Creature FX Volume 1 Released

amckay@allanmckay.com (Allan McKay) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:16:28 +0000

CREATURE FX VOLUME 1 - RELEASED!!!

In the last 24 hours since releasing the little teaser trailer, this DVD has recieved a lot of attention which is great to hear!! I'm very proud to announce that it is officially available for download!

Creature FX Volume 1 boasts over 8 hours of training content, covering everything from initially setting up the FX shot, Creating all of the Particle Systems and organizing them into an procedural system to control the timing and process the particles. We also cover building complex procedural shaders, masking and creating Fume FX based fire and smoke, as well as generating render passes and compositing all of the effects layers together and finessing the entire look inside the comp. As well as discussing workflow and pipelines for distributing the effects to any creature or character we need.

This DVD is aimed at intermediate to advanced users, but designed in a way it should be fairly easy for enthusiastic novelists to clearly follow each of the steps and get a good understanding for how each of the elements we cover works. Useful for both film, games and TV houses - this DVD is choc-full of advanced visual effects content!

Click here for more information...

Creature FX, RealFlow, FGit

amckay@allanmckay.com (Allan McKay) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:27:49 +0000

Creature FX - Volume 1 Sneak Peak

To be released October 29th - Creature FX - Volume 1, will be part of a new training series I have been working on the past several months. Part of the new product line I am focusing on raising the bar with level of quality and content for all upcoming training material. The Creature FX series is aimed at building production FX training content for character and organic orientated FX shots, expect a lot of information to come soon about this.

Creature FX Volume 1 is loosely based around a lot of the work I did on the upcoming vampire action film 'Day Breakers' (January 2010 release) as well as a lot of core additional methods I've focused on for this DVD.

There is 8 hours of solid content from initially building the FX passes and render layers to compositing all of it and creating a solid workflow process that allows for updating passes easily and having the rest of the system adjust to it, as well as easily being able to redistribute into other FX shots etc. And using a lot of compositing techniques to enhance the 3D passes and finesse the final composite.

Creature FX volume 1 - will be available for direct download from October 29th!

New Tutorials

Real Flow Basics - Introduction: As a lot of you know I'm putting a bit of time in now to focusing on some of the basic fundamentals of pflow/maya/real flow etc. I do have plans for a lot of advanced material coming up, but for the time being I'm putting together a few core tutorials on Real Flow, the first is literally just a introductory to how it works. Initially jumping into creating a quick fluid simulation and discussing a bit about the interface. I plan for a few more hands on exercises in the near future.

(Tutorials section will be updated tomorrow once I've had some sleep)

Folder Git: Grant Adam the creator of Render Pass Manager, has written a really useful application that is a life saver for both 3D enthusiasts as well as literally anyone who uses windows.

Folder Git is an evolutionary step up from Folder Express, which was an old application for XP that would allow you to create shortcuts on your right click menu, which meant in production - being able to build quick shortcuts to render directories, dailies folders and dozens of other places you need to access frequently - and that usually have large directory paths to get to.

It goes much further than that with a lot of advanced options, but here I just wanted to give a quick plug to it to initially point out how cool this tool is, so that others will catch onto this life saver! You can download Folder Git Here

Website of Allan McKay - Director/VFX Supervior

Creature FX Volume 1 Released

Creature FX, RealFlow, FGit