Nuke lessons request

Hey guys , I don't know if you realized , but Jason replied to our Nuke lesson blog . He asked us to contact him about it . So I hope you don't mind , but I took the liberty in writing him an email about it . This is what I wrote :"

Hey Jason,

I just read your reply at the blog concerning the Nuke Lessons . As you can see , our group is quite upset about how our lessons at Escape ended . We didn't have enough time to learn proper compositing , none of us finished our projects & most of us are still having a hard time with them at the moment ( half of our group discarded the projects ) . Personally I've been looking endlessly for some Nuke tutorials to help me composite my renders which are sitting there in my PC at the moment being useless . & I don't want to sound like an ass or anything , but I did mention a number of times our concern about learning Shake when it was pointed out in one your 3D World magazines that Shake is dead ( & by many other people as well ) . Of course you can't always believe what you read in magazines & I know that it will take studios sometime to change between packages , but the fact that you guys made those tutorials just now points out that you were convinced with Nuke yourselves as well . We ALL are interested in those lessons , but most of us can't afford it . As you read , we are trying to find a proper way to watch them that is affordable to us all . Is there a way you can give us those lessons for an affordable price please ? I am a personal fan of your online lessons , & I recommend them to everyone I know ( & I have convinced a number of people to subscribe as well ) . So I am really hoping you can find a way to give us those Nuke lessons .

I look forward to hearing from you soon .

Kind regards,

Aziz "

I hope that you find my request satisfactory guys .

Peace ;)

escape videos still active

still looks like we have access to the videos, handy !

Zbrush questions :o|

I was playing with Zbrush today actually, it's really good, got some questions if anyone can help. (I'm also sending a mailshot so ignore it if you read it here)

I've been messing around with the idea of making a statue for a project in ZBrush. I can't seem to find the answer on the online ESC tutorials.

I was thinking of modeling a medium poly model, UV mapping, texturing in Maya and Photoshop, importing into ZBrush then adding the detail. After that I will export medium poly model back to Maya and use displacement methods for the final render. As the texture was done in medium poly and as long as I don't displace too much which the texture work and not look stretched ?

The alternative I thought was not UV mapping the model but taking the medium poly into Zbrush, adding detail, then making a UV map in zBrush, painting in photoshop..exporting the medium poly into Maya with displacement and texture maps. In theory this method means i should have a high resolution texture UV map that should fit perfectly in Maya.

The problem i see is that you have to render the mesh with displacement map just to see the texture because it might not look great on a medium poly mesh.

Any ideas which would be the best method ?

Zbrush 4

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=071829

Looks pretty crazy - the last bit of the video where the human head textures are formed from snippets of d/l'ed images blew me away.

sidenote - Tu, there is an update for Zbrush OSX 3.12B - looking at the changelog it seems to fix many of the issues from 3.12a, i.e. now you can actually export working normal/displacement maps along with other bug fixes etc. I still dont think ztools are cross compatible with PC version.

Escape's Nuke for 3D artists !!

Well , they've finally done it . How to composite render passes in Nuke , online lessons :) . Been looking all over the place for something like this , closest I got was fxphd.com , but nothing this specific . I'm seriously considering taking it when I get the time . How about you guys ?

Exporting materials?

Does anyone know if it's possible to export/import materials from the hypershade?

I have an old scene file that i'd like to use for some materials I made in a previous project. The way i've usually gone about this is to import the entire scene into my current project (which adds all the materials to the hypershade)

Problem with importing scenes into your current work project is that bad things can happen and things can get messy and confusing.

I was wondering is there a way of exporting materials only form the hypershade? There is actually a import/export shading network option under the 'File' menu of the hypershade but I haven't been able to get it work. If you select a material and hit export shading network it asks to save that out as a regular mb file, but then importing that file does nothing. As a test I created a simple blin, exported it, deleted the blin, imported the file...no blin appears.

So is there a way around this?

cheers

Happy Jet fighter texture map update

Hi Guys

Just thought I'd drop you a note to say i've made a start with my jet fighter now that I've finished my work. I followed the mustang projection panel lines tutorial, quite long winded but it works. The lines don't match 100% as I havn't made any adjustments, looking good tho' they are in proportion.

Just a note when texture baking, make sure you click the mesh and the material at the same time, then texture bake, that took me about 1 hr to work out.

Also I've found an issue with Vista or photoshop CS, for some reason when you make a new lambert material and then load in an image (not projection, just normal image) I get a flat image icon not a sphere with the image mapped onto it in the hypershade. It only happens with tiff and jpgs that i have saved from photoshop CS, it works with any picture i've downloaded from the web (jpg) weird huh, must be photoshop saving it badly. I havn't tried older version of photoshop yet to see if the saved files work ok, anyone else had this problem ?