Mudbox is fast becoming an industry standard and should be in any 3D artist’s arsenal. Students will explore the basic tools and techniques necessary to become a digital sculptor and will also learn how Alpha channels are an integral part of the digital sculpting workflow to achieve certain details. Sculpting inorganic and organic objects will be explored.

Using Adobe Photoshop, students learn the essentials of texture painting. By observing and understanding an object’s surface qualities, students acquire the skills necessary to create photorealistic textures. Starting with a reference captured using a standard flatbed scanner, students learn how to create colour, bump and specular maps, how each type of map affects the surface qualities of a CG model, and how these three basic map types work together to create a photorealistic surface.

There are many different features and tools available, within Autodesk 3ds Max, to assist in the production of Visual Effects. In particular, the animation tool set can be extremely useful in creating not only key-framed animation but also more complex procedural and physically simulated animations that add depth and reality to your work.
Starting with fundamental animation concepts, students create a foundation of knowledge around standard practices and techniques. From there, various tools and resources that can be used to create basic interfaces and rigs to aid in the process of animating are examined. Finally, students explore different tools that can be utilized in creating physically accurate simulations. All topics in this course will be project driven.

This course provides students with hands-on training in building 3D objects, organic and inorganic, essential to creating a fully realized scene. Students learn the basics of working with polygonal objects, working in consistent scale, and understanding how to manipulate faces, points, edges and UVs. Students then create more complicated objects including, vehicles and organic objects.
Provided with a sound skills foundation, students learn and apply the basics of modeling, lighting, texturing and animating a scene using 3ds Max. While working through various projects, students gain a firm understanding of the interface and workflow of 3ds Max.

This course will explore how light behaves and how we can try to recreate it in a 3D environment. Further to this, we will be exploring how to output images that look realistic.
To accurately portray a realistic scene, three main themes are explored; lighting; rendering and materials. These three topics are integral to each other and will need to be explored together in order to fully realize a realistic rendering. The projects in this course are driven by this concept and are meant to show how each plays off the other; combining to give a realistic portrayal of mood, atmosphere and time of day.