Table of contents for March 2021 in 3D World

COVER ARTIST Arno Schmitz SOFTWARE Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush, Mudbox, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Marmoset Toolbag We often look to 3D for creating stunning science-fiction images, photorealistc product visualisation work, blockbuster movie visual effects or archviz scenes that set mood and tone – but 3D can also be a wonderful tool for creating art with a more traditional feel. With that in mind take a look at our fantastic fantasy cover art this month. If this kind of thing excites, as it rightly should, then turn to page 42 where the creator, Arno Schmitz, takes you step-by-step through his workflow. Elsewhere this issue we take a look at the VFX of Monster Hunter, teach you how to set up water simulations, render beautiful interior scenes with Epic’s Unreal Engine and bring…

SOFTWARE ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Maya, Arnold, Photoshop This highly detailed sculpt amounted to two to three months of work for freelance 3D artist Dylan Kowalski. The project provided Kowalski with an opportunity to broaden his ZBrush skill set and hone his high-poly sculpting. “It was a lot of experimentation, testing and of course, a lot of retakes on almost every part,” he explains. Kowalski embraced all of the tricks and techniques in his arsenal for this graceful character. The clothes were created in Marvelous Designer, giving Kowalski a good base to work with in ZBrush. “I decided not to make crazy simulated clothes,” he adds, “it was better for me to build a kind of block mesh that could be detailed later in ZBrush, it took less time…

SOFTWARE 3ds Max, Unreal Engine, Quixel Megascans, Quixel Mixer, Substance Source, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Premiere Pro David Baylis specialises in creating real-time experiences across the automotive and archviz industries. It took him four to five weeks to create the impressive cinematic that this still is taken from. Baylis embraced the full potential of raytracing on this piece. “Everything was full dynamic, no baking,” he adds. “This meant I could simply import my models and see the final result of my scene in real time. Thanks to the Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 I could run this smoothly at around 25 to 30fps.” The car itself was rigged in 3ds Max before being exported to Unreal Engine for animation. “The animation is pre-baked and doesn’t allow much flexibility inside the engine if…

Arno Schmitz is the principal character artist at Guerrilla Games, currently working on Horizon Forbidden West. Previously he worked on Horizon Zero Dawn and Killzone Shadow Fall. www.artstation.com/Arno Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills The goal of this project was to take a character I’ve been doodling during my high school and college years and recreate it to the best of my current abilities. Very similar to how Marvel takes existing comic book characters and evolves their design to be worthy of cinema by reimagining all the details and thinking about the functionality of the outfit. If you decide to use a concept that is not your own, be sure to credit the original artist. The technical specifications for this project are a guess…

Denis is a CG/VFX artist with two decades of experience across film, games and advertisement. His specialisations include compositing, procedural content creation, VFX and motion design. www.kozlove.net Made of shapes, colours and a bit of story, dERIVATIVE is a short film I have directed for the wonderful Mixpoint Studio in Prague. It follows through a row of visual transformations and is likely to be more a work of motion design than a classical CG animation. For this project I had the chance to personally craft every single pixel of the final film (which is freely available at vimeo.com/458135379). What has really helped me is a compositing-centred workflow, which I’d like to talk about in this tutorial. It’s not uncommon among 3D artists in the film and animation industries to overlook…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Creating exciting product shots used to be a matter of dark backgrounds and depth of field. Times change though, and the current trends in advertising are leaning heavily towards more use of single colours in environments, with well-lit hero objects to the fore. A traditional methodology to create a simple colour background would have been to render the shot with an alpha channel, and then in comp add a single colour. The issue with that kind of workflow is that often shadows are needed to add ‘weight’ to the hero object. That can become a complex comping issue as shadow maps need to be created, and these can create more problems in comp than they are worth. Thankfully…

dy93.artstation.com Dongyoung Hwang is a character artist from South Korea. He is currently studying industrial design to learn and discover techniques that cannot be learned by just studying 3D. PAUL ATRE IDES BY TIMOTHÉE CHA LAMET IN THE MOVIE DUNE Software Maya, ZBrush, V-Ray, Mar i, Substance Painter, XGen, Photoshop Year made 2020 TEXTURING An important thing for me when working with textures is to minimise the difference between the texture I’ve painted and the actual render. You need to paint while performing a render test in the software you want to use. I favour V-Ray as a renderer because it is the most interactive. The skin shader parameter values are only slightly modified and almost all the default values are used. I try to keep the process of work…

A veteran journalist and reviewer for the CG industry, Orestis returns to the pages of 3D World this issue to check out this mini PC. www.twitter.com/mrbastounis PRICE From £1,550 COMPANY Intel WEBSITE www.intel.com We explore the latest software and hardware tools to see if they are worth your time or money You might have seen Intel’s NUC ‘Next Unit of Computing’ range before. They’re tiny computers with X86 processors capable of running Windows or Linux, and very nifty for general desktop computing tasks: browsing, word processing, file sharing, entertainment, and torrents. They’re likewise useful for pro-grade tasks too: music production, web design, file, media and database servers, ESXi hosts and so on. However, with integrated graphics being the only available option, 3D had been absent from this list. Until now…

SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Redshift, Megascans, SpeedTree, Photoshop, Lightroom “I ALWAYS LIKE TO HAVE TOTAL CONTROL OVER THE FINAL RESULT IN PERSONAL PROJECTS WHEN I DON’T HAVE TO FOLLOW A STRICT DEADLINE” Freelance 3D artist Rafael Chies began work on this piece as a live demonstration in May 2020, when the year became so busy that he didn’t have time to finish it until months later. Chies enjoys the entire creative process, with every stage bearing its own pros and cons. “Sometimes I feel like modelling, sometimes I just want to lose myself in ZBrush sculpting tiny details,” he explains, “but seeing everything come together and testing light setups is the most relaxing part in my opinion.” One of the challenges in creating this ode to the Monkey Island…

SOFTWARE Cinema 4D, Marvelous Designer, Corona Renderer This inviting visualisation was created by Laura Savelli, of Italian creative studio Lucydreams, over a couple of weeks, from scratch to final render. The title Pixels & Flowers refers to the name of the sofa, designed by Saba. Like most of Lucydreams’ work, this piece was made from scratch with no pre-made assets. Modelling proved to be simultaneously the most enjoyable and challenging part of the process for Savelli. “We work a lot on the texturing and shading process,” she adds. “We love to give our best when working on simple things like choosing the right wood or fabric texture and setting a good projection, getting rid of texture tiling with Corona randomising tools, achieving a good bump or displacement effect, or getting a…

LOCATION Canada Luc Ray recently graduated at Think Tank Training Centre and is now working in the VFX industry. He lives with his wife and dog in Vancouver. 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 This is ‘The Night Tripper,’ a character based on a story I came up with called ‘Louisiana Trip’. I was heavily influenced by these three albums: Exuma - Exuma, Comus - First Utterance, Dr. John The Night Tripper - Gris-Gris. I personally find creating a music playlist just as helpful…

I love getting into technical processes and being as efficient as I can with my work, learning new things every step of the way with each project. www.ricky-thomas.com Developing 3D environments is easier than ever with free software like Unreal Engine and Blender. Often the most difficult part of the process is finding inspiration. Making use of the internet and drawing on real life is a great place to start, but it depends on your goals. If you want to create an environment from your imagination, then coming up with a theme and thoroughly researching it is a good idea. Creating concept art will help you plan before you jump into 3D, or if that’s not your style then being prepared to quickly iterate on your art can also work…

lorenzodesanctis.artstation.com Lorenzo de Sanctis is currently studying concept art at Nemo Academy in Florence, Italy, having begun studies on his own in 2015. PAINTING OVER A 3D RENDER To realise the deep-sea diver I used a combination of techniques and software. I started on ZBrush where I did a simple posing of the program’s default human body with the ZSpheres. After I sculpted the clothing and the helm I moved the object into Unreal Engine 4.25, where I assembled a scene with some assets from Quixel Megascans. After I chose the camera position, camera angle and launched the render I moved into Photoshop where I finished adding more details over my character, such as the rope on his waist and the elements where the helmet connects with the suit.…

SOFTWARE Substance Designer, Marmoset Toolbag Environment and technical artist Rodney Burton particularly enjoyed reliving his early gaming memories when working on this photorealistic render. “Every game written on the tapes I owned and played during childhood,” he explains, “it was fun to include them should anyone see the work and recognise them. The whole thing was a bit of a nostalgia trip and gave me an opportunity to insert my own narrative.” The process begins with a notes page on Burton’s computer, containing random ideas for things he might want to make. “When I want to make something new I block it out in Designer, Maya, or Unreal depending on the idea,” adds Burton. “From there I can judge how interesting or viable it will be and I might pursue it…

SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Arnold, Substance Painter 3D generalist Dhanad Islam began working on this piece whilst juggling a full-time job, family life and numerous other projects, all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. He had several goals he wanted to achieve with the character of Ostaad Bheem Shing (Ostaad means captain in Bengali). First, Islam wanted to prepare the character’s base mesh. “This was critical,” he says, “before I began sculpting details I had to do some math which I picked up from Kris Costa’s Digital Portraiture lectures. In order to fully utilise HD Geometry inside ZBrush, I had to layout the UVs in nine UDIMs. The goal was to render out 8K 32-bit displacement maps to capture all the high-frequency details and high-definition albedo maps.” Using ZBrush’s HD Geometry…

A central tool in most VFX or animation studios is a database to track and review shots. Many, like Animal Logic, use Autodesk’s Shotgun. “We use Shotgun as the central hub for all of our versioning, reviews and production tracking,” says Sydney’s production manager Sean McAlear. “We have a robust pipeline, with many inputs, all of which intertwine and drive automation based on ‘events’ that occur throughout the life of a shot or asset in a department. For example, if the status of a task changes to approved, a render will be generated and a version of the source files can be ‘delivered’ to another department.” “It is also great for artists,” he continues, “as we can condense a wide range of information into a single view, which keeps artists…

geosis093.artstation.com George Siskas is a freelance 3D character artist from Ioannina, Greece. He graduated from UOI School of Fine Arts and has been involved in 3D art for around three years. THANOS 3D MODEL REAL-TIME Software Blender, ZBrush, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag Year made 2020 “BY JUST USING A PRESET BACKGROUND AND SOME THREEPOINT LIGHTING, YOU CAN MAKE IMPRESSIVE CG CHARACTERS” LIGHTING I think lighting is the most important thing when you are working on a 3D portrait. By just using a preset background from Marmoset with adjusted brightness and some three-point lighting, you can make impressive and lifelike CG characters, even if you are rendering them in real time. I also added some fog along with bloom and grain effects. Nothing too fancy really, the program does all the magic.…

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 Sculpting digital cloth is a difficult task. Cloth can have a life of its own, but there are still real-world rules that it has to obey. It can stretch, but only so far. It can fold, but in predictable ways once you start to look at it bunching together. You only have to take a look at your own jeans closely and you’ll see how complex cloth can be, but if you look long enough, you will start to notice things like pinch points, seams pulling in repeatable ways, folded creases at the back of the knees, bunching folds at the bottom…

I am working as an architecture visualizer, CG artist, and tutor in this field. My passion is working hard and learning more about the 3D world. instagram.com/shayanshamlou Fountains are an attractive addition to public areas, gardens or large courtyards, and in this tutorial we’ll learn how to create one for our 3D scenes. First, we are going to enter the model into the software, and then we will undertake the materialisation, construction and preparation of the model. Next we will build the volumes through which water needs to be thrown up or down. The next step will be to enter into Phoenix FD and start simulating water. Finally, we will examine how to achieve a successful output from this plugin and render from the fountains in two modes. Working with…

Building a rig from scratch, in any application, can be a time-consuming and technically challenging process. Not only do you have to wrestle with constraints, expressions, ribbons and all hosts of node variations, but it can sometimes be repetitive, and a bit tedious. Learning even the basics of scripting, be it MEL (Maya Embedded Language) or Python, can not only eliminate many of these tasks, but it can also make you a more productive and valuable member of any team. You see, scripting does not need to be restricted to rig building. Imagine helping the other artists on your team by compressing a whole day’s work into the press of a button, with a script that only took you ten minutes to write. Take this a step further and you…

THE TRIP OF HOLY LIGHT Software Unreal Engine, Maya, ZBr ush, Subst ance Pa inter, Substance Designer, Quixel Mixer, Photoshop Year made 2020 ziwuxin.artstation.com Junliang Zhang, from Shanghai, China, is a 3D environment and lighting artist working at Avalanche - WB Games. LIGHTING AND MOOD Lighting in Unreal Engine 4 was the hardest part of this entire project. I wanted to create a warm and cool lighting mood for the early winter season. I mainly used a directional light as a key light and a skylight for the project. I adjusted the basic settings of my lights, such as colours, intensities, ranges and so on. I used an HDRI sky for my skybox with clouds and sunlight. Then I created some cloud cards for my background, which made the city…

ISSUE 269 FEBRUARY 2021 MASTER YOUR MATTES • Learn how to create amazing outdoor scenes with tips and tutorials from the experts in world building • Transform 2D calligraphy into a stunning 3D neon sign • Explore the incredible visuals of Wolfwalkers • Downloads Free models and textures, files and more! ISSUE 268 JANUARY 2021 BLENDER SPECIAL • This month, it’s all about Blender! The team behind the community-focused, open-source software deliver in-depth tutorials, take us behind the scenes on their exciting Open Movie projects, and provide lots of expert tips for how to improve your workflow • Downloads Free models and textures, files and more! ISSUE 267 CHRISTMAS 2020 DISCOVER SYNTHWAVE • Experts from across the synthwave scene take a look back at the history and influences of this…