INSPIRE TUTORIAL REVIEW #004

Hard Surface Texture Painting Workflow

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/spotlight-articles/42-tutorial-hard-surface-texture-painting.html

Ok, so technically this isn't a tutorial as such but it presents some great techniques and rules for painting hard surface textures. There's a few great tricks for really making photoshop painted textures come alive, but at the same time if you're new to texture painting/UVW mapping you might want to find something more basic and then come back to this. Regardless, this is a great reference for reminding yourself of the basic rules for effective hard surface textures. 8/10

INSPIRE TUTORIAL REVIEW #003

Create an Awesome 3D Future City 

http://forcg.com/tutorials/modeling/create-an-awesome-3d-future-city-day-1/

This is an extensive tutorial which focuses on modelling, using the plugin Greeble to add small amounts of detail to the buildings, and finally texturing lighting and then post production in photoshop. The instructions are reasonably easy to follow but be warned it takes a beastly computer to handle it, I think my final scene was at about 250,000 polygons. You'll also need Vray which you can just download if you don't have.

The final result is pretty amazing but it can really bog down your hardware, I had quite a few crashes with max untill I found out how to set things up properly. My first estimated render time was 108 hours! Mainly because I'd made a mess of the vray settings. I think my final version took about 20 minutes.

7/10, not great for a beginner user, even though it is step by step.

Freebies

This one isn't a tutorial as such, but it's some really nice Hi Resolution concrete textures which are available free to download thanks to cg.tutsplus.com (Have a look, they have some amazing tuts!)

http://cg.tutsplus.com/freebies/textures/texture-pack-7-hi-res-concrete-textures/

INSPIRE TUTORIAL REVIEW #002

INSPIRE TUTORIAL REVIEW #002

This one's an oldy, but a goody. If you haven't heard of it (and you should have) It's a character creation from the ground up, concepts, modelling, texturing, rigging and animating too. Step by step, very in depth and easy to follow. The only issue is that it was made with a fairly ancient version of 3DS Max so some of the features are named differently or found in different places.

I give it 8/10, definately worth a shot particually if you're somewhat new to Max.

http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.php