Kent Trammell will walk you through the shading, lighting and rendering of refractive materials. First you will see how easy it can be to set up a basic glass shader with the Glass BSDF. Then you’ll see how to gain more control by building a custom glass shader with the Refractive and Glossy BSDFs. All along the way you’ll become familiar with optimizing Cycle’s render settings for best performance verses best result. As a bonus you’ll be walked through a brilliant technique for faking believable caustics introduced by Bassam Kurdali on the Tube Open Movie blog.

cmiVFX has released their first video of the brand new MAYA AFTER EFFECTS - RAPID PRIMER. This course introduces viewers to the Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects pipeline workflow. Step by step we will build this happy little scene, from scratch. Within Maya we'll touch on multiple subjects such as modeling, UV mapping, building complex shaders, using different deformers, rigging, lighting and animating. More, we'll learn how to set up multiple render passes. Later on, how to use and compose them, setting up our render settings and all in a linear workflow.?In After effects we'll compose all the render passes and learn how to use the ever popular Trapcode Particular plugin to enrich are scene. We will touch on color correction, faking a shallow depth of filed, and whole lot of tips and tricks that would give our scene that final polished look.?This course was made for beginners, and as such the workflow is presented in an easy pace, with comprehensive descriptions and explanations which are given every step of the way. The instructor, Ran Ben Avraham, will make sure you understand the reason behind the actions.