CG Toolkit: The Making of Leon: Mega Pack
Video Training | HF-UP-FS | 10.8Gb
Part I : CG Toolkit Advanced character sculpture and detailing training videos.
Part II: A review of MuscleToolkit
Part III: An interview with : Karim Biri, Founder of CGToolkit
DVD 1
The first DVD, the sculpting DVD, is awesome. I may be biased here since I love to sculpt, but watching a sculpting video like this gets those creative juices flowing. Much like some other sculpture training videos, this one does a great job of going over the sculpting material and techniques before starting. Thankfully not a lot of time is spent on this part, as it can be drawn out and boring if it's too long. While I've seen most sculptors use a character sheet or drawings during the setup of the armature, we see him measuring an already made sculpture to use as a scale reference. Doing this, of course, depends on your preference and skill level. So at almost 25 minutes into the DVD, the tools and materials have been explained, and the armature is complete. This leaves plenty of time left for the actual sculpting.
DVD 2
The first thing to note on this DVD is that it is not an actual playable DVD that can go in standalone DVD players. It is a data DVD, filled with over 4 GB of data, full of scene files, PDFs, training videos, and scripts. The video files are full resolution, so you can clearly see what's going on.
Here's a rundown of what tutorial videos come on this DVD:
2 Intro Videos - one covering how to install everything and one explaining Leon's rig. If you plan on rigging or animating Leon, this will explain everything about Leon's rig and custom UI for the rig.
2 Texturing Videos - one that talks about unwrapping Leon's UVs and one on painting the map. This is fairly straightforward stuff, especially the unwrapping. There are plenty of techniques out there for good unwraps, and this is pretty much the technique that I follow. Watching the map being painted is always nice to see, as it's a pretty rare thing to have a video capturing that process.
DVD 3
This DVD has more training on it, plus the MuscleTK plugin. There are 4 videos on MuscleTK, ranging from the Introduction video to building arm and chest/back muscles, to skinning with MuscleTK after you have all the muscles setup. There are also 2 videos on resurfacing Leon from a scanned mesh. The first video talks about the basic modeling with a scanned mesh as reference, and the second video talks about making sure you have good topology in your mesh. There are also 5 skinning videos. They consist of Intro to Smooth Skinning/Influence Objects, Painting weights, Influence objects on the knee, Using a custom muscle deformer, and Adding secondary Jiggle to Leon's fatty tissue. The first 2 are fairly basic - steps that everyone should know if they've spent enough time skinning and painting weights. Using influence objects to correct deformations is something that maybe not everyone would know about, so that video would definitely be good for showing you how to keep good deformations (and not just rely on a smooth skin).
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