Nice online courses to take on 2D and 3D subjects

technokill

Hi gents!

So I got some money from the family, birthday and stuff, and I wanted to spend it wisely. I can purchase roughly 2 courses from mainstreams schools, like CGMA or CGworkshops.

I'm still not sure whether I want to focus on 2d or 3d, so both would work, as long as it's something useful. I haven't found my sweetspot yet and so far I pretty much like modeling/sculpting, as well as concept art/illustration (I know I should setup a more, let's say, structured strategy regarding my studies but I have been studying whatever I feel like doing).

There's CGMA but it's so full of courses that I don't even know where to begin with, neither if it's worth picking up a random course, outside their program's order. Didn't quite like anything from CGworkshops.

Not a lot of information but I hope you guys have some ideas. Lastly I have to say I LOVE ENVIRONMENTS and I know my way around most softwares even though I'm an amateur. And please don't restrict your opinions to CGMA, CGSociety and environment things only, as I said, I'm looking for useful stuff.

Thanks!

RobeOmega

Futurepoly

Pancakes

You don't need to pay money for education because there are a lot of resources online for free. Even though I'm a blender user, I find that the free Maya tutorials are really strong that you can watch on youtube. For exacmple there is a guy who build a motorcyle in maya, if you search for it over the course of 13 vids. I followed along in blender.

Also there are vids from an ex blizzard employee who shows how to do hand painted textures, which provides insights into all forms of texturing when you watch it. He was teaching a class on campus and decided to record it and post it on youtube. You will see there isn't much difference from a video tutorial and sitting in the class other than the obvious things.

Also, read the polycount wiki. And the rest us personal dedication/ability.

My advice on what to do with your money for the sake of this subject matter is...dayum I'm starting to sound like an Epic fanboy, but, my advice to you is to get Unreal 4 if you don't have it already. Also if you have photoshop, download the beta version of quixel suite and learn to put these into your workflow if you haven't already.

Using Quixel suite is going to FORCE you to bake maps properly if you haven't been doing that so far. That's what it's been doing for me. I know now that it is SUPER important to bake and UV correctly in a way that I didn't before because it gives you direct feedback on the quality of your bake in a way that isn't subjective.

ivanzu

Every 3D modeling tool has extrude,merge,move,push,scale functions,the only thing required to do 3D.Its all about moving vertices so every software "handles" modeling the same way.You just have to learn the basics in some software and it gets smooth as butter later.Get UDK,U4 like pancakes said.And learn the workflow from the polycount wiki or the internets.