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This is in fact a really powerful feature, which of course is great for saving and loading preset systems, but also for saving pflow scripts, and constantly used set ups, even just some to make “rotation, spin, position, random_scale” on the fly. Here we just quickly jump in and point out the potential and usefulness of this great feature in 3D Studio Max 2010.

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I was brought on board to create these earlier this year (2009) for the release. Although with certain limitations such as not utilizing any plugins and not making the scenes too slow in the viewport and copyright on textures or stock footage, it meant they needed to be more sample files to demonstrate how to create a flow for the set up, rather than a full blown production ready sample, at least in some cases. However I believe that pretty much all of these scene files that ship with max are very informative and useful in day to day production. A lot of the key concepts here are the core elements of what I use in building a lot of my more complex effects and flows. Check out this video just discussing how to use them and make the most of your Particle Flow En devours!

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Hopefully all newsletter subscribers still stay in tact, however feel free to resubscribe to the newsletter just in case!

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Allan McKay

San Francisco, USA

I’ve switched over to a lightning fast server, and unlimited bandwidth, all of the previous tutorials are online, and loads more are going to be popping up very soon, as well as other content, maxscripts, Real Flow, Maya and various other material too.

Bare with us over the next coming weeks as this website comes online, however I now have other people running and contributing to this website so it will become a lot easier for myself and others to keep it up to date and make more frequent updates.

I will be putting up a newsletter soon, so people who are interested in participating in CGWorkshops or other events that sell out quick can get a heads up before they are announced, ensuring their place in the workshops ahead of everyone else, as well as gaining access to exclusive content and other cool material that noone else has access to.

I’m excited and looking forward to getting this website online both to put together a focal point for solid visual effects content as well as various other areas I’m tied to such as travel, writing and film production.

Any ideas or things you would like to see covered, or anything else feel free to contact me! amckay@allanmckay.com

Allan McKay

Gold Coast, Australia

October 29th – Creature FX – Volume 1, will be part of a new training series I have been working on the past several months. Part of the new product line I am focusing on raising the bar with level of quality and content for all upcoming training material. The Creature FX series is aimed at building production FX training content for character and organic orientated FX shots, expect a lot of information to come soon about this.

Creature FX Volume 1 is loosely based around a lot of the work I did on the upcoming vampire action film ‘Day Breakers’ (January 2010 release) as well as a lot of core additional methods I’ve focused on for this DVD.

There is 8 hours of solid content from initially building the FX passes and render layers to compositing all of it and creating a solid workflow process that allows for updating passes easily and having the rest of the system adjust to it, as well as easily being able to redistribute into other FX shots etc. And using a lot of compositing techniques to enhance the 3D passes and finesse the final composite.

Creature FX volume 1 – will be available for direct download from October 29th!

Real Flow Basics – Introduction: As a lot of you know I’m putting a bit of time in now to focusing on some of the basic fundamentals of pflow/maya/real flow etc. I do have plans for a lot of advanced material coming up, but for the time being I’m putting together a few core tutorials on Real Flow, the first is literally just a introductory to how it works. Initially jumping into creating a quick fluid simulation and discussing a bit about the interface. I plan for a few more hands on exercises in the near future.

(Tutorials section will be updated tomorrow once I’ve had some sleep)

Folder Git: Grant Adam the creator of Render Pass Manager, has written a really useful application that is a life saver for both 3D enthusiasts as well as literally anyone who uses windows.

Folder Git is an evolutionary step up from Folder Express, which was an old application for XP that would allow you to create shortcuts on your right click menu, which meant in production – being able to build quick shortcuts to render directories, dailies folders and dozens of other places you need to access frequently – and that usually have large directory paths to get to.

It goes much further than that with a lot of advanced options, but here I just wanted to give a quick plug to it to initially point out how cool this tool is, so that others will catch onto this life saver! You can download Folder Git Here