Table of contents for June 2020 in 3D World

It’s easy to fall into thinking the most suitable cover art should be a great hulking mechanoid, a still from the latest big VFX movie or a sleek and shiny car, but that’s not always the case. Take this issue for example. I think Eugenia’s geisha render is stunning and showcases perfectly not only the content of her amazing Marvelous Designer training (on page 40), but that giving a subject a little more personality can be a very good thing. That’s not to say there’s no place for big VFX, so take a look behind the scenes on Netflix’s hit Altered Carbon, season 2, which is one of my personal favourites from the last few years. There’s never a bad time to learn a new skill, which is why we…

ARTIST Lorenzo Napoli SOFTWARE ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop Freelance concept artist Lorenzo Napoli spent a week working on the entirety of this demonic image, totalling 30-35 hours. When attending art school, Napoli immersed himself in the world of digital art and concept design, particularly favouring 3D sculpting and digital painting techniques. Napoli put a lot of focus into the posing of this character in ZBrush, which proved essential to the overall feeling of the image. The finer details were then created using masks and alphas, alongside ZBrush’s Inflate brush technique. “It was really interesting to work on something evil without any other specifications,” he reflects. “I spent a lot of time searching for references, particularly realistic images of tadpoles and other creatures.” The creature was created for Evilbook II, a book…

The Rookies is a platform to help digital artists get discovered without having to compete with professionals for attention. You’ll get to the front page of those sites one day, but for now, we’ve got your back and want to help turn your passion for creative media into a successful career. WWW.THEROOKIES.CO YEAR CREATED 2019 SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Knald, Nuke, Photoshop The goal of this piece was to achieve a realistic head and at the same time try to represent the marine’s mood, with tired eyes and a visible story on his face. I think that giving a soul to our digital characters is crucial. artstation.com/nicologranese ARTIST Nicolò Granese LOCATION Milan, Italy I'm studying to become a 3D character artist involved in cinematics. At the moment I just finished…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills AUTHOR Eugenia Peruzzo, also known as Igy, is a character artist with a background in graphic design. She has been working in the game industry for over four years. artstation.com/eugeniap This tutorial is an in-depth, step-by-step guide of my personal approach to creating a kimono in Marvelous Designer, from making the sewing pattern to exporting the complete garment. In addition, there will be some tips on how to import and handle the final mesh in ZBrush. The techniques can be applied to any other type of clothing. This workflow is tailored towards the end goal of making the garment usable for real-time character production. The type of kimono created is a fantasy version concepted by Radoslav Topalov, as…

AUTHOR Co-founder/art lead at Next-Gen Dreams 3D. An experienced freelance artist from Ireland who has worked on games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Hitman 2, and Firewall: Zero Hour. Flies drones in his spare time. A part-time string slinger. next-gendreams3d.com In this tutorial, I will guide you through the process of producing high-quality renders for your portfolio. You will be using Marmoset Toolbag 3 as your primary software package. We will start from importing the asset, right through to the finishing line of rendering out images using Marmoset’s powerful rendering system. We will cover applying your exported textures to the asset in Marmoset Toolbag, utilising the lighting features that Marmoset contains along with adjusting tone and colour with the in-engine HDRIs and available lights at your disposal. We will…

THE SPIRE Softw ar e Cinema 4D, Octane Render, Photoshop Year made 2020 Calder Moore artstation.com/refriedspinach Calder Moore is a lead texture artist at Atomic Cartoons. He likes to spend his free time tinkering around with different styles and workflows. AGEING ARTWORK To achieve the old photo aesthetic in Photoshop I added a Bloom pass from Octane Render, I ended up using more Bloom than I normally would, which really helped sell the look. Next I went about balancing the values by overdriving both the white and black, then clamping them back to be light or dark greys of about 15% and 85% respectively. I then added a lot of noise using the Camera Raw filter, I made the noise scale fairly big and added a bunch of roughness. From…

Maya Jermy Maya is a 3D artist and animator based in the UK. She started her career in 2012 remaking and animating characters for Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee - New ‘n’ Tasty. mayajermy.artstation.com Oscar Juárez Oscar is a 3D generalist based in Mexico City. He has been running Fibrha Studio since 2010 and specialises in archviz rendering, animations and Unreal Engine. www.facebook.com/FibrhaStudio Antony Ward Since the early 90s Antony has worked for many of today’s top game and VFX studios, and has written three technical manuals and many online tutorials. www.antcgi.com Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Maya Jermy replies You don’t always have to rely on the online material library when you are looking for a specific or unique material for your models. ZBrush…

ARTIST Soufiane Idrassi SOFTWARE ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop Ubisoft concept artist Soufiane Idrassi usually works on his personal projects after work. “If my calculations are right, this one took me around four days,” he tells 3D World. Idrassi is not only skilled in illustration and concept art, but also in the creation of game-ready 3D characters. Kitbashing was used to bring these fearsome machines to life. Idrassi took pieces of existing mechs and used them to create his assets quickly, and “the kitbash credit goes to Vitaly Bulgarov,” he adds. Idrassi enjoys the process of creating sci-fi images, and says, “For this one I really enjoyed setting up the mood and lighting in KeyShot. I love creating cinematic scenes and I try to make them as close to an actual movie…

ARTIST Alberto Petronio SOFTWARE Blender, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop Creating this detailed model took video game concept designer Alberto Petronio at least six months’ worth of free time, with many interruptions. “I loved creating the model because there is some storytelling present in every detail,” he tells 3D World. Petronio sees 3D as a tool for translating his initial designs. He adds: “I was a transportation and industrial designer for some years and would always use 3D to show my projects.” Much of his artistic inspiration comes from the real world around him, from historical events and true life stories to technological advancements. Petronio is currently striving to improve the speed of his process, particularly when it comes to designing his pieces. “To increase the speed of my designs, I very often model…

AUTHOR 3D World’s Rob Redman is a veteran 3D artist and creative director of a boutique studio, working across film, game, TV and print. He was a 3D artist on the Webby-winning Plot Device. www.pariahstudios.co.uk So, you want to make a game? Excellent idea, but where to start? Before we get going with all the fun stuff like modelling and lighting, we need to get organised. Life will be an awful lot simpler if we set ourselves up for success. We could just dive right in and make trees, write some music and start filling a terrain with random objects, but in reality that will lead to a lot of headaches, stress and lost time, as you spend hours searching for assets, digging through random folders and so on. Not…

AUTHOR Iñaki González has worked freelance for national and international clients since 2005, and also teaches at different universities in Barcelona. Cinematography, lighting, shading, look development, and VFX are his strong points. vimeo.com/inakiarte The following project was produced for a contest, where the brief focused on helping to bring people into small convenient stores, and buying a two-pack of shaving blades so they will always have an extra one in case it’s needed. The creative challenge was to create an impactful in-store poster with a headline for Gillette that shows Latin American shoppers why it’s better to buy a two-pack instead of buying the four-pack that is usually found in bigger supermarkets. I decided to go further on the concept and use the two main elements to create a heart,…

AUTHOR Mike Griggs is a 3D and visual effects artist with vast experience across the industry, as both a creator and a technical writer. www.creativebloke.com In our Basics series, we look at the fundamentals of a wide range of different topics in CGI to break it down into the core elements. This month we continue to explore compositing. In this second part, we will look at how to create a basic matte using Resolve based on our initial lesson 101 last issue. While we have not imported any footage yet or worked with 3D scenes, understanding how to do the basics with nodes will help later when working with footage. In this tutorial, we will take a quick look at the Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve/Fusion interface, to help us make…

ARTIST Baj Singh SOFTWARE 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Marmoset Toolbag With 11 years of experience in the industry, Baj Singh currently works as the character art lead on the Total War: Warhammer franchise at Creative Assembly. “Interesting and unique designs really help to inspire me,” he says, “however, I tend to steer clear of super high-detailed pieces these days. I prefer to focus on more simplified forms that emphasise silhouette, proportion and colour.” Singh increasingly looks towards indie games for his inspiration, admiring the results they achieve on a modest budget compared to their AAA counterparts. “On the final game asset, heavy subsurface scattering and fuzz was used on the fur and hair to achieve the fluffy effect,” Singh adds. “The hair itself was all placed manually, creating…

ARTIST Myles Lambert SOFTWARE Modo, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag Arrowhead Game Studios’ principle 3D artist, Myles Lambert, worked on this asset for a little over a week whilst in between jobs. “Most of the time went into matching all the shapes to the real camera as closely as possible,” he explains. Almost every element of this realistic image was approached in a very traditional way. “I did use a technique in Modo that allows you to use edges to create grooves without additional geometry,” Lambert points out. “I used this for all cuts in the plastic of the camera. I preferred this to adding them in Substance Painter for accuracy and control.” Lambert also uses his own plugins for Modo, which speeds up his process and reduces the more tedious…

1 First we hold a meeting with our art team to gather their thoughts and ideas on which aspects of our pipeline, workflows and tools can be streamlined. We then identify the focus of our next R&D project and work on a breakdown of our core objectives. 2 With their core objectives fully fleshed out, Airship’s R&D team then begin an extensive deep dive into the subject of their project and explore all the different approaches towards it, before trying anything out. 3 Next is the experimental phase, and this is where the team try out a lot of different processes in quick succession. As they go along they are careful to note what works well and what doesn’t. This then forms the basis for what the team should extensively…

KARA ZOR-EL Software Blender, Marvelous Designer, Photo shop Year made 2020 SCULPTING This is a personal sculpting project and my take on redesigning Supergirl based on the New 52 comic book line, the Injustice video games, and CW’s Supergirl series. I approached the model with purely manual sculpting from scratch, since it was for study purposes. The most interesting approach that I took was in creating the cape; I created the base with a quick simulation in Marvelous Designer and then made it look more stylised by sculpting on top of it. I used the Draw Sharp and Crease brushes a lot to add that sharp look to the wrinkles and folds. Yuditya Afandi yudit1999.wordpress.com Yuditya Afandi is a 3D character artist. He is passionate about modelling and sculpting and…

WHERE The environment is a moody bowl/valley with many rocky outcrops, grassy knolls and small coppices, surrounded by cliffs and impassable mountainside. As well as dust particles and various small fauna there will be strange abstract light particles, localised to be subtle track features. Hints of future or alien tech should be glimpsed to heighten the mystery. These will also be the basis for boosters and traps. WHAT LLYR is in essence a racing game. The track is a path that runs round, through and over the environment, which, although it’s an open world, will be guided with sci-fi signage and a floating companion (should be damaged or faulty to add tension). If the player leaves the track they get a limited warning to return or the pursuer will get…

AUTHOR Harrison Mead is a professional motion designer and product specialist at Notch. He started his career working in the live events industry. www.instagram.com/hmead96 I believe lighting is the key to making a good scene look brilliant. Over the next few pages, we'll discover how to achieve creative lighting in five very different scenes using Notch. First, we’ll explore how to create a realistically lit scene in less than five steps. We'll then move onto more complex scenes that use a combination of Notch's raytracing and path-tracing features. Why use ray tracing? It makes your scene look so much more realistic. With ray tracing, you can achieve bounce reflections and deeper, more accurate shadows. For example, the realistic mirror reflections you’ll see in some of these scenes are made possible…

AUTHOR Mike Griggs is a 3D and visual effects artist with vast experience across the industry, as both a creator and a technical writer. www.creativebloke.com Sometimes it is the small applications that are the most useful. PureRef is a great example. On first inspection, all it seems PureRef does is allow artists to collate image reference for a project. That, however, would be doing the application a considerable disservice. PureRef is an easy-to-use image organiser that enables artists to create well-organised image databases. These PureRef files can be shared over computers or with colleagues, whether they be on macOS, Windows or Linux. PureRef is not just an excellent cataloguing tool. It can be used creatively with virtually any application, since PureRef can adjust its opacity. This allows it to be…

Oscar Juárez replies Archviz most of the time requires teamwork, meaning also working with someone else’s models, and it’s so common that you receive a file that’s apparently ‘ready’, but once it has opened… Voila! All the textures are missing and the same happens with the proxy files. Why is this? Simple, the textures and proxy paths. We open the file in a different workstation and it can’t locate where we have all our good stuff. So that’s why I am going to show you a script that has saved me several hours relocating my textures and proxy files – Relink Bitmaps. With this we will relink all the missing elements that back in the day many of us would have had to re-link in a slow, time-killing process. So…