Table of contents for October 2017 in 3D World

This issue sees us discovering the secrets behind the VFX of Caesar and for more simian goodness, follow our tutorial on creating a monkey render on page 68. For you game artists out there we have a fantastic tutorial on page 36, showing you how to create game environments for PS4. Rob Redman Ed rob.redman@futurenet.com FIVE ISSUES FOR £5 When you sign up to a print subscription – turn to page 26.…

War for the Planet of the Apes enabled Weta Digital to utilise a new ecosystem modelling tool, called Totara, for the first time. “It’s a way of growing not only a tree but the whole forest realistically,” explains Weta Digital Visual Effects Supervisor, Dan Lemmon. “Rather than building a tree and placing that tree by hand, you scatter seeds across your whole mountain and then those seeds sprout, grow and compete for resources. You’ll actually simulate the whole ecosystem for 80 or 100 years. Some trees will die, branches will fall, and you end up getting a distribution of much more realistic forest. Two trees are growing side by side and their branches will avoid each other and develop more on the outside surfaces. There a lot of these details…

AUTHOR Syawish A Rehman Syawish is a visual effects and motion graphics artist based in Pakistan. Currently a student of computer science, he considers himself an aspiring polymath. Aiming to make a career in visual effects, he does a lot of R&D to recreate famous effects from Hollywood on his YouTube channel – The Alpha Channel. https://goo.gl/4qtzIz That portal effect was very special. It was pretty much the only effect in the movie that didn’t lean more towards motion graphics than visual effects so, in this article, we’re going to recreate that amazing look. We’re going to start by talking about nParticles in Maya. It’s hard to underestimate how amazing nParticles are, especially due to their Nucleus node, which brings all simulations on the same node, be it particles or…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a digital content creator with over two decades of experience creating Mograph, VFX and CGI for a wide range of clients. www.creativebloke.com Jason Knight Jason is a freelance digital artist with over 33 years of experience. He enjoys the flexibility of working with various styles and mediums. www.knightgraphics.daportfolio.com Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is a freelance 3D artist, specialising in the creation of game assets and environments. He is currently developing a new game. www.bit.ly/PietroChiovaro Paul Hatton Paul leads a studio of visualisers based in the UK. He delivers a host of projects including video and interactive environments. www.cadesignservices.co.uk Syawish A Rehman A motion graphics and VFX artist from Pakistan with nine years’ experience, Syawish…

01 DAZ STUDIO TO ZBRUSH Select the object you want to adjust on the Scene tab in DAZ Studio. Click File, and then Send to ZBrush. When the GoZ Export Options dialog appears, select Export with Deformations and click Accept. ZBrush will open with a blank canvas. If the LightBox menu appears, you can just click the LightBox button to hide it and get it out of the way. 02 OBJECT SETUP IN ZBRUSH Click and drag on the canvas to add your object. Hold down the Shift key at the same time to snap the object to the correct orientation. Click the Edit button on the tool bar. Note that this is different than Edit on the File menu. Now the object is successfully loaded in ZBrush, I usually…

PRICE $795 (single user licence) | COMPANY Pixologic | WEBSITE pixologic.com AUTHOR PROFILE Madeleine Scott-Spencer Madeleine is a creature and character designer and texture painter who currently resides in London. Previous credits include The Hobbit trilogy, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, Valerian, BFG and Life. www.maddiemonster.com MULTI VECTOR DISPLACEMENT MESH Vector Displacement Meshes enable you to store in a brush any shape that has been sculpted from a 2D plane in ZBrush. This allows the artist to generate an extensive library of complex shapes for use on a variety of surfaces. We found it particularly useful for storing brushes for varieties of horns, teeth, scales and other protrusions. You can even combine this with the new Brush Magnify option to vary the shape of each stroke based on…

Syawish A Rehman Syawish is a visual effects and motion graphics artist based in Pakistan. On page 82, he shares how to make disintegration effects. www.goo.gl/4qtzIz Madeleine Scott-Spencer Madeleine is a creature and character designer and texture painter who currently resides in London. Read her ZBrush review on page 94. www.maddiemonster.com Andrew Entwistle Andrew is a freelance artist with over ten years’ experience. Turn to page 36 to read his Unreal tutorial on game environments for Tethered. www.aentwhistle.com Steve Jarratt On page 92 you’ll find Steve’s review of LWCAD. He draws on years of experience as a writer and user of 3D animation software. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jarratt Paul Hatton Paul leads a studio of visualisers based in the UK. On page 81 he shows you how to speed up your renders, with…

In addition to all of the live-action photography, CG augmentation was needed for building environments. “The Hidden Fortress is one of our big environments in the film,” remarks Weta Digital Visual Effects Supervisor, Dan Lemmon. “A portion of the exterior we shot in British Columbia but we ended up digitally adding the waterfall and all of the interior. The baskets, totems, sconces and torches were built off of designs or pieces that the prop master or set decorator had put together with the production designer.” A significant element that needed to be simulated was the waterfall. “A big part of making it feel believable had to do with building the terrain underneath the waterfall, such as the rocks, channels, and interruptions the water flows over. By making the surface underneath…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-225-apes AUTHOR Syawish A Rehman Syawish is a visual effects and motion graphics artist based in Pakistan. Aiming to make a career in visual effects, he does a lot of R&D to recreate famous visual effects from Hollywood on his YouTube channel: The Alpha Channel. www.goo.gl/4qtzIz Ghost Rider shined as one of the new characters in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. You know what it means when Ghost Rider appears; first, that some sinners are going to be burned and second, there are going to be some really cool Ghost Rider transformation scenes, where you’ll see a living breathing dude turn into a firey skeleton. There are some interesting things that happen when Ghost Rider transforms and we’ll be breaking all of them down in the same way…

AUTHOR Guillaume Martinet Guillaume is currently a 3D character modeller for animated films at The Picture Factory in Luxembourg. artstation.com/artist/mrtnt This tutorial will show you how to sculpt an alien monkey in ZBrush. You will see the process step by step, from the gathering of the different references and inspirations that helped me create this creature, to the sculpting, texturing, rendering, and the finishing touches in Photoshop. When you are creating something that doesn’t exist, it really helps to spend time gathering as many reference photos from real life as you can. This is the case even if you are aiming for a sci-fi-esque creature, as is the case here. If the viewer can recognise elements, even if it’s on a subconscious level, it means that they will respond to…

01 SELECT THE GEOMETRY To create a Redshift Proxy, start with a mesh in its own Cinema 4D file, and make sure that all the textures have been converted to Redshift as this helps with both stability and predictability. When you are ready, select the mesh or meshes in the scene that you want to create a proxy from and select File>Export>Redshift Proxy (.*rs). Choose the location that you wish to save the Redshift Proxy to. 02 EXPORT SETTINGS On the Redshift Proxy Export dialog box, make sure that you are only creating a Redshift Proxy of the meshes you want by choosing Selected Objects in the Export drop-down. Be mindful of the Proxy Origin drop-down; if your model is centred, just choose World Origin. Make sure Add Proxy to…

01 MODEL THE JELLYFISH Go to the Polygons shelf and create a sphere. Keep its Height subdivisions low, around 8-10. Delete the lower half. Scale it up in the X and Z axis – when looking from the top in scale mode, you’ll see a small square, use that. Extrude the edges on the bottom and drag them downwards as you want. Now, on the newly created polygons, delete every other face. You’ll end up with a cylinder of sorts. 02 ANIMATE THE JELLYFISH I animated the jellyfish so that it would go directly up. In my example, using a 200 frames timeline, I moved the jellyfish up (in the Y-axis) by 20 points in 20 frames. In the next 20 frames, I moved the jellyfish down by 5 points.…

PRICE £2,599 plus VAT | COMPANY Armari | WEBSITE armari.com 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 magazine for five years. www.tzero.co.uk FEATURES 3.6GHz AMD Ryzen 1800X 32GB 2,400MHz DDR4 SDRAM AMD Radeon Pro Duo graphics with 32GB GDDR5 512GB Samsung PM961 M.2 NVMe solid state disk Warranty: Three years parts and labour, first year collect and return AMD RADEON PRO DUO The Radeon Pro Duo is an impressive new product. and it is essentially two Radeon Pro WX7100 GPUs on one card, but each one of these has 16GB of GDDR5 memory offering 224GB/sec bandwidth. Each GPU has 2,304 stream processors, too, for a whopping total of 4,608. But the…

Mass Effect: Andromeda, the eagerly awaited fourth instalment of the sci-firole-playing videogame, had a lot to live up to following the commercial virility and critical acclaim of the original trilogy, not to mention the fervid expectations of its hardcore fan base when it launched this spring, five years after the last release. Yet disappointingly for its developer BioWare Montreal, the response thus far has been distinctly tepid, as the game failed to entice strong ratings from the press and it has secured only a mixed response from its fans. One source of the criticism was for the character art, with the figures slammed as being ‘dead in the eyes’, ‘too robotic’, whilst others cited multiple cases of imperfect lip syncing during scenes. In fact the backlash became so fervent it…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills AUTHOR Johannes Richter Johannes has been enjoying working as an FX artist for over 10 years, busy creating visual effects on numerous acclaimed feature films, including Gravity and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. www.entertainmentengineers.net Houdini’s strong point has always been its procedural nature. With a few nodes and a small set of expressions, you can create complex and naturalistic results – models and scenes that would take forever to create in traditional ways. For a long time Houdini has been the backbone of many large-scale productions in the visual effects industry. However, because of its procedural approach, it’s often claimed to be too difficult to learn. While this might have been true a few years back, things…

Jason Knight replies When I first started using ZBrush, I was often confused by the interface. Much of that confusion continues to this day. The ZBrush interface is very different to other 3D-modelling programs, and can be very intimidating for new users. I often find myself scratching my head and searching the web for training or tutorials on how to accomplish tasks in ZBrush. To save some headaches for you, here is some of what I’ve learned from my research. My image, titled Metamorphosis of Nyssa, is about the never-ending desire to change who we are, when all the beauty we need is already inside us. This is another image that is inspired by Lois van Baarle, and is deeply influenced by the work of Carlos Ortega Elizalde. Although the…

PRICE €119 (£106, $136) | COMPANY WTools3D | WEBSITE lwcad.com AUTHOR PROFILE Steve Jarratt Steve is a freelance tech journalist and CG artist, with an unhealthy addiction to 3D apps and plugins. wikipedia.org/wiki/ Steve_Jarratt FEATURES Comprehensive snapping system Create walls, floors and roofs Add windows, doors, fences and roof tiles Real-time Boolean modelling Ability to store your own preset meshes CAD FOR LIGHTWAVE THE LW CAD PLUGIN FIRST APPEARED IN JANUARY 2005, WHEN VIKTOR VELICKO CHANGED THE NAME OF HIS ‘CURVE STUDIO’ TO LW CAD. ITS MAIN FUNCTION ON RELEASE WAS TO DELIVER A SERIES OF CAD-STYLE LINE DRAWING TOOLS. THESE SHAPES COULD THEN BE TRANSFORMED INTO POLYGONS AND EXTRUDED TO FORM ROOMS AND BUILDINGS. For many people, one of the reasons to keep using NewTek’s LightWave 3D was LW…