cgCoach Blog

The Foundry have released a new version Mari 1.4... there are some really cool new features!

This is my favorite software by far for texturing!

Very impressive paper that came out 2011 SIGGRAPH Asia. For more reading about how it was done go to Kevin Karsch's website.

ShaderMon, the new MAYA tool from Brillstudio, will give Maya shader artists the ability to save their shaders in a project based personal library,catalog them,backup the shaders to a Main library and load them anytime to any project while giving them a fully customizable  preview of the shaders.

A few of the features included in Version 1.0 :

* Breaking down objects and extracting  individual shaders
* Extracting multiple shaders at one go.
* Rendering thumbnails from most render engines (maya software, mentalRay,Vray etc.. )
* Grouping and cataloging shaders.
* Moving and and importing shaders across projects.
* Main Library and Project Based Library.
* Create custom setups for displaying of shaders.
* supports Names Spacing.
* supports Render layers.
* Supports IBL (mentalRay)
* Extracts textures to unique folders based on shader’s name.
* Rename shaders before saving to library.
* share your shaders (directly from maya) online with the world.
* Automatic  packing  and posting of shaders with textures.

Wacom has announced a pretty amazing product today, the Inkling. This so-called Digital Sketch Pen allows you to capture whatever you draw or write on a sketchbook or any kind of paper in digital form, “stroke by stroke”. Just insert a sheet of paper or a notebook into the receiver, use the Inkling Digital Pen and transfer your works to your computer to refine them digitally anytime later.

A thorough tut from Andy Davies showing the techniques needed to efficiently create a realistic rubble pile by making a tileable ground mesh using Displacement maps and placing pre-made Polypainted assets whilst offsetting the canvas.