3D and VFX Community

VFX Wizard's community for 3D, VFX and Digital Cinematography

Subdivision Modeling has been an icon for modelers and 3D artists during the first decade of 21st century.

Its forum, creative and energy filled, gathered talents from all over the world, eager to share their knowledge and their works in the friendly and productive environment of like-minded artists.

As long time members (and Lightwave 3D users) we mourned the loss of that site and when the unexpected opportunity of saving its name from oblivion arose, we decided to take a chance and try building a new community starting from scratch.

The future of Subdivision Modeling

The goal is to provide free, useful, advice and tutorials as well as a free community open to all 3D artists.

We are currently planning to build this community as an artist friendly meeting point, leveraging the experience acquired in managing the closed forum in our online school, a project that has been refined since 2008.

This may take some time since the platform on our server is custom made and the forum modules have not yet been implemented in the english version.

On the bright side, it’s a system developed from scratch for collaborative visual media discussions.

It has many unique features, including graphical reviewing, suggestions, inline videos, mentions (with or without notifications) and a social-like ranking algorithm that allows constructive posts to be spotlighted.

The system does also integrate with an efficient helpdesk that handles both user support and moderation tasks, ensuring an high quality user experience and absolute security.

Who will benefit from this Community

Also, being backed by a company in business since 2002, you can rest assured the community will be here to stay and won’t disappear in the void.

We are looking forward to modelers and 3D artists using any software out there, be it Maya, 3DS Max, Modo, Lightwave, zBrush, Silo or any other. Techniques come first, tools last.

Focus will remain on subdivision modeling, but in recent years computer graphics has changed.

Once we were used to create accurate topology of low resolution characters, nowadays we sculpt in zBrush, Mudbox or maybe work on 3D scan data and then retopologize the final mesh baking the higher subdivision levels.

Texturing too is undergoing a drastic change in gaming industry thanks to the adoption of physically based shaders such as “Disney’s PBR”. This switch goes well beyond in-game, realtime, CGI and applies to traditional rendering as well.

Procedural modeling is also a key player, with the current trend towards scenes of ever increasing complexity. And subdivision friendly procedural modeling is an hot topic (be it in the old POLAS’ tree generator or in SpeedTree’s amazingly realistic subdivision trees).

Something that has not changed, however, is how subdivision surfaces work.

Extraordinary points are still extraordinary. N-gons still require patience to be dealt with, and edge loops are as essential as they were in the past.

Beginners still need to develop a feeling for how subdivision surfaces works in order to produce a perfect topology.

There’s just no substitute to interacting with other artists: listening to their comments and critiques makes us better artists, always.

Going beyond 3D modeling

There’s a whole world of knowledge to be shared beyond 3D modeling.

That’s why in addition to the modeling section, at least five other sections will open: VFX, Digital Cinematography, Technical Direction, Shading and Real Time 3D. The ultimate goal is to bring the entire structure of our existing community over to the english speaking artist.

To kickstart the community we are curently undergoing the massive task of translating to english the best, hand picked, contributions from the over thirty-two thousand posts already published in the italian community.

Thanks for reading so far, we hope you’ll like the site when it will be integrated in our platform.