Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 102 i 3D Artist

31 ORNATRIX This is one of the best hair solutions that I know. In my opinion it is currently the best hair solution for 3ds Max (and remember: use modifiers!) Victor Hugo Queiroz 32 ONTOPREPLICA This is not a Max-specific plugin, but comes in handy when working with reference images. It’s a simple program that allows you to display windows on top of everything else and I use it to put reference images up. It comes in very handy when I want an image right next to what I’m modelling, without having to strain over to the next monitor. It works well for lining stuff, especially for designing sights on weapons, since you can mess with the Opacity settings as well. Mark Van Haitsma 33 BONESPRO We all know –…

With an abundance of tools available nowadays for painting and creating materials, there are myriad methods for creating realistic textures. But then take into account how many types of models can then be improved tenfold and made to look authentic with materials and shaders. Even in the real world, textures aren’t as clearcut as simply wear and tear, rust and dirt – there are so many references that can be observed for creating real randomness that the possibilities are endless. So it’s understandable, then, that there’s so much variation even in a texture artist’s portfolio and you can see this distinction in the work of Jacob Norris, lead environment artist at NVIDIA and CEO of PurePolygons, who creates fantastic natural environments that contrast well with his moody, man-made city scenes.…

XABIER URRUTIA Freelance artist artstation.com/artist/xabierurrutia 01 Create the clean pass In KeyShot, I import the 3D model from 3ds Max and select and modify the desired materials from the Material Library. I also create some labels that can be projected onto the model to enhance realism and make it look like a practical tool. 02 Render passes In KeyShot, I duplicate the model to create two more passes. First I create a Scratch pass, where I change each material to an aged state. The last pass is simply changing all materials for dry mud. Finally, I render all the passes from the same camera angle. Mostly I start with one of the smart materials that Substance Painter offers and from there I start to adjust it. 03 Create scratch…

TYLER SMITH Ant Fella, 2016 Software ZBrush, Maya, TopoGun, Photoshop, Quixel, xNormal, Marmoset Toolbag Learn how to • Understand the elements of what makes a good creature design • Understand the importance of research and study of animal anatomy • Use ArrayMesh in ZBrush to generate quick, complex segmented shapes • Sculpt soft organic forms • Sculpt hard exoskeleton forms • Paint organic forms in ZBrush • Extract texture maps • Render low poly-assets in Marmoset This tutorial will cover a full walkthrough of how to design, model, paint, retopologise and render an alien creature, introducing the tools and techniques needed along the way. We’ll use ZBrush for designing, sculpting and painting, Maya and ZBrush for retopology and UV work, xNormal and TopoGun for texture baking, Photoshop and Quixel for…

Michael Cauchi I am currently completing my third year at Bournemouth University’s NCCA and am hoping to soon be able to start my career in the animation / visual effects industry. Still Life , (2016) Maya, V-Ray, NUKE A procedural shading and backplate integration project that I did for the NCCA. Pretend king, (2015) ZBrush, Maya, V-Ray, Photoshop This is a little character design that I made for an NCCA project last year. Dishonored style study, (2016) ZBrush, Maya, V-Ray, NUKE I love doing quick sculpts in this style. This one took around five hours from beginning to the final image.…

SCULPTING The biggest tool in my arsenal is the Clay Tubes brush. I start at a low subdivision and start building forms by adding and subtracting with the Clay Tubes brush. I like the subtle imperfections across the surface that it usually gives me. I use the Standard and Dam_Standard quite a bit, especially for bringing out edges in bone or shells. Emanuel Palalic www.emanuelpalalic.com Emanuel is a character artist for id Software and spends most of his time making monsters, robots and other creatures Software ZBrush, Photoshop, KeyShot Zolton, 2016…

Render Legion has started a series of Corona Academy training sessions right in the heart of Prague. “Corona Renderer 1.0 was released almost two years ago, and it felt like the right time to start training people ourselves. That’s why we’re starting the Corona Academy – after all, nothing beats training direct from the people who wrote the software!“ says Adam Hotovy, partner, business and sales at Render Legion. The first Corona Academy in November 2016 was taught by Ondrej KarlÌk, the main developer of Corona Renderer. “We want training to be available worldwide so that people don’t have to travel too far and can get training in their native language, where the students know that the information in the course they are taking is accurate and useful,“ adds Hotovy.…

“We were rebuilding Aslan, which was quite a big technical challenge at the time because it was one of the first big fur jobs”Mike Mulholland,VFX supervisor Job title VFX supervisor Location London Education Computer Animation and Visualisation BA (Hons) – Bournemouth University Website www.ilm.com Biography Mike Mulholland started as a generalist at Cinesite in 1999, before moving to San Francisco later and working on The Matrix sequels. He then returned to the UK and worked at Framestore for ten years, initially as a rigger before moving on to become a CG supervisor and VFX supervisor. He’s been at ILM London since 2014. Portfolio highlights • Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 2015 • Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2015 • Jupiter Ascending, 2015 • Gravity, 2013 • War Horse, 2011 • Where The Wild Things Are,…

01 START SIMPLE In most cases, I start modelling with a simple primitive object like a box, cylinder, sphere or plane and after, I convert them into Edit Poly and start to play with their forms. I like this method because it lets you control every point, edge or polygon on your object. Bondok Max 02 USE A KIT LIBRARY If you are a concept designer and you need to do quick sketches, you need a library of your own kits. With every new work you gain new shapes, details which you can save for future projects as kits. In the next project, detail and change them. They are not only time-savers, but they also build your own style – it is your work, your signature in the 3D world.…

MAHMOUD SALAH 3D modeller/texture artist www.mahmoudsalah.xyz 01 Set up your model for Substance Painter When modelling and UVing a hard-surface object, there are some rules to take care of: your mesh should have even poly space and quads for a clean topology, and crease your edges to avoid stretches. Pay attention while working with UDIMs and Substance Painter, since you will import one object and Substance Painter will separate them into a texture set. You should always arrange your UDIM’s tiles, which will help you work faster. 02 Create Smart Materials After you import your mesh and bake textures (Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, World Space Normal and so on) you’re ready to make awesome materials. The way I like to think while I am working with Substance Painter is of…

WIKTOR ÖHMAN  Art lead, Quixel artbywiktor.com 01 Prepare your models and bakes To start texturing models with the SUITE you first need to have a finished and UV-mapped model. Both high and low-poly models work with the SUITE. I baked an AO, Normal and Color ID map. The Color ID is to separate areas of the mesh into groups that you can assign different materials to. 02 Detail with NDO The SUITE consists of NDO, DDO and 3DO. NDO is a normal creation toolkit, DDO is a texturing toolkit and 3DO is a real-time PBR previewer. On most of my models I took them through NDO to add definition and fidelity. It’s a faster way of adding complex details. 03 Set up your DDO project Once the Normal map is…

Tony Camehl Since I was a kid I’ve always been interested in creatures. I started sketching Pokémon monsters and after watching Star Wars: The Phantom Menace I became passionate about extraterrestrial creatures. After graduating from school I started teaching myself how to create aliens from outer space. Big cat is hunting, 2016 ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop This was part of my big cat animal anatomy study I started some months ago. I created a base mesh and after that I started doing muscle studies and ‘action pose’ studies. Learning to swim, 2016 ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop Another sculpture from my big cag animal anatomy studies. I tried to figure out how a cat swims and how it uses its front legs and back legs by watching a few…

Our experts The best artists from around the world reveal specific CG techniques Blender Pawet Brzustowski   artstation.com/artist/pawelbrzu A 3D artist based in Lublin, Poland, Pawe› specialises in hard-surface modelling and environments Clarisse 3.0 Rainer Duda   www.rd-innovations.de Rainer has over a decade of experience in the visual effects industry. He owns a CG production company In this tutorial we will focus on car rendering. The idea for our image is in a noir style – but what is noir? The word ‘noir’ comes from the French language and it means black. Noir is a style that appeared in Forties American gangster movies, among others. Also, it’s also proven to be a popular style in German expressionist films, such as The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari or Nosferatu: A Symphony Of…

“We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up, utilising a more modern framework, enabling us to iterate frequently and put more power into the Creator’s hands”Jonathan Williamson, project lead Founded by Blender trainer CG Cookie in 2014, Blender Market – the only marketplace dedicated to Blender – has relaunched. Blender artists can get paid for their work on Blender Market and professionals can grab tools, such as Retopoglow or Mirage, to improve their results and their Blender workflow. The Market offers over 600 products. After an incredible 100,000 lines of code being written in five months, new features on the Market have been debuted – all built with user experience in mind. The purchasing experience, for one, has been enhanced with a rating system that provides customers with the ability to…

“I had this CAD model for the Porsche RS, and I thought about doing something classic this time. I used V-Ray Carpaint for the car shader, and an HDRI with a V-Ray dome light. I was searching for some kind of European house for the background, and I was happy with this composition. Then, I did the compositing in Photoshop”Mohamed Raof Sayed, 911 Carrera RS, 2016 Mohamed Raof Sayed www.mohamedraof.com Mohamed is a 3D artist living in Dubai. He works on arch-vis scenes and enjoys vehicle vis Software 3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop Work in progress… “I’ve had the idea for this character in my mind for a while and I finally had some time to create her. I always like to use my personal projects to learn new tools…

If you head over to the website of visual effects studio Luma Pictures, you can watch a short YouTube clip of a prank played by its Melbourne office on their colleagues in Santa Monica, in which they pretended an air raid was happening during a Skype call. The revenge prank (the Santa Monica office had pretended to the Melbourne team that there was an earthquake in Los Angeles only the day before) is a neat summary of what Luma is as a company – they make astounding visual effects from dual offices, and they have some fun in the process. But there’s a serious side to Luma’s work too, evidenced by the astounding work it has made. Among the many highlights of recent Marvel films are several Luma-made VFX sequences,…

HOOMAN RAAD 3D character artist, Arna Studio www.hooman.artstation.com Where does your love for characters come from? Since my early days in this career my main motivation was only to create! When I make a creature and the result is lifelike – as if it could be a real being in another parallel universe – it really is a rewarding and amazing feeling! Getting to this point is both challenging and encouraging. How did you make the skin for the dwarf Sam’andûn lifelike? Can you detail your process? My intention for making this was to improve my skills for making fur and hair, but I ended up conducting some tests on the skin too. At first I gathered lots of references for both hair and skin, obviously, and later was…

Joel Zakrisson While Joel’s currently working as a 3D artist at EA DICE, he was recently a student at Future Games in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the course of the year he took on several ambitious and highly detailed projects, all gaining a lot of attention online. Mansion Hall, 2016 Unreal Engine 4, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance B2M, Marvelous Designer The atmospheric Mansion Hall was an experiment, where a calm warmth meets something eerie in one environment. Locomotive Exhibition, 2016 Unreal Engine 4, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance B2M, Marvelous Designer, MakeHuman Joel built an entire exhibition hall to showcase his Bavarian steam locomotive. Cog Ship Battle, 2016 Marmoset Toolbag 2, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance B2M, Marvelous Designer This project started out as…

Modern production pipelines rely heavily on physically based rendering. PBR render engines often come with special shading and lighting systems. There are some basic concepts to understand when the artist works with PBR materials, especially if you want some sort of realism in your shot combined with artistic touches. The latest version of Clarisse gives artists the freedom and control over the look and feel of complex surfaces without annoying the artist with too much complexity in the UI. This tutorial will dig into essential concepts of physically based material setups and how to set up values for a great compromise between rendering time and visual quality, where visual quality is based on the artistic use of PBR shading. As a fresh start in a basic shaded scene it is…

The VFX Festival 2017 is shaping up to be an unmissable event. Presented by Escape Studios, part of Pearson College London, The VFX Festival will be host to some of the biggest visual effects studios in the world, as well as a debut presentation of a secret project from Framestore. This year, the Festival is in association with arts and cultural hub Rich Mix and will be held at a new venue from 7 to 9 February 2017. Those attending include world-leading visual effects and animation facility Cinesite discussing its work on Independence Day: Resurgence. MPC will give insight on its ground-breaking approach to filmmaking on The Jungle Book. ILM will be presenting on a secret new project to be announced soon. Jellyfish will be discussing the creation of the…

The Marvelous Machines competition with SideFX is at its halfway mark now, but there’s still time left to enter and be in with a chance of winning a Dell UltraSharp 30-inch PremierColor monitor, Houdini FX, AMD Fire Pro W8100, Intel SSD 800GB, 3D Artist subscription and a Pluralsight subscription – and that’s just for the Best Overall award alone. There are also first, second and third prizes for the Image category and the Animation category, as well as a Splashscreen award, where your entry could end up being the next Houdini splashscreen among other amazing prizes. Remember, you can use other software to create your machines, but the more Houdini and Mantra is used, the more brownie points you’ll get in the judging process. If you end up using COPs…

Version 4.14 of Unreal Engine is an exciting update, with a brand-new forward shading renderer for VR – the samerendererusedinupcomingVRgame Robo Recall. There is also a new contact shadows render and an automatic LOD generation for static meshes, which will save time on building content without a third-party library. Animation tools are streamlined, with new features added to the non-linear cinematic tool Sequencer. C++ programmers on Windows can use Visual Studio 15 and Vulkan API is supported on Android, with mobile rendering features like reading from scene colour added. Per-pixel translucent lighting has also been improved, with the new forward shading functionality useable on translucent services for specular highlights from multilights, and image-based reflections from parallax-corrected reflection captures.…

Luxion, the developer of KeyShot, has made a new plugin for Revit available. The KeyShot for Revit plugin will support Revit 2015 to 2017, with LiveLinking model update technology, maintains the family structure, and has support for camera export, export of RPC placeholder objects and matching Revit compass. Meanwhile the plugins for 3ds Max, Maya and Fusion have all been improved with support for the latest software versions and much more. KeyShot 7 was made available for pre-order on 25 November 2016, with new features including real-time and render output viewing for a VR headset, import, playback and output of deforming mesh sequences and more. For more information, visit www.keyshot.com.…