Kim Goossen's Procedural Modeling Youtube channel

Ok so the theme this week is plugs. I really wanted to share Kim's work. If you're interested in learning great fundamentals in procedural modeling and general Houdini fundamentals, this is an incredible resource. I've worked a little bit with Kim at EA a few years ago and gained a mountain of knowledge from him and other incredible talents in this discipline. If you want to build sustainable, scalable, and dynamic cities, props, characters, etc. This is an awesome place to start.

Here's a link to Kim's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0VQvtms-36ilCVgJQXEM_Q

NVIDIA Hairworks Maya and 3DS Max Plugin available!

NVIDIA recently put out their Hairworks Maya and Max plugins for public use and I definitely encourage people to try it. No word on an engine side implementation yet but if you're interested in testing the performance of Hairworks in Maya, here's your chance. I've played with it a little bit but haven't gotten too far. Still very impressive toolset so give it a shot if you get the chance :)

Hit the jump for a video demo and useful links to try Hairworks for yourself...

Maya to Unreal Plugin

Shameless plug alert! I actually had a chance to play around with this plugin that allows you to sort of live link Maya to Unreal. You can hook up the camera from Maya to the UE4 editor and send object from your Maya scene directly to UE4 and back using serial ports and good timing :)

Hit the jump for links to the source and a demo video...

Alex Forsythe Motionbuilder Python Tutorials

Another shameless plug!

So this set of tutorials is absolutely HUGE if you need to work in Motionbuilder and write python scripts like you would in other DCC applications. Alex does a phenomenal job teaching scripting in Motionbuilder and Python in general. This helped me a ton at work and I wanted to share it here.

Here's a link to Alex's website with his suite of tutorials. The production value is great and the pacing is awesome if you're learning for the first time.

http://awforsythe.com/tutorials

YEBIS 3 Engine

(Real Time in Engine)

Silicon Studio over in Japan is putting out their new YEBIS 3 game engine. They plan to use this engine to develop their new Final Fantasy XV title along with other future titles. Kingdom Hearts 3 was also developed in this engine for a while before the team switched to UE4. This engine seems to do a really nice job with ooooh shiny objects so I look forward to how Final Fantasy will look on this platform.

Hit the jump for more screen shots and video demos of YEBIS 2 and 3...

Project Cars is getting prettier and prettier

I was introduced to this clip at work and I thought you might get a kick out of this. This picture doesn't really do it justice so you need to see the source video: http://fat.gfycat.com/RareOffensiveCavy.webm (Make sure that you're using a browser that supports HTML5, not Internet Explorer!)

Project cars is coming out soon and if you want to play a gorgeous racing sim, this may be the game to play. I'm really excited to see if they can pull these visuals off in their final product. I'm really impressed by how well done the graphics hold up in overcast lighting settings too.

Here's a link to their official site:
http://www.projectcarsgame.com/

Hit the jump for more screenshots from Project Cars development...

Unreal 4 Massive Collection of tutorials!

A friend from work found this really neat page that is a great collection of fantastic free official and unofficial tutorials for UE4.

Here's a link:
https://unreal-engine-4.zeef.com/tom.looman