Hey everyone! This is Ben Fischler, VFX Curriculum Director, and I wanted to tell you about some fantastic additions to our Animation Mentor Vimeo On Demand channel.

We’re rolling out NEW lectures dealing with the VFX side of production. We’ll dive into Nuke, Arnold, and Houdini, covering a variety of concepts and workflows. These lectures are designed to give you a solid foundation with specific tools and techniques so you’ll be able to get up to speed fast and start using them in your own shots.

Learn the Arnold Renderer

In this series we’ll cover the incredible Arnold Renderer from SolidAngle, which is a centerpiece of our VFX Fundamentals classes. Arnold is a path tracing raytrace renderer, highly optimized and able to render incredibly large scenes with incredible realism. For lighting artists Arnold represents an elegant, physically accurate solution that brings us closer to CG lighting that truly replicates real-world, on-set lighting. In this lecture we’ll be looking at Arnold in general, and more specifically how the MayaToArnold (MtoA) plugin allows us to take advantage of this tool in our own Maya scenes.

Go to NUKE Bootcamp

Our Nuke Bootcamp lecture is ideal for those new to Compositing and Nuke specifically, but are eager to ramp up FAST! Lecturer & CG Supervisor Aaron Estrada take us through the main components of Nuke’s user interface, and how to work most effectively with this incredibly deep toolset. After touring the UI, Aaron focuses on one of Nuke’s core strengths: Color. The foundation of Nuke’s architecture is build on Linear Color and we’ll tackle this challenging concept head on, looking at what the Linear color workflow really means to us in practical terms, and then how best to take advantage of it in our own work. Here again Aaron Estrada will cover the essential comp tools within Nuke, focusing on the Merge node, where much of the action happens! To wrap things up, we review the concept behind Premultiplication and why it’s so important in our comping process.

Oh Snap! It’s Houdini!

In the first Animation Mentor lecture to feature a 3D package other than Maya, our Houdini lecture will crack open this incredibly powerful 3D package that is often called the Technical Director’s Swiss Army Knife. It’s node based workflow allows for flexibility and creativity over the entire process and it has many tools to create simulations for FX (fluids, rigid/soft body dynamics etc) In this introductory lecture, Technical Director Jeff Johnson will take us through an overview of getting data in and out of Houdini from a shot animated in Autodesk Maya, then setting up a rigid body simulation. RBD is a great way to create a variety of effects, in particular effects driven by character interactions, but too challenging to animate by hand. After completing the simulation process, we’ll take our Houdini data back into Maya for final lighting and rendering. This lecture is a great way to get familiar with Houdini and integrate it into your own workflows.

We are incredibly excited about these VFX Vimeo On Demand lectures, and can’t wait to see everyone push their own work forward!