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
Igor Staritsin
CGWorkshop: Matte Painting with David Luong
Michal Matczak
CGWorkshop: Matte Painting with David Luong
Jimmy Brunet
CGWorkshop: Matte Painting with David Luong
Jacek Irzykowski
CGWorkshop: Matte Painting with David Luong
Andrej Blom
CGWorkshop: Boaz Livny's Advanced Photorealism with mental ray
Andreas Hummel
CGWorkshop: Boaz Livny's Advanced Photorealism with mental ray
Facundo Lavenia
CGWorkshop: Boaz Livny's Advanced Photorealism with mental ray
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
CGWorkshop Courses
Current Courses
Creating Maya Plugins
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
27th Mar 2012 - 22nd May 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 contruction 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 a...
Starts / Ends
27th Mar 2012 - 22nd May 2012
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...
Starts / Ends
27th Mar 2012 - 17th Apr 2012
Creature Texture Painting in Mari - March 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...
Starts / Ends
27th Mar 2012 - 22nd May 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
19th Mar 2012 - 14th May 2012
Maya/Unity Integration
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...
Starts / Ends
13th Mar 2012 - 8th May 2012
Nuke 6.3 Features
Steve Wright
Join Steve Wright, senior compositor and master Nuke trainer for a special 3 week workshop on the major new features added to the recent release of Nuke 6.3. This was a huge new release that added major new capabilities such as a planar tracker, particle system, deep compositing, displacement shader, all new spline and mesh warpers, and much, much more. This condensed 3 week workshop focuses on camera tracking with these major new features so it requires prospective attendees to already be trained on Nuke. Previous students of Stev...
Starts / Ends
5th Mar 2012 - 26th Mar 2012
Face and Figure Painting
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...
Starts / Ends
5th Mar 2012 - 30th Apr 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
20th Feb 2012 - 12th Mar 2012
Only 10 positions left - HURRY!
Upcoming Courses
Steven Stahlberg's Image Clinic
Steven Stahlberg
This brand new online workshop from Maya Master Steven Stahlberg comes as a direct result of his well-patronised CGTalk thread, Paintover Please, in which aspiring artists can upload work for a critique and paintover from Steven. This Image Clinic CGWorkshop offers students the opportunity to work with Steven intensively to develop and build their portfolios. Each week, students upload a Work-In-Progess piece for Steven to critique and paintover. You're then able to take his advice, and develop the piece further as the weeks go ...
Open For Enrollment On:
20th Mar 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Writing Shaders for Renderman and Mental Ray - April 2012
Karl Stiefvater
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 to the other ...
Open For Enrollment On:
12th Mar 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Character Facial Rigging - April 2012
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...
Open For Enrollment On:
12th Mar 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
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...
Open For Enrollment On:
27th Feb 2012 - Press the button to be notified prior.
Past Courses
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...
Course Closed: Press the button to enter your details to be notified when it runs again
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 strengths you have as an artist, or what area you specialize in (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. Stop fee...
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Concept Sculpting and Maquettes
Bryan Wynia
Sony Santa Monica's Zbrush master and Pixologic demonstrator Bryan Wynia goes through the process of creating 3D creature concepts in Zbrush in this fast, fun 3 week online training workshop. Work alongside Bryan as he helps you find references, brainstorm, create thrumbnails and practice speed-sculpting your concepts. He'll then help you select your strongest idea to refine and evolve, polypaint and render ready for your final image. Bryan has taught a number of classes and workshops, and is respected both as a creator, and as a...
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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 brand 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 ...
Course Closed: Press the button to enter your details to be notified when it runs again
Environment Design for Games
Simon Scales
Video game environment designer, 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 the p...
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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...
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Mastering Realflow 2012 for Production
Allan McKay
Secure a spot in the most up to date and advanced Realflow Workshop out there, with FREE Realflow 2012 student licenses for all students for the course duration, plus a downloadable Allan McKay DVD. With a limited amount of seats, this online vfx training workshop raises the bar on creating fluid simulation Visual Effects for feature films. ‘Mastering Realflow 2012 for Production’ is centered around bringing users quickly up to speed with all of Realflow 2012’s new features, as well as a general overview of how Realflow and ...
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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...
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Advanced Photorealism with Mental Ray
Boaz Livny
Join Nice Shoes' Head of CG Boaz Livny in this intensive mental ray workshop. You’ll cover topics including render settings, geometry, motion blur, shaders of all sorts (production and architectural), area lighting, indirect illumination and compositing workflows. Advanced Nuke compositing instruction demonstrates linear workflows and passes. This updated course features a lot of fresh material, and focuses around rendering a car under studio lighting as well as planting the car in a back-plate using the production shaders. Lots ...
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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 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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Advanced Fume FX 2.0 - Explosions & Pyrotechnics
Allan McKay
Allan McKay is fresh from blowing things up on Transformers 3, and now he's returning to CG Workshops to help you wreak explosive havoc. In this 8 week online workshop he reveals the tricks of the trade for creating high-end explosions and pyrotechnic special effects. This is an Advanced FumeFX 2.0 course geared towards those of you who want a leg up into fullfilling a dream of working in a big name studio and creating special effects for blockbuster Hollywood films. Allan McKay is an award winning Visual Effects Supervisor and ...
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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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