Table of contents for June 2018 in 3D World

This issue is crammed with training covering Maya, VR animation and more, as well as our regular Q and A section. We also take you behind the scenes on Black Panther and Star Trek: Discovery! On top of that you’ll find out how to make blockbuster-quality projects on only a modest budget. rob.redman@futurenet.com EMAIL rob.redman@futurenet.com WEBSITE 3dworld.creativebloq.com FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/3dworldmagazine TWITTER @3DWorldMag SAVE UP TO 47% When you sign up to a print subscription – turn to page 26.…

“The drone on SENTiNEL was made using various sci-fi models inside of Element 3D, our third-party plugin for After Effects, which was critical for such a short schedule,” says Andrew Kramer. Keeping the shots manageable was a big challenge, he adds, in particular the propulsion system. “There are a ton of fun ways to demonstrate propulsion effects, and it would have been fun to do some particle sims, but we just didn’t have time. So to give the shots an energy force, we went with a heat distortion effect along with illuminated pulse pads on the ship’s lower design. The other thing we did is add dust elements to the ground to show it whip past the camera. The sound effects help a lot too. “Getting the right speed and…

“Bryan said, ‘I want the Klingons to be fully developed in terms of who they are as a people and for them to be culturally savvy and beautiful,’” recalls lead creature designer Neville Page. “I remember thinking, ‘This is exciting because it’s going to be one of the first times that we get to think about who the Klingons are culturally in a very developed way.’ I did studies of our Klingons with hair and guarantee you that they are Klingons. I was able to explore their physiology underneath the hair and make it utilitarian.” There are cultural differences amongst the Klingons. “I proposed that wouldn’t it be cool if all of the Houses of Klingons had a different look,” reveals head of prosthetics and special effects make-up Glenn Hetrick.…

Houdini, the ground-breaking, Oscar-winning digital content creation application from SideFX, has a long and well-earned reputation for being the 3D software application that can do anything. Houdini has a procedural and node-based creation structure that sets it apart from many 3D applications and also makes it extremely powerful. The software comes with a full suite of creation tools from fluids, particles and dynamics to name but a few. Houdini is used in large studios where it handles a lot of the effects work for major blockbusters, and with the cheaper but nearly full-featured Houdini Indie, many freelancers and small studios are now starting to integrate Houdini into their own workflows. One of the keys to this integration is Houdini Engine. It allows practically any asset that can be made in…

Michael Smith, Leeds Antony Ward replies When it comes to animation, inverse kinematics, or IK as it’s more widely known, is a huge time saver. Being able to move a character’s hips while the feet stay planted, or keeping its hand steady on the balustrade as it ascends the stairs, not only makes an animator’s life much easier, but it can also help to produce more believable movements quickly and efficiently. IK allows the animator this freedom because unlike FK (forward kinematics), the joints are evaluated in reverse. So, with FK you would move the hip, then the knee and finally the foot whereas with IK the foot is evaluated first, so the chain works backwards. Imagine trying to create a walk cycle using only FK and keeping the feet…

“Trojan Horse was a Unicorn B-Sides is about bringing the business side of digital art to THU Festival for creators and artists interested in developing their own IPs, projects, companies or their work as freelancers. Gathering the expert figures of the industry to talk all about the business aspect of the digital art entertainment is what you might expect from these talks. If you want to be a successful digital artist nowadays you have to understand every aspect of it, especially how it works as a business. Because at the end of the day, your art must make the wheel spin and put food on the table. In this B-Side talk, Ratatouille’s acclaimed producer and Emmy award winner Brad Lewis talks about getting animated films made in the world of…

“For VIA, the environments were hand-painted in Photoshop in layers and those layers were imported into After Effects, where I created the parallax and did all my compositing and effects,” says Izzy Burton of Blue Zoo. “The 3D modelling, rigging, animation and rendering was in Maya. The hand-drawn 2D animation was Photoshop again.” Not all of this was in Burton’s technical comfort zone, but that was partly the point of the project. “Where there were gaps in my knowledge or skills, I managed to teach myself, with a little advice here and there from colleagues. There was a fair amount of redoing things when I made silly mistakes, but it was honestly the best way to learn the software.” “One of the biggest challenges was integrating 3D characters with the…

AUTHOR Antony Ward Antony has worked for many top game and VFX studios, and has written technical manuals and online tutorials. www.antcgi.com I have been using Maya for over two decades now, and during that time I’ve touched upon nearly all aspects of the application, from modelling to animation to dynamics and even scripting. Now, I say this, yet I don’t class myself as an expert. Maya is constantly evolving and with each release there is so much more to learn and experiment with. It’s a huge and powerful application capable of doing so much, so to learn everything it has to offer, inside and out, is a mammoth task. With that said there are a handful of fundamental tips and tricks I have picked up over the years, things…

AUTHOR Paul Roberts Paul is an environment artist with over 15 years of 3D teaching experience. He’s currently sharing his love of parametric workflows as training manager for iToo Software. www.itoosoft.com The scene and renders used in this tutorial were provided by Zagreb-based Studio Niskota (studio-niskota.hr), who created the project as a test bed for their no-post pipeline. All the assets in the scene are modelled and textured with such detail that they could be used for a close-up render despite ending up hundreds or thousands of metres from the camera in the final shot. The aim is to produce an image that’s ready to go straight from the frame buffer, with little or no post-production. Creating high-quality assets permits Studio Niskota tremendous freedom to experiment, without having to worry…

Elisa Grant, London Simon Edwards replies Occasionally I might be asked to create an illustrative image where boxy and textured geometry might be the way to go when it comes to representing trimmed and shaped organic forms, like hedges and shaped trees. But instead of attempting to paint a representation onto solid geometry, more often than not, a better result can be achieved by instead modelling up all the small details. This of course can apply to any digital modelling really (depending on the level of reality you are trying to achieve of course), but then obviously the computer will begin to slow as your hardware eventually reaches its limits. As a result, it is good practice to be aware of which areas in your model might require less detail…

Stop-motion masters Aardman are known for their forward-thinking and innovative work, and 2018 saw them release their latest creation in the form of sports comedy, Early Man. axisVFX cofounder and VFX supervisor Howard Jones was tasked with leading a team to create the film’s visual effects. Working directly with Aardman and director Nick Park, Jones is a specialist when it comes to hitting Aardman’s creative vision, going back as far as The Pirates! Band of Misfits before setting up axisVFX with fellow VFX expert Grant Hewlett. The newbie company set forward a pitch and won the job to collaborate on the 2015 Shaun the Sheep Movie, then later working on Shaun the Sheep: The Farmer’s Llamas. Early Man marks their third Aardman project as a company. SETTING THE SCENE Early…

Vertex 2018 was an event that covered many areas, from workshops and seminars to being the place to visit if you wanted some guidance on taking the next step in your career. However, a theme emerged during the day that has sparked some discussion, including during our panel towards the end of the day, and that was digital humans. Many of the projects that we see, either as part of the visual effects community or simply as consumers watching TV or film, are filled with characters, fantastical or otherwise, and many of these are digitally produced. If you are thinking about an orc or a humanoid of some type, the discussion tends to fall to how engaging that character was, how well it was put together and whether the performance…

TUTOR Maciej Kuciara Maciej Kuciara is a concept designer and a member of the Art Directors Guild (IATSE Local 800) working in both films and video games in Los Angeles, California. Some of his work include Ghost in the Shell, Captain America: Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy and the critically acclaimed PlayStation exclusive, The Last of Us. www.kuciara.com The workflow I teach in the Futuristic Character Design course is, in short, the same workflow I developed while working on Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell. It aims to solve unique design challenges with consistency and speed by using everything from loose sketching techniques to advanced final render procedures. In this tutorial, we will first begin by deconstructing our brief, planning our project, and gathering our references. From there, I…

CAPRI GETAWAY ARTIST Jake Williams SOFTWARE 3ds Max, Corona Renderer, V-Ray, Phoenix FD, Forest Pack Pro “As an artist I strive to find a good balance between tech and art,” says Jake, who spends his days working as lead visualisation specialist at WeWork in New York. For this creation Jake wanted to achieve the effect of a wide-angle fisheye lens, which does not currently exist within Corona, leading him to take a unique approach. “This led me to an old-school method of building the whole scene in reverse and pointing the camera into a mirror ball,” Jake explains. To work around further limitations he created a duplicate scene using V-Ray to get elements such as shadows, raw lighting and multimattes, before combining the two in Corona. Finally, the Phoenix FD…

“What I was most happy with in A Drop is a technique I wish other people would use more often,” says Vanhoenacker. “I found that if you track the shot perfectly, you have a direct connection between the virtual world and what was shot. So you put that as a setup inside your world, then make the characters you’ve shot go at the speed and trajectory you intended, and create a virtual camera. That has some restrictions, because you can’t go sideways or it will feel like this is flat footage in a 3D world. But as long as you stay roughly where the initial camera was, or at least along the same Z-axis as this camera, you get the illusion across. “This virtual camera can pan left, can pan…

Inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, American screenwriter and producer Gene Roddenberry sought to explore intellectual themes within suspenseful spacefaring adventures with Star Trek. A cultural phenomenon was born consisting of seven television series and 13 feature films spanning 52 years. The latest small-screen incarnation, Star Trek: Discovery, takes place a decade before the original TV show with the primary objective being to honour the legacy of the franchise. “I thought this was a great opportunity, but also daunting,” notes production visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman (Sleepy Hollow), who looked after the creation of just under 5,000 shots and received a VES Award nomination for the pilot episode. Pixomondo handled 1,700 VFX shots, with the Toronto facility responsible for 90 per cent of the work while Los Angeles produced the…

“WHEN THE FIRST TRAILER CAME OUT THE WORLD WENT BONKERS”Todd Perry, associate VFX supervisor, Method Studios Black Panther has become the fifth Marvel Studios movie to cross the $1 billion global box office mark. “It’s unbelievable that the world has such a huge reaction to a film and I can’t help but feel proud to be part of it,” remarks Method Studios associate VFX supervisor Todd Perry. “It was clear that Black Panther was going to be different just by reading the screenplay. You have the African side of things but also the component of strong women. There are no women on the sidelines who are strictly love interests. We knew that it was going to affect certain demographics harder than others but when the first trailer came out the…

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. We continue our look at lighting this issue with spot lights. Spot lights have been around since the start of computer image creation. As the name suggests, they take their influence from spot lights in the theatre or a film stage. Spot lights can be directed in a much more predictable way than other light types, and therefore offer a wide range of creative possibilities. In the past few years image-based lighting and area lights have become more…

Dom Williamson, Canterbury Maya Jermy replies Rendering realistic-looking liquids is not as easy as it seems. Have you ever been in a situation where you have spent precious time creating a model with the intention for it to imitate liquid, but there was something strangely off about it? There are a few possible causes: the environment and lighting settings, incorrect Index of Refraction (IOR) values of materials, or the model itself. Let’s take a look at something very basic you see every day: a glass of water. Nothing special at a first glance, but it can be really tricky to achieve that convincing render. No matter what render engine you use to create an image, or which software you model the parts in, the rules are the same. We will…

PRICE £399/$399|COMPANY Oculus VR|WEBSITE www.oculus.com Two years on from launch and the Rift is still going strong. After early legal bumps in the road were sorted Facebook focused on letting Oculus grow. A price drop last year helped (now £399 in the UK), and after the late addition of the intuitive Touch controllers the Rift is now rushing headlong to provide its users with some much-needed high-end content. The headsets now being affordable is one part of the equation, as you need a high-end PC to run the Rift on. Minimum specs have dropped to an Intel i3-6100 CPU and now only an Nvidia GTX 960 (it was the 970), but as the software have become more demanding you might want to check that out a little more closely…

VIDEO GET YOUR PROJECT MADE In this exclusive video from THU TV, producer and director Brad Lewis shares his thoughts on how to get an animated film made. An insightful talk, given with conviction and real Hollywood experiences. VIDEO + STEP IMAGES BOOTCAMP – HOUDINI ENGINE In this issue’s bootcamp, Mike shows you how to use Houdini Engine, to bring proceduralism to your app. VIDEO + STEP IMAGES ANIMATE IN VR VR artist Martin Nebelong shows you how to take VR a step further by adding animation to your scenes. FREE This issue we have a free video course from Learn Squared, teaching futuristic character design…