Table of contents for March 2019 in 3D World

Quixel, the industryleading provider of tools and services for 3D artists, was officially born in 2011. In reality, it was conceived many years before. “I’ve always had a passion for computer graphics, hardware and programming,” says Teddy Bergsman, co-founder and CEO of Quixel. “My step-mother was a 3D artist and when I was a kid I used to go to her office and marvel at how digital environments were created. I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years experimenting with building 3D scanners and software that brings real-world objects and materials into the digital realm.” “WE SCAN EVERYTHING. PART OF OUR MISSION IS TO SCAN THE WORLD”Teddy Bergsman, Quixel co-founder and CEO REVOLUTIONISING WORKFLOWS Bergsman would meet Waqar Azim (who would later become co-founder and COO of Quixel)…

There are many objects that make up this character, and one of the most challenging to achieve was the helmet and its gadgets, with each one having a life of its own. Whatever the reason, military designs always have to be intricate, packed with curves and angles that won’t align side to side, or upside down, when modelling. Keeping a moderate edge flow, unwrapping and painting these correctly requires lots of time and patience. I am going to show you my step-by-step process for painting the helmet in my Devil Dog render. This tutorial will give you all the necessary steps to achieve an initial decent layout that you can later customise using vector art and alpha brushes. To follow my process, you need to have at least a medium-level…

The dream of many 3D artists is to be well versed in all aspects of the 3D process, without having to spend many hours, days and weeks learning the craft and artistry behind a skill, such as character animation. Unfortunately, we haven’t developed the brain download technology so memorably shown off in The Matrix, but thankfully artists instead have a wide array of tools available to them, helping to deliver products in minutes that would otherwise take many months of learning. A great example of this is the Mixamo service (www.mixamo.com), which is now part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of tools. Mixamo had been around as a full paid-for service before its Adobe acquisition, and it’s now free with an Adobe ID (a Creative Cloud subscription is not required).…

Mark Olsen, New York Pietro Chiovaro replies Today I will show you my creative process for a simple clay material using Substance Designer. I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/Roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic output since it isn’t necessary for this substance. Next we can start to add the nodes useful for this material, so from the Substance Designer library we need: the Directional Noise 3, Grunge Map 007 and BnW Spots 1 noises (these are the base elements of this material), the Height to Normal World Units filter, a Levels filter, two Blend filters, a Blur filter and two Gradient Map filters for adding colour. Now it’s time to link all of these elements together. First of all, we need to link the Grunge Map 007 noise to…

PRICE $3,300 | DEVELOPER Wacom | WEBSITE www.wacom.com If you are a Cintiq user and are looking for a new workstation, or a move from Mac to PC, then the Cintiq Engine offerings are well worth some investigation. There are two options available, but the one tested here is the Xeon quad-core model, with 32GB and a half terabyte SSD hosting Windows 10 Pro. Rather than listing the specification and the results of a few benchmarks, I’ll try to give a more ‘experiencebased’ review, as the variety of software and attached peripherals will make any measurements less valuable. The unit itself is a slim box that slides into the back of the Cintiq and adds some ports by way of 2 USB-C, an Ethernet, HDMI and DisplayPort, complementing the existing…

Mixer has a clean and intuitive interface that belies the power on offer. Not only does it allow you to stack various Megascans surfaces on top of each other, with fine-tuning for placement and blending, but it also enables you to customise attributes of those surfaces, such as colour and specularity. On top of that it provides tools that let you handpaint masks and material layers, so you can easily add depth to a material. In this example we’ll show you how to create an old road surface, using a combination of some saved Megascans surfaces, an atlas and some hand-painted masking, using a custom brush, as well as the awesome fluid layer to add puddles in the recesses. 01 BOOT UP When you launch Mixer you’ll be presented with…

The planet Varsi Prime has vast oceans teaming with life. We’ve been using this fictional planet to do creature design workshops for years now. What better story to tell in comic panels than how a survey team was brought down by giant squidlike creatures as they surveyed the planet? 3D models have been used in comic work for years now. This tutorial gives a little introduction on how to create basic 3D models in either VR (Oculus Medium) or inside ZBrush and then render them in a cel-shader style. I added the VR creation section as more and more these days I start my design process inside a VR headset. I can block out a creature or vehicle design in no time at all, and even if it is very…

Dean Peters, Edinburgh Pat Imrie replies As artists we aim to create. This can mean re-producing the world around us in the smallest detail, sometimes creating elements that no-one will ever see – but we are content simply knowing they are there. But often, we just have to get the job done and out the door in order to meet a deadline. While we may wish we had all the time in the world to polish a project, the simple fact is that we don’t, and we must work smarter to find a balance between the level of detail we want to include, and the level of detail we need. Creating footwear tread patterns in particular can be more complex than you might think, as depending on the style of…

Gary Boberg, Iceland Antony Ward replies Trying to gauge the right daily or hourly rate can be a minefield. The problem is, if you set your rates too high, no one will hire you. Set them too low and you will find you are working twice, maybe three times as hard to make ends meet. To contradict this, sometimes a higher rate will give the client more confidence in your work, whereas a quote that is too low could be an indication that you lack self-confidence. As I said, it can make your head spin, so what’s a good middle ground? Let’s look at it from the beginning. When approached by a client asking for a quote, the first thing you should do is get a list of what they…

PRICE $1,800 per year (studio licence) / $50 per month (indie) | COMPANY Ziva Dynamics | WEBSITE zivadynamics.com I’ve had lots of fun working with Maya’s muscle tools in the past. I’ve spent endless hours in the muscle editor, adjusting the basic NURBS primitive, trying to get the shape I needed before painting influences, adjusting capsules and a whole host of other steps involved in building the system. I wouldn’t say it’s a pleasant task, but it gets the job done and gives the desired effect of muscles moving beneath the surface of the skin. It seems that the way Autodesk has approached creating a system for simulating muscles is very long-winded. It almost feels like a tool for artists, created by programmers, and I mean that in the nicest…

VIDEO + SCRIPTS CREATE REALISTIC CITYSCAPES WITH 3DS MAX Paul Roberts takes you through his process for creating believable cityscapes, using scripts in 3ds Max to make your workflow simpler and more efficient. VIDEO + STEP IMAGES SUBSTANCE DESIGNER In this video, from our Q and A section, learn some of the tools you can use in Substance. STEP IMAGES MASTER COLOUR THEORY Discover how colour use is vital to help viewers of your work understand emotional context. SIGN UP! For content direct to your inbox, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at: bit.ly/3dworldnews FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-244-comicart…

Replicas, a sci-fi thriller starring Keanu Reeves that tells the story of his character’s ambition to bring back his family, offered many opportunities for filmmakers to consider how best to bring the future sci-tech visuals to the screen. Various elements of virtual production were in the mix to visualise the storytelling and prepare for shooting. Replicas incorporated a new pipeline for previs, motion capture and postvis utilising Reallusion’s iClone and Noitom’s Perception Neuron. Storyboards were in place for developing the previs of a car crash sequence as the crew arrived in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Look dev was in the process for shots that would require creating a believable interaction between Keanu’s character William and a futuristic ARV augmented reality system. 345, a robotic character, would be tracked as a…

In this tutorial, starting with a simple grid, we’ll demonstrate how to populate a city with three types of building, each showcasing a different technique. We’ll start with courtyard buildings, add towers that are automatically scaled and oriented to fill an entire city block, and finally fill blocks with multiple midsize commercial buildings. All these techniques use RailClone, a procedural modelling tool from iToo Software. In addition to useful layout tools, RailClone is able to render enormous polygon counts, making it well suited for this kind of task. Don’t worry if you don’t have RailClone – you can use the free version downloadable from iToo Software’s website (itoosoft.com). This Lite edition limits you to three source building models per RailClone object, but apart from that all the other techniques shown…

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. This month we continue our look at cameras by exploring camera animation. Animation is a core skill that needs to be addressed by most CG artists. While many artists don’t need to learn all aspects of animation, there are some that are critical. A core animation skill that should be explored is how to animate the camera. Learning camera movement can bring to life practically any aspect of a project, from subtle pull-ins to tracking shots. Even setting…

Steve Higgins, Cardiff Maya Jermy replies A pivot point is located at the intersection of an object’s local axes XY and Z. In other words, it is an indicator of a centre point in a rotational system. An object can have only one pivot point, which can be repositioned. Pivot points can cause a bit of frustration during modelling, painting or posing a model. Once we start Booleaning things or removing parts of the model, the model’s pivot could end up far from the desired place. We have all been there, and will have some level of experience with misbehaving pivots. When it comes to creating an array of duplicates that we want to rotate around the model’s own axis, it is a pretty smooth operation. The default settings allow…

We’ve seen in parts 1 and 2 of 3D World’s VFX Diary series how visual effects goes through the pre-production and shooting stages. Now, visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet brings us into postproduction, which is where the grunt work on actual visual effects shots takes place. It’s here where plates are ingested, asset builds and shot production continues, and where scenes are finessed with compositing and final grading. Fleet provides specific examples from his experiences on the television shows Under the Dome and Daredevil to reveal what really happens in ‘post’. GOING INTO POST-PRODUCTION It might seem obvious, at first, what takes place in post-production. You have your liveaction photography and now you need to add the necessary effects. But how do things ‘move’ into post-production in the first place?…

Ever since its inception in 1999, Cartoon Saloon has carved out a unique place for itself in the animation industry. The Kilkenny-based studio was the brainchild of three friends, united by their immense talent and creativity. “We were a bunch of friends with a lot of energy, naivety and nothing to lose,” recalls co-founder and creative director Nora Twomey. Tomm Moore, Paul Young and Twomey met while attending Ballyfermot Animation College in the mid-nineties. “Tomm had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do when he left college: to make a film, in Ireland, about The Book Of Kells,” explains Twomey. The trio’s peers began contributing their sketches, paintings and story ideas while still in college. “I think what made the most lasting impression on me was the…

In their always-unique music videos, The Chemical Brothers often tend to take advantage of innovative CG and visual effects techniques. That’s no different in the recent promo for their latest song, Free Yourself, where a mini robot uprising – and dance party – takes place in a storage warehouse. The promo, directed by Dom&Nic and made through production company Outsider, features heavy visual effects by The Mill, which delivered the hordes of robots, some of which have human-like faces. During the action, several robots rip their human masks off and put other human parts on. For 3D World, The Mill’s visual effects supervisor Sid Harrington-Odedra breaks down how motion capture informed the movement of the bots, and what CG techniques helped make the intriguing music video possible. “THE CAMERA MOVES…