VFX Basics Course In 2 Weeks

For what basics course is intended

First of all, the basic course is required for those who want to learn the Projects course. Despite the fact that projects in the main course are not so complicated, absolute beginners will not be able to accomplish them. It is impossible to explain every time some particular action I do in the main course videos, each interface button, a menu item. Projects course are aimed at those who are already familiar with the software but wants to learn more about the process of full CG VFX production.

So if you’re just starting to think about VFX industry, you need a basic knowledge of software and the whole concept of computer graphics. That’s why I came up with basic course.

The most part of it is dedicated to Autodesk Maya and a small part is dedicated to Adobe After Effects. But it does not mean that most part of production process is spent on Maya. Maya is just more difficult to learn.

Why Autodesk Maya?

For me there are three main reasons:

  • functionality;
  • interface;
  • performance.

Autodesk Maya offers the the maximum of possibilities. Well may be not always complete, but still the maximum that we can have. The same will tell you its license price (personally I can not afford it and everything you see here is done on a leased workplace).

The Next Question Is Why After Effects?

After all, there is other remarkable software for compositing, such as Nuke or Fusion. And it’s true. This software is amazing. I love nodal architecture. But they are shot oriented. And in video ads complex transitions between shots are often required. In this case the layers and the timeline are more convenient.

Anyway the less software you use the easier will be project management. However this is digression and it relates more to the Projects course.

How I Created Basics Course?

I recalled 1998, when I just started. I recalled the difficulties I had in certain points of learning, the moments where I get stuck. What unpleasant surprises were discovered at first and what amazing opportunities emerged along with that. Of course many things have changed since then. They added many new features. I tried to tell about everything you could need for the start and tried to avoid unnecessary details.

The fact is that VFX theme is in general boundless.

You can pick up some interesting topic and dig deeper and deeper. In our case we need general vision of a problem. Very quickly we need to learn the necessary information and complete this course assignments. And I think 2 weeks is fairly enough for this course. Adobe After Effects does not require lot of time for studying. Especially if you are familiar with the layers workflow in Photoshop. I had my first movie made in After Effects 15 minutes after first time I saw this software.

Yet 15 minutes can be not enough, so the overview of After Effects interface and features in this course takes about 1 hour. Of course the amount of information provided in this course is significant. And it is impossible to learn and remember everything only by watching all these videos once.

But the main goal of these videos is to get you familiar with the software features. And its not supposed that you will remember exactly how to do this thing or that. But you should know that these things can be done and you need to know where you can find a way to do this.

I myself can not keep everything in mind. And so very often I go back to my old projects to recall my own developments.

Who Else May Need This Course?

In addition to thouse persons who will study the Projects course, Basic course can be interesting for some students who are not able to choose a profession, but want to get familiar with mysterious VFX industry.

Or it can be interesting for the person addicted to the visual effects theme. If the visual effects always make you have a question «how did they do that?» And this question does not leave your mind you probably need these courses.

What Is The Content Of The Basics Course?

This course has 10 chapters. 9 chapters are dedicated to Maya and 1 chapter is dedicated to After Effects. The main information is in the video lessons. Videos will let you to learn necessary information quite fast. And all the videos are divided into the chapters so you can easily find needed part. Moreover for the most chapter there are project files: maya scenes, textures and After Effects projects.

How This Course Works?

We will have learning plan for each working day. You get assignment at the beginning of the day. Next you watch necessary videos. And after that you should complete tasks and exercises necessary to consolidate new knowledge.

I will check and comment you progress. Tasks and exercises is a necessary condition for mastering this course. Even if after watching these videos everything will seem to be clear, when you will try to complete tasks you will probably stuck somewhere and you will have lot of questions. And you will get the answers as soon as possible.

So assignmets and control are implemented via the forum. In the forum you will communicate and discuss your progress with all the students and with me. But there are some persons that don’t like to talk and discuss their work with everyone. I do understand these people. Therefore each student will have its own closed topic, in which he will communicate only with me.

Basics Course.

Table Of Content

Chapter 1.
Maya Interface Overview

And Some Useful Stuff

In this short chapter you should pay particular attention to the next important topics:

    • Viewport navigation hotkeys
    • Snapping
    • Basic selection and transformation tools hotkeys
    • Spacebar hotbox menu
    • Attribute editor and channel box
    • Frame gates
    • Switching between different types of shading in panel view
    • Setting Maya project
Detailed Contents

  1. Viewport navigation
  2. View cube
  3. Listing through previous and past camera views
  4. Menu sets
  5. Creating, opening and saving files
  6. Selection type icons
  7. Selection mask icons and selection priority
  8. Snapping icons and snapping hotkeys
  9. Make Live icon
  10. Render view, Render current view, render globals icons
  11. Opening Attribute Editor
  12. Opening tool properties
  13. Shelves
  14. Creating and deleting custom shelf icon
  15. Tool bar
  16. Basic tools hotkeys
  17. Changing tool properties
  18. Panel layouts
  19. Toggling between views
  20. HotBox menu, switching between views using spacebar
  21. Attribute Editor and Channel Box
  22. Layer Editors
  23. Time slider and range slider
  24. Playback controls
  25. Character sets
  26. Preferences
  27. Panel view
  28. Frame gates
  29. Switching between shading types in view panel
  30. Isolate selection operation
  31. X-rayview
  32. Setting project

Chapter 2.
Polygonal Modeling Techniques

Sample video.

In this chapter you should pay particular attention to the next important topics:

    • Selection and transformation tools
    • Pivots
    • Polygon components
    • Selecting polygon components
    • Normals
    • Basic polygon tools
      • Create Polygon Tool
      • Append to Polygon Tool
      • Split Polygon Tool
      • Extrude Tool
      • Merge tools
    • Secondary polygon tools
      • Chamfer Vertex
      • Bridge Tool
      • Insert Edge Loop Tool
      • Slide Edge Tool
    • Attaching, detaching and duplicating polygons
    • Smooth preview and mesh smooth
Detailed Contents

  1. Creating polygonal primitives
  2. Interactive creation option
  3. Selection tools
  4. Move tool
  5. Rotation tool
  6. Working with pivots
  7. Scale tool
  8. Centering pivot
  9. Using Channel Box to transform objects
  10. Polygon components
  11. Using pivot mode with components
  12. Converting components selection types
  13. Growing and shrinking components selection
  14. Soft selection
  15. Create Polygon tool
  16. Split Polygon tool
  17. Append to Polygon tool
  18. Extrude polygon tool
  19. Merge Edge tool
  20. Bridge
  21. Merge to center command
  22. Chamfer vertex command
  23. Duplicating polygon faces
  24. Combining polygon surfaces
  25. Normals
  26. Reversing normals
  27. Separating polysurface into several polysurfaces
  28. Working with construction history in channel box
  29. Extruding faces
  30. Keep faces together option
  31. Bevel polygons

Chapter 3.
NURBS

This chapter introduces NURBS.

    • NURBS concepts and limitations
    • NURBS components
    • NURBS curves
    • Basic NURBS modeling operations
    • NURBS tesselation
    • Converting NURBS to polygons
Detailed Contents

  1. Simple NURBS primitives and their relationship
  2. NURBS components
  3. NURBS curves
  4. CV Curve Tool
  5. EP Curve Tool
  6. Bezier Curve Tool
  7. Revolve operation
  8. Editing revolved surfaces
  9. One more example of revolved surface
  10. Extruding NURBS curves
  11. Loft surfaces
  12. Planar trim
  13. Creating text with planar trim operation
  14. NURBS bevel
  15. NURBS tesselation
  16. Duplicating surface curve
  17. Projecting curve on surface
  18. Trimming surfaces
  19. Converting NURBS to polygons

Chapter 4.
Scene Organization

In this chapter you will learn how to manage objects and nodes in your scene.

    • Copies and instances
    • Outliner
    • Finding object or node in the scene
    • Groups and hierarchies
    • Display layers
Detailed Contents

  1. Duplicating objects
  2. Duplicate special
  3. Instances
  4. Symmetrical modeling
  5. Outliner
  6. All nodes and DAG-object only modes
  7. Outliner search line
  8. Hiding and finding objects
  9. Renaming in outliner
  10. Grouping objects
  11. Parenting
  12. Hierachies
  13. Parenting vs grouping
  14. Display layers
  15. Display layers modes
  16. Adding and removing objects from display layers

Chapter 5.
Materials

Video sample.

In this chapter you will learn about materials and material properties.

    • Material creation and duplicating
    • Common and specific material properties
    • Connecting nodes and shading networks
    • Ramp texture. Default color, color offset and color gain
    • Bump and displacement, bump shading networks
    • Raytracing and raytracing limits
Detailed Contents

  1. Assigning materials
  2. Hypershade
  3. Duplicating materials
  4. Shading networks
  5. Using color chooser
  6. Transparency
  7. Ambient color
  8. Incandensence
  9. Ramp texture
  10. Texture placement
  11. Default color texture
  12. Bump mapping
  13. Bump node
  14. Displacement feature
  15. Texture color offset and color gain
  16. Connecting nodes
  17. Connection Editor
  18. Diffuse property
  19. Translucence
  20. Shader Glow
  21. Specular properties
  22. Raytraced reflections
  23. Raytraced refractions
  24. Surface shader (digression)
  25. Raytracing limits
  26. Other refraction properties
  27. Hardware shading material properties
  28. Other materials overview

Chapter 6.
Applying Textures

In this chapter you will learn how to apply textures to the different types of objects.

    • Procedural textures
    • Difference between 2d and 3d textures. Advantages and limitations of 2d and 3d textures
    • Texture placements nodes
    • Projection textures
    • UVs
    • Editing UVs
    • Painting textures on geometry
Part 1 Detailed Contents

  1. 2d and 3d procedural textures overview
  2. Difference between 2d and 3d textures
  3. Using texture reference objects
  4. Advantages and limitations of 2d and 3d textures
  5. Simple procedural texturing example
Part 2 Detailed Contents

  1. Applying textures to NURBS
  2. Using interactive texture placement
  3. Sharing one texture placement between several textures
  4. Fix texture wrap
  5. Projection textures
  6. Projection texture wrap option
  7. Texture projection types
  8. UV-mapping
  9. Cuting UVs
  10. Laying out UVs
  11. Aligning UVs
  12. Stitching UVs
  13. Relaxing and unfolding UVs
  14. Creating UVs for objects with complex shapes
  15. UV creation modes
  16. Planar UV mapping
  17. Automatic UV mapping
  18. Spherical UV mapping
  19. UVs snapshot
  20. Painting textures on surfaces

Chapter 7.
Deformers

In this chapter you will learn how to deform geometry.

    • Nonlinear deformers
    • Deformers order
    • Deformers membership
    • Lattice deformer
    • Wrap deformer
    • Wire deformer
    • Blendshape deformer
    • Joint chains
    • Binding skin
    • Editing skin weights
    • Inverse and forward kinematics
    • Animation constrains
    • Building proper rig hierarchy
Part 1 Detailed Contents

  1. Nonlinear deformers
  2. Deformers order
  3. Adjusting deformers interactively
  4. Editing deformers membership
  5. Deformer sets editor
  6. Lattice deformer
  7. Wrap deformer
  8. Driving high resolution mesh with low resolution mesh using wrap deformer
  9. Drawing overrides (digression)
  10. Clusters
  11. Wire deformer
  12. Using dynamic hairs as wire deformers
  13. Blendshape deformer
  14. Blendshape Editor
  15. Adding new target to blendshape deformer
  16. Painting blendshape deformer targets weights
Part 2 Detailed Contents

  1. Creating joints
  2. Moving joints in joint chain
  3. Orienting joints
  4. Connecting joints
  5. Inserting joints
  6. Mirroring joints
  7. Naming joints
  8. Prefix hierarchy names
  9. Binding skin
  10. Painting skin clusters weights
  11. Setting skin cluster weights in component editor
  12. Mirroring skin weights
  13. Adding influence to binded skin
  14. Rigging

Chapter 8.
Animation

In this chapter you will learn how to animate different properties.

    • Animation keys: setting and editing
    • Making keyable attribute non-keyable and and vice versa
    • Working with animation curves in Graph Editor
    • Animating object along path
    • Set driven key
    • Connecting animation curves to attributes
    • Animating geometry shape
    • Geometry cashe
Detailed Contents

  1. Setting animation keys
  2. Making attributes non-keyable
  3. Hiding and showing channels in Channel Box
  4. Locking attributes
  5. Editing animation keys in timeline
  6. Duplicating animation keys in timeline
  7. Graph Editor
  8. Motion Trails
  9. Editing animation curve tangents in Graph Editor
  10. Using lattice to edit animation curves in Graph Editor
  11. Animation curve infinities
  12. Inserting animation key in existing animation curve in Graph Editor
  13. Scaling time range and values of animation curve in Graph Editor
  14. Moving keys in Graph Editor
  15. Animating object along path
  16. Motion path parametrisation
  17. Flow path object
  18. Track on terrain motion path example
  19. Normal costrain (digression)
  20. Set driven key
  21. Duplicating objects with anmation
  22. Connecting existing animation to an object
  23. Driving several objects example
  24. Replacing animation curves inputs
  25. Combining motion path and set driven animations
  26. Animating object shape with deformers
  27. Animating shape components
  28. Geometry cashe
  29. Animating construction history

Chapter 9.
Rendering

Video Sample. Dont forget to switch to 720p quality.

In this chapter you will learn how to render scenes of different types.

    • Common and renderer specific render settings
    • Different light types and light properties
    • Final gather
    • Outdoor lighting setup
    • Indoor lighting setup
    • Portal lights
    • Studio lighting setup
    • Mental ray physical lights
    • Mia material
    • Simulating materials with blurry reflections and refractions
    • Simulating colored metals and colored glass
    • SSS materials
    • Creating render layers
    • Render layers overrides
    • Object’s render stats
    • Render passes
Part 1 Detailed Contents

  1. Render settings
  2. Spot light
  3. Look through selected camera option
  4. IPR
  5. Light fog
  6. Light glow
  7. Light intensity curve and decay regions
  8. Barn doors
  9. Depth map shadows
  10. Raytraced shadows
  11. Directional light
  12. Point light
  13. Volume light
  14. Area light
  15. Ambient light
  16. Outdoor lighting
  17. Final Gather
  18. Mental Ray Physical Sun node
  19. Mental Ray Physical Sky
  20. Mental Ray Exposure Simple Lens Shader
  21. Indoor lighting
  22. Portal Light
Part 2 Detailed Contents

  1. Studio lighting setup
  2. Physical light
  3. Mia material
  4. Mia material BRDF attributes
  5. Image based lighting
  6. Blurry reflection
  7. Colored metals
  8. Glass material
  9. Blurry refractions
  10. Advanced refraction options
  11. Translucence property
  12. SSS shaders
Part 3 Detailed Contents

  1. Creating render layers
  2. Adding and removing objects in render layers
  3. Assigning different materials in render layers
  4. Render layers overrides
  5. Render stats
  6. Changing render stats in attribute spread sheet
  7. Using input line to select nodes (digression)
  8. Removing render layer overrides
  9. Render passes
  10. Assigning proper names to render images
  11. Prerendering and blending final gather maps

Chapter 10.
Adobe After Effects Quick Tour

This chapter introduces After Effects workflow to you.

    • Importing source files
    • Creating compositions
    • Working with composition layers
    • Layer properties
    • Animating layer and effect properties
    • Masks and mattes
    • Layers hierarchies
    • 3D layers
    • Working in timeline
    • Assembling passes
    • Basic color correction
    • Making final movie
Detailed Contents

  1. Standart workspace layout
  2. Importing source files
  3. Interpreting source files
  4. Importing single file from sequence
  5. Organizing source files
  6. Creating composition
  7. Renaming
  8. Navigating composition window
  9. Grid and guides
  10. Using snapshots
  11. Viewing RGB channels
  12. Composition preview resolution and render region
  13. Transparency grid and composition background
  14. Composition exposure settings
  15. Timeline panel
  16. Transforming layer in composition
  17. Layers order
  18. Layer properties (visibility, sound, solo, lock)
  19. Layer properties (layer label, layer number, layer name)
  20. Layer shy option
  21. Collapse transformations and continuously rasterize option
  22. Layer properties (quality, layer effects, frame blending)
  23. 3D layers
  24. Animating layers properties
  25. Layer’s motion blur
  26. Editing animations
  27. Graph Editor
  28. Easy Easing animation keyframes
  29. Applying and animating effects
  30. Effects order
  31. Layers blending modes
  32. Layer matte modes
  33. Bezier masks
  34. Parenting layers
  35. Layer speed property
  36. Timeline and work area bar
  37. Layer editing in timeline
  38. Playing back composition animation

Why you do not need my course?

  • if you do not want to complete daily assignments and to report your progress then you do not need this course
  • perhaps the quality of video and audio is not so good for you. So to give you an idea about video and sound quality we show some clips from the course on this site. Actually video and audio quality vary from chapter to chapter. But the information quality remains the same
  • maybe you can not understand what I am saying in these videos. I do realize that my English is terrible and for somebody it can be even offensive. So if my accent is unbearable for you or mistakes that I make annoy you then you should not buy my course. In any case I tried to keep the information supplied by the video maximally clear
  • you could make a bad opinion about me based on this site or based on my reel and you just do not like me. Then of course you also should not buy my course.

Money back guarantee

If in 3 working days after starting you will find that this course does not suit you — we will refund your payment.

How much does it cost and how to apply?

Requirements: Autodesk Maya and Adobe AfterEffects installed on you workstation.

2 weeks
300$

or send me an email with a yours convenient way to pay (paypal, western union, etc)

 

You will get:

  • Basics course video lessons and files
  • Personal forum account
  • Intensive coaching, control and personal assistance within the bought time
  • By finishing Basics course, Projects course will cost you 600$ instead regular 850$ price
 

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