Tips

The latest episode of Aaron Canaday's awesome Games Industry Mentor podcast has just been released.

Blender users Alfred and padfoot7726 have devised a cunning way too use Zbrush MatCaps within Blender!

Blenderguru.com have released a short but informative tutorial about using Blenders node system to create Depth of Field within a rendered scene.

Aaron Canaday's immensely cool Games Industry Mentor podcast about breaking in to the games industry has just been released.

Currently at Episode 7, Aaron is joined by BioWare Environmental Artist Isaac Oster and our very own Riki Babington in which they question "What is needed to have a successful portfolio that gives the artist the best shot at landing a job?"

 Sample workflow creating surface details combining color texture work and sculpted displacements. A process for creating "cavity" like texture is also shown here.This workflow could be used if you were creating color and displacement maps for rendering your mesh in Mental ray as a subdivision surface.

Ever wonder how Bungie's tools work and how they are developed to make the Halo games? Ever wanted to know how to spell Bungie in Japanese? At CEDEC in Japan Steve Theodore, Technical Art Director at Bungie, covers in both English and Japanese, art tools and development at Bungie. 

While much of their development is similar to many studios their approach to handling database style interfaces utilizing lessons learnt from iTunes is interesting and bold in allowing simplicity to dictate function.

I found this tutorial made by Josh Jay of Epic Games.  Goes over painting a Rock in Zbrush and rendering out the texture to Zbrush.

http://picasaweb.google.com/TheEnolaJay/ZBrush3PolyPaintingTutorialI#532...

Donald Phan, whose blog can be found here, does a great write up using xNormal's Ambient Occlusion feature. While typically the default settings in xNormal will generate great results Donald covers some of the advanced settings as well as tips xNormal has to offer to get more out of his AO maps.