With each passing year, more and more CG-driven films and television programs are showing up on screens around the world. Every so often, breakthrough projects scale new technical heights with increasingly impressive performances by their computerized characters. No matter how far technology advances, recent successes such as those achieved by WETA and their magnificent [...]

Mapping used to be rather easy. Back in the day we only had Flat, Cylindrical, Spherical, and sometimes Cubic mapping options. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we were able to get so much done-and done well!-with such primitive technology, but we were.
Today we have a much broader range of technology at our disposal. Simple [...]

Excerpt from 3DNY’s “MAYA | Multi- Pass Rendering” Interactive MediaBook
If you have been involved in 3d for a bit of time then you have probably heard the term Multi-Pass Rendering (MPR) bandied about. What is interesting though is how few people seem to know much about it. They have heard that it is a truly [...]

Excerpt from 3DNY’s MediaBook: MAYA | Multi-Pass Rendering
Recent versions of Maya have added enhanced support for the multilayered Photoshop file format. In doing so, Maya has added a great deal of capability. However, as might be expected, this new recognition of layers is not as easy to control as it is in Photoshop. That disclaimer [...]

From the Digital Basics Dept.: Topic suggested by Patrick St.Onge, Boston
Looping, or cycling techniques have always been part of the image business. In graphics we have always had a “step and repeat”, and as far back as the early days of films they had something called “film loops” that would play all day long at [...]

A shorter version of this tutorial originally appeared in 3D World Magazine issue #39 Why another article on depth of field (DOF)? The reason is that each solution I have seen comes with its own set of glitches. The two-pass technique I offer here minimizes many of these glitches, while trying to keep any new [...]

Take a look at computer modeled 3D women in film and games. Most 3D female figures have the shape of Laura Croft from Tomb Raider. Hips and breasts are beautiful but where are the real women?
As a painter turned digital artist I wanted to incorporate 3D figures into my paintings and animations. My painterly textures [...]