Autodesk Junior Masters award is awarded to outstanding and promising students of the CGI industry that uses Autodesk Products such as 3dsMax, and Maya. I was lucky enough to win it for the first time. And also, this was the first time a Sri Lankan CGI artist was recognized with an international award. Award-winning was officially announced at the Autodesk 3Dcember Live event held in Montreal by Shawn Hendriks, a technical marketing manager for Autodesk.
As for trophies, I was awarded a genuine roots leather backpack customized with the Autodesk Logo, the official certificate for the Award, and books - a limited edition of "The Art of the Adventures of Tintin" by Chris Guise for Weta Digital, Introduction to Autodesk Maya by Dariush Derakhshani and Imagine, Design, Create by Tom Wujec.
You can read my interview with Autodesk published on their Area website here : Read my full interview with Autodesk
You can view 3Dcember 2011 event page on the Autodesk Area website here : View 3December event page I featured
Autodesk Junior Master Award fig 1 : Trophies
At Q3 of 2014, I was invited by Autodesk to host two masterclasses for their educational hub, Autodesk University. It was a paid contract and I'm the first from my country to get invited to host such an online class. For the two masterclasses, my selected topics were-
- Developing animatable, detailed 3DAssets with 3DsMax and Mudbox
- Tips, Tricks and Secrets for a better 3Ds Max Experience
This master class is mainly focused on creating animatable, clean but detailed assets using Autodesk® software- 3DsMax® and Mudbox®; which most 3D artists find challenging and frustrating at the same time because of the confusing amount of software that is developed for this purpose, and confusing amount of techniques various artists use. But in this masterclass, I only use Autodesk 3DsMax® and Mudbox® so it will be less confusing and easy to understand, the fundamentals of the process.
I do a simple but artistic and stylish character for this lesson. Where, I will be using diagrams and flow charts that will help in understanding certain processes and techniques.
● The first section will be focused on creating a good base-mesh using 3Dsmax, where I will be using basic poly modeling techniques.
● After that, I will be porting it to Mudbox®, where I detail it using its sculpting tools where I end up having a High res Sculpt of the final asset.
● And I export this high dense mesh back to 3dsMax® and do the Retopology using 3DsMax’s new topology tools.
● And I go through the unwrapping process inside 3dsMax® and take the low poly Retopologized mesh back to Mudbox® for texture painting.
● Here I export the diffuse and other texture maps using Mudbox®.
● I switch back to 3Dsmax® and extract the normal maps and displacement maps using the high resolution mesh and low res Retopologized mesh, where I describe the process and essential settings roughly.
● And next I describe the process of preparing the assets for final rendering, where I point out very important but tricky points such as object scale and its effect on photorealistic rendering.
● At the end of this process, I will be putting up all the maps I have of the model in to a proper shader structure and modifier structure to get the best possible result out of 3dsMax’s mentalray® render engine.
● And for the last, I will be pointing out how detailed the model is going to look and at the same time, how easy it is to animate an object created with this workflow.
The idea of this masterclass is to give away tips, tricks, and secrets that professionals use in day-to-day life inside 3dsMax. Because of immense power and a vast amount of tools, different artists use different techniques and workflows when doing something. In this masterclass, I explain some great ways that will help artists in increasing their working speed and accuracy of the end results. And in addition, I give away some ‘hidden’ features that ordinary users won’t Stumble upon and find in their day-to-day life with 3dsMax. And I will also explain how effectively we can use basic maxscripting talent to simplify uniform, boring tasks. In explaining these things, I will go through each separate process in the content making, instead of randomly explaining them.
Separate, premade scenes/ assets will be used in explaining these scenarios and techniques.
● First section is about polygonal modeling. Here, I explain some techniques and shortcuts that will make polygonal modeling inside 3dsMax fun and easy. I also explain ways of avoiding some common problems that new comers to polygon modeling in 3dsmax may face.
● In next section, I share tips and tricks on lighting up a scene in 3dsmax. This includes exploring tools like ‘light lister’ and brief explanation about concepts behind common elements like shadow maps that we use most of the time.
● Third section is on texturing and rendering tips and tricks. Here I cover sections like how to use scanline rendering engine for quick and basic mentalray looking renderings (renderings that look like done by basic mentalray render setup; with color bleeding and indirect illumination etc..- that will be saving lot of time in less demanding projects and tight deadlines ) And how to use slate material editor to effectively organize and develop shader trees. And I explain methods that we can use in rendering dynamic effects like hair and fur
● Fourth section is about project management and use of simple max scripting to simplify boring and uniform tasks. In explaining this, I go through several very simple script examples that minimize the time and effort that some users have to spend on certain dynamic situations. I specially look at the topic, on how to create a dynamic and easy to adjust projects in order to deal with clients with tight deadlines and uncertain demands.
● Finally I will conclude the masterclass with a recap of what we learned throughout the class.