Table of contents for September 2020 in 3D World

It’s fair to say that the first half of 2020 has been a little unusual. What with lockdowns caused by the global pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement, things are in a moment of flux. What that means for us as a community of 3D and VFX artists is yet to be seen. Clearly the schedules of most, if not all, studios have been heavily impacted, with many productions stopping entirely. Other studios have flourished however, with new opportunities arising from turmoil. Some of you may already work from your homes or small studios, others may work as part of larger facilities and now find yourself at the dining room table. The jury is still out on whether the end result of all this change will benefit anybody, and…

ARTIST Ed Pantera SOFTWARE 3ds Max, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Mari, Maya, Arnold, XGen, Photoshop, TopoGun Character modeller Ed Pantera wanted to recreate his favourite female characters from fighting video games. “I made Cammy from Street Fighter last year,” he explains, “then I planned to make Morrigan from Darkstalkers.” It took Pantera four months to create Morrigan in his spare time. Substance Painter was used for the majority of textures, with Mari and Texturing.xyz maps helping to create the realistic skin. Much of Pantera’s inspiration also comes from his favourite films, the likes of Star Wars and Blade Runner. “I like movies that are full of imagination and nostalgia,” he explains. “If I am touched by a character after watching the movie, I start to make something. 3D technology is so developed now, there is…

ARTIST Alec Hunstad LOCATION United States I'm a character/creature artist and just graduated from Gnomon. I recently started my career at MPC and couldn't be more excited to see what the future holds. The Rookies is a platform to help digital artists get discovered without having to compete with professionals for attention. You’ll get to the front page of those sites one day, but for now, we’ve got your back and want to help turn your passion for creative media into a successful career. WWW.THEROOKIES.CO I created this character to develop a better understanding of the character pipeline for cinematics/film, and to learn Mari. Also, the concept was painted by the legendary Ariel Perez; I had wanted to translate one of his pieces to 3D for a long time. •…

“It’s about understanding the creative decisions [from the Original Trilogy] that make the shots look the way they look,” Hickel explains, in terms of how The Mandalorian refers to the shot-design heritage of Star Wars. He goes on to explain that a guiding creative principle was to ask: “What are good things to take from that and what are good things to leave and modernise?” To illustrate the point, Hickel notes that, “We gave ourselves licence to do a fly-by, like when the Razor Crest comes from a distance and we do a whip pan with it to show off the ship in a great way. That’s not something you see in the OT much. In fact, there aren’t any whip pan shots like that in SW. There are a couple of slow shots…

Tom Hankins Founder & art director at Colorbleed Animation Studios www.colorbleed.nl Allar Kaasik Senior VFX lecturer, Escape Studios, Pearson College London bit.ly/37WoAdT Kenneth Turner CG supervisor at Lexhag VFX www.lexhag.co.uk Matt Hoffman Owner, VFX supervisor, BluFire Studios www.blufirestudios.com Adam Clark Owner, VFX supervisor/artist at Trick Digital www.trickdigital.com Julius Worm Owner, compositor, FREIRAUM FX www.freiraumfx.com Bryan Ray Compositor, Muse VFX www.musevfx.com Nabil Matiben 3D generalist www.artstation.com/matberg Shaina Holmes Owner at Flying Turtle Post www.flyingturtlepost.com Assistant professor, Syracuse University bit.ly/2YrVWho Veikko Luukkonen Visual effects instructor, content creator at Phenomenal Creations bit.ly/2YvVrTs Vi-Dan Tran Action designer for the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, film director www.youtube.com/user/T7pro Jamie Dickinson Freelance colourist, finishing editor and trainer www.jamiedickinson.net Graham Stott Creative lead, Moonraker VFX www.moonrakervfx.com…

Matthew Novak has worked across many disciplines including modelling, texturing/shading, FX, lighting, and is currently a CG supervisor at Scanline VFX in Vancouver, Canada. novakcg.com Substance Designer can be overwhelming when it comes to creating fully procedural textures, and we can often be stuck questioning ourselves. Questions such as, how can this pattern be made efficiently, and how do we start? There’s no specific set of steps and no fixed rules to follow when you’re creating in Substance Designer. One thing that’s important is that everything is kept flexible and as simple as possible to reduce overhead and keep things logical. Organic materials in the real world are naturally formed and can often share similar patterns. These patterns often contain some sort of symmetrical details, vein-like edges and cracks, tessellated…

Having the ability to construct complex systems that allow an animator to easily and intuitively bring a character to life is a true skill, and one which takes time to learn and master. It’s not just a case of adding IK and FK to a creature’s limbs or producing a few blend shapes so they can emote. Rigging goes deeper than this, but the truth is all anyone will ever see are a series of colourful curves overlaid on top of a model. All the time spent developing systems, building node structures and tweaking skin weights is hidden away, and so it should be. At the end of the day, it’s our role as technical artists to create a rig which on the surface looks so easy to pick up…

ARTIST Col Price SOFTWARE 3ds Max, Mental Ray, Photoshop This dynamic scene only took freelance art director and concept artist Col Price a few hours to complete. “I just like to sling stuff together when it's my own work,” says Price, “it's more about the action and story than anything else.” “The ship is a simple model,” he explains. “I don't use normal maps or anything. It’s all lit with one light source. I always prefer to do this, it gives me a better lighting pass and lets me add colour to the shadows. That way I can paint on the image in Photoshop, adding extra textures and details.” The explosion elements were made using an assortment of photographs taken by Price, mostly of fireworks. The reflections are taken from…

ARTIST Tim Curry SOFTWARE 3ds Max, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag Video game artist Tim Curry has worked in game development for eight years, taking on numerous job titles and responsibilities. “Making props is one of my favourite things about game art,” he adds. Many of Curry’s usual techniques were utilised on this piece. “The most noteworthy technique used was one I learned from Ranulf Busby,” he continues, “who shared how to use parallax in Marmoset Toolbag 3 to simulate the reticle movement of a holographic sight. It was very satisfying to see it work as I expected.” Finding a technical aspect with which to push forward his work is crucial to Curry’s approach. “I really like finding something technical to do, even if it's small,” he adds. “For…

INSPIRING CG ARTISTS 3D WORLD sits down for a conversation with Richard Bluff, visual effects supervisor and Hal Hickel, animation supervisor, both at ILM in San Francisco, to unpack the creative adventure of telling the story of a galactic bounty hunter. Werner Herzog, world-renowned filmmaker and occasional actor, takes a key role in the new Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian. Speaking in 2019 about the series, Herzog made the key point that it deploys what he described as mythic images, and his description speaks to the visually compelling quality of the series and the rich tradition of Star Wars. It’s a pop-culture phenomenon that has captivated the imagination in two ways: the story unfolding on screen, and also the story of the creative impulses, choices and challenges to put those stories in motion.…

“One thing that Jon Favreau didn’t want with the CG animation,” Hal Hickel explains, “were certain things that he associates with CG animation and, in his case, negatively. I don’t always agree with him, but he very much wanted the rule to be: ‘If creatures are moving, there’s a reason they’re moving and don’t let things just drift around’, and that is something that can happen with CG animation because the computer is in-betweening, if you will. If you don’t go and adjust things and make sure that there’s a reason for the movement – that it doesn’t just drift between two keys – then you’re going to get that result. It did end up being a really useful style guide; because, of course, in stop-motion nothing moves unless you…

BIM Building information modelling covers various tools and software that create and manage digital representations of real buildings. The data provided can be used to manage the physical and functional aspects of the building in question. CAD Computer-aided design utilises digital technology to create, analyse, modify or optimise a design. CAD techniques are key to many industries including automotive, aerospace and architecture. CAE Computer-aided engineering denotes the use of digital software or technology in engineering analysis. Often CAE involves the analysis of a 3D visualisation of a design, testing and simulating it before it is manufactured physically. CAM Computer-aided manufacturing uses digital software to control machines and automate the manufacturing process. CAM software creates toolpaths for manufacturing machines to follow and converts them into a language the machines can understand.…

Holly has eight years of experience as a freelance VFX artist, and is a lecturer at the University of Lincoln. instagram.com/hollywattvfx This tutorial will guide you step-by-step through the workflow of utilising Bifrost’s powerful tools to create a small-scale simulated liquid. Bifrost is well known for its use in creating large-scale simulations and it can often be overlooked when it comes to smaller, more detailed simulations. The tutorial is aimed at complete beginners to Bifrost as well as those who have previously used it before for large-scale simulations. Bifrost is heavily dependent on the scene, so there is a focus on scale throughout the tutorial beginning with how to set up your scene to scale ready to add Bifrost emitters, colliders and killplanes. The next steps cover how to alter…

I was born in 1996 in Qom, Iran. I actually graduated in electrical engineering – very strange, I know! But I’ve always loved art. amir-nb.cgsociety.org In this tutorial, we will take a look at how to create a simple realistic scene. To start off, we need a great architectural design, then some high-quality assets and textures for making our design more realistic. After that, we will use a combination of lighting, colour harmony and composition to create our desired final look. 01 MODEL THE ROOM AND INTERIOR As you can see, this project only requires some simple modelling; you just need to know about dimensions in architecture to model this room. After creating the room it’s time to arrange the furniture. Some assets were purchased from 3dsky and Evermotion and…

I will demonstrate an easy and powerful way to create a sand material using Blender. This scene is characterised by many elements, the lighting, the models, the reflections, the smoke simulation and obviously the materials, one of these is the sand material. There are a lot of methods for creating a sand material – for example, using image texture – but in this article, I would like to explain how to create a sand material in a procedural way using nodes in Blender. Before we start with the creation of the material, we have to create the mesh: in this case, I created a simple terrain with some dunes. Once we have done this, we can start. First of all, we have to open the Node Editor panel and add…

In order to execute Ron Howard’s vision for Apollo 13, the team at Digital Domain had to embrace the most advanced tools and software available at the time. “For me it was SideFX’s Prisms, the precursor to Houdini,” explains Matthew Elliott Butler. “I was an artist trained as an engineer. I saw an application that allowed artists to open the hood and exploit their abilities to combine skill sets between the disciplines. I wasn’t running Prisms myself, but I was amazed at what these talented artists could achieve.” Fellow Digital Domain team member Kelly Port used Prisms alongside the compositing software, Nuke, which was originally written at Digital Domain by Bill Spitzak. “Nuke was still in its early days, but it was our core software,” Port recalls. “Digital Domain became…

ISSUE 262 AUG 2020 THE PIXAR ISSUE • A special issue dedicated to the world’s favourite animation studio, with exclusive RenderMan tutorials, tech insights, behind-the-scenes on their latest movies, pro tips from the experts, and a look back at the company’s history • Downloads Free models and textures, files and more! ISSUE 261 JULY 2020 TAKE A LOOK INSIDE INK STUDIO • Discover incredible vehicle visualisations from award-winning production studio INK • How 3D technology is helping to advance the field of medicine and healthcare • Create a Triple-A game in Unreal: Part 2, references and colour • Downloads Free video training, files and more! ISSUE 260 JUNE 2020 DETAILED DRAPERY • How to simulate clothes for game characters in Marvelous Designer • Find out how top studios create groundbreaking…

ARTIST Sina Pahlevani SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Arnold, XGen Character artist Sina Pahlevani worked on this image every day after work, completing it in around ten days. Rather than undertaking extensive planning, Pahlevani likes to develop his artwork throughout the process. “Most of the time I don't have a clear image in my mind, I just define the main story of my artwork. I might change things a lot during the process.” First, Pahlevani blocks out the character’s shape and silhouette in ZBrush. The second stage is adding further detail and enhancing the shape of the character, before it undergoes retopology, UV and texturing. “I do retopology and UV in Maya,” Pahlevani explains. “For the texturing part you might use Mari, Substance Painter, or ZBrush Polypaint.” The final stage of the pipeline…

ARTIST Roger Magrini SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, XGen, Substance Painter, Arnold, Photoshop It took character artist Roger Magrini three months to complete work on this lifelike recreation of The Lord Of The Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien. “Everything was hand-sculpted and Polypainted in ZBrush on HD Geometry,” Magrini explains, “except for his pipe, I used Substance for that.” Magrini often uses his artistic experience to create 3D cartoon characters, but he also enjoys the challenge of photorealistic portraits such as this. “I enjoyed most of the process on this,” he says, “but the best part was creating his smile.” Magrini began by gathering as much reference as possible, all with different angles and lighting setups. “Likeness is like a puzzle,” he adds, “so you need reference to fill in the gaps.” Magrini sculpted…

“It gives creative control back to the filmmakers because they can see the world that they’re interacting with. It’s not a sea of green anymore. It’s hard for me to imagine now because I’ve been involved with this technology for two-and-a-half years now. The idea of going back to a set that is bathed in green and the idea that the DP is trying to second-guess what this environment is going to look like from a single piece of concept art, it seems crazy now. Even when we shoot on our backlot we have greenscreen backing there because we’re back up against a railway yard (in LA) and we’re outside, but it’s very frustrating considering that the previous day we may have been on the volume where we could see…

Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He has been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 15 years. southerngfx.co.uk VR creation tools have been around for a while now. As artists we can sculpt, sketch, layout, design, iterate, paint, animate and do a whole host of other cool tasks right inside our VR headsets (HMD). While most of the sculpting is done using voxel-based modelling, very much akin to using spray foam in the air in front of you, Gravity Sketch focused on a spline-based workflow that really suited CAD-based modellers, and you can easily see how automotive designers can benefit from that sort of technology in their day-today work. But what about character and creature designers? Or artists coming from…

Maya Jermy Maya is a 3D artist and animator based in the UK. She started her career in 2012 remaking and animating characters for Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee - New ‘n’ Tasty. mayajermy.artstation.com Antony Ward Since the early 90s Antony has worked for many of today’s top game and VFX studios, and has written three technical manuals and many online tutorials. www.antcgi.com Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is a freelance 3D artist and YouTuber. An expert in the creation of game assets and environments, he shares many of his creations on his channel. www.pietrochiovaro.com There are lots of ways you can create scales for armour, reptiles or other subjects. You could create an alpha, a 3D brush or simply sculpt them on. If we want to find the quickest solution though, we should…

artstation.com/polycrunching Dave Miragliotta has been working in the game industry for about 11 years and is currently a senior environment artist at Respawn Entertainment. MODELLING I went with the modular approach when making the rocks for this scene. I was able to get a good variety with only a few different sculpts. When sculpting the rocks in ZBrush I made sure that each side had an interesting look to it. Leaving some sides simple looking with minimal detail allowed me to break up areas where it was getting too noisy. Also, I left out some details in the sculpt, like cracks which I added later using decals in Unreal. Because the rocks were being reused I didn't want any to stand out with too much distinguishing detail.…

How did you become a freelance generalist? After spending 14 years working in various game studios, I decided that I wanted to try going it alone. Luckily, I was working at Sumo Digital at the time and they fully supported my decision and gave me the option to return if it didn’t work out. 13 years later I’m still going strong. What skills and qualities are essential to being a freelance generalist? You need to be focused and dedicated to your work. If you’re at home, it’s easy to get distracted with other things. You also need to be constantly learning new techniques to improve your own skills, which from a client’s perspective, makes you a better person to hire. What advice can you give to artists that may want…