Table of contents for May 2017 in 3D World

There’s always something new to learn in 3D art, no matter how experienced you are. You might want to experiment with new ways of working, or perhaps discover new software and tools. We can all get in a rut, even without realising it, and often choosing to break away from your usual workflow to try new things will reap many rewards. This issue, we asked experienced industry artists for their advice on how to freshen up ways of working. Whether it’s revamping your tired portfolio by embracing Substance Suite for a more current, modern mix of work, or discovering a new way to rig in Maya, there’s always something you can do to push your workflow and your art to the next level. Even something as simple as exploring how…

Author Cirstyn Bech- Yagher Cirstyn is a freelance CG artist and educator, with over 15 years’ experience working in 3D. www.twitter.com/cirstyn Known as the most tedious task in 3D, especially for beginners, UV mapping is also the glue that binds models, bakes and textures together. It’s a necessary task, too, as a bad set of UVs and their resulting output can make a really good model look really bad. Whether you love or hate UVs, there’s no escaping them – they are essential to understand. Some of the most common problems that novices run into when starting out with UV mapping is finding the whole process an incomprehensible soup of terms and concepts, as well as never quite knowing where to begin, especially when working on hard-edged models. However, if…

Follow The video If you see the Play icon, use the link Author Matthias Develtere Matthias is a 3D artist at MachineGames, who specialises in hard-surface design and modelling. He also has a burning passion for combining history with art. www.bit.ly/mdeveltere Over the course of this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate how to go about texturing a high-poly vehicle for a sci-fiscene. Here, I hope you’ll find techniques and ideas that will help you to avoid drowning in the big game asset you may be tasked with creating. In this industry, you don’t always get the time to show off your high-poly because of time constraints, and so it’s important to know what steps you can take to improve your creation process. With this workflow, we will come up with a quick…

Rob Redman replies This question is really more about concept and art direction, as the tools used to create the models, along with associated materials, are just the same as if you are working on a photorealistic project. Remember that no matter what software you are using, or what names that software might give a specific tool, an extrude is still an extrude and bevelling an edge will have the same result pretty much anywhere you choose to bevel it. Sometimes thinking about the visual language you use is far more important, so really try to forget about the technical elements and think about developing the style. Immerse yourself in the world you are creating and think about some of those details; that will help your audience lose themselves in…

There are multiple ways to make a burning metal effect, and here I’ll be showing you how to create this using V-Ray. As you can see in the image above, I’ve used my personal logo and made a hot metal effect similar to all the promotional material for Batman: Arkham Knight. When iron is at its hottest, it actually glows bright yellow – so bright it’s almost white – and when it gets a bit cooler it goes red, so basically you’ve got a transition from bright desaturated yellow to a dark red. You can achieve this by using a ramp texture or something similar to the falloff texture that 3ds Max offers; it gets you from the bright yellow outer part of your model to a dark red bit…

One of Us, a boutique film production company based in Soho, was responsible for the visual effects work on Netflix’s historical ten-part series about Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, The Crown. The show tells the inside story of two of the most famous addresses in the world – Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street – and the intrigues, love lives and machinations behind the great events that shaped the second half of the 20th century. Given the nature of the show, the challenge for One of Us was to create invisible yet effective VFX. Using life-size replicas of Buckingham Palace and Downing Street , The Crown is one of the most lavish TV dramas ever made. One of Us worked in 4K on all 428 visual effects shots for this project,…

ENHANCE YOUR CHARACTER WORKFLOW Join the amazing Dan Roarty as he takes you through the process of creating production-ready characters in ZBrush, Maya and more. Emulate the art direction of Ghost in the Shell with ease TEXTURING A HIGH-POLY VEHICLE Download two in-depth video tutorials to help improve your texturing workflow CREATE STYLISED PROPS AND SETS Download this video tutorial to learn to create stunning low-poly environments in Cinema 4D 5gb of video & files GET YOUR RESOURCES You’re three steps away from this issue’s video training and files… 1. Go to the website Type the following into your browser: www.bit.ly/vault- 220-ghost 2. Find the files you want from the list Search the list of free resources to find the video and files you want 3. Download the files you…

CHROME CITY ARTIST Mike Johnson SOFTWARE 3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop “What inspires me as an artist are beautiful worlds in film and television, and concepts,” explains Mike Johnson, a full-time lead scene assembler at Blur Studio. “I really love the feeling when you see an image or film that takes you out of your day-to-day life, and for a second you forget where you are.” Fortunately for Mike, his day job means he has plenty of opportunity to play with shading, lighting and compositing. In fact, creating the atmosphere for Chrome City was his favourite part of the project. To make the image, Mike created the silhouettes for the buildings and filled them in. “Once I defined a style, I started replicating buildings and creating new silhouettes,” he reveals. “Then,…

For new 3D artists, the road to obtaining that dream job in the film or games industry is a bumpy one. The landscape of technology alone used in these industries changes rapidly. Artists can often find themselves faced with difficult decisions early in their education. Sometimes these decisions are as simple as which software to learn first. Other times, the software they decide to learn is influenced by cost factors. Think for just a moment about the investment that a student might make both in terms of time to learn an application in addition to money. Now multiply that by five different software packages. A primary 3D package, a sculpting application, a dedicated texturing application, a premium rendering plug-in and, of course, Adobe Photoshop. That barrier to entry really is…

There I was, staring at After Effects, willing it to please just let this comp work. I’d tried everything I could think of and nothing was working. AE is truly my first love, but it just wouldn’t cooperate with me in my compositing dilemma. Rather than break up entirely, After Effects and I had to have a talk about an open relationship. As much as I’d love for that story to be 100 per cent true, the spirit of it is where I found myself at the end of my layer-based compositing rope. That’s when I met Nuke – a true charmer. The biggest difference between Nuke and After Effects is the nodeversus layer-based organisation. Node-based organisation makes a more bird’s eye view of your composite possible. When you have…

Tutorials Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Author Dan Roarty Dan works at The Coalition as a lead character artist on the Gears of War franchise. He has also worked for Midway, Activision and Lucasfilm. www.danroarty.com This tutorial is based on the film Ghost in the Shell. I’ve been wanting to outline my entire process for creating a human character for a while and I’m excited to share the process with all of you! In this tutorial I’ll describe each step I went through in creating the character. We will start off by going through my process of utilising reference and a quick proxy mesh. From there, I’ll describe how I used a female base mesh as a starting point for my clothing and…

T his issue, we’ve joined forces with Pluralsight (formerly known as Digital- Tutors) to offer you a comprehensive video training course that you can download from our online Vault – for free! Simply visit our online content downloads page at www.bit.ly/vault-220-ghost for the files. Characters are a critical part of any movie or games pipeline and are a really popular area of study for artists. Character creation can be a tricky thing to pick up early in your 3D career, and modelling will be your first step on the way to doing so before adding flair with posing and textures later on. In this easy-to-follow guide from Justin at Pluralsight, you can learn how to create your very first character from scratch in Maya. Head to the Vault now to…

Hollywood heads to the Middle Kingdom to produce a blockbuster helmed by internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who has previously dazzled audience members with colourful action sequences in Hero and House of Flying Daggers. With the assistance of Western cinematic talent such as visual effects supervisor Phil Brennan (Snow White and the Huntsman), The Great Wall brings to life a vicious and ravenous Chinese monster that is fended off by the iconic ancient structure and a 12th-century army standing guard to protect humanity. “In the mythology, the Tao Tei has eyes in its armpits,” explains Phil, when discussing the antagonist that represents greed and gluttony. “We have them in the shoulders, which is still weird but worked better for the story,” he continues. Motion cues were taken from cheetahs…

nder the direction of Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) and benefiting from the Oscar-winning visual effects expertise of Guillaume Rocheron (Life of Pi), anime classic Ghost in the Shell gets a live-action upgrade. “In total we had 1,200 shots,” states Guillaume, who had four months of post-production to complete the visual effects. “MPC did 900, Atomic Fiction was responsible for 70, and MPC Creative in London [the graphic design branch of MPC] did a lot of the holographic work. It has been a great film with a reduced post-production time.” U Ghost in the Shell revolves around covert law enforcement cyborg (Scarlett Johansson) hunting an internet terrorist (Michael Pitt) in futuristic New Port City, where inhabitants are cyber-enhanced. “One of the big design elements of the original is…

hile a mouse is widely considered the ‘default’ mode of interacting with your computer, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most efficient or the most natural. The truth is, your mouse is hurting you – both in the figurative and the literal sense. Many of us work at a computer for long periods of time and have experienced pain or discomfort in our hands, wrists or forearms at some point while working, but may not have stopped to consider why. Your forearm is made of two bones – the ulna and the radius. The natural resting orientation for these bones is achieved when your palm is held sideways, like you’re making a thumbs-up gesture, or reaching W out to shake someone’s hand. When you place your hand on a mouse, you…

Cycles is a much loved render engine for Blender by the Blender Foundation and, although it’s an open source piece of software, it hasn’t been seen elsewhere. Until now. Insydium – developer of the hugely popular X-Particles for Cinema 4D – has created a bridge for Cinema 4D users to get the most from Cycles within Cinema 4D, and it works incredibly well. It contains all of the original features, plus a few extras, and now supports elements of Cinema 4D such as X-Particles and TurbulenceFD, amongst others. There are a few major differences between Cycles 4D and the standard Cinema 4D renderers, including the node-based material editor and the interactive preview render, which, with the help of my tips, you’ll have no trouble getting to grips with at all.…

Download your resources For all the tutorial assets head to: www.bit.ly/vault-220-ghost Author Arik Newman Arik is a freelance 3D artist who has worked in the industry for 10 years. His focus is on character and creature design. www.bit.ly/ ariknewman This enjoyable project first came to life when I was searching on the internet for inspiration for my next project. While I was exploring DeviantArt I came across the profile of Justin Rodrigues, who works as a character designer and visual developer. I was instantly blown away by his amazing art and knew I had found my inspiration. The crocodile pirate certainly looks very cool. It also has a great backstory, as well as a terrific pose, so I decided to take it on as my next personal project. I thought…

Paul Hatton replies Autodesk has come up with a genius mapping type that is well worth exploring if you are fed up with hard abrupt seams appearing in your textures. We’ve all been there haven’t we? This is a particular problem if your UV mapping skills are not quite up to scratch. Thankfully, Blended Box map is here to help to ‘hide’ those abrupt seams. For most simple objects, you’ll no doubt make use of the UVW Box map. This is a brilliantly simple and easy-toimplement map. The problem comes when your object is more complex in terms of geometry and you don’t have the UV mapping skills to fix it. The Blended Box map works similarly to box mapping apart from the fact that it blends together the textures…

insight News and views from around the international CG community ost people would agree that 2016 was a pretty turbulent year; David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman and Harper Lee died (among many others), and Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were among the biggest news stories in a year that many have dubbed the worst for quite some time. But how did the events of 2016 affect the VFX industry? And where are we now? We recently attended Escape Studios’ annual VFX Festival and spoke to a number of leading designers about the major challenges they face in 2017. M Hidden talents One of the biggest and most recurring subjects that came up was recruitment. Simply finding work-ready talent is an issue Blue Zoo co-founder and director Tom Box…