Table of contents for August 2019 in 3D World

“It was extremely dispiriting and there were many moments where we asked, ‘How are we going to crack this?’” reveals production VFX supervisor Erik Nordby. “We kept pushing, specifically with Pikachu until we started to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Then we found small successes, leveraged those successes to figure out other Pokémon, and then came up with this methodology that we needed to adopt.” There were four basic phases. “The first one being a chunk of great-looking 2D concept art that felt photoreal further than what we would typically do with creature art,” remarks Nordby. “The second would be this super simple 3D incarnation of that 2D concept art. We would rig it and do a quick turntable. That would be approved not…

A high-resolution digital double was made of Christian Lloyd as Argus. “Christian was sitting in the chair, and that was important because to get proper performance and interaction with actors you have to give them something to react to, otherwise, it will feel phoney,” notes Mr. X VFX supervisor Chris MacLean. “We maintained a lot of prosthetic and then added all of these eyes all over him.” While CG tentacles were planned for, the additional eyes were a late request by the production. The eyes came after we hummed and hawed over what we could do to make this character look crazy and add production value to the sequence,” states MacLean. “The blend points were important especially with all of the deforming and bouncing around he was doing. It all…

AUTHOR Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a 3D and visual effects artist with vast experience across the industry, as both a creator and a technical writer. www.creativebloke.com If you’re new to CGI, you may feel that there are far too many tools to choose from in a dizzying array of software. This series aims to break everything in CGI down to the very basics, so that every artist can be armed with the knowledge of which tool is best. This month we look at soft dynamic animation. In last month’s Basics we explored rigid-body dynamic animations, which are great for when hard surfaces are needed to be destroyed or worked with. Of course, this hits a brick wall (excuse the pun) when ‘soft’ objects are needed to be manipulated. Soft-body…

Paul Hatton replies Your first thought might be, “Why would I want to get dirt into the crevices of my models?”. It may seem a bit odd. Maybe you’re thinking that you want your model to be as clean as possible. Or maybe you just want to rely on the lights in your scene rather than faking it. These are interesting considerations, but I would argue that if you are aiming for realism then you need to consider not only the difficulty of light to get into crevices, but also the dirt that can build up in them. Even though adding this type of effect might be ‘faking’ it, I think we need to remember that what we’re actually concerned about most of the time is really the perception of…

If you need to show a younger version of an actor or a character in a particular project, there are several ways that can be done: you can simply hire a different actor to play the role; you could use archival footage; or, as is becoming increasingly more common, you can use computer graphics and compositing techniques to generate a completely synthetic version. That’s what visual effects studio MPC did for the Christmas 2018 John Lewis & Partners commercial, which follows the journey of Sir Elton John from the point he received his first piano and through various major music moments in his life. Scenes of Sir Elton made use of a stand-in actor, but were then completed with a computer-generated model of the musician to provide a final photoreal…

It’s 2019, and it’s now safe to say that we’re at a point where 4K resolution is a mainstream choice. The price for a general-purpose 4K screen has dropped to the same point a 1080p screen was at a few years ago. Mid-range workstations are more than powerful enough to render at 4K, and there’s plenty of 4K entertainment content to enjoy. The factor that now differentiates displays is no longer resolution but features. On the gaming side, the most high-end displays with 144Hz (or faster) refresh rates and adaptive sync technology are leading to more fluid 3D animation and better gaming experiences. For professional creative work, it’s colour accuracy that matters most, especially when it’s missioncritical to ensure the imagery that appears on your display will look right on…

“THE ONLY TYPE OF VISUAL EFFECTS WE DIDN’T HAVE ON THE SHOW WAS A NORMAL EXPLOSION, BUT WE DID EXPLODE A CAROUSEL IN SPACE”Chris MacLean, VFX supervisor, Mr. X A road trip through various roadside attractions takes on mythological proportions with American Gods, which airs on Starz and Amazon Prime Video. Much like the conflict between ancient and upstart deities featured in the novel authored by Neil Gaiman, the adaptation has experienced turmoil with the departure of original creators Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) and Michael Green (Logan). A constant presence throughout season one and two has been Christopher Byrne (12 Monkeys), who went from being a second unit director to the executive producer/director on the show. “When you see visual effects in other shows it has a different look,” notes Byrne. “What…

“When Technical Boy [Bruce Langley] is standing inside of the tunnel, we’re offsetting the cycles of the laser with different degrees in the lens of the camera,” explains Production Design International owner/partner Howard Ungerleider. “It takes a solid laser effect and creates this banding. We did a scan effect into a huge mirror overtop with a three-dimensional scan coming down, so when the camera shoots it it looks like he’s standing inside of a transporter on Star Trek.” To the naked eye it looked like Technical Boy was standing in a traditional laser cone. “We kept playing with the math on the camera, lower the shutter, raise the refresh rate on the laser, reverse those two and keep going down incrementally until we discovered what people would normally call a…

AUTHOR Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a 3D and visual effects artist with vast experience across the industry, as both a creator and a technical writer. www.creativebloke.com For over two decades, Chaos Group, the team behind V-Ray, have worked to make sure that their product is one of the most well regarded in the industry, by developing options for V-Ray to work with a wide range of digital content creation software, both in the media and design field. V-Ray works with CAD software such as Rhino, SketchUp and Revit, as well as packages such as Autodesk Maya, Houdini, 3ds Max and Blender. V-Ray also works with finishing products such as Nuke for film and animation work and Unreal for real time. V-Ray also has a reputation for being robust, efficient…

1. Terminator: Genisys The 2015 film included a scene of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator battling a younger version of himself. MPC took old prosthetics and extensive reference to build their digital version. 2. Blade Runner 2049 MPC resurrected the replicant Rachael as if she were the character played by Sean Young in the 1982 Blade Runner. A stand-in, digital scans, extensive reference and meticulous VFX artistry all played a part. 3. The Boy and the Piano A CG model of a younger Elton John, in addition to extensive compositing techniques, enabled this John Lewis Christmas commercial to be made, following the renowned musician throughout his career.…

Headquartered in the Seattle metro, an area that is home to some of the oldest and most famous game development studios in the world, V1 Interactive is relatively small by comparison. With a staff count of around 30, it’s a fraction of the size of some of its peers, and it will soon be stepping into a very competitive field dominated by big budgets and longrunning franchises. But what V1 Interactive lacks in size, it makes up for in experience. Each team member was specifically recruited for their job and comes with years, and in some cases decades, of experience. Each step in the process has been finely honed using cuttingedge technology in the hands of people that know exactly how to use it, and at the heart, the developers…

When preproduction for Pokémon: Detective Pikachu started in January 2017, the original plan was that principal photography would commence in August 2017, but that was later shifted to January 2018. “There is no version of us making this movie without that full year of prep, as Pikachu alone took us six months [to develop],” states production visual effects supervisor Erik Nordby, who previously collaborated with filmmaker Rob Letterman on Goosebumps. “Doing 60 characters in any movie is an absolute massive outlay of time, energy and resources, and add to that the necessary rounds of approval with The Pokémon Company. We spent four to five hours almost nightly for about four to five months calling Tokyo and also made trips there. You can’t force the trust that allows for compromises.” HUMAN…

It’s probably not that surprising that just about every sci-fi or superhero show today utilises CG and visual effects. Indeed, some characters in these types of shows are often entirely digital, while the locations and environments in these series are regularly synthetic, or a mix of real locations and manufactured places. 3D World looks at The Orville, Weird City, Doom Patrol and The Flash, and talks to the visual effects studios involved (Pixomondo, FuseFX, Artifex Studios, Encore) about how their VFX brought these sci-fi and comic-book stories to life. THE ORVILLE’S OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD ENVIRONMENTS Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville follows the crew of the titular space vessel as they carry out missions in space and on far-flung planets. That premise immediately calls for extensive digital environment work, and much of that is…

Every few years, a film seems to come along that galvanises audiences and, in doing so proves a useful reminder of the visual power and emotional impact that a film spectacle first experienced on the big screen can have. In spring 2019, Avengers: Endgame satisfied this tradition and, appropriately enough, the movie showcases the work of a studio that is synonymous with science fiction and fantasy movies: Industrial Light and Magic. ILM’s work for Endgame was hubbed at their studio in San Francisco, with ILM’s other studio sites also aiding on the project. Environment, lighting, animation, texturing and compositing all synthesised to create the worlds, characters and drama of the movie. “TO CAPTURE THE TRUE MEANING OF RUFFALO’S SMILE TOOK REAL STUDY”Michael Lum, animation supervisor, ILM Considering the fundamental challenges…

“That was done with a three-camera setup with enough parallax that I could throw that into Agisoft and do a point cloud to export,” states Mr. X VFX supervisor Chris MacLean. “Those exports get taken into Houdini as a sequence and we generated the points, particles and lines. We reprojected the three images onto a cylinder to add some parallax. We were trying to do it messier and feel like she’s learning how to use that power.” The holograms are constructed out of worshippers. “There are hundreds of images of people that are all buried in that,” reveals American Gods executive producer/director Christopher Byrne. “We had a couple hundred extras being worshippers, then we had a two-day guerilla shoot with Kahyun where we had a double decker bus, a wardrobe…

“It was a unique project in that there was a live-action sequence that was shot but needed to be transformed into something totally surreal,” states Tendril founder and director Chris Bahry. “Calling it rotomation is almost funny because what we ended up doing was so much more than that. It’s all carefully tracked object geometry, camera match moves, and sophisticated Houdini particle effects and composites that ended up resulting in the final look.” Mr. X built the Hall of the Gods background interior as a model. “They rendered a panoramic series that we were able to load up in Nuke and build a camera aligned panorama of the interior from. We would position and rotate that background in-between the live-action foreground that had some prop elements and columns, and the…

AUTHOR Maya Jermy Maya is a 3D artist and animator based in the UK. She started her career five years ago remaking and animating characters for Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee – New ‘n’ Tasty.artstation.com/mayajermy When modelling a character, it won’t always be based off a sketch or a full design. Sometimes you just get an idea and want to start modelling as soon as you have a spare moment. Working in the film or games industry usually means there is a sketch, an idea ready to be explored, but there might be times when you have to make your own. Starting off with your own initial sketch or drawing can prove very helpful along the way, as it keeps you from deviating from your goal. One of the problems I face…

Building lifelike CG characters can be a painstaking process filled with time-consuming corrective shapes, tricky guesswork and costly throwaway results. But, as the entertainment industry continues to push the envelope, the demand for plausible creatures is at its highest. Ziva VFX, created by Sci-Tech Oscar winner James Jacobs and Vancouver-based Ziva Dynamics, has quickly become an industry standard for making more realistic CG characters in less time by combining the effects of real-world physics with the rapid creation of soft-tissue materials. By mirroring the properties of nature, the Ziva method helps artists produce CG characters that move, flex and jiggle just as they would in real life, removing the most challenging steps from the rigging process. And as Ziva technology continues to spread into studio pipelines around the globe –…

VIDEO + IMAGES CHARACTER RIGGING IN VR Character creation has become even more intuitive with the ability to now interactively rig live in VR. Martin Nebelong shows you how in this tutorial. STEP IMAGES V-RAY NEXT In our Bootcamp this issue Mike Griggs introduces you to Chaos Group’s V-Ray Next. STEP IMAGES KITBASH A ROBOT ON YOUR IPAD Adam Dewhirst explores the possibilities of mobile modelling to create a detailed parts bin. VIDEO & FILES GET YOUR RESOURCES You’re three steps away from this issue’s video training and files… 1. GO TO THE WEBSITE Type the following into your browser: www.bit. ly/3DW-249 2. FIND THE FILES YOU WANT FROM THE LIST Search the list of free resources to find the video and files you want 3. DOWNLOAD THE FILES YOU…