3D Tutorial is a company providing primarily XSI training, started by Joe Saltzman. 3D Tutorial offers many XSI, clay sculpting and Photoshop tutorials and most are available as download and DVD.

XSI was known as one of those 'highend' tools that was reserved for the elite and studios. However, with the recent slash in XSI Foundation to $495 the floodgates have opened within the XSI community as an affordable highend tool. The new XSI price in no way means Avid has crippled the software. Couple this with 3D Tutorials' mission to offer affordable training we end up with a power house combo.

I am reviewing the download edition. Be aware, that this is the first in a series for a simulated production of a short movie. The remaining parts will continue into texturing and lighting.

As a download you get 14 movie files and a content directory file (.rar). The files you get as a download are self contained movies using the Uberplayer, a proprietary type interface using Quicktime (v7.0.2 reqired). One issue I have with this is the licensing. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting ones' work but whenever something is node-locked it makes me nervous. So, needless to say the new videos 3D Tutorial are producing are hardware locked so you'll have to pick the hardware you'll watch the videos on. I know Joe is a reasonable fellow, and you will find that he gives great personal support so if you require to move your videos to another machine I'm sure Joe would oblige. Further more, the videos are watermarked with your name and I found it barely noticeable.



The movies can be played at full screen and are about 1280x1024 in full window mode (its actually not exactly 1280, but close enough). The videos play smoothly and the audio is quite good. You have to be aware that Bernard is narrating in English with a French accent but I did not find this a deterrent as Bernard speaks clearly and does explain things well. If you have any doubt, download the demo. The Uberplayer doesn't work like a normal Quicktime interface. Each .exe file is a self contained series of movie segments. I did not see an option with the movie player to play each segment as a sequence so you will have to select each segment to play even after one ends. Here's the cool bit, in the Movies menu, each segment is shown and as well you will get an indication of how much of a segment you've already seen by a little pie-shaped icon. The one other little peculiarity with this type of movie segment setup is you find in a few occurrences a segment ends right in the middle of a sentence as Bernard speaks.

For a complete play-by-play breakdown to the videos you can view the link http://www.3dtutorial.com/pst2_v1_detail.html

From here on out you won't find any negative feedback. Bernard really leads you by the hand in texturing almost every object for the scene and this brings us to a video count of something like 120. Each video isn't terrible long and you spend 1 or 2 segments per model UV'ing the model.

While the tutorial is for beginner to intermediate I would still highly recommend you spend some time within XSI to learn the interface. Bernard does use menus often to activate the commands but at times hotkeys are more convenient and Bernard is sure to tell you the hotkey.



Bernard spends the first little while explaining how to setup XSI for the production and explains some of the building blocks from Python scripting to UNC paths, workgroups, plugins and the project structure.

XSI is a little different in how it handles objects and textures are no exception. For those who have used XSI you know how object oriented the scene structure is and that using the explorer is essential. For those who have not used XSI I have just warned you in the previous sentence. XSI is object based and as such it is extremely powerful. Even textures utilize an object oriented approach by using texture supports, but you need not worry. Bernard explains all this and even goes into how to deal with XSI's construction history, frozen geometry and blendshapes (geometry modified with shape modifiers).

Along with explaining the UV projection method you will learn the XSI texture editor in quite good detail and also how to use subprojections... very cool. Bernard covers UV clusters and how to use them to organize your UV's. This is critical as you will learn how to then take all the individually mapped objects and then put them together within the UV space as some items containing multiple parts are textured with a single texture



So, after about 11 hours of tutorials and as long as you follow along you will not only gain the insight to UV mapping with XSI but enough practice to become comfortable doing it.HOWEVER, I have to emphasize that this tutorial set IS NOT just for you XSI'ers. I watched these videos and thought about how I could apply them to my applications that I use. In fact I learned a couple of tricks that I would like to try and implement within Bodyaint. In fact I would also highly recommend that you review the models that are provided. You will gain an appreciation to some modeling topology and setups that aren't necessarily obvious to the novice.

Bottom line is you are not going to find a video of this calibre for the price its offered. In fact, I cannot even think of a UV video tutorial this in depth anywhere. You can't go wrong with this set whether you are an XSI user or not.