Table of contents for February 2018 in 3D World

What’s hot this issue SAVE UP TO 47% When you sign up to a print subscription – turn to page 26. The Last Jedi is set to be hugely exciting for people with an interest in CG, so this month you will find plenty of insight starting on pages 18 and 80. And if that isn’t enough ILM for you then we also have a fantastic tutorial form ILM artist Darrell Abney on creating a detailed alien pirate creature on page 42. rob.redman@futurenet.com…

CG art to inspire ARTIST SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, Mari, alShaders (Arnold for Maya), texturingXYZ Senior modeller Aldo works in the film industry at ScanlineVFX, and spent around 80-90 hours creating this beautifully realistic hitchhiker character with attitude. “I rely a lot on camera lineups, which is common practice in the VFX modelling environment. It’s helpful when there is no scan information and we only have to use photography or concept art alone to model a character, prop and environment.” Aldo says that typically, when creating artwork such as this, he will begin by heading into Maya, where he will create a camera and line up the model to help him achieve the correct measurements, like focal length and distance from the camera. “Since I was basing the model on…

CG art to inspire ARTIST SOFTWARE ZBrush, 3ds Max, V-Ray, Ornatrix, Mari, Photoshop, Marvelous Luis works as a 3D artist and art director at Serial Cut, and to challenge himself in creating likeness images, he created this uncanny portrait of American actor John Malkovich. Describing his image-making process, Luis says: “Typically I start gathering as many good refs as I can. Then I move to ZBrush and start from a base mesh at the lowest subdivision level, adjusting the proportions of the character and trying to match the reference photos. A good habit for me is to match one photo and cycle to the next one until it looks the same from every angle. It is really important to get the likeness working at low subdivision level. I projected a photo of…

MASSIVE FOUNDER STEPHEN REGELOUS BREAKS DOWN HOW TO QUICKLY GENERATE A CROWD IN MASSIVE FOR MAYA BY LOADING AGENTS, ADDING TERRAIN, RUNNING A SIM AND RENDERING A RESULT 01 LOAD AN AGENT • Click on the agent icon in the Massive shelf. This opens the file select browser. • Select an agent and click on the Open button. • The agent should appear in the viewport, visible as segments, and its group node should appear under the Massive node in the Outliner. 02 ADD TERRAIN • Add geometry to the scene. In this case we have added a polygonal grid. • Click on the terrain tool in the Massive tray to make the geometry active terrain in Massive. 03 PLACE THE AGENTS • Click on the Place tool icon in…

STEP BY STEP CREATE A SWIRL VDM 01 SCULPT THE SWIRL To start off, we first need to get a canvas, so head to Lightbox> Project>MISC and select the Brush 3D template. With a clay brush selected, build a little hill in the middle of the canvas, more or less to the size of the swirl. Now, with the radial symmetry on and DamStandard brush selected, start sculpting the grooves and peaks of the swirl shape. 02 FIX DISTORTED EDGES Make sure to stay away from the edges of the plane. If you accidentally mess up the edges, you have to fix them before saving the VDM: mask the edges, invert mask, go to Tool>Deformation>Relax Plane Grid or Morph to Grid, depending on the level of damage caused to your…

Oscar Juárez replies When creating architectural visualisation you need to represent a lot of details, and one of the most time-consuming is vegetation like grass, trees and bushes. In this simple tutorial I will show how to quickly create grass in Unreal Engine using a low-poly mesh. Let’s get to it. FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-230-jedi STEP BY STEP CREATE GRASS WITH A LOW-POLY MESH 01 IMPORT BASE LOW-POLY FBX AND TEXTURE Our first step will be importing our low-poly base mesh. I used just two planes here. It’s so important that you map them first and then export, as this will make things so much easier later, and as usual remember to set units to mm so we can export the correct size. Once imported we will have our FBX…

The Star Wars prequels of the early 2000s were widely criticised for what the public saw as “too much CG”. But Cheetham believes that was a different time, and the debate has now moved on. Nowadays, good CG is so invisible that it’s less about the quantity, and more about the quality. “CG in general has moved on, whether it’s a Star Wars picture or anything else,” says Cheetham. “That’s partly down to software advancements, but also it’s down to the talent. People studying how light falls or how a texture should be created, the materials of an object; I think these days there’s a lot more knowledge brought back from the set to the studios. On The Last Jedi, we certainly had a huge source of information from ILM…

AUTHOR PROFILE Cirstyn Bech-Yagher Cirstyn is a freelance CG artist and educator, with over 15 years’ experience in 3D. Her clients range from AMD to Exalt3D and Future. She is currently collaborating with AMD as technical artist for Radeon ProRender for 3ds Max. www.twitter.com/cirstyn FEATURES New, accessible UI Particle and property painting Cryptomatte PBR shader Many tweaks and improvements FAST BECOMING A STAPLE Clarisse is a fast and flexible compositing, lookdev and animation hybrid. Used in films ranging from Godzilla to Blade Runner 2049, it’s becoming a fast staple for many studios, like Double Negative. The new features in this release can give Katana an even more serious run for its money. When we took a look at compositing and animation hybrid Clarisse 3.0 a little over a year ago,…

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/vault-230-jedi 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 your PC or Mac PLUS There are more files and resources waiting online… VIDEO: Get the video tutorials for a selection of this issue’s training FILES: Download the high-resolution tutorial assets for all of our training…

Steve Jarratt Steve is a freelance journalist and CG artist, with an unhealthy addiction to 3D apps and plugins. Check out his SpeedTree review on page 90. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jarratt Michael Tschernjajew On page 48 you will find Michael’s Cinema 4D tutorial that will jump start your game projects, from modelling to final rendering. www.artstation.com/station02 Jessica Soderstrom The Mill’s Jessica Soderstrom demonstrates how to take a real-world prop and create a digital version of it, starting on page 56. www.jessicasoderstrom.com Darrell Abney On page 42 you will find Darrell’s fantastic tutorial that teaches you, step by step how to create an alien pirate character. www.darrellabney.com Oscar Juárez Oscar is an archviz specialist, creating in many apps, but has a keen interest in Unreal. He shares some of his secrets with us on…

CG art to inspire ARTIST SOFTWARE ZBrush, Modo, Marvellous Designer, Substance Painter, Photoshop Peter Sandeman, 3D artist at Blackmagic Design, created this charming 3D image based on an illustration by Tom Booth (@tomwilltell). The boy’s T-shirt was modelled in Marvelous Designer, tweaked in ZBrush and then brought into Substance Painter for texturing. “The hair is sculpted in ZBrush using CurveTubes, then I bring those CurveTubes into Modo. As they have clean topology I can convert them into curves for use with Modo’s hair system. Each tube gets its own hair material so I can get maximum control over the final look. It’s a relatively straightforward technique but it gives a pretty accurate representation of the sculpt you started with in ZBrush. It means I can avoid grooming tools and that’s…

Massive agents are customisable by the user, which means you can swap out geometry and texture maps and customise models to look any way you like. But the horse and rider agent does offer a variety of texture maps already built-in. “If you’re going to see a thousand or 10,000 horses,” says Stephen Regelous, “you don’t want to go, ‘Oh, those two look the same and they’re right next to each other.’” Massive therefore crafted textures in different colours (such as grey, black, white, brown, reddish) as well as adding in ‘dappled’ patterned versions of those. “The next stage,” adds Regelous, “was creating a procedural shader that actually makes unique dappled horse texture maps on the fly. It basically uses noise to create very realistic-looking patterns of dappled horse textures.…

Create a CG mask asset FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-230-jedi AUTHOR Originally from Sweden, I’ve worked the last eight years in London and Chicago at Framestore and The Mill creating hero characters for award-winning commercials such as VW Beetle and Smithwick’s Squirrel. www.jessicasoderstrom.com DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to www.bit.ly/vault-230-jedi Ihave always loved creating characters, especially wearable art like costumes and masks. I wanted to create a project that could also include my passion for CG asset building. This tutorial shows how you can integrate CG and physical projects while using one to the other’s advantage. In my design process I gathered plenty of references, both of real animals and interesting shapes. I had a clear idea that I wanted to design a mask with an…

Your CG problems solved Pietro Chiovaro replies There are a lot of methods you can use to create a realistic roof material, and many of these methods start by the utilisation of the internal textures of the software. However, today I will explain how to create a realistic roof material using some external textures, which you can create starting from a photo or by downloading from a site. Starting from this point, we need to first select the model in which we want to assign the material, then we have to open the Node Editor panel and add these elements: the Texture Coordinate input, two Image Texture nodes, the shader Diffuse BSDF, the Glossy BSDF shader, two Gamma nodes (that we can find in the Color section), the Hue Saturation…

AUTHOR PROFILE Steve is a freelance tech journalist and CG artist, with an unhealthy addiction to 3D apps and plug-ins. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Steve_Jarratt FEATURES PBR-based materials Supports PBR workflows with more accurate previews New SpeedTree library 150 new models with a range of species, with 4K and 8K PBR texture maps Updated leaf rendering system Offers a purported speedup of up to 1,000 times over its predecessor Realistic wind system Overhauled wind effects are now more natural-looking New generation algorithms Produces more natural placement of branches and leaves THE ART OF ARBORSCULPTURE Design a tree by drawing the trunk and branches, then use generators to add twigs and leaves. Add a Leaf Mesh with a texture and opacity mask, and use the new Cutout Editor to trim the mesh and add…

AUTHOR PROFILE Cirstyn Bech-Yagher Cirstyn is a freelance CG artist and educator, with over 15 years’ experience in 3D. Her clients range from AMD to Exalt3D and Future. She is currently collaborating with AMD as technical artist for Radeon ProRender for 3ds Max. www.twitter.com/cirstyn FEATURES Multiple unwrap and baking options Hard-edged and organic unwrapping Uniform pixel density in unwraps Network rendering Bakes in several render engines Flatiron by 3d-plugin.com touts itself as a full-scene texture baking application for 3ds Max. This comes in super handy if you want to convert entire scenes or setups for games or other environments, but after giving it a go it became apparent that the plugin’s quirks often detract from its usefulness. I had the chance to put Flatiron through some reallife paces earlier this…

1. When a model gets published in Maya we automatically create a Houdini surface asset, so the shading artist can immediately start creating and assigning materials in Houdini. 2. Materials are assigned as a SOP attribute, where we use procedural wild-card assignment that references material tags predefined in Maya (*metal*,*wood*). Each material can contain an arbitrary number of layered RISE shaders, a heavily customised version of SideFX’s Classic Shader. 3. Before publishing a surface asset, the artist can also assign custom split attributes which will be used to split the asset into several objectlevel nodes for easier separation into different render layers. All this is done in a special HDA (Houdini Digital Asset) we call the ‘asset container.’ This HDA is embedded in the HIP file. When the asset gets…

During the capture process, all the traditional horse moves were envisioned, including rearing and stomping. But Regelous' research into horse behaviour also uncovered some unusual actions that horses are capable of. “For instance,” he says, “there's this bizarre move that I'd never even seen until I started researching, where horses can actually hop on their back legs.” Another move now possible is to have the horse and rider fall realistically, just like an onset horse stunt. “This uses the smart stunts feature in Massive, which uses rich body dynamics. “What you don't want is for the horse to suddenly drop dead and be this floppy bunch of bones that eventually grinds into the ground. What you do want is for something that's still able to move and look like it's…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-230-jedi AUTHOR I am a digital artist specialising in concept modelling, production modelling and texturing. I have worked as a 3D modeller for over 12 years in games, films and commercials. Today I work for Industrial Light & Magic in Vancouver, B.C. where my team, along with the London, San Francisco and Singapore offices have just created tons of incredible assets for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. www.darrellabney.com For the past 13 years I’ve worked for various film, game and commercial studios as a 3D modeller, texture painter and concept artist. I’m something of a creature specialist now, but before I went digital I worked as a traditional sculptor, painter and make-up artist. Today I will be sharing with you some techniques I use in everyday modelling…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Maya Jermy Maya is a 3D artist and animator based in the UK. She started her career five years ago remaking and animating characters for Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee – New ‘n’ Tasty. www.mayajermy.com Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is an Italian 3D artist who creates 3D assets and environments, and is currently working on an open-source game. pietrochiovaro.artstation.com Antony Ward Since the early Nineties Antony has worked for many of today’s top game and VFX studios, as well as written three technical manuals and many online tutorials. www.antcgi.com Oscar Juárez Oscar is a 3D generalist based in Mexico City. He has been running Fibrha Studio since 2010 and specialises in archvis rendering, animations and Unreal Engine. www.facebook.com/FibrhaStudio GET IN TOUCH…

Just imagine what would happen if an important plot detail was leaked on a film like The Last Jedi in advance. Not only would you potentially ruin the cinema experience of millions of people, your name in the industry would quickly become mud. So as to be expected, security was super-tight on the project, to the extent that Jellyfish Pictures worked off a totally separate network from their regular one, and the internet connection was limited to simply downloading files from ILM and nothing else. “We pretty much work off the grid on all these – and I think that’s the norm these days with any Disney or Marvel show,” says Cheetham. “You have to work in a cut-down, established way that cannot be visible. “You limit mobile phones, you…

AUTHOR PROFILE Lance Evans Lance produces creative content for editorial clients like AMEX, Absolut Vodka, Scholastic Books, and has also created seminars for Apple. lanceevans.com/digital FEATURES Solids modelling Sub-div modelling Long list of 3D formats/ conversions Excellent rendering options Greatly improved user interface form·Z is a nearly threedecades old workhorse in the CAD and 3D realm. While originally designed for the architectural and industrial designer markets, it has always been a popular option for those working in the entertainment sphere as well. With the exception of character modelling, this program can create just about anything you might need. An obstacle to full acceptance in the creative markets however, was form·Z’s CAD underpinnings, interface and workflow, which was a bit clinical for many tastes. This was a shame, since the tools…