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.