T u t o r i a l s

This tutorial area will walk you, step by step, through the process of using messiah's powerful tools.  These are meant as a "jump start" to get you familiar with working with messiah to create things you never thought possible.  Once you learn these basics, the rest is limited only by your imagination...   (Actually, you'll be limited by time, money, and a fickle audience.)

There are three skill levels here, and they're each displayed at the beginning of the tutorial:

The Tutorials are grouped into the following categories:

Effect Types: Contains tutorials for each of the different effect types, such as Bones, Melt, etc.  These will give you the basic idea of what the various effects are used for and how to set them up.

Expressions: Contains a variety of tutorials using various effects and tools, like Sliders.

Compose: How to use the non-linear motion editor.

Texturing and Rendering:  How to use the texturing system and how to render the images.

General: Contains a variety of useful and educational projects.  Many of these use a combination of tools and effects.  One of the great things about messiah is that everything works well together and effects can be layered.  Some of the tutorials in this section will show you how to combine effects.  Most of the tutorials in this section are of the Intermediate and Advanced skill level.

The idea of these tutorials-- even the Advanced ones-- is to teach you how to use the tools, therefore they might not seem too exciting.  But we believe that this is the best approach.  To give you a couple of analogies to explain this better, it's like teaching you how to use a pencil, but not how to draw; or how to use a word processor but not how to write a novel.  In my experience, tutorials that are too specific aren't very helpful.  Not only that, but one of the things they end up teaching you is how to rely on tutorials, which is a bad thing.

To begin, select a category from the list at left.  A completed scene file of each (where applicable) is located on the messiah CD in the  messiah_content\Scenes\Tutorialsfolder.