Table of contents for April 2016 in 3D World

SUBSCRIBE Subscribe to 3D World and get both the print and digital editions. Turn to page 50 for the latest offers! If you dream of creating characters for Naughty Dog or environments for Infinity Ward, then this issue is for you. On page 42 leading art directors, artists and graduates share their experiences of the games industry... and advice on how you can land your dream job! Plus, on page 36, Epic Games’ artists reveal what it takes to create photoreal hair, in real-time, using Unreal Engine 4.11. Training this issue comes from professional artists at Cloud Imperium Games, Guerrilla Games, Ninja Theory and MachineGames, who tackle modelling, rigging, concept design, texture asset creation and more, beginning on page 51. If you want to break into the games industry, this…

ARTIST PROFILE Jeen Lih Lun Jeen has worked in video games for over seven years and is a senior artist at Ninja Theory in the UK. Her latest title was Disney Infinity 3.0 where she modelled Anakin, Obi Wan, Sabine and other characters. www.jeenlihlun.com The title of this image is Lady in the Wind. I enjoyed every step when creating it, especially sculpting the torso and making the hair for this image. I set myself a four-week window for this project, but unfortunately I didn’t have a lot of time left for detailing the fingers, feet and the face because I spent far too much time on the torso and experimenting with the hair. For the body, I start with low subdivision to get the proportions and general landmarks right. When I…

AUTHOR PROFILE Simon Fenton Simon is a digital artist with 22 years’ experience working in video games and computer graphics. He’s worked at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Rare joined the team at Escape Studios in where he is the head of games, leading games art courses. www.bit.ly/simonfenton As the video games and VFX industries advance, there are new technologies that point towards convergence of the two; VR perhaps being the most recent and exciting. Convergence has been a buzz word for many years. Indeed many of the same tools, such as Maya or ZBrush, are used in both fields, but it wasn’t that long ago that a single plant in the film Avatar had more polygons than an entire game environment. Now, in many instances, the production methods used…

VIDEO+RIGGING FILES MODEL AND RIG A GAME CHARACTER Download video walkthroughs and rigging files to create a game-ready model VIDEO+SCENE FILES+TEXTURES GAME ENVIRONMENT Get the video walkthrough, 3ds Max work files and textures to create this environment VIDEO+TEXTURES SCENERY Follow the video and download the texures PROJECT FILES STINGRAY Download the project files to try Stingray STEP FILES CONCEPT DESIGN Download the step-by-step screens…

ARTIST PROFILE Matthew Doyle Matthew is a game maker, and passionate about 3D and 2D art. He enjoys building worlds and making characters that inspire. Helping others learn the tools is also a daily part of what he does. www.matthewdoyle.com www.stingrayengine.com With Unreal Engine and Unity hogging the scene it can be difficult for a new app to break in, but Autodesk is making some inroads with its Stingray platform. Released in August 2015, Stingray is an easy-touse real-time rendering software and 3D game engine that works well with Autodesk Maya LT softare. For this tutorial you won’t need to know anything about game engines – the goal is to introduce you to the software and how to set it up. We’ll look at importing files from Maya LT directly…

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 In my last article I covered the questions that I was initially faced with answering when starting out with V-Ray for Nuke. In this article I’m going to show you different ways of setting up lights within the V-Ray for Nuke plug-in, and a use for the values in the Position pass that we can get V-Ray to output. As a compositor, I feel most comfortable working in the world of 2D, manipulating AOVs (Arbitary Output Variables) to give me the desired look I want. Adjusting V-Ray nodes in Nuke’s 3D space is fairly simple, but it’s nice to have it feel as familiar as possible. I spoke…

EXPERT PANEL Gaëtan Lassagne Gaëtan is a senior technical artist at Allegorithmic in France. He’s also a part-time teacher for technical art students. www.gaetanlassagne.wordpress.com Fady Kadry Fady is a senior generalist with over five years’ experience in the VFX and animation industry, working on TV commercials, film and music videos. www.fadykadryart.com Francis-Xavier Martins Francis-Xavier is a character artist and CG generalist based in Brighton. He’s worked in video games, media and TV. www.polyjunky.com Mike Griggs Mike is a UK-based freelance 3D, VFX and mograph artist, who has been polishing pixels since 1995 for broadcast and commercial projects. www.creativebloke.com GET IN TOUCH EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO ian.dean@futurenet.com Q ZBRUSH | ARNOLD | MARI How can I texture and look develop a leather material? Rupert Moore, UK A Fady replies Hopefully as I explain…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO If you see the Play icon, use the link ARTIST PROFILE Ben Erdt Ben is a professional character/creature artist and modeller who is currently working at Guerrilla Games. www.ben-erdt.de ARTIST PROFILE Perry Leijten Perry is a technical artist currently working at Guerrilla Games. He started out as an allround artist but later found his passion in rigging and scripting. www.perryleijten.com TOPICS COVERED Concept design Model high-poly armour Textures in Mari and Quixel Model rigging Render settings As a huge fan of Epic’s Unreal Tournament and its universe, I was keen to explore modelling the fearsome Skaarj for this tutorial project. From the very first brush strokes in ZBrush to the final rendered image, the following step-by-step breakdown will give you an insight into how this game-ready character…

ARTIST PROFILE Matthew Trevelyan Johns With a professional career spanning over seven years, Matthew now enjoys working as a senior environment and vehicle artist for Cloud Imperium Games. www.artstation.com/artist/trevelyan TOPICS COVERED Shading Texturing Mesh creation Detailing The ability to create textures is a vital skill for any video game environment artist. Coupled with the advent of physically based shading in most modern game engines, it’s now possible to recreate a myriad of realistic materials and apply them to the beautiful virtual worlds we create. An environment you hope to recreate can feature literally hundreds, if not thousands, of unique texture details. It might be possible to create textures and shaders to represent every minute detail, but for every unique texture and shader loaded into a game engine, there’s an incurred memory…

ARTIST PROFILE Matthias Develtere Matthias is a junior 3D artist at MachineGames, who’s worked on the Wolfenstein series. He likes to work on environment assets and vehicle models. develterematthias. wordpress.com Artists who have made a video game environment before will know how much time it takes to make everything from scratch – from high-poly to low-poly versions for every model, to unique textures for all of them. The result is you end up doing the same props over and over again. For next-gen games, knowing how much further you can push the amount of detail could really be a nightmare. So let’s come up with some unique and fresh ideas of how to speed up your pipeline. The aim of this tutorial is to give you some tips on how…

AUTHOR PROFILE Paul Hatton Paul leads a studio in England specialising in creating beautiful and interactive videos and environments. He has been working in the industry for over a decade. www.cadesignservices.co.uk The groundbreaking PBR texturing software from Quixel has reached its second iteration. Its suite of tools (NDO, DDO and 3DO) provide everything you need to move a 3D model through the texturing, lighting and rendering phases. Quixel has made every attempt to make the adoption of this suite of tools as straightforward as possible. Despite the confusingly named tools (confusing to me at least!) it has succeeded in creating an easy to navigate website, and 3D artist Wiktor Öhman has created a gorgeous set of workflow tutorials that make viewers want to delve into the software. This new version…

AUTHOR PROFILE Paul Hatton Paul leads a studio in England specialising in creating beautiful and interactive videos and environments. He has been working in the industry for over a decade. www.cadesignservices.co.uk Iray is owned by Nvidia, the same company that own mental ray. What sets Iray apart from mental ray though is its ability to deliver immediate results within a range of different disciplines including architecture, engineering and advertising. Before we dive straight in let me just give some background to Iray. So far it has been shipped with 3ds Max, in the same way that mental ray is. The problem for Nvidia though is that Autodesk have the ultimate say in what the final Iray product is like. Nvidia have decided to break their Iray rendering software out of…