[FONT=arial black]It’s game on! Join our Game Jam webinar series
This January, join us for an exciting series of webinars that will show you how to use MODO and MARI for game asset creation. As you probably know, MODO is our powerful, fully featured 3D content creation package, while MARI is our high-detail, physically based 3D painting solution. Used together, these two applications offer tremendous flexibility for asset creation, and we’re going to show you both how and why.
The most frustrating thing about learning a new application is, well, learning a new application! Specifically, learning the basic concepts behind how an application works. This series of webinars is intended to get you up to speed using MODO and MARI, fast. In each of the webinars, we’ll be showing a different aspect of MODO and how it can be used in game workflows.
Each webinar will also include a special guest speaker, who’ll give either an interview, or deliver a workflow session or mini tutorial showcasing their own work. You can get more details on the first three presentations and register to attend below. You won’t want to miss these! We’ll send you another email in January with the next set of sessions.
[FONT=arial black]Webinar 4: Basics of baking in MODO; MARI production example
Greg Brown, Nick Trifunovic
January 8, 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. (PST)
MODO’s built-in render engine is both powerful and versatile. While it is most widely known for creating beautiful, photorealistic images, it can also used for baking both geometry and textures. Combined with MODO’s shading system, it presents extraordinarily useful workflows. We will be covering a wide variety of uses for MODO’s baking toolset in this session.
Nick Trifunovic will be showing us how MARI 3 helps him achieve highly realistic, custom-built PBR textures. Hard surface textures can be challenging; the recent addition of PBR approaches have made things even more complicated. In this realm, there’s no competition: MARI’s ability to paint smoothly on high resolution meshes with many channels—each containing many layers—is unparalleled. You won’t want to miss the tips and tricks Nick’s crafted through the years to create beautiful textures.
[FONT=arial black]Webinar 5: Baking in MODO for game engines; scripting in MODO
James O’hare, Nicholas Stevenson,
January 13, 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. (PST)
Normal maps are a surprisingly complex topic. You’ll hear all sorts of jargon being thrown around: tangents, bitangents, and vertex normals, oh my! … James O’hare will be providing insight into these topics and more. James is the creator of many plug-ins for MODO including the Vertex Normal Toolkit. He previously worked at Rockstar Games as a character TD; these days he’s working here at The Foundry helping us improve MODO.
One of MODO’s defining characteristics is its avenues for customization. Artists can easily create interfaces, systems and workflows to make a task easier. When you combine that with the scripting enhancements introduced in MODO 901, great things become possible. Nicholas Stevenson will be showing us Python scripting in MODO. As an artist who taught himself Python, Nick offers a unique perspective on approaching scripting as an artist.
[FONT=arial black]Webinar 6: Rapid character design workflow; advanced rigging techniques in MODO
Greg Brown, Yiris Hallal
January 20, 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. (PST)
MODO is known for its high-speed modeling tools; however, it’s much more than just a modeler. Features such as our rigging toolset can be used in very interesting ways to create systems that expedite workflows. As an example, the rapid character design workflow will help you develop concepts and execute final characters with excellent topology, faster than ever—all while following modern character design techniques such as silhouette creation.
Yiris Hallal will be showing us how perform some advanced rigging tasks. Yiris is a CG generalist at Boxel, but rigging is where his work in MODO really shines. Yiris has been doing very interesting things with our tools. The performance on his rigs is excellent and he’s even worked out clever ways to do things like stretchy IK.
[FONT=arial black]Webinar 7: Rigging and animation for Unity; a special presentation (more info later)
James Guard, Greg Brown
January 27, 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. (PST)
We like to play nicely with as many game engines as possible. We already showed rigging and animation in connection with UE4 in an earlier webinar—now we need to show you the same thing for Unity. James Guard is an eclectic 3D artist who has created and distributed multiple games using MODO and Unity, and will to guide us through the process. How do you have multiple animations on a timeline? How do you export animations to Unity? How do you properly set up a rig for Unity? James will discuss all of this and more.
You won’t want to miss the final presentation in this series. What are we showing? Well … we’re not quite ready to divulge that just yet, but let’s just say we’re going to show some things for the future, and the future is looking promising! Keep checking for more details on this presentation—it will be exciting.