Animation
Keith Lango VTS videos
Some very informative animation tutorial videos (roughly an hour each) now at $2 USD per tutorial. The concepts are software-agnostic, though he uses Maya in the videos; any 3D software with decent animation tools should suffice -
BlenderGroupie Videos on blip.tv
A repository of videos from Blender Foundation's creative commons-licensed DVDs (so yes, they are legally hosted here). Some of the now-impossible-to-purchase-anywhere animation training DVDs are hosted here.
Facial Mocap in Blender
This is one of the only really informative tutorials about facial mocap in Blender available. Blender now includes a thoroughly-integrated set of motion tracking tools - and there are still very few tutorials regarding its use for mocap! So here's a decent one, just to show the workflow.
- Facial Mocap with Blender's tracking tools, part 3 (the interesting part :)
Rendering
Cycles
Blender's integrated raytraced global illumination renderer (only brute force path tracing is implemented at the moment). Some notable features include CPU and GPU-based rendering (CUDA primarily, OpenCL is not well-implemented), Open Shading Language support (developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks; only available on CPU), object/camera motion blur, physically-based nodal shading, render passes and layers, true 3D depth of field.
The only features really lacking for character rendering, as of this writing, are SSS, volumetrics, and hair/fur (though there is some seriously impressive work being done on a strand rendering patch, and SSS can be faked via a Ray Length value returned from the Light Path node).
- An introduction to Cycles
- Compositing in Cycles
- OSL in Cycles - Introduction
- OpenShading.com - a growing Blender Cycles/OSL script and tutorial repository
Luxrender
Luxrender is a physically-accurate unbiased spectral renderer. Some notable features include OpenCL GPU acceleration, Metropolis Light Transport sampler, Bidirectional/Pathtracing/Photon Mapping/SPPM/Instant Global Illumination/Direct Lighting integrators, physically-based materials and sunsky models, Irawan and Marschner woven cloth model, volumetrics. Plugins and exporters are available for most 3D applications.
Modeling
Human Face Modeling
A pretty informative page about good topology and important minutiae to consider when modeling a human face
Modeling a Next-Gen Sci Fi Prop
A hardsurface modeling tutorial by Racer445
Hard Surface Essentials by Grant Warwick
A very useful source for hardsurface modeling theory/tips and tricks.
Topology Principles for Animation
I don't know who this guy is, but he's pretty knowledgeable. This page addresses topology for good deformation.
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