Table of contents for No. 127 in 3D Artist

Wrecking our cover this month is Wreck-It Ralph! Ralph has found time away from the release of his latest film, Ralph Breaks The Internet to mess around with our masthead. While we get that fixed, you can hear from our regular contributor, Ian Failes, who has headed into the depths of the web to find out how Walt Disney Animation Studios has made Ralph, Vanellope and the tech even better for the sequel on page 24. We’ve also kindly asked some animation pros this issue to tell us what we need to take our animating skills above and beyond. There are 20 incredible tips and techniques to learn from. Just head over to page 32 to see them all. Elsewhere, James Clarke heads into the new London office of ILM…

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1. STORYBOARD It’s at this early stage that the script is translated into visual form. Here it was about communicating, via quick storyboard panels, Ralph and Vanellope’s arrival to the internet. Storyboards are often edited together to form early animatics or story reels to get a sense of the flow of the movie. 2. VISUAL DEVELOPMENT Vis dev artists then explore how the characters and environments might look in the final film. Their concepts, realised in everything from pencil sketches through to Photoshop artwork, include imagery that conveys mood, tone and colour, and will form the basis of the final animated and rendered scenes. 3. LAYOUT Using early character and environment geometry, layout artists will then position elements in the scene. They also determine the framing of virtual cameras. It’s…

LIGHTING Rendering was done with V-Ray for 3ds Max. The goal was to bring bright colours to make it look like a drawing. The V-Ray light embraces the round shapes of the 3D model. Parameters are set to render soft, coloured shadows. My tip is to make the lighting simple – one light with good parameters is better than multiples lights. Laura Chan artstation.com/laurachan Laura Chan entered art school and gained a video game director master’s degree. She works as a 3D artist at Ubisoft Mobile. Software ZBrush, 3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop SakeAddiction ,2018…

For a better visual feedback on the upcoming material FX stage, it is good to add some post-process effects. The first one is bloom, which can get a high value, followed by a small threshold value. That effect adds glow around the mesh based on the colours, which takes it closer to the movie reference. Furthermore artists can support the hologram effect by activating chromatic aberration with a small offset like 0.25. To add a bit of depth by using mesh information the ambient occlusion can be turned on with a pleasing radius value like 45 degrees, for example.…

• “The movie starts in the story department, where artists will pitch ideas on a written script. They’ll put the storyboards together in an animatic, eventually cutting together the entire film in 2D drawings. We have a program called Pitch Doctor that they use to do rudimentary drawings.” • “The art department starts coming up with concepts for characters and environments. Those can include traditional drawings and paintings, digital drawings and paintings, or sculptures. They’ll then put together packets of looks for each model.” • “The packets will be passed on to the asset department, which do modelling, shading, texturing and rigging. They’ll put together all the assets for the film.” • “The set dressing department will use a setup similar to a theatre stage to figure out where things…

Unity has been awarded its first Technology and Engineering Emmy Award in the category of ‘3D Engine Software for the Production of Animation’. The award is for Baymax Dreams, a collaboration with Disney Television Animation that resulted in three two-minute shorts broadcast on Disney XD as part of Emmy-nominated Big Hero 6: The Series. The Academy highlighted the Cinemachine and Timeline technologies within Unity that made these shorts possible, adding that the tech showed excellence in its engineering creativity. Isabelle Riva, head of Made with Unity says, “We’re thrilled that the technical achievements powered by Unity and demonstrated in Disney Television Animation’s Baymax Dreams are being celebrated by The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The real-time revolution is happening now and Unity is proud to support partners as…

Unreal Engine 4.21 The latest version of Unreal Engine will make their industry-leading Niagara effects toolset even more powerful and easy to use. Users will also be able to build multiplayer experiences on a whole new scale with the Replication Graph functionality. There’s a host of other updates and 121 improvements submitted by the Unreal Engine community. Visit unrealengine.com. Substance Painter Allegorithmic has released the latest update to Substance Painter, bringing with it a completely new engine, which is capable of better performance with lower hardware demands. The new memory and management system allows for up to 300 tiles running at once. The latest update is available now. A 30-day free trial and variety of plans can be found at allegorithmic.com. Valkyrie Engine Talansoft’s new real-time 3D engine allows 3D…

Job title IKINEMA CEO and founder Location Farnham, United Kingdom Website ikinema.com Biography Alexandre Pechev, IKINEMA CEO and founder joined Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey in 2005. In 2007, he developed new animation software based on personal research for satellite control and the IP was generated. IKINEMA officially launched in 2009. Alexandre won the Royal Academy of Engineering Entrepreneur Award 2010 for his work on IKINEMA technology. Today the company brand is recognised as the leader of quality animation solutions which delivers hyper-realistic and believable 3D character motion and whole body immersion harnessed by world-renowned studios and companies in games, VFX, film and TV, virtual experiences, VR, AR and MR, training and simulation, and more. Portfolio highlights…

MODELLING The challenge for me developing this model was to decide as early as possible how many suckers I would create per tentacle. The number turned out to be around 60/80 pairs of suckers per tentacle. I modelled four suckers with different resolutions in Maya and then decided how to lay them down in level of importance, eg big suckers with more polygons and smaller suckers with a fraction of the polygon count. Pedro Pereira artstation.com/pedrofragapereira Pedro Pereira is a freelance 3D artist originally from Lisbon. Software Maya, ZBrush, Mari and Nuke Octopus, 2018…

IAN FAILES vfxblog.com Ian speaks to the geniuses of animation at Walt Disney Animation Studios to find out how they are re-rendering Wreck-It Ralph for brilliant new sequel, Ralph Breaks The Internet on page 24. 3DArtist username N/A ABSKETCHES absketches.com AbSketches is a visual creative studio who has kindly given us a masterclass on creating stunning architecture visualisation. Their seven-page tutorial is on page 56. 3DArtist username abSketches RAINER DUDA welovecgi.de Taking inspiration from Blade Runner 2049, studio owner and university lecturer Rainer has shown us how to make an awesome hologram in real time with UE4 on page 64. 3DArtist username rainerd STEFAN KANG CHUN YIH stefankang.com Based in LA and working at The Mill, Stefan teaches us how to create effective procedural lightning storms in Houdini this issue.…

“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was a fantastic experience in terms of working within ILM and leveraging the knowledge base and the toolsets that exist,” says Alex Wuttke of working on the summer blockbuster, “That was a perfect show to demonstrate the power that is wielded by having access to all these different partners and ways of working. “We have a department called the Digital Model Shop which is where we generate all of our assets and there’s a fantastic history around that. The quality of the output is just phenomenal. It just kind of makes working on the shot production side of things so much better and easier when you have a really decent-quality asset to be working with; something that’s almost bulletproof in terms of the different lighting conditions…

Bio AbSketches is a visual creative studio focused on positioning brands through impactful marketing collateral. Software 3ds Max, V-Ray, Adobe Photoshop Learn how to Model a scene from photographs Stage an office scene Use render passes in V-Ray Use the Camera Raw filter in Photoshop Speed up your workflow with plugins Concept The goal of this piece was to visualise a sleek, modern office design using elements of an existing foundry building. The image was created by Nick Pazdan of the abSketches team.…

There are significant features in the Blade Runner movie reference that can’t be achieved with plain geometry details. These features are the eyeliner, eyebrows, lipstick surface and eyelashes. There is a bit of geometric detail available but the key here is to paint a proper mask texture. Substance Designer is a great help by painting greyscale eyebrows and areas for the eyeliner in the red channel of the texture. The same can be said for the green channel, which will get details around the lips to indicate areas where the lipstick and/or lip-gloss is put on.…

I like to break the setup into three sections. The first section is Input – it’s usually the source geometry. This is where you can swap out your geometry and swap in a final model or a higher-resolution object. The second section is setup – inside the setup is where I keep all the effects and simulations. The last section is the render. I like to keep this separate from the other nodes, so that everything looks clean and organised. When I render I will only make this node visible. Most of the time I will import all the final caches and clean up the unused attributes so that the computer doesn’t have to spend extra memory to calculate the render before importing into this node. This way of organising…

Pechev says that though there isn’t one project that can be considered his favourite, there were many that demonstrated IKINEMA’s abilities and were very high profile, like The Void – Star Wars: Secrets Of The Empire. He also mentioned Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice at SIGGRAPH 2016, which was a “good demonstration of how things are changing”. IKINEMA’s LiveAction seamlessly delivered perfectly matched actor behaviour (on set), resulting in convincing humanoid motion for the virtual Senua character (on screen) with cutting-edge VFX techniques. And best of all? It happened all in front of a live audience. The demo took home the Best Real-Time Graphics & Interactivity Award that year.…

Exclusive Keyhydra video For an exclusive discount, head to page 91! 3 Premium CGAxis models A collection of models to use in your work 25 Textures from 3DTotal.com Download plenty of high-quality textures Log in to www.filesilo.co.uk/3DArtist Register to get instant access to this pack of must-have creative resources, how-to videos and tutorial assets The home of great downloads – exclusive to your favourite magazines from Future! Secure and safe online access from anywhere Free access for every reader, print and digital Download only the files you want, when you want All your gifts, from all your issues, in one place Free for digital readers, too! Read on your tablet, download on your computer…

In 2012, Walt Disney Animation Studios brought the world of videogame arcades to life for Wreck-It Ralph. Now the studio has gone into the world wide web for the film’s sequel, Ralph Breaks The Internet, directed by Rich Moore and Phil Johnston, in which Ralph (voiced by John C Reilly) and his friend Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) stumble into cyberspace. That new world proved to be a complex thing to create, full of diverse characters, structures and vehicles, all of which needed to be designed, animated and rendered. But in the six years since the release of the original film Disney Animation has continued to refine its arsenal of tools and approach to the toughest effects and animation challenges, of which there were many in Ralph Breaks The Internet. HOW TO…

BADER BADRUDDIN animdojo.com  3D artist FABIO BONVICINI mrxfx.com  Creature CG supervisor/ department manager, Mr X NATHAN BRETON pixomondo.com  Creature FX lead, Pixomondo WILL COOK blue-zoo.co.uk  Animation director, Blue Zoo EMANUEL FUCHS mackevision.com  3D artist, Mackevision VIKAS JAISWAL fablefx.com  Creature rigging supervisor, FABLEfx JAKUB KROMPOLC rig-it.net  Rigging TD and manager, RIG-IT.net TIM MACKINTOSH rsp.com.au  Head of animation and creatures, Rising Sun Pictures DAVID MATTOCK davidmattock.co.uk  Creative director, Full Rotation Animation…

“It’s a global role looking after all the studios and keeping a heads-up on all that’s happening in the virtual production world,” explains Matt Rank. “It’s such a broad term covering so many different elements. “To sum it up the way we cover it is: we’re heavily involved in any digitising of anything that will actually occur on a film set whether it be an actor’s performance, a camera move, filling green screens with content, all the way through to giving filmmakers ways of working, making them feel comfortable and giving them the tools that they’re used to using on a set but maybe it’s in a white studio.” Rank, who has a background in engineering and hardware that saw him segue into mocap work and then onto a wider…

After squeezing into a motion capture suit, being covered in reflective markers and performing a variety moves, 3D Artist sits down with Creative Assembly’s motion capture team to find out how that becomes an orc from Total War: Warhammer II. “Essentially my role just now was to keep an eye on everything and give you feedback on your performance,” says senior animator Chloe Bonnet. Next the captured performance is passed along to mocap manager Peter Clapperton, he says, “I go through each take as part of a clean-up process, which involves making sure none of the markers are missing and the skeleton isn’t out of place anywhere. It’s a long and drawn-out process.” Bonnet and her team then receive the data in FBX format and put it into MotionBuilder, which…

In life, nothing has the precise sharp corners that 3D models tend to have. Even the sharp edge of a knife has some degree of curve to it. Keep this in mind as you build out your models. Use the Chamfer tool and modifier to your advantage to smooth out corners and edges. When using the modifier, to avoid your smoothing groups getting messy, check the options to Smooth Chamfers Only and Smooth to Adjacent. This will allow your models to catch edge highlights and give that extra ounce of polish.…

Bio Rainer Duda started his career as game developer, moved afterwards to feature films, autostereoscopic movie creations and finally to his own VFX studio in Germany. Software 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine Learn how to OrganisescenesinUnrealEngine Embed procedural generators in Unreal materials Set up real-time materials for fast adjustment through instancing Quickly paint masks in Substance Painter Light your meshes without light sources in Unreal Engine Work on screen space for visual effects Create a small cinematic render-environment in Unreal Engine Concept It is important to play with colours to identify a working composition. Those self-made visual restrictions channel the whole creativity to the colour transitions which can be set up in the material.…

TEXTURING To achieve a good-quality texture on this guy I needed to combine the best of both Mari and Substance Painter to paint textures, like displacement maps, for the small details. Procedural bumps and masks were used as well to combine all of them with the raw material extracted from ZBrush into Maya with V-Ray shaders. Vinicius Favero viniciusfavero.artstation.com Favero is a Brazilian character artist based in Vancouver working in the games/films market and seeking to learn new ways to improve his skills. Software ZBrush, Maya, V-Ray, MARI, Substance Painter KangrinboqeWarrior ,2018…

Job title Effects technical director Location California, US Website blueskystudios.com Biography Sarah Beth Eisinger is currently an effects technical director for Blue Sky Studios. She previously spent five years doing the same for Pixar working on films such as Incredibles 2, Inside Out, Finding Dory and Coco. Her passion lies in effects that help to drive a story forward. Portfolio highlights What’s the best thing about working on group projects? The people? The collaboration? For effects technical director Sarah Beth Eisinger, it’s also the sheer size of working on a feature film, ”I love that it’s like the biggest group project you’ve ever worked on,” she says. “Everyone’s working together towards this one goal, so it’s super collaborative. It’s a total dream, I…

The latest release builds on a decade of advancements and integrates dozens of industry-first breakthroughs. Updates include state-of-the-art Spectral AI Denoising, AI lighting, high performance out-of-core geometry and 10-100x speed upgrades in the scene graph and viewport. OctaneRender 4 is available for purchase now from otoy.com, and is a free upgrade for existing users.…

The games animation and VFX industries always need new talent to feed their growth, and this means a need for students to be taught more industry-relevant contemporary software and pipelines. On courses throughout the UK, students learn Maya or Nuke software hoping to create a reel that will get them into the industry. To many students it’s a race to learn the software well enough. However it’s becoming clear to me that there’s another important perspective to this that gets ignored. It’s also about learning the right behaviours and attitudes to guarantee success in these industries. Just like sport, science or any industry this means learning and being inspired by role models. But strangely the UK VFX industry has never been good at promoting inspirational VFX figures to help students…