Table of contents for September 2017 in 3D World

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING DIRECTOR Jon Watts MAIN VFX STUDIOS Digital Domain, Luma Pictures, Method Studios, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Trixter SYNOPSIS Peter Parker returns to live with his Aunt May and begins to embrace his newfound identity as Spider-Man WEB www.spidermanhomecoming.com Rather than focusing on the limitless capabilities of an acrobatic gravitydefying superhero and CG, Spider-Man: Homecoming places emphasis on storytelling and character. The $175 million co-production between Marvel Studios, Columbia Pictures and Pascal Pictures brings together film-maker Jon Watts (Cop Car), production VFX supervisor Janek Sirrs (The Matrix) and the digital wizardry of Digital Domain, Luma Pictures, Method Studios, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Trixter. “A lot of the Sam Raimi films were cartoonish and over the top,” says Kevin Souls, Luma Pictures VFX supervisor, who has worked on four out of…

PROJECT TITLE Heineken: The Trailblazers STUDIO MPC Advertising SOFTWARE Maya, Houdini, Arnold, ZBrush, internal tools DEVELOPMENT LENGTH 3 months WEB www.bit.ly/ mpcheineken The beer industry has long sought to wow us with epic commercials, from the ‘surfing horses’ film for Guinness in 1998 to the 2006 ad where a cast of thousands formed the shape of a Carling Draught drinker. But it’s unlikely anyone will ever top Heineken’s latest global ad, The Trailblazers, for sheer scale and ambition. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen for Publicis Italy, it’s part of Heineken’s ongoing Cities campaign, which encourages men around the world to get the most out of their city by stepping out of their comfort zone. Taking the concept to its logical extreme, the one-and-a-half-minute commercial transports four men on a night…

01CREATE AN EMITTER With an XP system added to your scene, create an Emitter, set to Object, with the geometry you want the plant growing from added to the field and the selection added to the Selection field. You also need to set the Emit From setting to Points. In the Emission tab, set the Mode to Shot. Change the Speed to a suitable setting and add a little Variation so they don’t all grow at the same speed. 02ADD MODIFIERS Add a FollowSurface modifier from the Modifiers list and drop the object in the field that you want the stems to grow along, adjusting the settings to suit your needs. Follow with a Turbulence modifier to get some controlled movement in the growth. Once you’re happy, add a Trails…

With the second film featuring Wonder Woman, filmmaker Patty Jenkins (Monster) sought to explore the character arc of the central character: the princess of the Amazons who discovers her superhero powers and learns about the cruelty of both mankind and the Gods. “It’s more grounded than where she’s going to get to in Justice League [an upcoming superhero film featuring Wonder Woman],” explains Wonder Woman’s VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer, who is best known for his Oscar-winning work on Life of Pi. “It’s an emotional journey from her perspective.” Diana, or Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), comes from a secluded mythical island, Themyscira, which has been home to the Amazons for thousands of years. “Themyscira was extensively concepted, so we worked closely with Aline Bonetto, the production designer,” explains Bill. “She had…

he eyes of everyone in the CGI and digital content creation industry will be turned towards Los Angeles this summer, when the 44th Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques – otherwise known as SIGGRAPH 2017 – takes place. As one of the biggest shows in the industry, with exhibition stands and representatives showing the latest announcements from Autodesk, Maxon, The Foundry, AMD, and NVIDIA amongst many others, SIGGRAPH is a must for CG artists. 44 years of excellence The reason that SIGGRAPH has garnered the respect of the CGI community over its 44 years, is that it focuses on the science and collaboration that is so vital to the industry. SIGGRAPH is packed with many areas to experiment with the latest technologies, see presentations on how some of the…

VIDEO & FILES GET YOUR RESOURCES You’re three steps away from this issue’s video training and files… 1. GO TO THE WEBSITE Type the following into your browser: www.bit.ly/ vault-224-character 2. FIND THE FILES YOU WANT FROM THE LIST Search the list of free resources to find the video and files you want 3. DOWNLOAD THE FILES YOU NEED Click the Download buttons and your files will save to your PC or Mac PLUS There are more files and resources waiting online… VIDEO: Get the video tutorials for a selection of this issue’s training FILES: Download the high-resolution tutorial assets for all of our training CREATE AN INFERNO IN NUKE Follow the videos and download the step images to make an explosion in Nuke. Also included are several .vdb files,…

reamWorks’ head of international outreach and international talent consultant, Shelley Page, is so passionate about animation that she founded Eye Candy to showcase the genre. “The origin of the Eye Candy Show was a series of regular screenings of the latest animation shorts, graduation films and TV commercials, collected during my travels around the world to present to my colleagues at DreamWorks Animation,” says Shelley. “At first these were only shown at our studios in the USA but later, as the studio expanded to more distant locations, I also took these screenings to our animators in Bangalore, India and, more recently, Shanghai. Some years ago, I was invited to make a special Eye Candy presentation at the FMX festival in Germany [now an annual part of this event] and since…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-224-character AUTHOR Dave Throssell Dave has been creating VFX and animations for longer than he cares to remember. He is CEO of Fluid Pictures. www.fluid-pictures.com Here at Fluid Pictures, we have generated literally thousands of animated sequences over the years. In this tutorial, I hope to give you some pointers as to how to bring your project to a successful conclusion. The project I have chosen to share was a test piece for a client – we wanted to create something that was a realistic render of a room, but was more European than the usual Californian modernist environments. This tutorial aims to take you through the process of creating a realistic architectural fly-through. We assume that you know how to model and texture, and although we…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-224-character Paul Hatton replies This question has one very obvious answer for me: DaVinci Resolve. There’s no doubt about it, it just has to be DaVinci! Let me tell you why I think it’s so great for colour grading. First, it’s completely free. And I’m talking totally free – there are no adverts, no subscription fee and no one-off cost. You just download it and you’re good to go. Before I get carried away, I should recognise that there are a few limitations to the software. However, these can be removed by purchasing the software and in reality, I think there will only be a very small subset of users that will need the advanced features anyway. Second, it is not just great for colour grading, but…

EXPERT TIP MAKE IT DIFFERENT If you want a more homogeneous effect, you can delete the image texture and set a Roughness value between 0.000 and 0.500 in the Glossy Shader. FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-224-character Pietro Chiovaro replies I created this material for a short movie that I’m making, I used it for a gate and other environment objects, so I think it is the perfect material for answering your question. First, create a new material slot in the Node Editor panel in Blender, and start adding these nodes: a shader Glossy BSDF, a shader Diffuse BSDF, the converter Math, the input Texture Coordinate, the internal texture Musgrave Texture, a Mix Shader, two colour Gamma and the Material Output. After you’ve added these elements, you can start creating the final…

Back in 2014, the Blender Institute developed Blender Cloud – a subscription service that provides users with collaborative tools and acts as a repository for training and open-source assets, which subscribers have direct access to. As a paid-for service, Blender Cloud is instrumental in generating the funding for the Institute’s short films, replacing the sale of DVDs, which are now almost obsolete. The latest Blender short, Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, is a significant milestone for both the app and for Blender Animation Studio, the production arm of the Blender Institute. The three-minute film is proof of concept, and is being used to seek funding for a full-length feature film starring the aforementioned spy – a character who is based on the cult comic books by Dutch artist, Martin Lodewijk. “With…

T his issue, we’ve joined forces with Pluralsight (formerly known as Digital- Tutors) to offer you a comprehensive video training course that you can download from our online Vault – for free. Simply visit our online content downloads page at www.bit.ly/vault-224-character to get all of the files you need. In this course, brought to you by Mark Masters, anyone wanting to make the step from stills to animation will gain useful and useable insights into how to best approach their character animations. Character animation can be a daunting task to undertake but this detailed, easy-tofollow course makes the process intuitive and rewarding. After completing this six-hour course, even absolute beginners will feel confident animating in Maya. FYI For more high-quality video training, visit Pluralsight at www.pluralsight.com AUTHOR Mark Masters Mark has long…

DEEP HOVEL ARTIST Scott Stadick SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag, AutoCAD, Quixel, Marvelous Designer “Something about secluded or lonely dwellings is extremely romantic to me, so the subject matter tickled my fancy,” says Scott Stadick, who created Deep Hovel as part of the recent Artstation Ancient Civilizations: Lost & Found challenge. “How awesome would it be to have a little wrecked ship converted into a home to live in and explore the surroundings from day to day, or drink tea then take a swim?” Scott drew on his architectural experience to create the navigational hologram on the ship in AutoCAD. The Blizzard Entertainment environment artist intern says he spent around 120 hours building it. He used ZBrush and Photoshop to create most of the scene, with Marvelous Designer for the…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-224-character AUTHOR Paul Champion Based in Dorset, UK, Paul is a VFX/3D instructor and freelance artist, writer and technical editor, who enjoys collecting film posters and urban art in his free time. www.bit.ly/paulcha Creating and compositing explosions is usually a task for two different artists or studio departments. In this tutorial, I will blur that line by using V-Ray for Nuke plug-in. Instead of working with rendered explosions from a VFX application, I’ll instead show you how to use .vbd files exported from Houdini. The advantage of this workflow is it allows compositors to work with the explosion’s volumetric data with tools to change the look and orientation of the asset, without having to send back to the VFX artist or department for changes. As a workflow…

Syawish A Rehman replies There are two methods to make a disintegration effect. You can use an nCloth simulation – which, as you might imagine, is resource-heavy – or you can use particles and opacity maps. The second method is very easy to simulate and doesn’t require too many resources from your machine. Although the particles generated do require some resources, it’s nothing compared to the nCloth simulation’s required power. For the second method, in short, you need to prepare a monochrome map of how you want your mesh to disappear. Before you do that, however, you might need to redo the UV mapping – I find that camera projection works best to do so but that’s not always an option, especially on a complex mesh. A better solution to…

he award-winning creative agency, Psyop, which has offices in New York and LA, has drawn over 600 million views for its Clash of Clans ads. In part, this is down to its new VR and 360-degree content, with PipelineFX’s render farm manager Qube! proving crucial. “One of our big challenges lately has been rendering 360-degree and VR content,” says Andy Jones, Psyop’s head of VFX. “The number of assets that need to be loaded is often much larger than for a typical shot.” With such a strain on Psyop’s render farm, which can scale up to 500 nodes, an efficient manager was needed. This is where PipelineFX’s Qube! comes in. QUBE!’S EXTENSIVE PYTHON API GIVES US ALMOST UNLIMITED FLEXIBILITY WHEN IT COMES TO INTEGRATING SOFTWARE WITH THE RENDER FARM Alon…