In the first volume of this two-part tutorial, we’re going to create a pipeline for processing and detailing terrain in Houdini 16.

Follow along as Heba Hassan shows you just how powerful Autodesk Vred truly is. Heba will teach you how to use Vred to get you up and running rendering your scene faster than ever.

These are great previz and concept art skills that can be used in production. Even for a personal project, you wouldn’t just jump straight into designing a mech in Maya and spend months on it. You should be able to come up with some 2D concept artwork first. Once you’re happy with it and once it’s approved, then you go ahead and model it in Maya and Zbrush. These techniques can be used for speed painting, illustration, game design, graphic design; whatever you choose to use it for, you’ll be happy that you learned these skills.

One of the more exciting sci-fi movie franchises to come around the last couple of decades has been the Alien series. A big part of that has been the care they put into the creature design. A favorite is the "Facehugger," and in this series, Greg Kulz will walk you through modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating a Facehugger.

In addition to speed painting concepts and brushes, Jonathan teaches you concepts such as compositions, the rule of thirds, the Fibonacci spiral, and several rules to do with color, light, and perspective.

Diego Trazzi, Effects Supervisor on the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film, presents the first of a series in essential foundations for BiFrost, and how to migrate from earlier versions. This volume contains an introduction to fluid simulations in BiFrost 2017.

Jonathan McFall, from Escape Studios, presents a 5 1/2 hour special course for cmiVFX on in-depth sculpting and texuring. Jonathan focuses mainly on Autodesk Maya and Mudbox, explains some of the lesser-known but powerful features of Mudbox, and also touches on various workflows including ZBrush, Mari, and Photoshop. This course is packed with valuable content. Buy it now!

Haji Gadirov creates another excellent course for cmiVFX on Flame and Fire effects inside Houdini.

In this course, we use 3DS Max with M-Particles to create an awesome destruction simulation. We'll be flying a spaceship through the doors of a temple, destroying the pillars and fracturing the floor.

With the power of both Cinema 4D and Substance Painter, Greg Kulz shows us how to achieve both a beautiful design, and efficiency, with the use of multiple apps.

Industry veteran, Haji Gadirov, uses Houdini to teach you, in depth, how to make a pyro and clustering effect to create a flare trailing an airplane.

Abhimanyu Tanwar, digital compositor who has worked on films such as World War Z, Edge of Tomorrow, The Great Gatsby, Seventh Son, and Gravity, shares his unique expertise with Stereo Quality Control and Compositing by using the powerful Foundry tool, OCULA, which is used on almost every major motion picture.

In the ten chapters of the series, we work with the motion of aliens, knights, SWAT, and robots to swing a sword and a tail, do parkour, rage-out on boxes, and throw a punch.