Smoother Animation With Intel® Core™ i7 Processors

by Steve Pitzel

Introduction: Disguising seams in NURBS models

Today is a great day to be a 3D animator! It wasn't long ago that animators were stuck with creating stiff-jointed, scarred-looking automatons. These characters had all the beauty and grace of Frankenstein. Rendering engines couldn't handle deformations, or high-level geometry, and polygons ruled the gaming world. The computing power for creating fluid movement and seamless-looking joints simply wasn't there.

Core i7

artist

modeling

animator

texture map

NURBS

NURBS modeling

hiding seams

Graphics

Creating Textures for Characters by Ryan Bird

Fewer things in digital content creation are more mysterious, magical, and, quite frankly, odd as how a gray, often faceted chunk of virtual geometry becomes a character through the clever painting and mapping of textures. It's an art, it's a science - yeah, there's a whole mathematical thing to it too - but more than anything else, it's just weird how you can flay your character's skin into a bu

Name Your Digital Poison

Okay - what's your worst production nightmare? Intersections? Texture seams? Weighting vertices? Creating soft shadows?

Do you hate it when physics and IK collide? What is it that either keeps you up at night - or just gives you headaches during the day? Are there any headaches you've cured recently? Give a shout out here - you just may find yourself with a voucher for a free downloadable tutorial from the Gnomon Workshop.