CGmasters: Ninja Character Creation Vol.1

Blender Certified Trainer Lee Salvemini has recorded, from start to finish, modeling a character suitable for a pre-rendered game cutscene or short film. In the DVD Lee will guide you through the tools and techniques used in Blender to create the character, from the modeling stage, to posing the character, applying realistic cloth simuation, and finally rendering and compositing the model with nodes in an epic scene for client/team presentation. All tutorials include helpful pop-up hints and complete audio commentary. Ninja character concept by David Revoy, Art Director of Sintel.

Like the other video tutorial cgmasters did, this Ninja Character Creation tutorial video is available in 2 forms, as a physical DVD and as downloadable content. I downloaded the files of the tutorial and although a very large download that will take a while even on highspeed connections, the download was reliable and highspeed. Your mileage may vary with large downloads such as this, so if you are not sure go with the DVD. Both the downloadable files and the DVD have identical content.
It is important to note that this is Volume 1 of a proposed 4 Volume set of video tutorials. The 1st volume covers all the processes involved in modeling a ninja character from the ground up at least as far as creating and modeling its mesh geometry. The other aspects of making a production ready character, texturing, rigging and animating will be covered in future volumes.

The video tutorials are viewable either through a web browser interface that indexes and describes the videos available or you can view the video files directly using whatever media player you want so long as it supports mp4 video file format (vlc is provided). The visual encoding quality of the videos is very high so you should not have any problems at all viewing the videos and seeing what is being done in the videos. Throughout the tutorials important keyboard shortcuts are displayed on screen so it was always possible to find out what was being pressed on the keyboard. Lee also talks almost constantly throughout the videos describing what he is doing and why, making it very easy to follow. Another helpful thing was that periodically time stamped blender file names would be displayed on screen indicating that the Blender file for that time position in the video tutorial is provided in the files, great time saver if you don’t want to follow along with every step.

The videos are split among 14 Chapters, most of the chapters split into multiple parts, making it easier to take in all the information in more manageable chunks, the longest part of a video is 37 minutes, so finding the time to work your way through the all the videos should be easier.



Project files are included
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