Table of contents for August 2016 in 3D World

SUBSCRIBE Subscribe to 3D World and get both the print and digital editions. Turn to page 28 for the latest offers! The CG industry doesn’t stand still and this issue we offer the inspiration and training to keep up. We discover what it took ILM to set the new standard for CG characters, plus discover how to create a VR scene in Maya – using the free app with this issue. Turn over for more… ian.dean@futurenet.com…

MARI GOES FREE The Foundry has released a free, noncommercial version of Mari, its awardwinning texture painting software. A staple of the VFX industry, Mari is an essential tool, and you can now learn it at your own pace – and at no cost. Visit www.thefoundry.co.uk to download a copy. FABRIC 2.2 IS OUT The latest version of Fabric Engine has added Python support to Canvas visual programming, making the system accessible to a wider range of technical directors and technical artists. As an added bonus, Fabric for Modo is part of this release. Watch a demo online here: www.bit.ly/210-fabric ENLIGHTEN TO ARCH-VIZ Global illumination technology, Enlighten, is stretching out from game development to add arch-viz users to its roster, and Yugen, an Australian firm that specialises in creating life-like,…

ARTIST PROFILE Dominik Capodieci Dominik is a CG professional and a developer of VRPlugin. He has more than 16 years of experience working for the movie, TV and gaming industry. www.vr-plugin.com ARTIST PROFILE Moritz Strickhausen Moritz is a developer of VR-Plugin and has more than 20 years of experience in 3D programming. www.vr-plugin.com TOPICS COVERED Setting up the system Scene Assembly workflow VR-Plugin usage Rendering for Gear VR Over the course of this tutorial we will explore how to handle high-poly count scenes with Maya, in virtual reality. We will demonstrate how to manage GPU caches to preserve a good framerate in your head-mounted display (HMD). The scene, we will be working on is a variation of an asset from a film set. This performance-saving technique was used while working…

ONE ADDING SPONSONS The sponsons put the ship’s centre of gravity towards the mid-rear and double up as areas to mount turrets. I export the mesh out of 3ds Max as an FBX with smoothing groups, preserve edge orientation, and tangents and binormals checked in the geometry settings. I then import this FBX into UE4 as a uasset. TWO POLYGON COUNTS Because we reuse a lot of standardised materials and texture sets, we can spend a lot more polygons on the ships. This tends to be anywhere between 200-450k tris. This sounds a lot but UE4 handles tris very well and the extra detail means that Unreal’s HBAO does a great job of generating real-time ambient occlusion on the models. THREE SCALE IN ENGINE This workflow allows us to create…

Eva Ng Eva is a London-based freelance 3D artist who specialises in lighting and compositing. This issue she reveals how cloud rendering changed her life, plus she explains how to create shaders with advanced specular reflections using Maya, on page 32. www.eva-ng.com Christian Alzmann ILM concept artist Christian Alzmann can boast Star Wars, Terminator and Indiana Jones on his CV, which now also includes Warcraft. On page 36 Christian joins other ILM artists to reveal what it took to bring Blizzard’s orc hoard to the big screen. www.christianalzmann.com Scott Mitchell Scott is a senior animation art director at Ubisoft, and on page 48 he joins other professionals to reveal what they look for in new portfolios and showreels. Your career in VR, video games and animation just got a helping…

The nature of the industry means the appetite for processor cycles for rendering will always be more and more voracious. From increasing in resolution, 360deg and complex VFX, so anything that makes this easier to access will be a winner. Hence the attraction of cloud-based solutions to offer ‘infinitely’ expandable processing powers. This can also be harnessed for real-time work, whether it be for traditional games or VR. The recent ILM XLab demos are living proof of that high quality, real-time graphics can be delivered to low-end platforms and devices. The limit will be the size and reliability of the pipe that you send it down. You will always have to acknowledge that there will be security issues with cloud rendering. As a result, there will be resistance to putting…

GET PUBLISHED EMAIL YOUR SHORT TO ian.dean@futurenet.com VITAL STATISTICS TEAM CEO & executive producer Eric M. Miller Story Charlie Petrek Animation Jacob Gardner and Scott Raymond Character design Valerio Fabbretti Surfacing/Grooming Violette Sacre Lighting & Look Dev Graham Cunningham COUNTRY US SOFTWARE Maya PRODUCTION TIME One year Bink began with a purpose, rather than the story, says creator, Eric M. Miller. “I knew the framework of what I wanted before I started collaborating with the imaginative writer, Charlie Petrek,” he says. “I wanted the short to be high quality, but simple to produce and short form so the studio could afford to make multiple episodes.” Taking influence from the Minion shorts (set in a white environment) and stylistically looking towards Big Hero 6 and The Incredibles, he and Charlie were…

AUTOHAIR This reseaerch enables you to create fully automatic hair modelling from a single image. Developed by students from Zhejiang University. The method has been demonstrated on internet photos, resulting in a database of 50K 3D hair models and a corresponding hairstyle space that covers a wide range of real-world hairstyles. SKETCHIMO This sketch-based motion-editing workflow for articulated characters has been developed by students at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Weta Digital. It’s a novel sketching interface for expressive editing of motion data through space-time optimisation. MAPPING VIRTUAL & PHYSICAL REALITY Students from the, University of Hong Kong developed this project that maps a pair of given virtual and real worlds to support real walking in HMD-VR applications. www.bit.ly/siggrapphpapers…

“If you have dark hair that abruptly ends and turns into skin colour, it’s a telltale sign of CG,” says ILM’s Jason Smith, visual effects supervisor. “If you zoom into real photography, you don’t see black hair close to bright pink skin. When hair goes into the skin, it stays visible. It doesn’t abruptly end and turn into skin colour. So, we softened the transition from hair to skin and allowed the hair to interfere with the scattering. The skin at the base of the hair becomes a little darker for a tiny, tiny piece. That added a lot of reality to the eyebrows, particularly. The orc eyebrow hairs are on and under the skin.”…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO When you see the Play icon, use the link For a long time now I’ve been stuck in a rut with my work. Not with creating the models or scenes – I’m always happy with those. The problem lies with rendering. I’ve been using Maya for over 15 years now and in all that time my final renders have always been generated using mental ray. It made sense to use it; it comes with Maya, works well and doesn’t cost any extra to use, so why look elsewhere? Yes, it did the job and for the most part I was happy, but there was always something lacking, something that just didn’t look right. I put this down to my own skills not being up to scratch and…

ONE TAKE THE PHOTOS The first step is to take a series of photos of your food item. Make sure there is a good overlap between each photo to ensure the stitching is a success. TWO USE A PHOTO MODEL STITCHER Using something like 123D Catch or PhotoModeler, import your photos, adjust the settings and generate your 3D model. 123D Catch is available on multiple platforms, which is really handy. THREE UNWRAP AND APPLY YOUR PHOTOS Finally, unwrap your resulting 3D model and apply higher resolution photography to the model. Note that you may be best off re-topologising your 3D model after it has been automatically created.…

For this tutorial I will show you my work for Blind Guardian and talk about how I use V-Ray for shading/texturing and rendering. I will also talk about the workflow of creating displacement maps to achieve the same results of the ZBrush model in 3ds Max, with VRayDisplacementMod. For all the assets you need go to www.bit.ly/vault-210-film 1 EXPORTING DISPLACEMENT MAPS FROM ZBRUSH Exporting an accurate displacement map from ZBrush is extremely important for achieving good results on hyperreal renderings. This is the reason I generate 32-bit EXR maps. Those maps contain pixel values above 1.0 and negative pixel values below 0.0. To export displacement maps in ZBrush: ARTIST PROFILE Gustavo Groppo Gustavo is a freelance 3D artist currently living in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s passionate about what he does…

ONE CREATE THE LIGHT Redshift can use standard Maya lights; there is a dedicated Light Object in Create>Lights>Redshift Physical Light. Nest this in the spaceship group and place at the rear of the engine. TWO ADD AN ATMOSPHERE To enable the glow, Redshift needs an atmosphere. This is enabled in Render Settings under the Output tab, by creating a new node in the Environment>Atmosphere section. THREE ADJUST THE GLOW Now that everything is set up, use the IPR to aid in adjusting the glow to suit the scene. Make Sure Motion Blur is on to help shape the glow.…

With editing trends currently asking for quick transitions, lots of shots and varied lighting, it’s easy to see how it could take an age balancing and grading them all so that they provide the narrative support needed, while retaining continuity of the grade. In actual fact, almost half the workload can be dealt with in just a few clicks. This all comes down to working smarter and planning ahead a little bit. For some, this is now second nature but if you are new to grading, or rarely do colour work yourself, it is definitely worth knowing what you can do to save time and help your clips gel with a single look for any given scene, all while being efficient. At the end of the day clients want a…

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 PRICE £174 per month / £1,404 for one year / £2,668 for two years / £3,791 for three years | COMPANY Autodesk | WEBSITE www.autodesk.co.uk Every year when Autodesk releases its latest version, it faces a barrage of critical feedback. This has been the case for a number of years, mainly due to the lack of useful features and an apparent refusal to implement some of the most requested features over at Autodesk Uservoice. I’ll stay out of that conversation and focus on reviewing the new features. According to Autodesk’s website there are 23 new features – though a…

GET PUBLISHED EMAIL YOUR CG ART TO ian.dean@futurenet.com Visit the online Vault to download extra process art for these projects: www.bit.ly/vault-210-film 3D WORLD VIEW “The lighting is beautiful in this scene, as Christian manages to give his sci-fi environment a warmth and realism that is often missing in genre scene illustrations.” IAN DEAN Editor I came to the conclusion that the scene needs the clouds. For one they break up the otherwise monotone look and give a sense of scale FROM HERE I CAN ALMOST SEE THE STARS ARTIST Christian Hecker SOFTWARE Vue, Daz, Photoshop A freelance artist working in illustration, Christian Hecker’s focus for From Here I Can See The Stars was detail and atmosphere. Creating the image in Vue and kitbashing together the scenery, Christian was able to…

ILM was the sole vendor for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which meant a crew of 450 in the four ILM studios created all the CG characters and visual effects in 1,300 shots (67 minutes), 900 shots of which were all-creature shots. A team that topped 100 animators in ILM’s four studios created the appealing characters. “Everyone wants the turtles to be loved,” says Kevin Martel, animation supervisor for ILM. “On the first film trying to fit the data onto a turtle face and still seeing the actor was hard. But that hard work helped us this time. We made great strides on the first film with Muse [motion capture system] and Fez [facial animation system]. We started to see the power of facial motion capture. With…

EXPERT PANEL Francis-Xavier Martins Francis-Xavier is a character artist and CG generalist, with over a decade’s experience in games, media and TV. www.polyjunky.com Eva Ng Eva is a London-based freelance 3D artist who specialises in lighting and compositing. She loves to create compelling imagery that will entertain. www.eva-ng.com Paul Hatton As the 3D visualisation team leader at CADS 3D, Paul creates renders and models, visualisations, animations and interactive walkthroughs. www.cadesignservices.co.uk Daniel Hennies Daniel works as a digital artist at Germany’s Ugly Kids where he has been based for over eight years creating RealFlow fluid sims and much more. www.bit.ly/209-daniel Pietro Chiovaro For the last few years, Pietro has worked creating 3D assets and environments, and is currently working on an open-source game. www.bit.ly/pietro-chiovaro GET IN TOUCH EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO…

“There was a constant danger that the orcs would look like latex, silicon and plaster, like everything you don’t want,” says Jason Smith, visual effects supervisor. “It wasn’t a matter of more or less [subsurface] scattering. If we turned up the scattering, they’d look like silicone.” For reference, the crew took photographs of a shirtless PA in broad sunlight and looked at how the shadows on his skin transitioned from sunlit to shadow, and at the bounce. “We tried to find out where we were going wrong, where exactly the problems were,” Jason says. “And we found the scatter colour tended to be a bit too neutral. If we didn’t have enough red in the scatter – enough blood – the skin felt more like wax or silicone. With the…

ONE TINY ICONS Along the bottom of the V-Ray frame buffer you will see a whole host of tiny icons, each of which opens up a wealth of tools to help you as you render. TWO A BIT OF HISTORY By clicking on the small H this will open the History window where V-Ray will keep track of each of your renders. Therefore you can quickly compare between them. THREE A OR B? Identifying two images in particular with the A and B tag will then give you a slider which you can move across the render, allowing you to interactively compare the two.…

ONE START SIMPLE Once you have modified your basic polgyon object to create a new complex object, you can progress its design with some simple steps. TWO USE SYMMETRY By using the Symmetry Modifier to create a more complex object, you can begin to expand the silhouette of your object and add in more detail. THREE AND REPEAT Then use Symmetry again on the new model to create an even more complex object. Continue with this process of using Symmetry to develop the form.…

With Fractured Space being what it is – a freeto-play team combat game – the ships and their abilities are the stars of the show. Each one has its own personality that’s a reflection of its own function, and it’s largely my job to craft a design that on the surface visually communicates what that ship’s role is. We have worked very hard to create a universe within the game that exists within the realms of possibility and future science. This appeals to a particular type of sci-fi fan that likes to see realistic designs that are based on function rather than aesthetic. This doesn’t mean that aesthetic doesn’t drive the conception of ship; it just means that a stylistic decision has to be justified and not just there because…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO When you see the Play icon, use the link Redshift is one of the most exciting renderers on the market as it’s GPU accelerated, as well as unbiased (basically Redshift can make any kind of materiel even those that aren’t physically possible). Therefore it allows maximum creativity, flexibility and speed for CG artists. This tutorial should help you get to grips quickly with the basics of using Redshift within Maya. Tips, for example, such as loading in textures, which in this case are created in the great Substance Painter from Allegorithmic. So why should a 3D artist learn a new renderer, or application for that matter? Well the obvious answer is that we should never stop learning. The other reason is that Redshift offers users a vastly…

AUTHOR PROFILE Mike Griggs Polishing pixels since 1995, Mike is a UK based freelance 3D, VFX and mograph artist. He also works as a freelance technical writer. creativebloke.com PRICE £1,199 exc VAT / 1,459 / $1,799, Upgrade £329 ex VAT / 419 / $499 | COMPANY The Foundry | WEBSITE www.thefoundry.co.uk The Foundry has just launched the latest version of Modo: Modo 10.0v1. This not only offers some great new features for games artists, but also a new upgrade and purchase model as well which could leave some users scratching their heads. It seems like yesterday when Modo 902 was launched, but the developers haven’t been sitting on their hands; they have just released the next major upgrade, Modo 10, which concentrates on game asset creation. Wait, what? This is…

AUTHOR PROFILE James Morris James has been writing about technology for two decades, focusing on content creation hardware and software. He was editor of PC Pro. www.tzero.co.uk PRICE £9,594 inc VAT | COMPANY Armari | WEBSITE www.armari.com Intel’s Xeon processors have diverged quite a bit from the consumer-oriented Core range over the last few years. The Xeons can have a lot more cores, while the Core range generally offers faster clock speeds. But what if you could have both at the same time? Armari’s Magnetar M44-AW1200G2 appears to have the answer to that question. The Magnetar sports a pair of Broadwell-generation Xeon E5-2697Av4 processors. This is a special edition promising the best of both worlds. Each processor has 16 cores and with Hyper-Threading available, which means there is a huge…