Table of contents for October 2018 in 3D World

01 GENERATE THE TERRAIN Start a project by adding one of Instant Terra’s terrain generators. The Viewport displays a visual representation of the terrain and the Graph hosts the procedurally linked nodes that compose the terrain. Double click on the node to open its parameters and modify them to begin shaping the terrain. You can also import terrains from single image files or several image files and modify them. 02 TRANSFORM THE TERRAIN Explore different approaches by linking nodes, for example, to constrain the elevation, compress the terrain on the Y axis to achieve a folded structure, and create a natural slope. The individual nodes accumulate procedurally, and can be mixed using composition nodes to form the different geological properties of the terrain. Focus first on global forms and then…

There are certain names, phrases and places that have become part of the furniture for people within the visual effects, animation and motion graphics community, and none more so than SIGGRAPH. For 40-plus years now, ACM SIGGRAPH has been at the forefront, extolling the virtues of innovation in computer graphics as well as celebrating the achievements of the many artists, scientists, filmmakers and others who share this passion. In August 2018, SIGGRAPH will be holding its annual conference in Vancouver, which will see thousands of artists, developers, students and manufacturers joining to share in the latest and greatest of the CG community. You will find that many developers have a lot to show and will have stands running their own dedicated talks and demonstrations. SIGGRAPH is the best place to…

The Animation Workshop is recognized across Europe as a Center of Excellence with expertise in animation related activities in the areas of education, culture, communication, and business. In training and working with creatives in the animation industry over the last nearly 30 years, The Animation Workshop (TAW) has continually explored interesting and useful applications for animation. This experience has shown that animation can break down walls, make complicated information easier to understand, and - when executed properly – create lasting artistic impact. Two areas that TAW sees as increasingly important and ripe for development are the dissemination of knowledge through a program called Science Visualization, or Sci-Vi, and a framework for art cooperation called Expanded Animation. Both of these programs take animation into exciting new territories by activating new partners,…

“Red Giant was started by Andrew Little and Sean Safreed. Drew was a motivated sales guy, and Sean was very knowledgeable in the area of software development. Someone introduced them to each other, and they decided to work together,” explains Red Giant’s head of marketing Aharon Rabinowitz. “The reaction to what Red Giant had to offer was so good, it didn’t take long for the company to grow and make a name for itself.” In the 15 years since its inception Red Giant has continuously developed software for editing, motion design, colour correction and VFX. The company’s products have been used in everything from major motion pictures to worldwide television programming and web production. “We’re best known in the industry for Trapcode Suite, Magic Bullet Suite, Universe and PluralEyes, but…

When you first launch Medium the new changes in this recent update don’t immediately jump out at you. This release is the largest update since launch and as you would expect in such a young application, a lot has gone on under the hood. The developers have worked on reducing memory usage and have made big improvements in performance using a Vulkan-based graphics engine, resulting in better frame rates. After looking at a slightly different background sky you will try and access layers, and that’s when the big change hits you. A new scene graph changes the whole layers system and integrates a lot of functionality into one main area. Layers get a boost from 20 to 100, which really helps to build bigger and more complex scenes. The feel…

VIDEO + STEP IMAGES CREATE A VFX SHOT USING APPLE MOTION James Rickards takes you through the entire process of creating a visual effects shot, including object tracking and motion graphics elements. VIDEO + IMAGES BOOTCAMP This issue, Mike Griggs delves into SurfaceSPREAD, the plugin for distributing models over a mesh. VIDEO + STEP IMAGES ICLONE Alex Borre shares his expert techniques for successful iClone clothing projects. 50% off training at www.idiscover.tv with code ‘3dworld’ Offer ends 8 September FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-238-siggraph…

So much has changed at Pixar. Technology and the deep-diving research that precedes it over the years has allowed the studio to produce some of the most groundbreaking visual energy ever seen. When the first instalment of The Incredibles universe came to our screens, a lot of the software had only just been written by a very small team. Back in 2004, Pixar was still that cheeky upstart of a start-up animation team. Nowadays the studio is part of the Walt Disney Corporation. In the early years of Pixar, those pesky movies were released almost on a yearly basis, showing off by breaking down the barriers of digital possibilities, from the simulation of Sulley’s fur in Monsters Inc., then the beautiful water and coral in Finding Nemo. Leaving behind the…

Need a snowy mountain range for your film? Ice walls? A waterfall? An alien planet? Filmmakers like to take audiences to exotic natural locations, and when they do, visual effects and 3D artists are regularly called upon to help build these worlds. Whether it be via matte painting, procedurally generated terrain, digitally sculpted environments or a combination of all of these, artists work hard to ensure these locations look real, even though by their very nature the environments are often in the background. 3D World asked VFX studios Image Engine, Scanline VFX, RISE FX and Rodeo FX about the tools and techniques they used to build the natural worlds for some of their recent projects, including Lost In Space, Black Panther and Game Of Thrones. LOST IN THE FOREST Image…

At first glance Deadpool 2 and Solo: A Star Wars Story appear to be extremely different from each other, but looking beyond the spandex superhero costume and weird alien creatures, similarities begin to show through, especially in the approach towards designing, creating and executing action sequences. Despite the fantastical human capabilities and settings, the goal for each production was to ground everything in reality, or at least pseudo physics, to create a sense of believability for the audience. Interestingly, the signature set piece for both movies involve heists, whether it be rescuing a mutant from a military convoy or stealing cargo from an Imperial monorail train. Rather than create full CG environments to match the stunt action filmed on blue screen, filmmaker David Leitch (Atomic Blonde) elected to use downtown Vancouver, British Columbia for the…

For the first time, SIGGRAPH will be host to an Immersive Pavilion, devoted entirely to virtual reality, mixed reality and augmented reality. It will feature a VRcade, a space for playing VR, MR and AR games; the Village for showcasing larger projects; and the VR Theatre, which is part of the Computer Animation Festival. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ first VR short film, Cycles, will make its world debut at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the Village and will explore the true meaning of creating a home and the life it holds inside its walls. Elsewhere in the Village, Welcome to Light Fields is an experience focused on the freedom of motion, realistic reflections and translucence in VR. It will take visitors to the mahogany interiors of Gamble House in Pasadena, glossy ceramics…

Just under two years ago, Allegorithmic started extending itself to new markets. Clients from automotive, transportation design and aerospace were knocking on the door of the Substance developers and it’s in part why Pierre Maheut, Allegorithmic’s market strategy director of architecture and design, and some of his colleagues were hired to help the company reach new heights with new industries. Now, Allegorithmic can count almost all of the OEMs as its customers. “We are at most points of the pipeline,” says Maheut, “for the marketing and the final CAD configurators, but also at the very beginning in the design studio. Colour, material and finish (CMF) designers are experiencing new materials to test.” It’s no wonder that Allegorithmic has chosen automotive for its biggest Substance Source release. With 700 assets made…

Cadiz, on the southern coast of Spain, is redolent with history. It’s not somewhere you’d expect to find the headquarters of a company on the cutting edge of instancing and scene assembly tools in 3ds Max, but that’s where iToo Software began and have grown for almost 20 years. iToo Software have one stated goal – to make life easier for artists. Their procedural tools are designed to remove limitations. Too many polygons? No problem! Complex procedural model to create? RailClone removes the technical barriers associated with parametric workflows. Forest Pack and RailClone play an essential part in the pipelines of major studios including ILM, LUXX, ScanlineVFX, Blur and more. These studios come for the instancing power but quickly realise the benefits of an advanced feature set that’s perfect for…

The jobs are moving. The people aren’t. As migration restrictions hit more socially polarised nations, it’s getting harder for talented artists to chase the work around the world. Furthermore, they want to work from where they live – not uproot families and navigate challenging circumstances to live in the most expensive cities of the world, where you’ll often find a concentration of the most desirable jobs. This issue isn’t specific to the postproduction industry, of course, but it’s where I have the most first-hand experience, having gained it from founding VFX Legion and turning it into a global institution with a remote workforce located from one end of the globe to the other. Having a global workforce has enabled us to give artists the work/life balance they desire, but it…

It’s not been an easy almost-year for VUE, with its website and support still in rebuild mode due to the December 2017 hack. Luckily, this has not affected their development roadmap, and they managed to stick to their quarterly release cycle. VUE xStream 2016 R6 is the latest version, and it ships with the usual new features and improvements, like revamped import options and industry-standard shortcut updates, IBL importance sampling, randomised cloud layer parameters as well as MetaCloud improvements and the ability to have EcoSystem populations with native instances in 3ds Max and C4D. It supports LightWave 2018, and there have been significant performance updates. While I can’t argue the increase in speed for the UI and EcoSystem population and display, which was impressively noticeable on my 64GB RAM/1080 setup,…

ARTIST Hadrien Gouedard SOFTWARE ZBrush, KeyShot, Substance Painter, Photoshop “For this image I used a classic process: sculpt in ZBrush, pose in ZBrush, quick Polypaint, and then I did some tweaks on the materials in KeyShot to get a nice SSS effect,” says character artist Hadrien Gouedard. He begins his creative process with some quick 2D sketches before rushing them in ZBrush, then finishing off with 3D-Coat, Substance and Marmoset, or directly in KeyShot. Hadrien’s work on this particular image was driven by a desire to lend a crazy personality to such a wild and dangerous animal. “The challenge is always more artistic than technical for me,” he adds. “The goal is to keep it fun throughout the entire process, when I look at the sculpt it needs to make…

ARTIST Yisu Zhang SOFTWARE Maya, V-Ray, Mudbox, Mari, Photoshop “Pretty much everything used to create this image is a basic modelling technique taught to new students,” says Yisu Zhang. He is currently just a student at Think Tank Training Center and very new to the world of 3D art, not that the quality of this image suggests it. “I used displacement for the ground and dirt, V-Ray 2-Sided Material for the leaves and varying degrees of SSS material for the geckos and berries,” he explains. “VRaySun and Sky provided the only light source. I painted my diffuse/spec/bump maps in Mari. V-Ray fog and depth of field are tweaked in Photoshop.” As he continues his studies, Yisu has ambitions for the future: “I want to tell stories with my artwork. I…

Original plate: Production found a quarry in British Columbia, Canada, that had the appropriate black rock and sand feel for the alien environment. Several sequences were filmed here, including those that served as the crash-landing site for the show’s ship. In this shot, the scene needed to reveal an expansive environment below as the characters look on. Environment build: Image Engine had a wide gambit to design the mountainous and cloudy environment. The studio produced several original concept paintings in Photoshop (rather than ‘photobashing’ existing real photography of mountain scenes together) and then continued the build for the final background painting. Final shot: Image Engine tends to use an array of off-the-shelf tools for digital environment work, such as Maya, Photoshop, Terragen, ZBrush and NUKE. But they also bring different…

Pietro Chiovaro replies For this type of material, I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/Roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic output since it isn’t necessary here. Now we can start to add some nodes, so from the Substance Designer library we need: the Scratches 3 noise and the Fibers 2 and Stripes patterns (these are the main elements of the material), the Height to Normal World Units filter, the Levels filter, a Warp filter, two Blend filters and last but not the least the two Gradient Map filters. Now we can start to link these elements. First of all we need to link together the Scratches 3 noise with the Stripes using the Warp filter. Then we have to link the Warp to the first Gradient Map and to the…

3D professionals around the world know KeyShot as the industryleading, real-time renderer that gives them the advantage with its speed, ease and quality. KeyShot is different than most rendering software – it’s stand-alone, realtime, CPU-based and available for Mac and PC. Together, with Luxion’s real-time ray-tracing technology as the backbone, KeyShot has proven to be the go-to renderer for high-quality results fast. SIMPLE, YET ADVANCED When you open KeyShot, you’ll be introduced to the most minimal user interface. Don’t worry though, it’s on purpose. The focus is meant to be on realtime results as every change you make in KeyShot – whether it’s a material, texture or environment update, lighting tweak or camera adjustment – can be seen the instant it’s made. The user interface keeps the workflow simple, but…

Have you ever been working on a project, only to find out that you don’t have enough compute resources in-house to meet your deadline? If so, then you’ve undoubtedly searched the internet for render farm services to assist. When you did this, you found a lot of “services” that claimed to offer rendering. Most of them were unclear on how they worked, how much they charged, or even where they were in the world. You may have signed up for one of the services you found, only later to realise there were obstacles that prevented you from meeting your deadline. If that was you, then allow us to introduce you to Pixel Plow, an alwayson, easy-to-use, cloud-based render farm service. Simply go to pixelplow.net and sign up for an account.…

In the sequel Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom directed by J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage), Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) return to Isla Nublar to save the remaining dinosaurs from an erupting volcano; however, their altruistic efforts are undermined by those who have nefarious plans in mind for the prehistoric beasts. Just under 1,200 visual effects shots were supervised by David Vickery with his ILM colleagues in London handling 550 shots and Vancouver producing around 200. Other contributors included Important Looking Pirates, El Ranchito, Image Engine, Scanline VFX, One of Us and Nvizible. RETURNING TO ISLA NUBLAR “We did establishing shots of Isla Nublar,” states ILM visual effects supervisor Alex Wuttke. “The challenge there was to stay true to all of the various depictions of the geography…

“The main inspiration for this project comes directly from Inuit oral history and the rich storytelling tradition of the north,” explains Daniel Gies of short film Giant Bear, for which he is acting as both co-director and lead artist. The film follows the story of a starving hunter who, after the mysterious death of his dogs, is confronted by a nanurluk. He then enters a kill-or-be-killed showdown with this enormous iceberg-sized bear. After completing work on its successful animated short, Amaqqut Nunaat: The Country oF Wolves, Montreal-based studio e.d.Films went in search of a new challenge. The project arose from Gies and his codirector Neil Christopher’s desire to capture the vague and uniquely paced storytelling style of the north. “It is a landscape that could swallow the unwary whole, where…