This course, taught by Matt Leonard, is going to be slightly different from our other Maya offerings because we�re going to be working alongside a new and very exciting project called �Moving Day�. This short film is being directed by award wining director Jason Wingrove. �Moving Day� tells the story of a young girl and her fight against the fairies who inhabit the garden of her new home. Our short film is literally being produced throughout the term and we�ll have first hand experience of working in post during a live project.

Mark Christiansen, author of Adobe After Effects CS5 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques, returns for a new project-based course featuring composting and effects for PROJECT ARBITER.
The short concept film, currently in post production, was shot with 2 RED cameras and fxphd members will be able to work through several shots on the film, potentially even having their shot find a place in the final release and their name featured in the credits.

Fxphd�s popular camera tracking specialist Victor Wolansky teaches this third PFTrack in production course continuing his tendency to tackle only the most difficult shots. You�re sure to pick up a ton of new, high-end techniques for both object and camera tracking.

This course will teach techniques and concepts for rendering realistic, physically based CG elements in a visual effects context (i.e. for integration into live action shots). As it is a hands-on course in using Mental Ray to do these things, it will start with a fundamental treatment of everything from light and pixels through to cameras, response curves and compositing, as well as "learning to see". The course will be performed using the 3ds Max application, but most things apply to Maya and Softimage as well.

This course, Taught by Geoff Tobin, AIMS to Give an introduction to the inner workings of Massive from the Ground up, Introducing Concepts such as core fuzzy Logic and How IT relates to Creating an AI Brain for a Massive Agent. In order to demonstrate each of the aspects of Massive we'll develop a vehicle agent and show how a simple traffic simulation can be created. Massive is the Artificial-life crowd simulation Software Developed for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Used on Motion Pictures major, TV Shows and Commercials

The course goes into the techniques used in doing visual effects work with 3DS Max and its plugins - Thinking Particles, Rayfire, and FumeFX. Coming from a feature film production background, the focus is on quality and efficiency. It is a holistic view of the process - from planning, through fragmentation, rigid bodies, particles, fire/smoke, down to management and assembly.

The release of Smoke on Mac has opened up the software to a much wider variety of users than any other Autodesk systems product.

In Intermediate Fume FX, we jump right in the deep end, initially introducing a lot of the core concepts behind Fume FX and how Congruent Solvers work - such as Fume FX, Phoenix, Maya Fluids etc. all work.

This term, to mark our 10th Background Fundamentals, we ve got a blockbuster in store for fxphd members.

This is going to mainly be a project-based course, with shots being examined and finessed over several classes. Sean Devereaux will be leading the charge as prof for the course, with a few special guest speakers. First, fxphd regular tahl Niran will be doing several classes covering integrating 3D elements into composites.
Frank Reuter, the worldwide king of Nuke tools and customization will be our guest speaker for two classes where he will cover Nuke 5 customization, tcl and python scripting as well as advanced gizmo creation with expressions galore! Frank faces difficult production challenges everyday and comes at Nuke with that vital problem solving background. No other person on the planet has as much production experience as a Nuke technical director and these two classes will crack the mysteries and tricks of custom Nuke wide open.