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After producing post-apocalyptic horror comedy Zombieland and crime drama Gangster Squad, filmmaker Ruben Fleischer enters into the realm of superheroes with Venom. A volatile parasitic alien symbiote that inhabits other beings finds a host in investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) as he uncovers the nefarious plans of a survivalist corporation known as the Life Foundation run by Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed). “It’s always about character, casting the best actors for each role and providing a space where they can do their best work. I was excited to learn the whole a spect of visual effects as I had never done an entirely CG character before in a film. It’s a whole new set of skills in my toolbox as a filmmaker and is such a huge part of modern…

“You’re moving between character and effects animation, so one builds on top of the other and [they] inform each other,” explains Paul Franklin. “There was a fair bit of work that also went into streamlining the pipeline because there were so many shots, particularly in the final sequence when Venom and Riot are confronting each other at Carlton Drake’s rocket launch base, which is largely CG. Changes were made to the workflow so that we could see first-pass lighting consistently in context, understand whether we were on the right track in making sure that all of the shots were balanced, and that the story was being told dramatically.” Final shots are still reliant on the skills of artists. “It has been a collaboration of all talents, starting with the layout…

Back in November 2017 I directed and produced my first title sequence for a design event in Antwerp called Us By Night. The film is one continuous shot of a growing superstructure that acts as a backdrop for the title cards. I have always been fascinated with procedural workflows so the goal was to take this to the next level. I wanted to build something with dependencies that followed a ruleset, so that it could grow itself without me having to direct it. I had over 65 title cards that needed to be shown throughout the piece. My intent was to create a scrolling background that continues to build from the bottom up to form a bigger structure that would represent a trophy of sorts for the event itself. This…

Simon Edwards replies In real-world photography, rays of light are at their most visible when they have a surface to bounce off, such as dust, pollen or a mist. When these ‘sources’ are unavailable, isolating the light against a dark surface generally works well. In the virtual computer environment these same beams or shafts of light can be simulated with an effect known as volumetric lighting, or ‘god rays’. God rays might appear when shining through clouds, trees or small cracks in an otherwise dark room. This effect can be achieved by using a ‘Volume Light’ effect, which is available in the Environment dialog of 3ds Max. Here you can pick a light source for the effect and apply a Density value as well as a Noise and even a…

“MANY PLUGINS HAVE BEEN BROUGHT INTO THE MAYA FOLD AND BECOME PART OF THE BASE SOFTWARE, FOR EVEN BETTER INTEGRATION” Maya is one of the most comprehensively featured 3D applications available. It’s vast and capable, but that means certain tasks can be harder to complete, as you learn the workflow and navigate the menu systems. This isn’t a failing, as artists working in particular fields will build the muscle memory to do what’s needed, but for the many generalists who only rarely use certain tools, it can be frustrating. This is where the community comes into play, with either smart artists writing scripts or canny developers spotting the need to make odd jobs easier. There are many ways that Maya can help improve your workflow, but plugins are something most…

Over the years, the technology needed to support truly engaging virtual reality experiences has reached a level of capability and affordability that has meant immersive virtual projects are most definitely here to stay, and will only get better. VR has mostly been about a single person donning a headset to play a game, or to create digital content alone and in a limited environment, although backpack VR rigs are starting to pop up more frequently. WorldViz has taken the concept and now offers the tools to make VR a full group experience, where multiple users can easily share and engage in a project together, interacting with each other in ways that have more of an emotional impact as well as wide-reaching uses. Visible, the software that WorldViz uses to run…

PRICE Core: $2k / FX: $4.5k / Indie: $269 / Apprentice: Free | COMPANY SideFX | WEBSITE www.sidefx.com Some serious users of Houdini might say that the software is more of a 3D operating system, because of its complexity and versatility. The newest release, 17 or namely Banshee, is the heaviest release in recent years. As usual, the dev team at SideFX have focused mostly on the effects modules, but have also touched on almost all other parts of Houdini, so just listing all of the new features and enhancements would need a few pages, at least. As you may have noticed in previous releases, many new features are ‘by TDs, for TDs’ kind of tools and the low-level, hard-coded ones are throttled back. It’s the same with this version,…

“It’s black on black a lot of the time,” observes Venom visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin. What defines a black-painted metal object is not the direct illumination but the reflections of the environment around it. “What we needed to do was to dress the reflections into the surface in order to give us a read on the shape. Initially we were driving it from the HDRI maps that we captured on the locations on set, but Venom came out looking like a highly polished 1950s car driving down the strip in Vegas. He was a glittering galaxy of lights, which didn’t make him appear particularly threatening because he ended up looking like a Christmas tree sometimes!” Franklin continues: “We ended up lighting him in much the same way you would…

1. Original frame The frame from the original 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit features actress Sally Field riding next to actor Burt Reynolds. Ultimately, the present-day Reynolds, playing ageing movie star Vic Edwards, would be composited by Trick Digital to sit next to his younger self. 2. Roto “We used Fusion Studio to rotoscope Sally out of the shot,” explains Trick’s Adam Clark. “However, since her hair was blowing in the wind and she’s moving across the car in the shot, we ended up having to completely replace the background. This meant using Fusion Studio to rotoscope Burt’s Bandit character out of the shot and then rotoscoping him back in, along with Vic.” 3. Final “We used Fusion Studio’s rotoscope and keying tools to do this frame-by-frame,” explains Clark.…

When it comes to making a character move in 3D you are only limited by your knowledge and imagination. A rig can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be and can take anywhere from a day to a month to build, some even longer. Once you start digging into the world of rigging you may find it easy to become overwhelmed by how complicated the process can be. With constraints, utility nodes, expressions and a whole host of other Maya tools thrown into the mix, it can make your head spin and might put you off even attempting it. With this three-part series we will focus on building a rig for a cute robot character, generously supplied by the editor of this magazine Rob Redman.…

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. Let’s continue exploring materials and shaders by looking at bump and displacement maps. In a previous issue’s 3D Basics article we took a look at normal maps, which are a type of image map used to add extra detail to your models. There are other image map types for adding details and relief to models: bump and displacement maps. These both use black and white imagery to create relief data for a model, making bump and displacement imagery…

PRICE £234 for the set of three, or £84 each | DEVELOPER 3DTotal | WEBSITE 3dtotal.com Most artists will be aware of the array of écorché sculptures that are available these days, mostly male and female human anatomy and in a range of styles from full écorché to planar. Firstly, what is écorché? It simply means ‘skinned’ in French and in this context it refers to an anatomical model or sculpture that has had its skin removed to help an artist understand what’s going on underneath. 3DTotal has a large range of figures available and they have been very popular for some time now. This new range adds to that growing collection with a dog, a horse and a large cat, covering three of the more popular large mammalian families.…

“We had to dress the reflections carefully into Venom’s eyes,” states Paul Franklin. “He looked best in a complex lighting environment such as the street where he first appears; that gave us a subtle low light and highlight in the eyes. We also did things like subtle vignetting which we controlled on a shot-by-shot basis to give us some shape so they didn’t look completely flat. Even some subtle surface relief which is quite organic.” The human eyeball isn’t completely smooth. “It has veining and all sorts of things going on in it that give it a subtle relief,” remarks Franklin. “You don’t necessarily notice it when you’re looking at a person’s face but you notice it when it’s not there. You sell the emotion through the shape of the…

Adrift images © 2018 STXfilms • Big Little Lies images © 2017 HBO • Three Seconds images © 2017 Central Partnership • Sicario: Day Of The Soldado © 2018 Sony Pictures “WE USED ONLY 300 REAL PEOPLE, SEAT ED IN THE FIRST ROW. THE REST OF THE CROWD BEHIND THEM WERE CG”Pavel Bezborodov, visual effects supervisor, CGF A few issues ago, 3D World examined several recent projects where invisible visual effects were relied on in unique ways. Far from being ‘simple’ effects, invisible VFX involve significant attention to detail in order to hide the fact that they are effects at all, which is certainly the case in the new projects being showcased here. They include water simulation work on the lost-at-sea adventure Adrift, seamless green-screen compositing in Big Little Lies,…

The render revolution, powered by the adoption of using the graphics card (GPU) of a computer to allow both interactive render previews and much faster final renders, has brought many huge advantages for artists. There are catches, however, such as render engines requiring a certain GPU hardware or computer operating system. This can leave many artists feeling left out due to the hardware choices they have made. Thankfully though AMD, the maker of both CPUs and GPUs, has created a powerful, physically based, next-generation render solution: Radeon ProRender. This offers hardware-agnostic solutions for Maya, 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, Blender, SolidWorks and Unreal Engine, which are available now with a Modo version available in beta. As Radeon ProRender is based on OpenSource standards, it can work on any GPU and…

Pietro Chiovaro replies Today I will show you my simple process for the creation of the desert sand material using Substance Designer. For this type of substance, I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/Roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic output since it isn’t necessary for this substance. At this point we can start to add the nodes useful for this material, so from the Substance Designer library we need: the Grunge Map 006 and Dirt 1 noises (these are the main elements of the sand material), the Height to Normal World Units filter, two Levels filters, a Warp filter, a Blur filter and the Gradient Map filter which will give colour to the sand. Now it’s time to link all of these elements together. First of all, we need to…

Autodesk is a name synonymous with 3D design software. In fact, when you see visual effects in any blockbuster movie or TV show, chances are Autodesk software is behind much of it. But Autodesk wasn’t always the creative software giant it is now. When John Walker founded the company in 1982, it had a simple product line, which included AutoCAD and not a glimpse of 3D powerhouse and flagship software Maya to be seen. At that time, Maya was owned and developed by Alias, which first released the software back in 1998. Alias recognised the potential of Maya, focusing its efforts on a major update every year until the company was acquired by Autodesk in 2005. And it had a very solid foundation to work with: not two years before,…

“Since the beginning my goal with Video Copilot has been to deconstruct high-end visual effects and motion design in order to find ways to make it easier to do,” says founder Andrew Kramer. Since 2005 Kramer has been running Video Copilot as a collaborative resource for training, design tools and artists, aiming to show creators just what’s possible. “Video Copilot started as my journey through visual effects and motion graphics was developing,” he explains. “I was somewhat motivated by a sentiment at the time that ‘certain effects could not be achieved in After Effects’; this definitely fuelled some of my early experiments and helped to challenge me.” This led directly to the creation of Action Essentials, a collection of pre-keyed action elements that is soon to be reimagined and updated.…

VIDEO + STEP IMAGES RIG A ROBOT IN MAYA In this tutorial from 3D veteran Ant Ward, you will learn how to take your character models and rig them for use in your animation projects, using fast and efficient methods and easy workflows. STEP IMAGES BASICS: BUMP MAPS In this issue’s Basics Mike Griggs shows you how to use the bump channel and how it can help your work. VIDEO + STEP IMAGES MAYA VFX Follow along with this expert training from Stephen Studyvin, showing you how to use HDRIs. SIGN UP! For content direct to your inbox, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at: bit.ly/3dworldnews FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-241-maya…