Table of contents for March 2016 in 3D World

This issue we’ve gathered together a group of amazing artists to share their advice for designing, modelling and rendering robots and mechs on page 36. Also, beginning on page 30 our team of expert artists answer your mech-related CG art queries. Plus, turn to page 48 to discover how to create this issue’s mech cover. Using 3ds Max, Mudbox and Corona Renderer, our cover artist Tomi Väisänen shares his pro workflow to model, texture and render a battle-damaged mech. If you like what you read this issue, why not take things a step further and subscribe to our new Pro Subs club offer; members get exclusive news, discounts and offers as well as 3D World delivered both in print and digitally! See page 53 for details. SUBSCRIBE RIBE Subscribe to…

HEROES – DARK KNIGHT This high quality animated knight comes with two LOD levels (3344 tris and 1554 tris) and two high quality sets of textures. The package includes 12 animations. Get it at: bit.ly/205-knight FANTASY HORDE – TROLLS These animated characters come with an optimised polygon count, two LOD levels (6000tris and 3000tris) and four different textures. The pack includes 12 animations and face rig. Download here: bit.ly/205-trolls LOW POLY GOBLINS These three low poly goblins are optimised for mobile. The pack comes with 950-1050 tris for the complete character and weapons, three textures on each and eight animations. Download it at: bit.ly/205-goblins…

OSCAR SHORTLIST RELEASED At the time of going to print the shortlist for the best VFX Oscar for 2016 was announced and included 10 films that stood out in 2015, of that list MPC had worked on many, including The Revenant. As you read, this the list will have been baked off to the final five movies, but we’re predicting a tussle between The Martian and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The 10 shortlisted movies are, Ant-Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ex Machina, Jurassic World, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Tomorrowland and The Walk. Adam Valdez, MPC animation director and VFX supervisor says, “2015 has been a significant year across all the MPC sites. Artists have continued to bring their collaborative spirit,…

SET UP RENDER PASSES The model’s materials are set up in grouped folders, so it’s a simple task to render several passes. A Clown pass can be used for easy selections in Photoshop. I render a Beauty pass with an alpha channel, then a Shadow pass by making the mech a flat white so I can multiply the shadows in Photoshop later. BACKPLATE AND ALIGNMENT When choosing backplates I prefer a background that isn’t too distracting. Use walls or windows to match the perspective and then save your camera. I try to use an HDRI that matches the lighting, and also try and match the angle of shadows to make the model appear situated within the scene. OVERPAINTING In Photoshop, I take a rough-edged brush and pick out small areas…

ONE BLOCK OUT PRIMITIVES Intersect the forms you want together and make sure that loops match as closely as possible, and there’s enough geometry to maintain. TWO ATTA CH AND EDIT Attach geometry and delete unwanted edges. Get the edge flow to match the main form. I keep small gaps between geometries to help bridging and welding. THREE BRIDGE AND CLEAN Bridge geometry together and make support loops. You may need to move vertexes by hand. Keep constraints on for faces. Check geometry works with subdivions.…

ONE USE POINT DISTRIBUTORS This distributor lends itself well as a starting point for ivy. You can now create points and click in the viewport where you would like the ivy to start growing. TWO OBJECT REACT MODIFIERS Object react is very useful for growing around Max geometry. Make sure Magnetic is ticked, pick the object and have a play with strength parameters to get the climbing ivy effect. THREE USING OBJECT SLICE Object Slice is another helpful modifier when creating vegetation that interacts with geometry. By adding this you can pick objects that would like GrowFX to not grow through, avoiding messy intersections between meshes.…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO If you see the Play icon, use the link! ARTIST PROFILE Camille Kleinman Camille enjoys drawing and sculpting, and teaching others the art of digital clothes design. She is an expert in Marvelous Designer and has a video training program for those wanting to master the tool. www.CGElves.com TOPICS COVERED Patterns Sewing tools Simulation Posing Animation In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a beautiful, dynamic 3D dress using Marvelous Designer 5 (MD5) – the cloth simulation software used by leading artists and studios to quickly create clothes for 3D models. Used on games like Assassin’s Creed and Metal Gear Solid V, as well as major motion pictures including The Hobbit, Ted and the Adventures of Tin Tin, MD5 is fast becoming the industry standard. Since…

CRAIG CRANE Director, Motion Associates Ltd www.linkedin.com/in/craigcrane “The biggest issue with remote working is the security of the data, so backups and encrypted drives are essential. My company Motion Associates is a provider of on-set Lidar scanning for VFX and takes clients’ security requirements very seriously, to the point that we invested £40K last year alone in security measures to ensure we are compliant. These measures are applicable to working on-set, in our studio in Sussex and beyond.” JAMES HATTIN Founder, VFX Legion vfxlegion.com “I first came up with the idea of a fully remote pipeline in 2000. ISDN was the fastest internet we could afford. Living 400 miles from my office in Santa Monica, I’d make a duplicate drive of all the data needed to composite the work, then…

1. TRY IT YOURSELF “Learn to look at things critically. Investigate how a shot or scene was put together, look at the development of the shot and try to emulate it, if possible.” 2. KNOW THE TOOLS “In comp you need to know your toolset. You should be ready to go, and artists who can be ready to jump on shots without thinking what tools do what are essential. Train yourself to look at colours and so forth in a shot and know which tool was used.” 3. WHEN TO PASS “Take time to look at how shots are created and understand what can and can’t be done, and when to hand off to another department. Using the bar scene as an example, we used Houdini for the FX elements…

Amin Akhshi Iran-based Amin is a skilled mech modeller who mixes ZBrush, Mari and Marvelous Designer to create unique mechanical concepts. www.artstation.com/artist/amin Tor Frick Tor is a 3D generalist with a love for machines, working as technical art director at MachineGames, most recently on Wolfenstein: The New Order. www.torfrick.com Nadeera Gunasekara Nadeera is 3D modeller at X10 Productions, a film and advertising production company based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Their clients include Unilever and Pizza Hut. www.artstation.com/artist/nadee77ex Paul Massey Paul works in motion graphics at McCann Manchester. He mostly works in TV advertising, from video editing to 3D modelling and character sculpting. www.artstation.com/artist/zeclipse Valeriy Orlov With over eight years’ experience in film and video games, including The Godlike, Valeriy is founder and art director of Magix FX and Valart Studio.…

Valeriy Orlov’s Weapons For Peace is an open-source project that he hopes will inspire artists to rethink how weapons are used and created. “Weapons must be used in a very limited case and only as a demonstration of force, aiming to protect civil people and not as an act of physical aggression to pursue someone’s selfish goals,” says Valeriy. In a sense, he wants artists to create ‘defensive weapons’. His initial robot concept is the MMCS RATNIY M09, created as a modular design so artists can see how each piece fits together and can be developed in new directions. “This character is simple and can be easily understood by everyone. I think that it’s not quite the right strategy to start a big opensource project with complicated characters,” says Valeriy.…

ARTIST PROFILE Hannah Kang Hannah is a graduate of the Gnomon School. She currently works as a 3D artist at Legacy Effects in California. hannah_kang. artstation.com TOPICS COVERED Character design Detail modelling Composition Rendering Compositing FOLLOW THE VIDEO If you see the Play icon, use the link! Before starting off a personal project, I like to brainstorm and choose wisely (to my best ability) why I want to be modelling a certain subject. What drives me the most towards a direction for my project is the story aspect. Creating scenarios and stories in my head makes the process much more enjoyable instead of creating random characters or scenes. I like feeling connected to my work because without that, I would be creating an empty, but pretty, image. One artist that…

AUTHOR PROFILE Josh Parks Josh is a compositor at MPC as well as a part-time lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. www.joshparks.co.uk V-Ray for Nuke is an exciting plug-in in the compositor’s growing arsenal of gizmos and plug-ins, which are available to throw at a project, in order to make quicker changes to the look of a shot. As someone who has used V-Ray a little while ago in Maya, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the plug-in for Nuke. I like the idea of bringing in all the image sequences and starting from there, with all decisions on textures and lighting having been decided previously in the pipeline. Despite this, I can see a need for compositors to have access to make these changes in Nuke. When I…

AUTHOR PROFILE Marta Niemczynska Marta is a 3D designer at Corporation Pop in Manchester. For many years she produced work for animations and commercials and is now focusing on game engines. corporationpop.co.uk We’ve been using Unity for more than five years, so when Unity 5 launched we wanted to test its new features, particularly the physically-based shader and realtime GI (global illumination). PBR (physically based rendering) texturing is not a new concept, but we hadn’t had the chance to use it in the Unity engine without using third party assets. We decided to recreate Corporation Pop’s studio as closely as possible in Unity 5. Here I share our insight from the project, in which we create an online 3D virtual environment. We had to understand how the geometry of the…

AUTHOR PROFILE Steve Jarratt Steve has been interested in CG for many years. He’s a regular contributor to 3D World and edited the magazine for two years. bit.lly/steve-jarratt After four years in development, Paint & Stick has arrived, and mighty impressive it is too. Effectively two plug-ins in one, it enables the creation of hand-drawn animation within After Effects, plus the ‘gluing’ of 2D elements on to 3D renders. It features the usual array of painting tools, with the import of Photoshop brushes and creation of custom brushes within After Effects, onion-skinning, plus erase and matte brushes (for erasing strokes or the layer itself). For compositing artists and animators, this in itself is worth the investment, but as this is 3D World we’re more interested in the ‘Stick’ part than…

When you’re creating amazing new 3D worlds, you need someone to explore them. Who better than this awesome space explorer, an animated character with optimised polygon count? It’s the work of ‘Polygonmaker’, aka Brazilian 3D artist Fabio Brasiliense, who specialises in creating 3D art for mobile games. His work can be seen on Creative Market. A platform for digital design content from independent creatives around the world, Creative Market recently launched a 3D art section. It’s a great place to sell your content, says Fabio. “I’ve been creating characters for online stores since 2011, and uploaded the models to Creative Market just before the 3D store opened,” he explains. “It looked like a great opportunity to expand the business.” FABIO BRASILIENSE Fabio, aka Polygonmaker, is a supplier of royalty free…

SICK BASTARDS Second place in the Humster3D competition was ‘Sick Bastards’ by the RStyle team, who used 3ds Max, Corona, ZBrush and Photoshop. “Producing this image gave us a good workout with UVW texture unwrapping,” explains founder Konstantin Rozumny. “The hardest part to model was the car’s engine – I had to dive into mechanical drawings and photos to make it.” Working from one camera view enabled him to add a huge amount of details to the foreground objects. “This gives an impression that all the geometry in the image is very detailed. I also spent a lot of time on textures, most of which are custom handmade. Bump maps, reflection maps and dirt maps add a great amount of detail to the image, even if the geometry is not…

EXPERT PANEL André Roux André has more than 10 years’ experience in the digital art/game industry. He is lead production artist at Inovae Studios and Camouflaj. www.inovaestudios.com Cirstyn Bech-Yagher Cirstyn is a freelance CG artist and educator, with over 15 years’ experience in 3D. Her clients include AMD and Daz. www.northern-studios.com Carsten Biernat Carsten is a senior concept designer at Unique Voodoo Studio. He is now focusing on creating 3D concept designs for games and movies. www.uniquevoodoo.com Rob Redman Rob runs a 3D animation and VFX studio, working for clients ranging from governments to rock stars. He’s also an industry commentator and trainer. www.pariahstudios.co.uk CINEMA 4D How can I make my robots more menacing? Charles Lewis, UK Rob replies There are two main approaches to answering questions like these. The…

EXPERT TIP Make it real The level of believability is the most important thing in mechanical design, which you virtually have to represent on your artwork. START WITH SIMPLE SHAPES I start from a simple basic shape; a cube and a cylinder in Maya. At this stage I’m not worried about the details, I am just trying to figure out how and where the parts are going to join, and which parts are going to have movement. It’s better to use different colours for each part and group them accordingly. CREATE A QUICK RENDER When I’m done with the basic mesh of my model, I do some quick renders from different angles in KeyShot, the real-time renderer, to see how it’s looking. Before moving on to the next step, I…

ARTIST PROFILE Tomi Väisänen Tomi is a 3D artist at Ubisoft RedLynx, and is from Helsinki, Finland. Working in the advertisement and game industry for several years, Tomi also fits in personal projects when he can. tomivaisanen.com In this tutorial I’ll explain my workflow for creating a convincing and detailed mech, scarred by battle damage and completed with worn, grime and grunge textures. I will guide you through all the steps, starting from the gathering of reference images, which will give you a clear vision of where we are going. After that, I will plan and sketch out the model in 3D primitives. I will show you how to survive the stress of crunch time by speeding up your process. I’ll also share my process for modelling complex forms with…

ONE EDITING LAYERS A simple trick to go back and edit a layer in your normal is to enter Sculpt mode – second button on the left in the NDO UI panel. You can enter Sculpt mode at any time. TWO WORK ON SMALL DETAILS Use the Brush tool in Photoshop to add small details to an existing normal map. If working on an existing normal it will use the same layer settings for speed. THREE USING SCULPT LAYERS Remember, anything added to a Sculpt layer is instantly converted to a normal. When you exit Sculpt mode, it automatically zips your file to reduce file size.…

ONE START WITH A BOX Model from reference as a guide. A good poly-modelling method to keep clean quad geometry is to start from a box, apply a TurboSmooth and Spherify modifier. TWO VIEW ALIGN Select the top half polygons in top view and hit View Align in the Edit Poly menu. Delete the bottom half and we have a quad mesh to work with. THREE PUSH AND PULL VERTICES Now go with the flow, following the reference guide behind. When happy with the shape, apply Shell and TurboSmooth for thickness and a Noise modifier for more detail.…

MAIN FEATURES GPU accelerated render engine Full biaised engine, which allows for greater flexibility Vastly increased render speed compared to CPU based render engines One license comes with free plug-ins for Maya, and Softimage applications GPU rendering has revolutionised the CGI industry over the past couple of years. Redshift has become one of the most talked about GPU render solutions as it offers the flexibility of existing CPU based render solutions, with the speed of GPU acceleration. The key to Redshift is that it’s a biased render engine, meaning it uses techniques to ‘cheat’ how the image works – exactly the same methodology traditional CPU based render engines such as V-Ray use. Unbiased engines mimic the physics of light much more closely, meaning comparably much longer render times and potentially…