Editorial
Welcome to the first issue of 2010, and with the New Year comes two new tutorials to get excited about!

We’ll be starting a fantastic new five part tutorial series on character modeling by the second place winner of the Dominance War IV competition, Cédric Séaut using Max, beginning this month with a look at the concept of the character, focusing on the building of the character from the mesh to the basic sculpting. We also start the New Year as promised with another new tutorial series, environment lighting with Andrew Finch for Max and Mental Ray, Andrzej Sykut for Max and V-Ray, Joseph Harford for Maya and Mental Ray, and Fredi Voss in Cinema 4D. Each of our artists begins with our outdoor scene at night, and talks us through the lighting and applying mist and fog. With two great new tutorials like this the following few months promise to be exciting!

In this issue we also pick up where we left off in our V-Ray for Max series by Eric Ennis, this month focusing on materials and textures. He walks us through V-Ray and its many settings, and we also get a peek at some of the special features that it offers. Another tutorial we pick up again in the New Year is creating a Fantasy Scene by Richard Tilbury; this month Richard shows us how we can use Photoshop to extract textures from photos to enhance our Fantasy Scene.

This year’s first interview is with Digital Domain artist Thitpong Jitmakusol, otherwise known as Pao, asking him what it’s like in California working on blockbuster movies, and how his artwork is influenced by his upbringing in Thailand.

We bring you a making of from Łukasz Pająk, and in our gallery feature artwork from Sven Juhlin, Christopher Desse, Alexey Kashpersky, Caio César Brachuko Fantini, and many more!

What a start to the New Year?! Enjoy!