I find it really annoying when I find freebies that are ‘for a limited time only’, and it’s something we’ve been guilty of with our free tutorials. We’ve had some great feedback about them, and with that in mind we've decided to revamp the way our freebies work.
Escape Studios announces winner of the CG Graduate Design Awards
Firstly a big thank you to all of you who entered our CG Graduate Design Awards. We were really impressed with the standard of entries and it made last week’s judging day with our friends at The Mill pretty tough.
September's Free Tutorial - Bumping and Adding Effects
If you want to gain more production-level modelling skills, this is a great tutorial. It’s taken from the final part of our Advanced Shading with Maya online course and looks at the steps needed to create a realistic render, by adding bump detail with procedural textures and making use of effects.
Free Tutorial from Brand New ZBrush Course
We’re really excited about this month’s free tutorial because it’s taken from our new soon-to-be launched ZBrush Course. This tutorial is great if you’re looking to up your ZBrush skills to an advanced level. It’s an in-depth tutorial that demonstrates how to use tools to create fine details, specifically ‘Wear and Tear’ on a pre-made Gas Mask model. Plus, it’s only 12 minutes long so you’ll be able to squeeze it into your lunch break.
July’s Free Tutorial – Object Tracking in PFTrack
We have a real treat in store for you with July’s free tutorial; it’s a pretty technical and hands-on, and takes an in-depth look at geometry tracking within PFTrack.
It’s one of the final tutorials taken from our Camera Tracking for VFX Course and explains how the use of geometry can ‘Solve’ the motion of an object, enabling CG elements to interact with live action objects.
Top 8 tips for the perfect show reel
Everyone knows the importance of a well put together show reel, but it's surprising how many there are out there that fail to tick all of the right boxes. Very often a show reel will fail to showcase the breadth of skill of the candidate, or will let itself down with a few issues that are fairly simple to fix. Therefore, we've put together a list of points to help you perfect your show reel and to maximise the impact it has on prospective employers. After much discussion at Escape Studios, plus a fair bit of back and forth on Twitter, we have whittled down the list to these 8 tips:
TWO Free Polygonal Modelling Tutorials
If you were looking to improve your modelling skills you couldn't have picked a better time, because this month we're giving away TWO free tutorials instead of one!
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Our New Animation Tutor
Meet our new animation tutor, Alex Williams who comes from a rich tradition of 2D animation. With over 20 years of industry experience that includes work as a storyboard artist, character designer and animator on more than 20 feature films for Disney, Universal, Warner Bros, Fox, DreamWorks and Sony, his film credits include animated masterpieces such as 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?', 'The Lion King' and 'The Iron Giant'. His most recent work includes animation for the Oscar-winning 'Monster House', as well as 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'.
FREE Tutorial: Professional Lighting for VFX
This month's free tutorial is part of a series that discusses alternative methods of recreating naturalistic lighting in an exterior environment. Taken from our Advanced Lighting with Maya and Mental Ray course, this tutorial concentrates on optimising raytrace shadows within a manually lit scene, and will teach you how to add ambient shadows via a custom occlusion shader. This tutorial will give you the production level skills expected of a junior lighting artist.
Register for your Free Tutorials
Make sure that you're registered to receive our free monthly tutorials because we have some amazing ones scheduled over the coming months. The tutorials are different every month and cater for all levels of ability; some will be for those just starting out in the industry and others will be professional level, designed to help fine tune skills.
Free Advanced Level Tutorial - Perfect Your Shading Skills
This month's Free Tutorial is taken from our Advanced Shading with Maya & Mental Ray online course and is one of many videos which explains how to harness the power of Maya's utility nodes to simplify, speed up & add realism to your work. This tutorial is great because you'll use a practical example.
This month's Free Tutorial - Reflections, Raytracing and Render Settings
Make sure you don't miss out on this month's free tutorial - Reflections, Raytracing and Render Settings. This month we've focused on the skills that graduates need when looking for work. This free professional-level tutorial concentrates on developing those key skills as well as understanding reflectivity, material attributes & render settings. Here's a quick breakdown of what's included:
Breaking into CG - Guardian Careers Talk Podcast
Games tutor Simon Fenton has made his media debut for Escape Studios on the Guardian’s Career Talk podcast. You can hear Simon talk about getting into the industry, his role as a tutor at Escape, his background and much more, alongside Tom Baskaya of Framestore, an Escapee and most recently a compositor on Avatar. Tom also talks about his time at Escape, as well as what it was like working on James Cameron’s masterpiece.
Free Camera Projection in Nuke Tutorial
We’ve just made another free tutorial available to you all: Camera Projection in Nuke is a great opportunity for those of you who want a better understanding of Nuke's 3D environment.
