Table of contents for August 2021 in 3D World

“IT WAS CHALLENGING TO ACHIEVE GOOD-LOOKING FUR, BUT I OVERCAME THAT BY ADMIRING SOME REAL-LIFE REFERENCES LIKE CATS AND RABBITS” ARTIST Aneesh Chandra SOFTWARE ZBrush, Substance Painter, Blender, After Effects Freelance 3D artist Aneesh Chandra chose to forgo using any procedural techniques in the creation of this Pokémon fan art. He used ZBrush to sculpt and Blender’s Particle System to create the photorealistic fur. “The most enjoyable element for me was simply the chance to recreate the iconic Pikachu from Pokémon in a realistic form,” he explains. “The idea was to have Pikachu wearing his trainer Ash's cap and holding a Poké Ball, as he doesn’t like to stay inside the ball.” Chandra started by sculpting the basic shape of Pikachu in ZBrush and took time to refine the sculpt.…

Inspired by the horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft, author Matt Ruff penned Lovecraft Country, which revolves around a 22-year-old African American US Army veteran Atticus Turner searching for his father during the racial turmoil of the 1950s, and encountering a variety of monsters. The novel was adapted into a ten-episode series for HBO by executive producer Misha Green (Underground) who collaborated with visual effects supervisor Kevin Blank (Lost) to achieve the epic scope of the storytelling. 3,500 visual effects were completed remotely by Rodeo FX, Framestore, Important Looking Pirates, Crafty Apes, Blackpool Studios, BOT VFX, RISE FX, and Spin VFX. “Usually, 3,500 shots are hard on their own and midst a pandemic it is a little harder!” chuckles Blank. “One show that prepared me the most was the NBC series…

JAPANESE TORII Software Unreal Engine 4 Year made 2021 Kacper Bartnik fisherowski.artstation.com Kacper Bartnik is a digital art student. He has been creating 3D environments and level art for over five years. DETAILING The whole scene is based on very beautiful and highly detailed concept art by Christian Dimitrov. To recreate those details, I used Megascans assets and a wonderful Torii gate model created by Jasmine Cornell. Firstly, I checked the 'Enable Displacement' option in the Megascans plugin properties to make sure that Bridge will import all assets with extra displacement texture applied. Then, I had imported all mossy assets from the library and increased the 'Tessellation Multiplier' and 'Displacement Amount' values in their materials. Tweaking those options made moss looking detailed and realistic without using cards.…

For the creation of this Japanese house, and in particular the creation of the wood texture, I started from a photo I had previously taken. A photo that will become a texture is not simple to take, and we have different factors to keep in mind, including symmetry, lighting and shadows. First, it’s important that we take a photo from the correct position, so it’s important that we place the camera parallel to the object, in this way we will avoid any sort of distortion in the final texture. Secondly, it’s important to make sure we do not photograph the material during the sunrise or sunset, or at any other time when the light may change fast. The third and final element to keep in mind is to avoid having…

Architectural office and general contractor IttenBrechbühl AG comprises of approximately 320 employees, all helping to take large and complex buildings from basic design to commission. With more than 300 hospitals under its belt, IttenBrechbühl has firmly established itself as a specialist for the health sector but has also lent its expertise to education, research, transport and industrial services. This work is done across 11 locations in Switzerland, Germany, and Luxembourg. In 2017 IttenBrechbühl began work on the headquarters of Scott Sports, a sporting goods manufacturer that has been based in Fribourg, Switzerland since 1978. After winning the Arc Award BIM in Gold for the construction of SwissFEL, a largescale research facility in Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute a year earlier, IttenBrechbühl opted to again employ an innovative Building Information Modelling (BIM)…

As art director at award-winning production studio Saddington Baynes, Luis Cardoso’s role is to oversee the many artistic aspects of a variety of different projects across a range of creative fields. Here he breaks down a typical work day at the studio, giving an interesting insight into his responsibilities as art director. 08:00am After experiencing a four-year stint at Burberry, where I worked on high-end CGI across a variety of luxury products, including cosmetics, fragrances, clothing and accessories, I dare say I have learnt a thing or two from my colleagues about how to maintain a healthy lifestyle routine. Most notably, I have developed a great appreciation of the benefits of a good night’s sleep, of which the very last few minutes I am enjoying at this time of the…

ARTIST Bernardo Oliveira SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Arnold, Photoshop Based on an illustration by Ekaterina Burmak for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, character artist Bernardo Oliveira started working on his 3D recreation of the character in 2019, returning to finish it in early 2021. Oliveira created the character’s garments in Marvelous Designer. “It’s important to do some research to get better results,” he says, “so at this stage I like to get some real references of similar garments.” After blocking out the character and creating the garments, Oliveira used Maya to retopologise each mesh and work on UVs before jumping back into ZBrush for detailing and posing. “I like to go back to Marvelous to simulate the garment again and get better folds with the base…

ARTIST Vincent Boichut SOFTWARE Maya, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Unreal Engine Freelance 3D artist Vincent Boichut based this piece on an original concept by artist Jenny Mati. He primarily used Maya to model the environment’s assets and vegetation, Substance Painter and Photoshop for texturing and Unreal Engine to render in real time. Boichut utilised Runtime Virtual Texturing inside UE, allowing his assets to blend into the surrounding landscape. “I also used the Niagara particles system in Unreal for the falling leaves and chimney smoke effect,” he adds. Boichut’s approach to lighting the scene was simple yet effective. “It’s basically one yellow-tinted directional light, to give that warm and cosy atmosphere you can feel at the end of the summer here in France,” he explains. “I switched the Shadow Filter Sharpen to…

TO CLAIM HIS PLACE Software Blender, Gravity Sketch, Photoshop Year made 2021 Max Schiller artstation.com/maxschiller Max Schiller is a freelance concept artist using VR, 3D and 2D tools. He works in the movie and game industries. VR, 3D AND 2D I tried to come up with a cool story, searched for good references, and sketched out my ideas. After that, I blocked out the scene in 3D, attached materials, and refined all the objects. I jump between Blender and VR programs such as Gravity Sketch or Medium by Adobe. VR allows me to create more organic, natural-looking 3D objects. Texturing and lighting give the scene life, so I spent a lot of time refining those elements. I rendered the shots in Cycles and brought them over to Photoshop. Here I…

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a procedural volumetric fire shader. This method has multiple benefits compared to the alternative of simulation, as no volumetric data has to be stored directly and the result can consistently be tweaked with the parameters that go into generating it. In the following steps you will learn how to effectively work with volumetric shaders in Blender and how to set them up for both of Blender’s native render engines, Cycles and Eevee. For the creation of the volumetric textures used by the fire we will cover various concepts and techniques of the procedural texture generation in Blender’s node-based shading system. Those concepts cover several aspects of procedural texturing in general, like creating and manipulating shapes in 3D space and using noise…

In our Discord, we get many questions about topology from beginners wanting to get into the industry. They ask what it is, why it matters or how to improve. It’s a vast topic, but let’s cover the basics: topology is the organisation or flow of edges on a model. And a good, clean organisation of this matters. From a UV mapping standpoint, clean and quadified geometry makes for easier unwraps. But more importantly, clean topology matters because it’s a quality-of-life concern. Problem-free geometry makes life so much easier. This goes for everyone, but especially for animators or game artists. Clean and regular quads make it simpler to work with your model. It also helps avoid shading or baking errors. Not to mention that a nice and even layout is also…

A graduate from the Gnomon School of VFX, Devon Fay started his career at Blizzard Entertainment, working in the film department on projects such as Starcraft II: Wings Of Liberty and World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and later as a matte painting lead for Diablo III. Seeking a new challenge, Fay transferred his focus to real-time environments, joining Neversoft Entertainment and later Infinity Ward as a senior environment artist, working on a variety of games in the renowned Call Of Duty franchise. Currently he works as a creative lead at Riot Games, and has taken time out of his hectic schedule to answer a few questions about his day-to-day work life, career goals, and favourite projects. Do you have a background in 3D design or are you self taught? I started…

MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects MODELS + TEXTURES FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a set of fantastic textures from and build your own asset library with these incredible free ‘shopping mall’ models from in our monthly model and texture giveaway. HIGH-RES SCREEN GRABS CHARACTER CONCEPTS Follow along with Sebastien Hue, as he shows his process for creating our stunning cover art. BLENDER FILE CREATE FIRE WITH BLENDER Download the Blender scene file that accompanies this step-by-step training. ISSUE 276 NEXT MONTH Developing unique looks - come back for part 2 of our series on Blue Zoo ON SALE 13TH JULY Subscribe today: www.bit.ly/3dworld-subs…

ARTIST Robert Roeder SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine 3D environment artist Robert Roeder spent roughly seven months creating this atmospheric ode to Dark Souls III. “When I started this project in October 2020 I was still in the process of interviewing for a new position and kept working on it after I joined, trying to chip away at it in small steps every day after work and finished it at the beginning of May 2021,” he tells 3D World. “From the start of this project I knew that it would involve a very large amount of work for one person,” he adds, “not just by the size of the environment itself but also the number of bespoke props.” This led him to use and reuse tileable…

#1 STUDIO AND SHORT FILMS Now in its 21st year, Blue Zoo has become one of the UK’s leading animation studios. It’s built its name producing joyfully compelling animations, packed with story and character, brought to life with unique and innovative visuals. The studio boasts a colourful portfolio of work spanning long-form children’s TV like the BAFTA-winning Numberblocks, boundary-pushing short-form animation, original IPs, and existing IPs like The Adventures Of Paddington, and has also worked on adverts for companies such as Disney and Playmobil. Blue Zoo has garnered a host of animation awards for its work and won the BAFTA for Independent Production Company of The Year twice. Throughout its rise and rise, Blue Zoo has remained committed to building a positive work environment, populated by talented, enthusiastic artists that…

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The model, design, and animation of the Shoggoth evolved at the same time, thereby influencing each other. “One of the big asks was for the gills on the side of the head to expel blood in quite a violent way,” explains Framestore VFX supervisor Grant Walker. “Consequently, we had to make the mouth feel capable of blitzing a head. We ended up with these pincers that would move fast like mandibles. The mouth had another jaw inside of it. I looked at sharks as their jaws and gums do not necessarily connect to the cranium itself. The jaw could extend down and have multiple layers. We went through several iterations for the bones and joins until there was enough mobility to roll the teeth out like an angelfish.” The Shoggoth…

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept This tutorial will cover the pipeline used to create this science-fiction concept illustration from scratch, for an early stage project or pre-production research for a film or game. It starts from a 3D vehicle rough sketch done in VR, through to a final key art concept illustration in Photoshop. The purpose is to show how 3D can help speed up the process of creation, and adds flexibility to your workflow in terms of framing, composition and lighting of the scene, without delving too far into heavy, detailed sculpts and models. Since the final goal is to provide a still 2D work as a proof of concept or concept illustration, and the time frame is often short, it is…

Creating humans has long been the holy grail for CG artists. It’s a task that has always been seen as difficult and time-consuming, partly because the end result isn’t just about the geometry, or the materials and lighting, or the rigging and posing. It is all those things, but a believable human is definitely far more than just the sum of its CG parts. Epic saw this problem and introduced the MetaHuman Creator software, an online tool for generating photorealistic human characters for use not just in its own Unreal Engine, but in other 3D apps too (currently only Maya is supported, but expect others later). The tools are really quite simple to use, with a similar feature set to other character creation software, but the results are a step…

Liquid simulations are still one of the more complex areas of CGI that always seem to require expense – whether that is the expense of buying a third-party plugin or the cost of time while the computer solves a particle simulation. However, Cinema 4D artists can create a more than acceptable liquid solution using the in-built MoGraph and volume tools with a bit of ingenuity. The technique I shall demonstrate is an excellent way of showing liquids filling a container from within. It doesn’t offer all the extras that go with a simulation-based approach, such as creative splashes and reactive physics, but for background objects or as a good way to grow ooze, this technique will have you covered. The other great thing about using MoGraph and volumes for ‘pretend’…

TIGER FRIENDS (ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY GOP GAP) Software Maya, XGen, V-Ray, Substance Painter, Mari, ZBrush Year made 2019 Erica Liu ericaliuser.com Erica Liu is a look development artist. She is currently working at Nickelodeon Animation Studios. GROOMING While working on the tiger’s groom, I felt the best way to approach this would be utilising XGen’s groomable splines. With this method, splines were generated on the tiger’s mesh that I was then able to position using XGen’s brush-based tools. Brushing the fur gives the user greater control over the direction, especially in tighter areas and when direction changes quickly. The little boy’s hair was completed using guides. I felt this was more necessary because of how stylized it was and I needed more control over the defined clumps, length, and silhouette.…