Table of contents for September 2019 in 3D World

SAVE UP TO 71% on your bundle subscription with our exclusive code — turn to page 24 This month we celebrate our 250th issue of 3D World! To celebrate in style we thought we would talk to some industry experts to bring you a massive collection of tips, to help you boost your skills. Oh, and we take you behind the scenes on that little project, Toy Story 4! rob.redman@futurenet.com…

Fusion has been used to create the visual effects and motion graphics on thousands of Hollywood blockbuster films and television shows. Fusion Studio 16 is a massive update that brings all of the improvements made to Fusion inside DaVinci Resolve to the stand alone version of Fusion. As well as dramatically faster performance, the interface has been completely updated. New GPU Acceleration All 3D operations are GPU accelerated, making Fusion much more responsive and interactive. In addition, there are dozens of GPU accelerated tools such as time effects, dissolves, stereo 3D tools, vector motion blur, corner positioning, color tools and more. B-spline and bitmap mask operations are accelerated, as are the planar and camera trackers. Work Faster with Nodes Fusion uses nodes to represent effects and filters that can be…

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60 BOX MAPPING Use box mapping together with tiling textures to quickly texture your model without the need to unwrap it. Just set the image node from Flat to Box and connect the vector input to the Object or Generated coordinates. Then you can start layering more textures on top of each other. 61 POINTINESS AND AO You can mimic Substance Painter’s curvature and Ambient Occlusion based effects directly in Blender by using the relevant nodes, multiplying them with a grunge map and passing the result through a colour ramp to create a custom mask to blend your tiling textures or materials. 62 GREAT FREE TEXTURES If you’re doing, for example, architectural visualisation and are looking for high-res textures for your interior surfaces, it’s often helpful to visit the websites…

147 MORPH TARGET In ZBrush some essential tools are held under Subtool> Morph Target. Store the Morph Target then make some changes to the sculpt. Now you can toggle or blend between the updated sculpt and the stored morph. Rinse and repeat. This gives a fine level of control between two sculpting changes. 148 STORE CAMERA ANGLES IN TI MELINE ZBrush introduced the timeline for animation purposes, but it is also a great way to store camera position quickly. This is useful if you are aligning your sculpts to multiple reference photos for sculpting a likeness. When you have your sculpt aligned simply store a keyframe for each position you need. 149 ZBRUSH TO OTHER 3D I use a process of roughly sculpting ‘sticky’ geometry to bring into another authoring…

AUTHOR Donovan B. Douglas, MFA Donovan teaches modelling and animation classes at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. He has worked in 3D since 2002. 3ds Max, ZBrush, Mudbox and Maya are his favourite 3D programs. Author www.donoman.com PART ¼ Welcome to Part 1 in a four-part series on creating a unique, fully rigged robot using only a CAT Rig in 3ds Max. CAT, which stands for Character Animation Toolkit, is a unique animation system available in 3ds Max. CAT Rigs are offered in a variety of pre-built character rigs directly within the program. Preset CAT Rigs are available for animals, insects and fantasy creatures, so the possibilities are endless for creating mechanical versions of each of these. In this first part we will add all of the control objects needed…

Creating believable trees has always been a difficult challenge for artists; as with all things in nature, no two trees are the same, and traditional cloning techniques do not lend themselves easily to natural creation. And while there are many solutions such as stock asset libraries for foliage such as trees, these are limited when the brief calls for a bespoke tree solution, such as those found on an alien planet for example. Enter the award-winning SpeedTree. With this application, an artist can create a bespoke series of trees of any size, either through the supplied templates or entirely from scratch, with full control over every aspect of the creation and position of every element, from trunk to leaf. SpeedTree comes in a range of different product options to suit…

Crafting photo-realistic CG primates has become a staple for Weta Digital, with Dr. Phinneus Pogo (Adam Godley) from The Umbrella Academy joining the ranks of King Kong, Caesar and King Louie. The CGI human/chimp plays a father figure to children with supernatural abilities, adopted and mentored by Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), in the Netflix adaption of the comic book series created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. Branching out into television programming presented a slightly different challenge for Weta Digital VFX supervisor Chris White (Maze Runner: The Death Cure). “In terms of the work itself we did similar techniques, because we wanted the same quality as a film production, but we had to come up with a plan that would work for all of the episodes that was tight…

It was nearly a quarter of a century ago that audiences got a glimpse of the future of animated feature films, when Pixar unveiled the world’s first fully CG animated movie Toy Story in 1995. Since then, the technology – and artistry – behind Pixar’s many releases has soared to new levels. All that technology, artistry and storytelling ability is there on the screen in director Josh Cooley’s Toy Story 4, which now sees Woody, Buzz Lightyear and a host of other characters out in a much wider world. It’s a film that, thanks to Pixar’s increased firepower (including the physically based path-tracing architecture now in RenderMan), was simply not achievable before. Over the next few pages find out how the studio made some of the most complicated scenes and…

3D World magazine has been showcasing the very best in CG for 250 issues and 19 years. What better way to celebrate that fact than by gathering the friends, artists and innovators that have grown alongside the mag over the last two decades? Back when issue one of 3D World hit shelves in the year 2000, computers weren’t capable of handling a fraction of the geometry or texture information they can today. PCs had just a handful of megabytes of RAM, now there are tens of gigabytes on one machine. Lighting technology was very much a work in progress and rendering has come on in leaps and bounds. Procedural systems that enhance creativity, such as Substance Designer and Quixel Mixer, were just a pipe dream. From Chaos Group to TurboSquid,…

3D WORLD magazine is 250 issues old, and in that time, the digital content creation landscape has changed radically. The increase in power of computer hardware and the advancement of 3D software means that a single artist can now create feature-film level work on a single computer, which would have been hard for a team of artists to build back when our first issue was released. The fact that there are so many tools and processes for a 3D artist to choose from means that it can be overwhelming. An artist can be a modeller, character rigger and environment artist by their third morning cup of coffee, and with the vast advancements in render technology in the last few years, they can deliver full renders to a client before lunch.…

156 PLAY WI TH SCALE Manipulating the scale of objects within your scene is a great way to add further visual interest. As long as the proportions of an object are correct, the scale can fluctuate. This allows you to assign new functions to recognisable objects – bolts become bollards, and a camera aperture turns into a 50-foot portal. 157 FOCUS ON YOUR STRENGTHS My background is in architecture and design, so my personal projects are heavy on form and function. I use my environments to experiment and test new design ideas – with a great deal of trial and error. I also like to over-design my environments in order to hide the fact that my lighting and materials are not technically accurate. 158 ADD SMALL DETAILS I am a…

213 BELIEVABILITY When doing outdoor environments, try to find a plate, a single photo that has all the information you need when it comes to lighting and atmosphere. The trap with 3D is that there are no limits, so if you choose one photo and obey the rules of that reference, your work will be much more believable. 214 KEEP RENDER PASSES SIMPLE When it comes to render passes, I like to keep things simple and get my beauty pass to look as much as possible like the final result, instead of using AOVs a lot, for example. I still use them in the comp for certain operations obviously as they are powerful tools, but once again, I try to keep things simple. 215 SWITCH TOOLS Be flexible and make…

AUTHOR Adam Dewhirst Adam Dewhirst is a build supervisor for Double Negative London. He has over 15 years of experience in VFX spanning games, film, TV, commercials and children’s television. Author www.instagram.com/dewhirstadam PART 2/2 At Vertex 2019 I gave a talk called ‘How to Build a City in a Day’, and last issue we looked at ways to make your own kitbash pieces using the iPad software Shapr3D. This month, I want to take some of those pieces and turn them into a giant cityscape. To do this we are going to be working outside of a conventional methodology, using plugins and pre-made setups to help us along. The purpose of this task is to rapidly prototype an environment that we could use for a variety of reasons – as…

Antony Ward replies The humble normal map is now a fundamental part of game development; whether it’s a 3D or 2D game, these magical textures help to add depth and detail to the most basic of geometry. On the surface they seem complicated, but how do they work? When a 3D model is lit the lighting is primarily calculated on a per vertex level, so when you have a low-polygon model the light is spread between the vertices, which makes the polygon look flat. With a normal map, the lighting is instead calculated on a per pixel level, giving you much more information to work with on the same polygon. How it works is that each pixel represents a normal and the colour of that pixel is the angle in…

CONSOLE CUBES ARTIST Johannes Larsson SOFTWARE Maya, Photoshop, Arnold, Substance Designer The Game Assembly art teacher Johannes Larsson began working on this image to practise rendering with Arnold, as well as learning how to create materials using Maya’s shader graph. He worked on and off during his free time for around two months. “What I found to be really iterative was using Substance Designer for the micro noise in the plastics and rubber on the different cubes,” Larsson tells 3D World. “With minimal work I could make noise to fit another cube’s material in no time. I studied the plastic surfaces of the console controllers that me and my friends owned, then found reference materials for the rest online to try and make the surface feel as real as possible.”…

1. Storyboards Here, artists at Pixar draw key frames for the scene in which Woody, with Forky, run into Gabby Gabby and her ‘helpers’, including Benson, inside the antique store. The boards suggest possible set positioning, camera angles and character poses, and often get edited into ‘story reels’ to review the film before any actual animation production is carried out. 2. Layout Pixar’s camera and staging team take the storyboards and early set builds to place virtual cameras. That further informs more set and prop builds and allows for decisions to be made about character movement, framing, lensing and general shot composition. An important part of staging in the store was to show the toys’ point of view, compared to that of humans. 3. Lighting and rendering After animation, Pixar’s…

01 INSERT MULTIMESH BRUSHES Create your own greebles in ZBrush and save them out as IMM (Insert MultiMesh) brushes so that you can easily access them later. Convert them to NanoMesh brushes and use the NanoMesh feature to add repetitive modelling greebles simultaneously, such as placing bullets on a belt, or feathers on a bird, for example. 02 SPLIT UP YOUR DETAILS As a guide, split your sculpting work between around six levels of subdivision in ZBrush. Primary details should be worked on in subdivision levels 1 and 2, secondary details should be worked on in levels 3 and 4, and tertiary details should be worked on in levels 5 and 6. Use ZBrush layers to split your finer details up and work non-destructively. 03 MARI MASKS IN ZBRUSH Use…

117 XGEN AND XGEN INTERACTIVE Maya has a very powerful system that enables you to create realistic hair or fur. XGen’s guides are easy to use and the modifiers are incredible, but it may require a learning curve to introduce expressions. XGen Interactive is more artist-friendly where you can use brushes to modify your hair, but also introduce modifiers. 118 MASH NETWORK With Maya’s MASH network, you can create complex motion graphics effects in real time and very fast with minimal effort. But also, you can use it to speed up your modelling. For example, I have used MASH to add instances of bolts to a 3D model, giving me the power to place objects on difficult surfaces and control procedurally. 119 LIGHT FILTERS Most lights have powerful filters that…

172 EDGE TO SPLINE If you’re looking to create rivets along a seam, select the edge you need to populate with your object. In the toolbar, go to Mesh>Commands>Edge to Spline. This will create a spline from the selected path. Apply the spline to a MoGraph cloner by changing the Mode to Object and add the spline in the object box. Add your riveted object as a child of the cloner. Andy Lefton 173 USE VERTEX MAPS When working in organic shapes, vertex maps are a good way to blend alpha maps for transparency. Select the points needed for the vertex shader, select Set Vertex Weight and change the value to 100%. A vertex tag has now been created on your object. In your material alpha channel, click on the…

234 SCULPT ANYWHERE Some of the most beneficial advantages VR sculpting has over traditional 2D methods is the capability to sculpt anywhere you want. This especially became helpful when designing cockpits for the game, Archangel Hellfire. Traditionally, I would start off with painting a panoramic view of the cockpit in Photoshop. Afterwards, I would take that concept and block out the shapes in ZBrush or 3D Studio Max. Finally, I take the proxy model into the VR game and see how it looks. The problem with this method is that the translation gets lost from importing into different software and by the time the design is in the VR game, it loses some of the design languages from how I originally visualised. Oculus Medium helped me mitigate the whole problem…

If you are 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 look at particle animation. Particle systems are used in a wide variety of ways. They can invigorate motion graphics, and they are the basis for creating realistic ‘fluid’ simulations such as fire and smoke. Particle systems can also create stunning abstract animation, and can be used to add or dissemble existing meshes in unique ways. Not all particle systems have the same functionality, as it’s dependant on the digital content creation software being used.…

Pat Imrie replies It’s been some time since I last covered a question pertaining to ambient occlusion specifically, and that has a lot to do with software and technology evolving to a point where it has become a lot easier, and in some cases more efficient, to simulate realistic lighting scenarios in our scenes. This is probably most notable in current real-time engines, the capabilities of which have increased dramatically over the last several years to a point where we are able to create full game cinematics and short films in real time, taking full advantage of the flexibility that such technology allows. Several years ago, effects such as ambient occlusion required many hours to render separately or as part of a rendered sequence, and in many cases required extensive…

Antony Ward replies When I first started to learn Maya back in 2004, one aspect I wanted to also get to grips with was MEL (Maya Embedded Language). MEL is the heart and soul of Maya. It’s a series of commands that the user can use to create custom scripts or tools to help automate repetitive tasks. In my mind, even if I only knew the basics of MEL, it would not only help to give me a greater understanding of Maya, but also enable me to enhance my own workflow. I began my journey working through some MEL fundamental books and tried to go through the Maya documentation, but nothing seemed to stick. Although I was learning the basics, a lot of it wasn’t relevant to me at that…

CHARACTER RIGGING USING CAT Part one of our rigging course by Donovan Douglas introduces the CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) system and shows you how to start creating a fully rigged robot. Q AND A Get the full-sized screenshots and files that accompany this issue’s Q&A section. KITBASH A CITYSCAPE Adam Dewhirst explores the possibilities for creating huge cityscapes with kitbashed parts. 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/3DW-250 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…