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At CG Master Academy, the team encourages the community of artists to push their boundaries and challenge themselves and each other.
Whether you are looking for growth, change, adventure, or perspective, there's nothing more rewarding than learning new skills and experiencing something different.
Try something new! Instructors are professional artists who are ready to teach you the necessary techniques so you can broaden your scope, expand your abilities, and advance your work. Take a look below at our introductory and foundation courses to find a course that will serve you and your goals!
If you have any questions regarding registration or portfolio review requests, please contact the CGMA Admissions Department at registration@cgmasteracademy.com or 1 (800) 959-0316.
Fundamentals of Houdini for 3D Artists with Varomix Wey
This class will take you from zero to hero with Houdini’s procedural workflow.
You will gain confidence and experience in all areas of Houdini’s powerful 3D pipeline including procedural geometry, particles, fluids, dynamics, shading, lighting, and rendering. This is a great course to take before intermediate and advanced courses because it breaks down the fundamentals, giving you a deeper grasp of how Houdini works.
Fundamentals of Substance for Environment Art with Ben Keeling
In Fundamentals of Substance for Environment Art, students will build their knowledge using the Substance suite. Students will work on the tools they needed to create excellent 3D artwork. Students will start by creating simple geometric patterns and become familiar with the UI of both Substance Painter and Substance Designer.
You will learn how to bake from high to low poly to aid in the texturing process across the course. In the later weeks, we will delve deeper into Substance Designer learning the process of creating both pattern-based and organic materials. You will tackle all aspects of material creation, first by breaking down the height map and normal before learning color and roughness textures.
You will learn how to create an asset texturing pipeline in Designer before moving into prop texturing using Substance Painter, both using provided game-ready assets.
Intro to FX Using Houdini with Timothy Stam
Intro to FX using Houdini will give an exciting introduction to a variety of FX capabilities in Houdini.
This course is designed to focus on VFX that are commonly called for in the film industry today. You will go over procedural modeling, fluid FX, particles FX, rigid body destruction, smoke, and lighting & rendering. Each week we will focus on a certain procedural aspect while maintaining a wider perspective of Houdini's incredible capabilities.
This course will strengthen your practical knowledge in VFX, and give you a greater understanding of Houdini's common uses in VFX companies.
Intro to Maya with David Mooy
Students are introduced to the Maya interface and philosophy, as well as 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, and animation. Lectures cover the application of these tools in the VFX, game, and animation industries. Students will work on multiple projects throughout the course.
Intro to Production Modeling with Hunton Hodgkins or Vidya Vinnakota
The aim of this course is to expose you to all of the things you'll need in order to be successful in a professional work environment as a 3D modeler. During this class, you'll learn how to streamline yourself to be a fast, efficient, and effective 3D artist.
One of the core issues that junior artists face when working at a large company is learning how to acclimate to the studio environment. This course will teach you what the expectations are for production modeling and what it’s like to work on a production team. You will be creating models that are production friendly using the tools, techniques, and practices that are taught throughout the course. These apply to the game, film, and animation industries.
You will create props from provided concept art, and at the end of the class, you will assemble them into a scene--creating a vignette you can show in your portfolio or your demo reel.
Intro to Rigging with Fabio Siino
This course is an introduction to rigging. You'll explore how digital characters are brought to life using simple controls.
You will start by looking under Maya's hood to understand how the system of nodes works, moving onto the basics of rigging and completing our very first project. The goal for the first weeks is to learn the fundamental rigging concepts that can be applied to every project. After completing a few projects--which include a shark rig, a spaceship rig, and a rope sim rig--you will work on a bigger project which will be divided into modules.
As a matter of fact, each week we will focus and learn how to rig a specific module, how to combine them together, and how to assemble the whole setup into a master rig. At the end of the course, we will add more details on our main project using nCloth and rigids. You will develop rigging skills and knowledge currently used in the visual effects industry.