Indice dei contenuti per May 2020 in 3D World

“IT WAS CRITICAL THAT WHATEVER WE DID TO ASSEMBLE AND CONNECT THE SHOTS TOGETHER NEVER BETRAYED THE CAMERA WORK”Guillaume Rocheron, production VFX supervisor In order to honour the stories told by his grandfather about being a soldier during World War I and immerse the audience in the experience, filmmaker Sam Mendes (Skyfall) decided to follow the mission of British lance corporals Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and William Schofield (George MacKay) to call off an attack through war-torn France as if it was a single shot. The concept led to a rethinking of the traditional way of tackling visual effects, which are normally divided by shots and sequences. The post-production period for 1917 lasted 17 weeks with digital augmented imagery encompassing 91 per cent of the theatrical runtime. “Visual effects pipelines…

1. LEGO DIGITAL DESIGNER A massive part of the directors’ brief was to ‘stay true to the medium’, so from a very early stage we knew that we weren’t really going to be able to take any shortcuts. Because of that we committed to individually creating every single digital LEGO brick. One track involved developing models and designs using LEGO Digital Designer (LDD). Despite being a relatively simple app, LDD was an obvious choice for building our designs as it came with a complete brick library and reasonably advanced LEGO building capabilities. With each LDD model, we could generate a list of brick IDs and set to work on creating the required bricks, starting with the most commonly used. 2. DEVELOPING A BRICK FORMAT FOR DIGITAL BRICKS LEGO Denmark had…

PART 1/3 The project I am going to break down here is a pitch for a commercial I did for an advertising agency in Barcelona, Spain. The campaign was about promoting a brand of still water, and the overarching theme was relating to the purity of this water brand as being like the water you may extract from a glacier. It was also important to find similarities to the legend of Excalibur, which has always fascinated me. With this idea in mind, I decided to create a bottle made of stainless steel emerging from the ice, and cutting through it as if it was a sword. This was a project that had several technical challenges, such as creating a pattern of ice that needed to look clean and believable when…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO http://bit.ly/3DW-food AUTHOR Rusty Hazelden Rusty Hazelden is a visual effects artist, writer, and YouTuber based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He makes videos about movie visual effects techniques. YouTube.com/RustyHazelden PART 4/4 For over 30 years, Pixar’s RenderMan has been used in the film industry to render movies featuring groundbreaking animation and visual effects. In this four-part tutorial series, we're going to discover how to harness the power of RenderMan by taking an animated shot from start to finish, and learn all of the techniques required to create a photorealistic animation using Pixar’s RenderMan for Maya. Creating photorealistic images with RenderMan has never been easier. In this series we begin with untextured objects in Maya, and learn how to create surface materials, set up lights, adjust camera attributes, and…

The iPad is now ten years old, and in that time, it has occupied an awkward space in many people’s computing lives. While it is great for content consumption, it can be argued that as a creative tool, the iPad has had its limitations for all but 2D artists, who are well supported by applications such as Procreate. 3D artists now potentially have a breakout tool on the iPad. Forger is an app that has been around for years; it started out as a piece of software that was interesting but limited, and has been developed into a full-blown portable sculpting studio that for many artists could become the primary sculpting tool in their arsenal. Forger has all the tools that a useful sculpting application should have, from an excellent…

A few issues ago we crowned the 16-core AMD Ryzen 3950X paired with an Nvidia Quadro RTX graphics card as the current all-round best recommendation for a desktop rendering specification. And that recommendation has not changed, even after testing a workstation with a 32-core Threadripper processor, one with an Intel processor and both new AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Our advice is pretty simple. The 3950X is the best processor on the market today. For a mid-range rig, pair it with a Quadro RTX 4000. If you want more graphics performance, bump that up to an RTX 5000, with either 32GB or 64GB of memory, and the biggest SSD you can afford. Anyone who really does work with the most high-end workloads is probably rushing to order a Threadripper-based workstation…

James Brady Co-founder/art lead at Next-Gen Dreams 3D, James Brady is an experienced artist hailing from Ireland. www.next-gendreams3d.com Iñaki González Iñaki González has worked freelance for national and international clients since 2005, and he also teaches 3D. vimeo.com/inakiarte Mike Griggs 3D World regular Mike Griggs returns with the latest instalments of our long-running Basics and Bootcamp series. www.creativebloke.com WEBSITE 3dworld.creativebloq.com FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/3dworldmagazine INSTAGRAM @3DWorldMag TWITTER @3DWorldMag…

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AUTHOR Ryan Barth Ryan Barth is a professional motion designer who is also a technical product specialist at Notch. He has been an integral part of user support both online and on location, assisting some of the biggest and most exciting shows in the touring industry, including U2, Foo Fighters, One Direction and Frozen on Ice. www.notch.one Over the last few years, there’s been an increasing focus on real time, with modern GPUs enabling ray tracing for increased visual fidelity, making real-time engines more capable than ever. Alongside this, there has been a growing need for more artist-focused tools that allow designers the flexibility they require to create anything they can imagine, without the need for code. Notch is an accessible, real-time content-generation For all tool which is used for…

AUTHOR Andrew Krivulya Charly Andrew Krivulya is a full-time 3D generalist who specialises in hair and fur grooming, texturing, modelling, sculpting, shading and lookdev. In his spare time, he creates 3D tutorials for his YouTube channel with 11,000 subscribers. www.artstation.com/artofcharly In this step-by-step we will go over the entire process for creating photorealistic fur using 3ds Max, Ornatrix, Redshift and 3D-Coat. We will start with making some base guides from which we will create the entire fur. For this we will use the Ornatrix plugin in 3ds Max. The next step will be to apply 12 Ornatrix modifiers to achieve the preview of fur in Redshift IPR. We will use the Hair From Guides modifier to convert the guides to the hair; OxClump to make the clumping effect you can…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Maya Jermy replies There are many ways to add glow to an image. The simplest and most common one is the process of post edit, when the render passes are put together in a final composition, for example, in Photoshop. However, there is a way to create a glow-like effect and control its behaviour directly in ZBrush BPR. Everything you need for this process can be found in the Render menu, under BPR Filters. When you open those settings you will find an array of options that can affect how materials react in render. You may discover that even the tiniest change can massively affect the material. To be able to understand how to successfully manipulate the outcome…

News and views from around the international CG community Acclaimed singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé recently embarked on her Real Life A World Tour, managed by Fruit Pie Music, and with visuals from creative technologists Bluman Associates. Sandé and her band dreamt up some ambitious ideas for the look of their stage show. Tour and production manager Kumar Kamalagharan of Fruit Pie turned to Pod Bluman, owner of Bluman Associates, to help execute Sandé’s vision. “Pod Bluman never laughs me out of the park when I come to him with a grandiose brief and a non-grandiose budget,” says Kamalagharan. “We’re on the same wavelength and bounce ideas around until we nail a practical, affordable and highly creative solution.” To successfully deliver the all-singing, all-dancing visuals for the tour, the team at Bluman…

An idea written on the back of a cigarette pack in Patisserie Valerie in 2009 set in motion the establishment of BlueBolt by Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor and Angela Barson, who at the time had no business plan, lacked financial backing and were wondering where their first job was going to come from. “Angela and I had worked together at MPC and had left at separate times, but knew there was a gap in the market for VFX work on television and mid-size budget features that didn’t need the big VFX facility pipeline,” says Ains-worth-Taylor. “It was a natural conclusion to give it a go and with our then third business partner, Chas Jarrett, we three embarked on setting up BlueBolt. We spent a bit of money forming a website saying who…

PRICE £2,500 | DEVELOPER Scan | WEBSITE www.scan.co.uk With this workstation, we’re getting our first chance to test out AMD’s new RDNA graphics architecture in a profession-algrade Radeon Pro W5700. This is a mid-range card with 8GB of memory, comparable to Nvidia’s Quadro RTX 4000. The entire specification is an example of what we think the average person would want from a rendering workstation without breaking the bank. The Radeon Pro W5700 is what we’re most interested in here, though. At the back AMD has generously included five DisplayPort connectors as well as USB-C, so potential display connectivity is superb, supporting five 4K displays at 60Hz. But disappointingly, unlike the small single-slot Quadro RTX 4000, AMD has had to go with a dual-slot approach, with a very chunky cooler taking…

“FLESHING OUT THE WORLD INFORMS THE VISUAL DESIGN, AS WELL AS PROVIDING CONTEXT AND PURPOSE” NATIONAL MECH LEAGUE ARTIST Jake Woodruff SOFTWARE 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag, Maya This sporty mech is the work of Jake Woodruff, an environment artist at Playground Games, and Kyle Moody, Cloud Imperium’s lead mocap specialist. Around three months was spent creating the character, with the pair working on it whenever they had time to spare. “At the beginning I built a library of kitbash parts to build up the high-poly model,” explains Woodruff. “This is something I do on most hard-surface projects to speed up the process and ensure consistent details.” For Woodruff, the most enjoyable aspect of creating this mech was envisioning a backstory and the world that the character inhabits. “Fleshing…

3D artists are highly skilled digital builders, combining creativity with their software of choice to build anything, from robots to entire cityscapes. World building, however, is an entirely different discipline – one that exists at the intersection of artistry, storytelling and technicality. 3D World has gathered experts in production design across film, television and video games to lift the lid on the art of building worlds. BELIEVABLE IMMERSION “World building in VFX means that we are creating an environment that looks and feels naturalistic to our viewers,” explains Paul DeOliveira, a VFX supervisor at Spin VFX. DeOliveira and the team at Spin have been behind VFX for The Expanse since its first season in 2015. He adds: “The audience needs to identify with the concept, and believe in the photorealism of…

REPTILE Created for Walking With Dinosaurs 3D, RepTile enabled the creation of repetitive geometric features, in particular, scales for the dinosaurs. Past approaches for this task did not allow for minute controls or shape detail, especially in the traditional modelling (which requires geometry) and texturing (displacement) methods. “We developed a system that allowed artists to work in a way that split modelling and surfacing separately, but still allowed us to bring their talents to the problem,” outlines Daniel Heckenberg, R&D supervisor – Graphics. QUILL Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls Of Ga'Hoole was made up of over 60 feathered characters. Animal Logic crafted its procedural feathering pipeline called Quill for the film. “We made Quill because there wasn’t a solution around then that was just the right fit for the…

In our Basics series, we look at the fundamentals of a wide range of different topics in CGI to break it down into the core elements. This month we delve into compositing. Why does an artist need compositing? Surely everything can now be done in a render? The latest generation of render software can now create imagery on a laptop in minutes, which five years ago would have taken hours on a workstation costing the same price as a nice car. The answer to why we need compositing is straightforward. Compositing allows a level of refinement of the imagery or animation that is still hard to achieve in 3D software. A decent compositing application also possesses an NLE (non-linear editor) which allows shots to be stitched together, retimed, colour matched…

Saddington Baynes is a London-based production studio, S specialising in a variety of disciplines from CG and animation to VFX and post-production. Alistair Messom applies his vast CG skillset to the role of lead automotive artist, working on striking stills, animations and promotional films. His work allows the studio to advance their mission to create imagery that inspires. 3D World recently caught up with Messom to find out what a typical day in the life of a lead automotive artist is like, and how he tackles each project’s challenges of managing tight deadlines and client expectations. What does your role entail? My job entails working primarily on automotive projects, however, this specialist area develops a lot of skills that flow nicely into a whole bunch of different disciplines. Even though…

14 years ago Intel launched its first ‘Conroe’ Core 2 Duo processor, a dual-core chip that blew away the performance of anything AMD had at the time. It then quickly followed up with the world’s first quad-core chip, which was an astonishingly powerful processor, and commentators asked whether AMD should be worried. “ANOTHER MAJOR ADVANTAGE IS AMD’S SUPPORT FOR PCIE 4.0, BRINGING GREATER BANDWIDTH AND TRANSFER SPEEDS” We are not quite seeing a direct reversal of that situation now. Today’s mainstream Intel line-up still has a (very slim) edge when it comes to single-threaded performance, with processors that run at higher boost clock frequency. The 8-core Core i9-9900K processor runs at up to 5GHz for example. Single-threaded performance matters a lot. In games, on the Windows desktop and when running…

PRICE £222 per month / £1,782 per year / £4,812 for 3 years | COMPANY Autodesk | WEBSITE www.autodesk.co.uk I’ve been using Maya for almost two decades now. I remember the days when you needed a Silicon Graphics machine to run it, which was expensive enough, and once you couple that with the price of a Maya licence you were spending a small fortune. I’m not sure if this just helped to make it a more desirable application with it being so out of reach, but everyone I knew wanted to work with it. Thankfully the prices dropped over the years and now Maya is much more affordable, although many still think it’s too expensive, especially when compared to other applications like Blender and Cinema 4D. Since its early days,…