Table of contents for September 2016 in 3D World

Epic is a word that crops up a lot when talking with Martyn Culpitt, VFX supervisor with Image Engine, who were responsible for creating 170 shots for Independence Day: Resurgence. It comes as no surprise, given director Roland Emmerich’s track record of grand-scale destruction, and Image Engine’s successful collaboration on the same movies, White House Down and 2012, we’d expect nothing less than complete and utter global chaos. “Very ambitious; the movie is epic!” exclaims Martyn. “The scale of the shots is absolutely huge. There are so many different pieces that are needed for each shot. A lot of the work we did was with the actors on blue screen plates, so it was a lot of work to create the full-CG environments that surrounded them.” Complex environments One sequence,…

What did you think of the process? The technique Keith Lango introduced on the short film is very special, from the perspective of an animator. It forced me to focus mostly on the very essence of my performance. How did it work for you? This style is nothing more than pure blocking, no extras, which allowed me to have a lot of time to think nearly as a live-action actor in real time, and offer the director multiple acting choices to choose from in a single day. That’s how fast I was able to animate. But the core value was in realising that being an actor is the most important skill to have as an animator, because amazing polishing and details won’t save the day. What did you learn from…

NO.1 WORLDWIDE Gnomon was ranked School of the Year at the 2015 CG Student Awards For Beat Reichenbach, studying at Hollywood’s Gnomon – School of Visual Effects, Games and Animation was a passport to a job at his dream studio. Growing up in Switzerland, the rising star of the VFX industry – a finalist in both last year’s international CG Student Awards and The Rookies 2016 – dreamed of working at Blur Studio, creators of legendary cinematics for games like Doom, Tom Clancy’s The Division and Elder Scrolls Online, and recently, the visual effects for Deadpool. “I always wanted to go to the US,” he says. “I loved movies and I wanted to work in the industry.” Searching for a course that would give him a route into a major…

LUIS LARA Luis works at G24 Studio in Spain. Take a look at their blog for great art and breakdowns. www.behance.net/GranDosicua The latest Humster3D Challenge asked artists to interpret the idea of an ‘Explorer of New Worlds’ and deliver a CG scene that would excite, challenge and reward viewers. The winner, selected by a team of industry judges (including 3D World) was Voyager by Luis Lara. A brilliant take on the theme, Luis’s illustration forces the viewer to ask questions and develop their own narrative: “It isn’t a product rendering or a character concept, the image must mean something, tell something to the viewer beyond the modelling technique or texturing work,” explains Luis. “I think that’s the difference between a render (or painting, drawing, photo) and real art.” Luis says…

STAR WARS: COMMANDER Sequence’s approach to animation and VFX is based on design, and their team has a unique talent for creating and building narrative extensions for existing IP. For example, Sequence produced all of the CG animation for this recent Star Wars video game trailer. HALO: THE FALL OF REACH Bundled with the limited editions of Halo 5, and now available on Netflix, The Fall of Reach is an animated adaptation of the novel by Eric Nylund. Sequence’s team of less than 50 worked for six months to produce over an hour of polished 3D content. BOUND Bound is the latest video game from developer Plastic (Datura, Linger in Shadows) and Santa Monica Studio. Bound’s interesting as it combines pre-rendered 3D with captured footage, which Sequence used to express…

AUTHOR PROFILE Mike Griggs Polishing pixels since 1995, Mike is a UK-based freelance 3D, VFX and mograph artist, as well as a freelance technical writer. creativebloke.com Adding people to animations, can be tedious, especially if it’s only to add life to an architectural walkthrough. With the latest release of Anima, AXYZ Design offers a standalone solution for mass people creation for Cinema 4D and 3ds Max. As a massive fan of the first release of Anima, it is great to see that AXYZ has consolidated the feature set and has made Anima a lot less fiddly to use. The methodology of using Amima is pretty simple, load in geometry (.obj, .3ds, .dae, .fbx and .lwo formats are supported) from a 3D scene into Anima’s workspace, draw the paths that the…

OctaneRender 3 has been a long time in development and now the productionready GPU renderer is finally shipping. Will the new features make it worth the wait? Mike Griggs tests the renderer using the Cinema 4D plug-in… With some changes along the way in the development process, OctaneRender 3 is highly anticipated by existing and new users. Thankfully it seems that Otoy has rewarded that patience with a product that enhances the existing Octane experience rather than one that has been completely overhauled. Amongst the range of new features are support for volumetrics, which means smoke and fire generated in applications like Houdini or plug-ins like Turbulence FD, is supported. We tested OctaneRender 3 through the Cinema 4D plug-in, the standalone application is still there, and is still an acquired…

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-anim THE MAGICAL JOURNEY BEGINS ARTIST Harold Tovar SOFTWARE Blender, Krita, Photoshop Created for a Blendernation online challenge with ‘Journey’ as the theme, this epic render took Columbian video game artist Harold Tovar three days to make. “What I enjoyed the most was translating the characters from 2D to 3D – I usually start sketching some ideas before jumping into the 3D software, but for these characters I only had some rough sketches on a piece of paper. When the characters started to come to life in 3D was an exciting experience,” says Harold. All of the elements were built from scratch in Blender using simple geometry, as Harold explains:…

WHAT IS ANOMALIA? Anomalia is a dedicated animation training academy based in the Czech Republic. With teachers from every major animation studio, including Pixar, Disney, Blue Sky, Aardman, LucasArts and more, Anomalia offers professional training for film and video game animators. www.anomalia.eu Animation is inherently slow, expensive and laborious. So when animation workshop Anomalia held a twoweek ‘lab’ to create a 10-minute short with a team of 20 animators, called Poutnik, director Keith Lango had a tough task ahead: “A typical large Hollywood animated film requires a character animator to complete about three seconds of final animation per week. A team of 20 animators moving at those speeds meant that we would only be able to produce two minutes of animation in total – nowhere near enough to tell the…

EXPERT PANEL Paul Hatton Paul leads a team of 3D visualisers at a company in the UK. They specialise in traditional visualisation and interactive environments. www.cadesignservices.co.uk Nick Leonard Nick specialises in texturing, look development and lighting. He works as a lighting technical director for MPC. www.nickleonard.co.uk Jason Knight Jason is a freelance digital artist with over 33 years’ experience: Today his Wacom tablet receives much love, while his paintbrushes rest. www.knightgraphics.daportfolio.com Francis-Xavier Martins Francis-Xavier is a character artist and CG generalist, with over a decade of experience in games, media and TV. www.polyjunky.com Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is an Italian 3D artist who works in the 3D creation and re-creation of environments, and on an open source game. www.bit.ly/pietro-chiovaro GET IN TOUCH EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO ian.dean@futurenet.com EXPERT TIP Know where…

From computer animation to game art, motion graphics to visual effects, London-based Escape Studios specialises in industryfocused, highly-intensive courses designed for artists who are not just looking for a job, but who are dedicated to creating a successful career and making an impact in the creative industry as we know it today. Since first opening in 2003, Escape Studios has been recognised as a first-class education provider for the creative industries. Collaborating with studios such as Framestore and MPC, and pioneering individuals such as Paul Franklin (DNeg) and Eamonn Butler (Cinesite), everything Escape Studios produces is entrenched with industry knowledge, insight and connections. Whatever your specialism or level, at Escape Studios, you’re in good hands It’s for the game-changers You’ll find Escape Studios Alumni behind many Oscar- and Baftanominated and…

News and views from around the international CG community Amongst the big US animation studios, Blue Sky Studios stands out from the crowd. While it doesn’t have the budgets of Disney, Sony Pictures and Pixar, there’s a passion, a sense of experimentation and drive that ensures the US East-coast studio a place in our hearts. This year Blue Sky Studios celebrates 30 years of filmmaking and it’s worth taking a step back to marvel at their journey. From a small advertising and VFX studio formed by friends who met on TRON to global animation house, Blue Sky has married some impressive tech (its proprietary CGI Studio renderer is one of the best in the industry) with a passion for character-driven animation. While Bunny (1998) led the way to feature films,…

ALEX WILLIAMS Alex has worked on titles including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and studios from Blue Sky, to Sony Imageworks. He now teaches animation at Escape Studios. www.alex-williams.com Professional animators need to be able to please both the director, with the quality of their work, and the producer, with their speed. As head of animation at Escape Studios my job is to make sure all my students are ready to succeed in today’s animation industry. What follows are nine simple steps that all animators can take to make sure their workflow is good, fast and reliable. Escape Studios, part of Pearson College London, teaches students the art of filmmaking and specifically VFX and animation. To find out more, please visit the website. Create a camera and lock it off It’s…

“We also used multiple toon outlines on the characters to make them feel more hand drawn. Procedural noise shaders and cycling keyframes were employed to animate toon line attributes like line width, line end thinning, offset, transparency and so forth. This solved the problem where toon lines can feel fake and mechanical because they never vary from the rigid, settled geometry of the mesh. By animating the offset we enhanced the feeling of the lines being hand drawn because the silhouettes of the character were constantly shifting. Plus, we procedurally animated the verts of the character meshes to keep the silhouettes alive even while the character stood perfectly still. By placing this animation on a deformer node, but keeping the construction history of the mesh, we found that the mesh…

m HIGHLY ACCLAIMED Megascans is used by artists at ILM, MPC, Ubisoft and many more Swedish tech company Quixel is best known for having effectively transformed the texturing industry with their massively popular texturing toolset, Quixel Suite; helping texture virtually every major game franchise of the last three years. Fittingly it was dubbed as t his year’s best texture app in the March 2016 edition of 3D World. After a first look, it quickly becomes apparent that Quixel’s next release, Megascans is destined to make a much greater impact in 2016. Megascans is a massive online library of tileable surface scans, scanned vegetation and 3D scans. The entire library is consistently produced and identically calibrated, and plugs right into physically based rendering pipelines. Built around a philosophy of complete ecosystems,…

This year’s Siggraph takes on the broad theme of Render the Possibilities, and this stretches to the popular Production Sessions held around the show. Every Production Session was selected by program chair Miki Rose and a sub-committee made up of three industrial professionals, the XSV (Ex-Student Volunteer) and a liaison from the Conference Management group. Planning this year’s sessions began at the end of Siggraph 2015 and final decisions were made in the first half of this year. There were 40 entrants that Miki had to whittle down to just 10. “We did several rounds of discussion, debating the merits of each suggested session based on many different criteria, including interest to attendees, new and unusual topics, advances in technology or methodology, scope of the projects, speakers, on-site demonstrations or…

What do people need to know? Everybody has access to tech now so we’re back to the day when I started – back then it was Softimage not Maya. A lot of people relied on the idea they knew how to use software, but that’s not enough, anyone can learn tools. Good animation is about really great observation and performance; and execution of ideas is really important. What impresses in demo reels? When looking at demo reels it’s all about the art, so I would advise people to study figure drawing and art and really, for my money, you don’t have to have a complex finished film if you want to be a character animator. I would say, take the simplest thing and make it work, don’t go overboard on…

IAN KIRBY Ian launched The Sequence Group in 2006, releasing the motion comic I Am Legend. www.bit.ly/ian-kirby With a legacy in 2D art, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that The Sequence Group’s principles for whatever project they work on relies on good use of composition, shape and colour. “Our roots remain firmly in that artistic, painterly style,” says founder and creative director Ian Kirby, as he tells us about Sequence Group’s early days developing the first motion comics, called Broken Saints, with art director Andrew West. What followed was a motion comic series for Warner Bros, I Am Legend, that set the course for the studio. “Working on that project really opened the doors to more international work for Sequence,” says Ian. “Since then we’ve had the opportunity to…

FREE DOWNLOAD! Get your video course: www.bit.ly/vault-anim This issue, we’ve joined forces with Pluralsight (formerly known as Digital-Tutors) to offer you a comprehensive two-hour video training course that you can download from our online Vault – for free! Simply visit our downloads page at www.bit.ly/vault-anim for the files. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create MEL scripts that automatically generate the motion of a walking ant. You’ll discover how to drive the ant’s stepping legs, head and antennae movement, and the secondary body movement with scripts that respond to the changing position of the ant. You’ll also learn how to set up the rig so the position of the ant can either be manually controlled by the animator or guided by a procedural wandering path, complete with automatic aim…

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 Intel’s fifth-generation Broadwell processor range has already been superseded by the sixth-generation Skylake at the lower end of the market and on notebooks. But the workstation Xeon E5 Broadwell only just arrived. After the all-conquering Armari Magnetar M44-AW1200G2 (reviewed in issue 210), we now have a slightly more affordable alternative in the shape of InterPro’s E Series E200BWE. That is, it would be if it weren’t for the graphics. Not content to ship two of the most recent Intel Xeon E5 processors, InterPro has also chosen to include the fastest workstation graphics card currently available, with the largest frame buffer: the Nvidia Quadro…