Table of contents for October 2021 in 3D World

SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Arnold, Photoshop Vikas Kumar Prajapati is a senior game artist at Lakshya Digital. “I was watching The Lord Of The Rings and got the idea to create an elf character,” he explains. “There are a lot of images of elves on the internet. I used them to understand the basic features but tried to make my own unique design.” Galad was modelled and sculpted from scratch in ZBrush, Prajapati giving his full attention to the forms and features before breaking the details into layers. “I like this piece because it is a strong character with a simple design,” he adds. “I loved the forms of the head and antlers.” Prajapati created every detail from scratch in ZBrush: “I created VDM brushes for horns, spikes and damaged skin…

#3 ANIMATION AND STORYTELLING ON A BUDGET Animation is storytelling, from character rigging to a simple walk cycle and the most explosive of action, everything in animation helps to tell a story. Nowhere is this more true than at Blue Zoo. If you’ve been following 3D World’s in-depth series on the UK animation studio you’ll know that story is at the heart of everything they do. In this third instalment of our Blue Zoo series, we’ll be diving into the animation process, with a focus on the studio’s long-form children’s series. We sat down with directors to find out how popular shows like Pip And Posy, The Adventures Of Paddington, Go Jetters and Digby Dragon are animated, as well as how the team overcomes the numerous hurdles involved in production.…

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artstation.com/nugreon Mustafa Hussein is a self-taught 3D environment artist, currently working for Al-Joud Studio as well as freelance on a variety of projects. GROUNDED FEEL IN REAL-TIME ENVIRONMENTS Achieving the grounded feel and the cohesiveness of this environment was really challenging. I used many techniques, starting with simple debris geometry I put in the corners between the ground and walls, which have a dithering material to blend the edges. I also used the vertex paint to paint plaster and dirt in the corners to make contact areas more logical, and adding decals in the edges was enough to make them feel really cohesive. For the ground I also added debris and rubble to achieve that feeling. SHANASHEEL OF BAGHDAD Software Unreal Engine 4, 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, ZBrush,…

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate step by step how I created my recent rocket launch artwork, and hopefully it may answer some of your own questions regarding how to go about building a large urban city scene in 3D. Creating a large-scale cityscape can seem like a daunting challenge and knowing where to start and what workflow to use can present the largest hurdle. Once you have decided on a direction, based on your inspirations and any reference material you have collected, the task becomes much easier. Creating the actual buildings is less of a problem and in this step-by-step tutorial I will show you my typical workflow process for this kind of project. Because of the distance of the camera from the individual assets you will find you…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO bit.ly/3D-world-luca Pietro Chiovaro replies There are many ways to create a stylised stone material, the most common of which is the use of textures and in this article, I will show you how to create a stylised stone material using just two and a half textures and some default nodes. For this material I started off with a really simple model, basically a distorted sphere, and to begin, I created and assigned a new material. First of all, we have to open the Node Editor panel and add: the Texture Coordinate input, two Image Textures, the default Voronoi Texture, two Subsurface Scattering BSDF shaders, two Mapping nodes, the Hue Saturation Value, the Mix Shader, and of course the Material Output. The first thing we have to connect…

LA and Glasgow-based DI4D provides the highest fidelity facial performance capture for leading visual effects and pre-rendered animation projects. Facial performance capture is the process of filming the facial movement of actors, analysing that data and using it to drive the facial animation of digital characters in video games and movie visual effects. By driving the facial animation of a digital character with an actor’s performance, especially when the character is a digital double of the actor, it is possible to obtain a very high level of realism while remaining faithful to the actor’s performance. Since its formation in 2003, DI4D has contributed extensively to the innovation of facial performance capture technology by pioneering the use of stereo-photogrammetry and ‘4D capture’. Stereo-photogrammetry is a technique that allows a ‘3D scan’…

SOFTWARE Daz Studio, Marvelous Designer, Blender, Quixel Megascans, Photoshop Nikolay Kvartnikov works as an art director and CG artist at Fiero Animals, a creative retouching and CGI studio. To celebrate his second anniversary of giving up smoking, Kvartnikov decided to make this personal project for the studio’s portfolio. “Sculpting was the main challenge on this project,” Kvartnikov tells 3D World, “but drawing maps and creating materials is one of my favourite things to do.” At first, all of the clothing was sewn onto an ordinary character model, before an additional simulation was made on the skeleton to achieve the characteristic folds. “Everything went with varying success,” Kvartnikov continues, “some details were quick, but the boots and hat turned out with three or four passes. It was constantly necessary to look…

“IN CREATING THIS IMAGE I WANTED TO CAUSE FEELINGS OF HOME COMFORT, NOSTALGIA AND DAYS GONE BY. THERE WAS BRIGHT LIFE, BUT IT IS IN THE PAST” SOFTWARE Unreal Engine 4, Blender, Substance Painter, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer Environment and level artist Mikhail Beresten spent four months experimenting with master materials, physically based rendering, lighting and other details for this photorealistic apartment. Currently studying at university in Khabarovsk, Russia, Beresten’s aim is to create his own game titled Relieve, and this environment is a small part of that. “In creating this image I wanted to cause feelings of home comfort, nostalgia and days gone by. There was bright life, but it is in the past,” he reveals. Beresten recounts his pipeline by dividing his assets into four groups: furniture, cloth, modules…

When a fantasy movie strikes a chord it’s usually because it succeeds in weaving a thread of reality through the escapism and visual spectacle of it all. Luca takes a story of friendship and places it within the genre of a richly imagined fantasy tale and to begin the process of drawing these two worlds together, the team working on Luca embarked on a research process that included an exploration of Italian myths, legends and lore – from tales of dragons to the story of a bellringing octopus that saved a village from a band of pirates. “Some of these tales were actually made up by fishermen,” says the film’s director Enrico Casarosa. “They’d find a great fishing spot, and they didn’t want anyone to take it over, so they’d…

cemtezcan.com Cem Tezcan is a freelance technical designer based in Ankara, Turkey. He loves retro design elements and is interested in technical design and CAD modelling. ENVIRONMENT DESIGN AND PACKAGE VISUALISATION My purpose on this project was to create an environment that related to the movie and render the models and package designs by doctorcollector.com. I created the blister pack models with Substance Designer and sculpted exported tessellated displacement for the inner part of the package to match the figures inside, then re-textured everything with Substance Painter. The translucent material of the blister packs has a little absorption and subsurface scattering on translucency. I also added a ‘camera angle driven falloff’ to the translucency to give the edges of the blister a more solid look. Using Perlin noise as a…

Glen Southern replies iPad sculpting has become very popular lately with apps like Forger and Nomad Sculpt. There seems to be two main groups of users, and they are often people just starting out exploring 3D sculpting, or existing 3D artists that just want to sculpt on the go. Nomad Sculpt is a very capable sculpting program and it has a lot of painting tools and features. Once you’ve sculpted your character or creature you can use the paint tools and a range of alphas to bring the surface to life, just as you would in a program like ZBrush or Blender. There are several options to get decals and tattoos onto the surface, so let’s start with a simple one. You can simply take the paintbrush and apply it…

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 meets the pace of development in GPUs, which is rapid to say the least, with a new generation coming hot on the heels of the previous one. This latest workstation graphics card has upped the ante in some significant ways, in a bid to dominate the arena. The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 is a very well-specced graphics card with some rather noteworthy attributes. To start with there is a whopping 32GB of memory, more than enough for the large datasets that visual effects artists and visualisers need for their work. This is EEC memory as well, adding a layer of protection for these critical environments. Such a quantity of memory allays any fears users might have of culling texture sizes or worries about geometry density…

SOFTWARE Unreal Engine, Photoshop Senior concept artist at Sucker Punch Productions, Hans Park initially struggled to find the right mood and lighting direction for his underground kingdom. “I spent a couple of days setting up the base 3D blockouts with light and mood in Unreal Engine 4, and then spent a couple more days polishing it by digital painting,” he tells 3D World. Park was conscious of the number of ruin and forbidden temple concepts that are seen across the digital art community. “The most challenging and enjoyable thing was how I could figure out the distinguishing point from others to present a unique and enjoyable experience to the audience,” he adds. “I always try to stand on realism at the starting point of creating concepts, and then think about…

LOCATION Singapore I am a student from Think Tank Training Centre, and my dream is to become a texture artist for film and TV. SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Mari, V-Ray, Nuke YEAR CREATED 2019 I wanted to push my modelling skills and I thought a reptilian creature would be a good way to challenge myself in ZBrush. I noticed that most reptiles people chose to create in CG were dinosaurs or dragons, so I wanted to try something a little unique and I thought the chameleon would be a great idea! www.artstation.com/leejiamin The Rookies is a platform to help digital artists get discovered without having to compete with professionals for attention. You’ll get to the front page of those sites one day, but for now, we’ve got your back and want…

Ajailbreak takes place onboard a prisoner transport ship known as the Hemlock, which leads to a series of adventures ranging from a crash landing on a planet that gets ravaged by a massive dust storm, to visiting a submerged world populated with destroyed rollercoasters. Intergalactic consists of eight episodes overseen by showrunner Julie Gearey (Cuffs) that required 850 visual effects shots provided by Milk VFX, which in turn received additional support from Egg VFX. There was not much of an opportunity for production VFX supervisor Jean-Claude Deguara (Good Omens) to reuse assets as environments were not revisited, except for scenes involving futuristic London. “This happens a 100 years into the future,” explains Deguara. “We have done a few projects in the past where we needed London so we managed to get…

amir_nb.artstation.com I was born in 1996 in Qom, Iran. I graduated in electrical engineering – very strange, I know! But I've always loved art. SCATTERING A FOREST This scene features an amazing Porsche car modelled by Szymon Kubicki. After building the road and adding extra elements using assets from Evermotion’s Archmodels, I then started on the forest area. I used Maxtree's wonderful models for all the plants in my scene, and I did all the scattering of plants with the Forest Pack plugin. I set a limit for the scattering of trees in the Camera section, to make sure they only spread in my active camera view; however, in some places, due to lighting and shading, it may be necessary to have a tree behind the camera. Next, in the…

Mike Griggs replies Despite the inherent complexity of all the tools and skills a 3D artist has to master, ironically one that would appear simple – working with clients – is probably the hardest to get right. Client work is defined by an artist seeking to understand and meet the client’s needs – which, in many cases, is clear and concise communication that is on-brand. In many cases a client, especially when working in stills, will ask for a Photoshop file with the correct brand colours in place. This can be a chore for both the 3D artist and the client if a typical multi-layered file that a 3D artist would use is given to the client’s print department. These difficulties arise because print designers use a different skill set…

artstation.com/matsdegraaf Mats De Graaf is a 3D game artist currently in his third year as a student at SintLucas, Eindhoven. HARD-SURFACE MODELLING Since this prop was only shown in a YouTube video it was quite hard to find any good references. The way I fixed that was by looking at real-life objects in my own home and saw if they would match up to the model. I found my old phone and saw a lot of details, like tiny scratches or some metal chipping around the edges, and even smudges on the back and some colour noise variations like green and yellow. This was really helpful and definitely got me the great end result. SONY POLAROID DEVICE PROP FROM BLADE RUNNER 2049 Software ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Marmoset Year made…

Follow the link to download your free files bit.ly/3D-world-luca MODELS + TEXTURES FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a set of fantastic textures from and build your own asset library with these incredible free ‘palm tree’ models from in our monthly model and texture giveaway. HIGH-RES SCREEN GRABS THE LAUNCHER Create a detailed science-fiction cityscape using 3ds Max, in our step by step guide. HIGH-RES SCREEN GRABS + VIDEO BLENDER NODE GRAPH Follow along and learn how to create layered and masked materials in Blender. ISSUE 278 NEXT MONTH Take a close look at the flaming effects of Those Who Wish Me Dead ON SALE 7TH SEPTEMBER Subscribe today: www.bit.ly/3dworld-subs MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects…