Not only will you learn how to use the Cycles render engine, you’ll also learn the core principles of physically based shading. Using the ninja character as an example, we’ll go through all the various kinds of surfaces and study how and why they look the way they do, and then replicate that using node-based materials.

Cycles can often seem slower than traditional renderers, due to the fact that it’s a brute-force path tracer (meaning that instead of trying to fake or approximate light, it calculates it exactly as it behaves in reality), giving us the best possible image quality by default. For this reason, we’ll also cover several ways to optimize our scene and speed up the render without losing image quality.

DVD Chapters

0. Introduction
1. Building a Basic Material
2. Texturing Overview
3.1. Lighting Setup
3.2. Fresnel
3.3. Subsurface Scattering
3.4. Metals
3.5. Clothing
4.1. Sai
4.2. Goggles
4.3. Eyes
4.4. Hair
5. Node Groups
6. Render Optimization

Home Page - http://www.cgmasters.net/training-dvds/character-creation-volume-3-5-cycles-convert/