This is an incredibly awe worthy DVD course with award winning character artist Richard Smith, who has worked on titles such as Star Wars Battlefront 3, Time Splitters 4, Without Warning and Haze.

In this DVD, he takes you through modelling a Next-Gen game character, starting with a rough concept design and evolving it into a low-res base mesh. Then ZBrush is used to create further detail, specially those pesky clothing folds. With all this detail in, the sculpture is modified using a plugin for Maya called Nex. Finally, XNormal produces a normal map and is ready to bring into Maya.

This DVD is aimed at artists with a basic understanding of polygon modelling in Maya, but the techniques demonstrated can be applied using almost any other 3D modelling software.

There are currently 2 new courses at CGWorkshops open for registration: Compositing in Nuke with Steve Wright and Rigging in Maya 1 with Todd Widup. Plus from now until the end of February 2010, all CGS members get 10% discount* off all CGWorkshops.

Steve Wright course offers an eight-week introduction to Nuke, a powerful visual effects compositing program that is taking the visual effects industry by storm. While designed for compositors, this workshop is also ideal for 3D artists that want to understand the Nuke workflow as it is being integrated into modern CGI production pipelines.

Lead Creature Technical Director and Maya expert Todd Widup will take you through the ins and outs of rigging in Maya 1. This course will take you through many aspects of rigging, from writing a check list of what all your rig needs, to optimum positioning of joints, and finally, work on both scripting the rig building and the mechanics behind the scenes on how to build the rig by hand.

* For new members the 10% CGWorkshop discount becomes effective 24 hours after you have paid your CGS membership payment.

This is another mighty course organised by Escape Studios. The course itself has been developed and taught by Pixar Veteran Jeff Pratt. Jeff honed his character animation skills on some of Pixar’s best loved movies including Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Geri’s Game and A Bug’s Life. It begins with a professional introduction to all aspects of creating CG work using Maya and then move on to look into the core principles of animation, realistic movement, weight and timing, which as we all know are the secret of life.

To find out more, visit Escape Studio’s website, or contact Jason Jenner, Escape’s Training Manager.

The Raindance peeps have organized this course for those of you with an idea for a film, the course has been designed to help you fine tune your film pitching skills. There’s a panel of top British film executives (ie the decision makers of the film industry). This is like the dragon’s den for filmmakers of all sizes. For a fiver you’ll get 2 minutes to convince them that your movie is worth investing in. Some of their past pitches have ended up in the production line: Meet The Parents (1994), 51st State (1995) and Siamese Cop (1996).

If you’re interested head over to Live!Ammunition!, book your place and get the typewriter out (ok the laptop) but do it, ok?

Pixar Technical Director and author of Digital Lighting & Rendering, 2nd Edition, Jeremy Birn is back to mentor students in Lighting & Rendering in Maya. Throughout this workshop, students will be moving from introductory subjects into more ambitious topics, such as adapting your lighting designs for Global Illumination, creating new looks in Hypershade, optimizing Mental Ray’s rendering performance, and working with Image Based Lighting.

Student numbers will be strictly limited to 35 places only. For more details and enrolment information go to CG Workshops
Course Begins: 21 September 2009
Course Ends: 15 November 2009
Fee: USD $499.00
Registration closes: 18 September 2009