CG Academy DCLM DVDs Reviews!!

[amckay]

Awesome! That's great that 3DWM are jumping in and doing some reviews, very cool

[sadghost]

that's great :thumbsup: cg-academy DVD 5 IS MY NEXT PURCHASE i'll be able to get it in 2 weeks.
Question are there any other DVDs comming out this year from cg academy? I thought I read that you will have a DVD on proceduralism,can we have a little more detail on the contents thanks?

[Chris Thomas]

Well "Proceduralism" DVD covers the topic from a Fundamentals to Intermediate level I would say, its going to be sold as an intermediate title, and I think it'll make a cool DVD for any new/intermediate users that want to move on more into the technical aspects of 3dsmax, say for rigging or general TD work.

On a basic level it discusses just what Proceduralism is, how it can be used to improve your setups in 3dsmax, the pitfalls to look out for like topological dependancy, over complexity and so on.

It also discusses the technology behind a procedural workflow, with chapters outlining node based architectures. A demonstration of how to solve the same procedural problem in 3dsmax, Maya and Houdini (I've had friends working in those packages record those sections for me, so they are also real world solutions on each app), this is to give a better/broader picture of just what procedural/node based systems are all about and how each package uses a different approach, (Houdini will probably pop most peoples corks, its such a Cool/Mad system, very technical but also powerful)

I look at the Stack, what its for, how it can be used to build our procedural objects up. The various elements of the Stack such as the toggle buttons for modifiers, renaming modifiers, making them active in the viewport or at rendertime etc, pining a modifeir, spotting instanced objects and modifiers etc.

I look at the major modifier groups and give a quick rundown of what these main groups can be used for, with practical examples.

I look at instancing and referencing, including objects, modifiers and all the way down to controllers, and this is all demonstated with practical examples.

I look at how using proceduralism and the stack in Max allows us to experiment with our object models and setups with little or no "risk" i.e. we can easily roll back to an eariler stage if needed and try another approach.



The DVD is going to be pretty big I think (duration). Its a very complex topic and I've found that pretty much all the chapters are running at around half an hour on average, so I'd guess it'll be a good 3 hours or so long when finished. Its mainly a theoretical DVD, though wherever possible I'd used practical examples to demonstrate what I'm talking about.

DVD2 in this series "Advanced Proceduralism" is going to look more at the node based workflow, and I'll show how you can connect nodes paramaters to each other via various methods auch as instancing (as in DVD1), wiring, expression controllers, script controllers etc. I'll then move on to show a number of real world cool Procedural examples. I may even throw some Particle Flow interaction in there to show how broadly applicable procedural techniques can be.

Interesting?

[KRZ9000]

ooooooh yes Yes YES!:thumbsup:

[jonny3d]

yeah Hi Chris


I too am imtrested in learning more about "Advanced Proceduralism" , i've got some technical work coming up soon a new ad spot for a well known sports brand , the ad "Timey" has to show water / sweat, all working in close with filmed & CG character standins. would like to learn more about how to use Particle Flow interaction with the stack in a procedural way.
can you give anymore details about Particle Flow and your new "Proceduralism" DVD

cheers
jonny3d

[Chris Thomas]

Well Proceduralism will not be covering much of that workflow. Its more of a fundamental DVD and its goal is more to set out the groundwork for DVD2 in the series, mind you they are pretty far reaching fundamentals, so probably worth watching if you need to work procedurally (As it seems you do). There is a lot of ground covered here, as I said in another post this is going to be a pretty long DVD.

DVD 2 in the series Advanced Proceduralism WILL be dealing with practical implementation of advanced procedural workflows, building on the ideas and techniques shown in DVD1. At the begining of the DVD I'll be carrying on some of the intermediate skills first touched on in DVD1, looking at how we can link nodes together in a more node based way. Using instanced controllers, wiring controllers together, using expression controllers and also script controllers and looking at the pros and cons of each system.

The kind of thing I'll be dealing with in the practical section is manipulation of several models via a Particle Flow Scripted Operator and then bringing those models combined together into PFlow and using it as a particle mesh.

I used this technique for the animation seen in DVD1 of my Pflow series, where each particle has an arrow whose length is based on the particles speed, and also a text counter showing the speed of the particle. Using this technique you can build some pretty crazy (inteligent) procedural particle shapes.

I'll be running through my Pflow Spiders experiment of a few years back, where in that case Particles controlled the animation speed of the spiders per particle. That one is a mixture of rigging, scripting and Pflow.

Creating rocks procedurally, and using a simple MAXScript to update the seed on all the rocks with one button press.

And any other cool ideas/systems I can come up with ;)

Should be a very cool series of DVDs. I've pretty much got DVD 1 done, its all recorded and pretty much all edited now. So it will be available pretty soon.

Cheers

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