Table of contents for January 2018 in 3D World

In September 2002, Joss Whedon’s latest project Firefly premiered on Fox. Set 500 years in the future after a civil war, the show followed the adventures of Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his ragtag crew as they strived to make a living – legally or otherwise. After airing eleven of its fourteen produced episodes, the show was sadly cancelled and despite its short life, Firefly went on to gain a cultlike status. Regarded as one of the greatest tragedies in science-fiction television, its post-show success has allowed Whedon’s tale to continue to live on through comics, board games and regular ‘Browncoat’ fan meet-ups. Zoic Studios, who worked on the show’s visual effects, also happen to turn fifteen this year. Bagging a Creative Arts Emmy Award for their outstanding visual effects on…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-229-firefly It is well known that one of the biggest challenges in game production is terrain. The tools game engines provide are really limited compared to packages like ZBrush and Substance Painter, so this article provides an alternative method that combines a range of software to create massive and detailed terrain outside of game engines. We’ll also cover how to eventually bring it into UE4. The primary tools used in this article are UE4, ZBrush, World Machine, Maya and Substance Painter. Unreal Engine is one of the most powerful game engines that has been around for years, ZBrush is well known as the most powerful and flexible sculpting package, World Machine is a professional tool for realistic terrain generation, and Substance Painter is the best texturing software…

If you’re new to CGI, you may feel that there are far too many tools to choose from in a dizzying array of software. This series aims to break everything in CGI down to the very basics, so that every artist can be armed with the knowledge of which tool is best. This time we are looking at the snapping function. One of the key things that working in CGI should provide is greater precision. However, it is amazing just how difficult it can be to get accurate control over CGI mesh placement in the 3D world of digital content creation applications. This is where snapping can come in handy, as it allows objects to align to others via a range of desired parameters. Whether snapping to the grid of…

Bethan McCarthy, Birmingham FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-229-firefly Oscar Juárez replies Every time we press play and step into our levels created in Unreal Engine, it’s always an inspiring experience that makes us think: what else can I add to make it even cooler? Well, this time we are going to use the everhelpful blueprints to change the furniture materials in our scene. STEP BY STEP CREATE MATERIAL INTERACTIONS WITH BLUEPRINTS 01 IMPORT THE MODEL AND CREATE THE BLUEPRINT First of all we need to see where we want the interaction. Once it’s settled (in this case we will change the TV Base), it’s time to have the model. In this level we will only change the material of the main body, so we need to have the FBX file with…

Save the date! We are pleased to announce we are hosting an exciting, brand-new event – Vertex – for one day only on Tuesday 13 March at Olympia, London. Just like how a vertex connects everything, our event will bring the CG community together for practical inspiration and a fantastic networking opportunity. This special event assembles experts from every industry and discipline in CG, from games and VFX through to VR, covering character concepting, real-time creation and more. You’ll be able to boost your skills with leading industry artists and learn from the world’s best creative studios no matter which area you specialise in. You’ll get hands-on advice and tips and hear about the newest developments at our top talks, including from CG industry veteran Christopher Nichols (founder of the…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-229-firefly AUTHOR Martin Nebelong Martin is a freelance artist living in Denmark. He has been working as a 2D artist for 15 years, but since he got his VR headset five months ago, 3D is becoming an increasingly bigger part of his work. www.artstation.com/martinity VR is slowly gaining ground as a serious tool for entertainment production, and programs such as Oculus Medium, MasterpieceVR, Quill and AnimVR are helping to define virtual reality as a viable tool for professional work. It allows for a whole new level of artistic freedom, and it’s only going to get better over the coming years. This tutorial requires a bit of prior knowledge about Medium, and won’t go into the most basic tools and settings. However, Medium is very intuitive to use,…

FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-229-firefly Making a CGI scene believable is all down to effectively replicating the realistic details that you’d be likely to find in the real world: this can be scuff marks on paint work, wrinkles on a face, or foliage spreading around an exterior to make it look lived in. Normally the creation of vegetation especially would require either a great deal of modelling time, or the purchase of a vegetation plugin, which can get expensive fast. Thankfully, there is an alternative solution. ‘An Ivy Generator’ (IvyGen), available for free at bit.ly/2zBGiVG, is a standalone application for Windows, Mac and Linux, which allows the creation of realistic ivy formations that are literally grown around an existing mesh. Also available as a plugin for both Blender and 3ds Max,…

Jonathan Wilkins, Yorkshire Maya Jermy replies Creating beautiful textures for your character or environment can be a bit of a hassle at times. You may find yourself working on a project with a very tight deadline, so it is good to be able to apply techniques that will enable you to manage your time better and help you to work more efficiently. My favourite part of character creation is the sculpting, so I always welcome methods that make the rest of my work a pleasure. In essence, it is all about cutting corners where it’s possible. I have been through the process of creating maps entirely in Photoshop and never really enjoyed it. I do not find it cathartic to switch between software just to get a single map out…

This time last year we learned of a pre-release program code-named Adobe Felix, 3D software targeted at the design and content creation markets. This month Felix came of age and has been released to the world as Adobe Dimension, part of the Creative Cloud suite of tools. Adobe invented the digital content creation market 30 years ago, and its Creative Cloud suite has more applications than most of us can keep track of. However, the longtime omission from this line-up has been a full-fledged 3D application. But things have changed in the last year as Adobe has brought more than one 3D program to market. The first was Adobe Fuse, a Poser-like program that gives you the building blocks to create 3D characters. Now we have Adobe Dimension, targeting the…

Over the past 35 years, I’ve been fortunate to be at the helm of companies that were at the bleeding edge of entertainment and technology. From the mid 1980s through the early 1990s, I was the general manager of Industrial Light & Magic where we ushered in the age of digital film technology, winning Oscars for the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Terminator 2, The Abyss and Jurassic Park. Then, in 1993, I founded Digital Domain, which developed software such as Nuke and where we won Academy Awards for Titanic and What Dreams May Come. Needless to say, it was a wild and crazy ride. Back in the early Nineties, I recall visiting a Department of Defense test centre, where I sat in a flight simulator powered by an…

Blade Runner 2049 brings back Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard; however, this time around, the government-sanctioned replicant assassin is the one being hunted in a world at the mercy of an egomaniacal scientist. Tasked to find Deckard and bury a revelation that could ignite a civil war is a Nexus-9 replicant named KD6- 3.7, a hired killer for the LAPD portrayed by Ryan Gosling. Blade Runner 2049 VFX supervisor John Nelson spent two years crafting 1,190 visual effects shots and relied on the expertise of Double Negative, Framestore, MPC, Rodeo FX, BUF, UPP, Atomic Fiction and Territory Studio to produce desolate cities, holographic companions and celebrities, drone-projected advertisements, manufactured memories, analogue UI and a replicant cameo. Shot composition was inspired by storyboards drawn by Sam Hudecki under the direction of…

AUTHOR Marat “Flamm” Latypov I’ve been working in the game industry for more than 12 years now. Since 2010 I’ve been working in a company that creates mobile and social games. In general, I participate in developing prototypes for our new projects and, of course, I make models and animations. www.artstation.com/flamm Here I’ll be talking about the process of creating ReY, a character that I did for the Beyond Human challenge (real-time) on ArtStation. I decided to develop my own character design, and here I will take us from concept art to final render. Eventually I even did a few animations for ReY; she’s a character for a game, after all, so she has to be ‘alive’. I really like characters designed by Anna Cattish and Jamie Hewlett, so I…

TUTOR Jeff Wolverton Jeff Wolverton has been working in visual effects for major motion pictures for over 15 years, having created signature effects for Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain and many others. jeffwolverton.com In this Houdini tutorial you will learn how to combine some visually complex methods to construct new effects. The first method you will look at is the concept of a shader slowly disappearing the shell of a 3D object, or an object breaking into pieces (a particularly popular topic for many 3D artists). You’ll learn about flowing the particles along curves and using cross-time tricks to disintegrate one object but have it reintegrate into a different one when it reconstructs itself. This makes for powerful and intuitive effects that are simpler to set up once you have…

FREE This issue we have a free video course from Pluralsight, teaching teleportation effects in Houdin FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/vault-229-firefly VIDEO + STEP IMAGES DESIGN AN ENVIRONMENT IN VIRTUAL REALITY Martin Nebelong shows you how to use Oculus Rift with Oculus Medium, to sculpt an exterior environment directly within a virtual reality workspace VIDEOS BOOTCAMP - IVYGEN In this issue’s bootcamp, we demonstrate the power and usefulness of Ivygen, enabling you to create natural elements quickly and easily VIDEO + STEP IMAGES UNREAL LANDSCAPES Learn how to create landscapes using ZBrush and Unreal Engine 4…