COURSES TAUGHT BY THE EXPERTS
CGWorkshop Instructors are the best in the business. They've worked on high-profile games and films, and can give you the skills to make an impact in the world of CG. Each CGWorkshop gives you a planned schedule of projects to complete, and the opportunity to get personal time with the instructor within your classroom.
Franco De Rosa & Martin Punchev
CGWorkshop: Concept Sculpting and Maquettes with Bryan Wynia
Ibrahem Swaid
CGWorkshop: Digital Painting - Finishing Touches with Don Seegmiller
Ruth Marco & Jonathan Kuo
CGWorkshop: Digital Painting - Finishing Touches with Don Seegmiller
Mike Ulloa
CGWorkshop: High-End Fantasy Game Art Creation with Katon Callaway.
Jimmy Brunet
CGWorkshop: Matte Painting with David Luong
David Demaret
CGWorkshop: Becoming a Better Artist with Rob Chang
Mele Klumpe
CGWorkshop: Becoming a Better Artist with Rob Chang
Del Melchionda
CGWorkshop: Becoming a Better Artist with Rob Chang
AJ Lee
Concept Sculpting and Maquettes with Bryan Wynia
Delcio Gomes
Concept Sculpting and Maquettes with Bryan Wynia
Mauro D'Elia Matheus
Concept Sculpting and Maquettes with Bryan Wynia
ALexander Zelensky
Modern Game Art: Weapons with Jon Rush
Fabricio Moraes
Sculpting and Texturing in Mudbox with Young Choi
Tristan Conners
Sculpting and Texturing in Mudbox with Young Choi
Kamil Durzynski
Environment Design For Games with Simon Scales
Massimo Porcella
Environment Design For Games with Simon Scales
Stephen Macfarlane
Environment Design For Games with Simon Scales
Brandon Reimchen
Environment Design For Games with Simon Scales
CGWorkshop Courses
Current Courses
3D Environment Design
Paul McWilliams
Paul McWilliams has been Environment TD on such visually spectacular films as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” and the Visual Effects Oscar award winning “Inception”. In this 8 week, fully online, mentored CG Environment training course, he'll take you through the vfx production workflow he used to create "Mal's house" that was such an integral part of the urban Inception dreamscape. Work with Paul as you create, model, refine and texture a new house (seen pictured above). You'll then work on LookDev, lig...
Starts / Ends
25th Jun 2012 - 20th Aug 2012
Python in Maya
Shaun Friedberg
It can be hard to learn your first scripting language and just as hard to make the transition from one to another. One of the hurdles you might face when making this transition is learning how to think like a Python programmer. In this workshop, we’ll learn how to do this and begin to take advantage of the incredible tool set available to you in Python. Understanding Python opens you up to potential work in areas you might have never considered; other programs, and even other fields. Python is used in many areas other than just ...
Starts / Ends
25th Jun 2012 - 20th Aug 2012
Creating Maya Plugins - June 2012
Karl Stiefvater
Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of Maya is its ability to be modified and adapted to a variety of uses and media. In this new fully online 8 week CGWorkshop, The Matrix and Second Life veteran Karl Stiefvater shows you how to reach into the heart of Maya and change it to do YOUR bidding. Rendering, animation, modeling - we'll cover all the major subsystems in Maya and show how to implement the tools YOU want. We'll look at the major APIs for interfacing with Maya's engine, including custom commands, shader nodes, deformer ...
Starts / Ends
25th Jun 2012 - 20th Aug 2012
Introduction to FX using Houdini
Spencer Lueders
Spencer Lueders is currently a Senior FX Technical Director at Rhythm and Hues Studios in Los Angeles. He's now here to work with you at CGWorkshops in this 8 week online, fully-mentored Houdini training course. Spencer will take you step-by-step through the construction of a production ready scene in Houdini - right from looking at the UI and creating procedures in Week 1, through the Copy Operator, and then on to particles and how to control them when you're creating cracks, wind effects, dissolving effects, fluids etc. He'll ...
Starts / Ends
25th Jun 2012 - 20th Aug 2012
3D Creature Sculpting
Bryan Wynia
Students appreciated Bryan Wynia's 3 week Concept Maquettes course so much that he's made a full, 8 week online training course for us. So get ready to make some serious, full-bodied monsters, creatures and characters! Sony Santa Monica's Bryan Wynia will take you through the full 3D character and creature development process, helping you create, refine, sculpt, paint and render until you have not one but two fully crafted maquettes for your portfolio - one bust and one completely fully-bodied. Bryan's experience creating charact...
Starts / Ends
25th Jun 2012 - 20th Aug 2012
Intermediate to Advanced Techniques in V-Ray - Part 1
Boaz Livny
Boaz Livny brings you the first part of his new CGWorkshop, Intermediate to Advanced techniques in V-ray. In the first part, you'll learn the fundamentals of lighting and rendering. This will include a basic tour around the V-Ray sofware in both Maya and SoftImage, a look at shading fundamentals and basic lighting techniques. Boaz will take you through various camera effects like lens shaders and motion blur, rayswitch techniques and how to match live action. He'll then move on to more intermediate topics in the final week - c...
Starts / Ends
11th Jun 2012 - 16th Jul 2012
Compositing for Feature Animation
Nick Deboar
Building from his experience on a number of animated feature films, Nick Deboar will cover how Nuke is used in modern feature animation pipelines. This course is aimed at compositors who want to know more about compositing 3D renders, and lighting artists wanting to composite their own shots. The course will cover common production tasks, such as dealing with multi-channel exrs, linear color, motion blur, depth of field and premultiplied images. It will then move on to more advanced topics; working with position passes, creating...
Starts / Ends
11th Jun 2012 - 23rd Jul 2012
Making a Splash: Realflow Workflows revealed
Chris Soyer
In my first CGWorkshop I plan on using a layered approach to teach the students the history of fluid effects in CG, the science behind the sims, and the practical application of this knowledge in Realflow while doing task based lessons geared towards mastering the finer points of the package. I will also build the students eye for fluid work as well as their technical skill by looking at weekly examples of fluid work for discussion. To give you an idea of how a typical class will work - We would begin with a 10-15 minute science...
Starts / Ends
11th Jun 2012 - 6th Aug 2012
Nuke 2D Compositing
Steve Wright
This is where to start on your path to learning to Nuke. This workshop introduces the Nuke interface and shows how to navigate between the viewer, node graph, curve editor, and property panels. Keyframe animation, expressions, and linking between nodes are covered in detail. You will get extensive training on Nuke’s unique 32 bit float “linear lightspace” color management and the major color correcting nodes. The RotoPaint node is covered in great detail with nearly an hour’s worth of tutorials for this very sophistiated ro...
Starts / Ends
11th Jun 2012 - 23rd Jul 2012
Look development and Image based lighting in Maya
Noah Vice
More often than not the skills you learn while studying a software package are not necessarily the skills you need to make a beautiful, convincing, or photorealistic image. These skills often come later through training and years of experience through trial and error on the job. This workshop is aimed at fast-tracking that learning process by studying the principles and techniques behind good look development and lighting. A sound understanding of these techniques not only provides the artist with a method to consistently achie...
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Fundamentals of Digital Painting
Don Seegmiller
Renowned painter Don Seegmiller’s Fundamentals of Digital Painting workshop is designed for the beginner digital painter. There's a lack of good basic instruction when it comes to digital painting, and this workshop aims to fill that lack of instruction and give the beginner digital painter a good foundation for their own future work. If you are a beginning digital painter or you've never painted an image digitally but want to give it a try, then this workshop is a must! There are so many different ways to approach digital pain...
Starts / Ends
21st May 2012 - 16th Jul 2012
Sculpting and Texturing in Mudbox
Young Choi
Young Choi is a Senior Character Artist at Sony Santa Monica. He's joined us here st CGWorkshops to share his years of experience creating 3D characters in Autodesk's Mudbox. Young's 3 week Mudbox online training CGWorkshop takes you through the process of creating a Frankenstein monster. Young covers the pros and cons of using Mudbox over similar products and gives a sculpting overview followed by discussions about different sculpting brushes, layers, stamp tools and stencils. He'll talk you through extracting maps from your sc...
Starts / Ends
21st May 2012 - 11th Jun 2012
Advanced Maya Dynamics - Breaking Ground
David Alexander
Creating photoreal effects has always been one of the hardest jobs in computer graphics. There’s a very fine balance between simulation and creative control. This is especially true in a fast paced post production world. In this 8 week course David Alexander will take you through the entire shot recently completed for a major TV series. You will learn production proven techniques on how to procedurally generate cracks, falling debris and dust, replicate objects along a surface, work with particle instances, expressions and dyn...
Starts / Ends
14th May 2012 - 9th Jul 2012
Only 8 positions left - HURRY!
Upcoming Courses
Nuke 3D Compositing
Steve Wright
This is part two of the overall Nuke Compositing Workshop for those artists that want to go beyond 2D compositing and advance to 3D compositing. This online vfx training workshop dives into Nuke’s awesome 3D compositing capability and covers the several major new features introduced in Nuke 6.3. Of course this workshop will thoroughly cover the basics like creating 3D geometric primitives, adding lights, cameras and shaders, plus texture mapping and animating geometry. The workshop then pulls it all together with several example...
Open For Enrollment On:
28th May 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Intermediate to Advanced Techniques in V-Ray - PART 2
Boaz Livny
Boaz Livny calls Part 2 of his new V-Ray course "Go Pro". This second five weeks delves into more advanced practices and techniques, and shows how you can incorporate V-Ray and other packages such as Mari and Nuke into your workflow. You'll look at texture painting, UV preparation, linear workflows and some compositing. There may even be some fluid rendering with Naiad. Each week will look at a different package and subject, and how you can work it in to your pipeline. You don't need to have taken Part 1 of this workshop to tak...
Open For Enrollment On:
28th May 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Comic Book Art and Storytelling
Coro Kaufman
Renowned concept artist and creator and co-founder of Massive Black in San Franciso, Coro Kaufman joins us to share his skill and passion for Comic Book Art and Storytelling. In this 8 week online fully mentored workshop, Coro will take you on a journey which will allow you to realise your comic storytelling dreams. Starting with teaching you techniques for developing credible and believable concepts and stories, he'll go through his process for developing a complete short comic. You'll learn how to use thumbnails to flesh out ...
Open For Enrollment On:
11th Jun 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Creating and Styling CG Hair
Becca Baldwin
We're excited to welcome Blizzard's Becca Baldwin to the CGWorkshops team with her brand new 8 week, fully mentored workshop, "Creating and Styling CG Hair." In this course you will learn how to dive in to CG hair for the first time or improve skills you already have. Any skill level is welcome! The course is flexible to work with you to improve your skills wherever they may be, in whichever hair package you choose to use. At the end of the course you will have several portfolio pieces you can use whether it is focusing sole...
Open For Enrollment On:
21st May 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Past Courses
Absolute Beginners
Anne Pogoda
This workshop is for everyone who appreciates art and eventually surfs CGTalk for that reason, but feels they're too much of a beginner to enter the other workshops. Maybe you have a secret desire to study and learn digital art, but you haven't been able to find a suitable beginner class before. In the Absolute Beginners workshop we learn how to handle Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. The workshop is sensibly built around making you learn the software and handle the tablet alongside your first approaches in digital painting. The fo...
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Environment Design for Games
Simon Scales
Video game environment designer, LEGO concept artist and matte painter Simon Scales takes you through the art of creating polished, game-ready environments in this brand new 8 week online digital art training workshop. Simon will start with the basics - setting up an effective workspace to create a professional workflow. He'll then move into idea and reference gathering, and how to quickly generate interesting compositions that form the basis of worlds. You'll look at how to create custom shapes and brushes that can help speed up ...
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Becoming A Better Artist
Robert Chang
Robert Chang’s “Becoming a Better Artist” has been one of the most popular courses we’ve ever run at CGWorkshops. Why? Because no matter what area you specialize in as a visual artist (3D, 2D, film, animation, comic books, games, illustration, visualization), this course will teach you the most critical knowledge, techniques, and creative approaches that today's artists working in highly competitive industries must know in order to function as a confident and authoritative creative force. Have you been feeling frustr...
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Writing Shaders for Renderman and Mental Ray
Karl Stiefvater
Sometimes, in the quest to create the perfect image, it is necessary to get one's hands dirty in the complicated business of writing shaders. Be it a new lighting equation or a neat trick from this year's SIGGRAPH, shader writing is the single most powerful way to customize your rendering and set it apart from the herd. In this 8 week online vfx training course we jump into the deep waters of shader creation for the two most popular rendering engines: Renderman and mental ray. We will see how many concepts transfer from one ...
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Creature Texture Painting in Mari - April 2012
Justin Holt
With the first run of this workshop selling out in 10 days, don't miss this opportunity to work with Justin. Image Engine's Lead Texture Painter Justin Holt shares with you the secrets that helped him create textures for iconic characters like The Incredible Hulk and Rattlesnake Jake in Gore Verbinski's Rango. With The Foundry offering free educational Mari licenses to students of this course for the 8 week duration, there's even more reason to join Justin as he goes into detail on the best ways to develop film quality textur...
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Character Facial Rigging
Judd Simantov
For seven years, Judd Simantov was the Lead Character Technical Director at Naughty Dog, working on gaming classics like the Uncharted series. Now he's here to share the secrets of succesfully rigging stylized faces and caricatures with you. In this new 8 week online workshop, work with Judd as you learn the differences between rigging realistic and stylized faces, discover the best areas to place joints so you get muscle control and good animation control, look at different skin binds and discuss workflow methodologies for painti...
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High-end Fantasy Game Art Creation
Katon Callaway
Games look amazing these days, and trying to create all the necessary assets at such a high standard can seem overwhelming. Often, we have a vision that we want to see come to life, but it can be tough with all the tools out there to complete it. Join Katon Callaway as he guides you through the process of creating high-quality, industry ready assets that can be used in modern engines.Over these eight weeks, we will try to cover all the bases needed to help you reach the result you want without interfering with your artistic abili...
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Modern Game Art Weapons
Jonathan Rush
Fresh from 5 years of working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA Bioware's Jon Rush helps you hone your sculpting skills on a piece of awesome weaponry in this short 3 week online digital art training workshop. Building a great weapon can be different to creating a character or creature. EA Bioware's Jon Rush helps you hone your sculpting skills on a piece of awesome weaponry. Bring your passion for 3D and perfect your weapon creation skills. This workshop is open to all 3D modelling applications (Max, Maya, XSI, etc...), and tak...
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Maya/Unity Integration - March 2012
Anthony Romrell
Join the Utah Valley University's Anthony Romrell as he takes you and your character on a journey through Maya and into Unity. In this eight-week, fully mentored workshop, you will create a character in Maya (or import one, if you have a low-res one you'd like to use.) Anthony will then help you create textures and UV maps that can be read by other artists, as well as different types of shading with normal and displacement maps. We'll construct sets and prop models that can be used in-game, overview polygon count, and optimizat...
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Face and Figure Painting - March 2012
Don Seegmiller
Portrait painting and figure painting have always been one of the measuring stones of an artists' skill, and humans the most painted and drawn subjects. When you think about it, it's not all that unusual that we should be so interested in the representation of the human face and figure. The reason is of course that we are interested in things that are close to us and what could be closer than what we are? Join renowned digital artist and teacher Don Seegmiller in this 8 week online training workshop in taking traditional paint...
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Matte Painting
David Luong
Blizzard Entertainments' Matte Painter, Compositor and VFX guru David Luong is back to take you through the tricks of the trade with his Matte Painting workshop. This is an intermediate to advanced level matte painting class using Adobe Photoshop as well as using After Effects and/or Nuke to composite your design into your final project using Maya. Though it has some beginner’s topics, it will quickly get into more advanced areas. Matte paintings give clients a vision of a full environment that will save money and time. Efficie...
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Monster Character Painting
Don Seegmiller
*ALL NEW MATERIAL* Work with Don Seegmiller and let your imagination run wild in this 8 week fully online workshop! Monsters are fun to paint. They range from the frightening to the absurd and anything in between. Painting monsters gives us the opportunity explore a variety of painting 2D techniques all within a single creature or series of creatures. As you work you will also be improving your painting skills. Both Photoshop CS5 and Painter 12 will be used extensively throughout the workshop. It is recommended that you have the...
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Iconic Heroine Design and Creation
Sze Jones
In this new workshop, Sze Jones will demonstrate the professional workflow, artistic and technical techniques required for creating an iconic heroine. With over a decade of experience as a lead character artist and supervisor in the game cinematic industry, Sze will provide valuable insights, professional critiques, anatomy paint-overs, topology notes along with artistic feedback mimicking a real production environment. Sze will provide professional critiques, personal guidance and valuable feedback. Participants will learn discip...
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