earlier I did not make a per pixel glossiness map for this one, instead I used a low value for the overall glossiness. Some engines support this type of value based input for surface slots. Like in the Unreal Engine you can add a constant to any slot you want.
This is the result with the maps applied.
Download the .PSD
Tutorial by Philip Klevestav
Glu3D v1.3.36 & Pwrapper v1.016 for 3DsMax 2012 32Bit/64Bit
Glu3D is a complete system that makes easy making liquids in Autodesk's 3dsMax, Maya and XSI. glu3D uses particles to simulate the liquid behavior, and a multi-resolution polygonal surface is also generated to display the liquid surface.
Main Features
- Particle based dynamic engine that automatically animates liquids that interact with surrounding geometry
- Poly surface mesh surface sequence is generated to visualize liquid surface
- Fully integrated in 3dsMax and Maya
- File cache system to store pre-calculated dynamics results
- Wet maps ( 3dsMax only)
- Texture mapping ( 3dsMax only)
- Arbitrary planar shapes as sources ( 3dsMax only)
- Fill objects function to speed up scene initial condition setup
- Friendly customizable UI full of shortcuts, menus and toolbar buttons
- Integration with Particle Flow ( 3dsMax only)
http://www.filesonic.com/file/1301935484/3...3DsMax_2012.rar
or
http://www.wupload.com/folder/113564
or
http://www.fileserve.com/file/CbrDkgH/3Dal...3DsMax_2012.rar
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