interview
AN INTERVIEW WITH Allan Mckay What other training material is coming after Advanced Visual Effects Training DVD. I’ve got a new DVD about to be released through turbosquid – which covers a lot more in-depth material on effects, more working as solid shots so it covers shaders, particles and handling the actual shots, and sometimes compositing them. So lots of crowd effects, liquid, procedural effects and other fun stuff, as well as scripting and advanced techniques. I also offer consulting and on & off site training for studios and individuals, which so far seems to work quite well, as for a small fee I can usually talk with a studio and their staff before a project and devise the best approach and sometimes example scenes or scripts etc. to get them started on a job, which goes a long way in cutting down wasted production time on a project, which sometimes can be crucial. I also plan to do a master class tour soon – and plus there’s some other stuff in the works. Basically try and give back to the community as much as I can in terms of helping others get to where they want to be as an artist & operator etc.
I have seen you’re all training videos, and those are always in Max, Afterburn. Etc. Do you favor any specific software/plug-in or do you consider all software packages almost the same. I tend to use what gets the job done, I usually find 3D Studio Max with a few custom written scripts and plugins can go a long way, although there are a lot of jobs I also do in Maya. Both I find equal in strengths and weaknesses, so my preference really is on a job to job basis. I do like Maya’s flexibility, and I love Max’s ease of use. I’m able to do some shots in max within a couple of hours that take days to do in Maya, however I find I hit less walls with Maya as most things I can work around with a bit of scripting work, and other things Maya handles memory and larger chunks of data more efficiently.
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Issue 03 April 2006
