Pixel and Poly - Design Focused Creative Services

Over the years I have found a great many resources and references - on websites, forums and through my own work. I will attempt to share, on this page, many of these great reference materials I have found with the rest of the online community. Many of these items are in the form of videos, stills and written pages. Some are credited and some are not. If you have any great links or material that you think will be at home here on this page just let me know.

3D Software

Lightwave 3D / NewTek - Makers of the famous industry standard Lightwave 3d software.

Silo / Silo Forums - One of the best stand alone SDS modelers out there. Silo has one of the best and cleanest interfaces around. And has full displacement painting as well.

Blender 3D - One of the best and most well known, free and OpenSource 3d applications around. It has tons of features; from modeling to texturing to rendering and animation and game development.

Strata / StrataCafe - Strata is one of the best overall 3D applications for the 2D artist wanting to make the move to 3D.

Wings3D - A very powerful SDS modeler that is OpenSource and Free. It was based on Mirai.

MODO / Luxology - A 3D modeling, painting, and rendering application.

Autodesk MAYA - One of the industry standards for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering.

Autodesk MAX - One of the industry standards for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering.

Maxwell Renderer - One of the best physically correct, unbiased rendering engines. Maxwell creates amazingly real images.

Cinema 4D / Maxon - Makers of Cinema4D and Bodypaint. Both great 3d applications.

Terragen - A scenery generator for Windows and the Mac OS. Terragen is free for personal non-commercial use.

Online Forums / Communities

CGSociety - The CGSociety is the most respected and accessible global organization for creative digital artists. The CGS supports artists at every level by offering a range of services to connect, inform, and educate.

Scifi-Meshes - The definitive site to go to if you are interested in creating science fiction art. It is mostly CG related, and a majority of the work is of different space ships.

NewTek Forums - The first place to go when you want to talk about all things Lightwave.

Foundation 3D - A great forum and community for 3d artists. They there are many Lightwave users as well as Modo users there although the forum is open to all users.

Subdivision Modeling - A great forum for all thing that relate to subdivision modeling.

SpinQuad Forums - A great forum and user community for Lightwave 3D and Modo users.

Military-Meshes - This is a companion site to Scifi-Meshes, but covers military subject matter.

Polyloop Forum - A great forum for Hexagon and Carrara users.

Images / PDFs Reference

Digital Sculpture Techniques - The famous article by Bay Raitt and Greg Minter which originally appeared in Ineractivity magazine. This covers the main principles and essence of subdivision modeling.

488 Star Wars Reference Pictures - These are my personal pictures from "Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination" show that was held in Philadelphia, PA.

Star Wars Photo Reference - A great photo collection of Star Wars ships from the "Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination" show at the Museum of Science, Boston.

Photographic Human Reference - Do you need specific reference shots of a particular human pose or body part?

Starship Schematics - A wonderful reference area for many ships from the Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and the Space Battleship Yamato universes.

Subdivision Modeling Reference Images -
Subdivision step-down guide
Eyes, Nose, Mouth workflow
Human figure workflow
Human head workflow (adult / child)
Human head workflow
Good loops on a human head
Another human head workflow
Loops and poly regions for a head
Great topology for a human head

Texturemap Links

IOR / Index of Refraction list - This is a list of hundreds of materials and their associated IOR values. This can be very useful when rendering accurate materials in your 3d application.

CGTextures - One of the best free texture resources online. Thousands of free textures in all different categories. This is the first place I go when I need textures for my 3d work.

Hard Surface Texturing Tutorial - This is a great tutorial that covers how to create textures for hard surface / mechanical objects. It mostly covers techniques on how to create the textures in Photoshop (or GIMP) for your maps.

Visible Earth / Blue Marble - Some of the highest resolution images of the Earth available anywhere. Direct from NASA.

Mayang's Free Textures - Another great free texture site. With over 3400 free textures to choose from.

Solar System Texture Maps - A nice collection of texture maps for all the planets in the Solar System, as well as the Sun and the Earth's Moon.

The Celestia Motherlode - Very high-end planetary textures, including Earth textures up to 32k in resolution

Advanced Aircraft Texturing - This is one of the best texturing tutorials I have found. It covers the basics of texturing a model from start to finish. If you don't know where to begin this is a good place. You'll need to register with Military-Meshes.com to view it. It mostly covers different techniques on how to best apply the maps as compared to actually painting them.

Training / Tutorials

Lightwave 3D Video Tutorials - A collection of some great videos. Take a tour through the LightWave 3D environment with the videos and loadable sample content.

Free Lightwave Video Tutorials - This page on the NewTek forums has many free videos created by Proton / William Vaughan. There are over 24 hours of training available. Yes that's right! Over a days worth of videos!

Polygon Primer - This is the place to go to learn all about Subdivision Surface modeling. Covers many topics from the basics and some history to more advanced topics.

Fundamentals of Subpatch Modeling - This is one of the best guides on subdivision modeling. It is written for Lightwave but can be applied for most SDS modelers. There is also a big focus on hard surface modeling.

Puzzled Paul's Wings Tutorials - Some of the best Wings3d tutorials on the net. Many of the techniques can also be used in other SDS modeling applications as well.

Solar Voyage Tutorials - Amazing tutorials on the creation of planets, nebulae, star fields, asteroids, etc.

Ultimate List of Lightwave 3D Tutorials -
An enormous collection of Lightwave 3D tutorials and links.

Video Tutorials

Pixel and Poly Video Training Page - This page has a directory of all of the training videos I have available on this site.

Bay Raitt animated GIF 1
Bay Raitt animated GIF 2
Bay Raitt animated GIF 3

Sub D -Elron's time-lapse body build GIF

Belt ring Wings3D time-lapse GIF

Graphics Related Links

Adobe - Main page for the maker of Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, GoLive, Flash, etc.

Apple - Apple's main page. They make the Macintosh (and iPod). 'Nuff said.

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program. Don't have the money to spend on Photoshop just yet? Download this free OpenSource program that has pretty much the same functionality.

Free Pyro Exposions - Tons of free video files of explosions and other pyrotechnic effects. Perfect for compositing into your next project.

Photoshop Brushes - A great source for free and unique Photoshop custom brushes.

wiki CG Encyclopedia - Read up on anything and everything that is Computer Graphics related.

Lorem Ipsum - Text Generator - Do you need garbage text to flow into a temporary layout or design, this is the place to go.

Brands of the World - Logo Database - A great repository of thousands of vector eps logos. Before you recreate a logo you need, look here first.