Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 101 i 3D Artist

If you haven’t tried to use Blender yet then why not? You can sculpt and model, unwrap meshes, composite, perform simulations, create games, edit footage for film, render in GPU or CPU, render physically accurate shaders and much, much more in Blender – and best of all, you can do all of this without spending a single penny. On top of that, it’s open source and the code is being improved all the time by a dedicated community of Blender users and developers. It may sound slightly grassroots, but Blender has actually been used to deliver shots for feature films, such as first-person action movie Hardcore Henry and others. VFX supervisor Yaroslav Kemnits from Division LLC explained that this was thanks to the software’s innate flexibility and modern toolset. The…

“CryEngine really shows its power when it comes to VR games” SINA ELS Senior 3D Artist Crytek www.sinaels.com Crytek’s next-gen VR-enabled game engine CryEngine V uses a ‘pay what you want’ basis for its business model “Making 3D art with CryEngine over the years has really made me appreciate one of its biggest strengths: the ease with which it allows me to create great-looking assets and scenes. Physically based rendering allows consistency in the visual quality of different lighting setups without having to adjust textures each time the lighting changes. An asset on which textures were tweaked in a neutral lighting setup will work everywhere else, too. Following PBR guidelines also ensures visual consistency on assets created by various artists. When working on an asset in a 3D…

ANDREW HARRINGTON lead environment Artist Amazon Game Studios games.amazon.com Lumberyard is a free triple-A engine (no revenue sharing, no subscriptions), deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch “Breakaway, Amazon Game Studios’ first title, takes advantage of Lumberyard’s triple-A performance and professional-grade tools, running at 60fps with fully-deferred lighting, and I enjoy using the engine’s vast selection of rendering features to create our levels, such as PBR rendering, voxel-based global illumination, Substance Painter integration, vegetation and foliage painting, and the Time of Day editor. Our team leveraged Lumberyard’s sophisticated character tools, Geppetto and Mannequin, to create Breakaway’s rich selection of legendary characters. Using these tools, our animators set up real-time dynamic clothing and physics attachments to bring them to life. “One of our favourite features is Lumberyard’s asset processor, which makes it…

Gustavo Åhlén Gustavo Åhlén is the founder of Svelthe, a business dedicated to creating concept art, motion graphics, animation for games, commercials and films. For some years I have specialised in human anatomy as well as traditional arts, and after improving my skills in these areas I began in the CG world. CG Particles Experiment 01, 2016 After Effects, Cinema 4D, Trapcode Form This image was made as a personal particles experiment where the base mesh was done in Cinema 4D and exported to After Effects where a Trapcode Form effect was added. CG Particles Experiment 02, 2016 After Effects, Cinema 4D, Trapcode Form This was also made as a personal particles experiment. Once again I created the base mesh in Cinema 4D before exporting to…

Our experts The best artists from around the world reveal specific CG techniques Maya Michael Cauchi mikecauchiart.com Michael is a 3D artist based in Bournemouth, specialising in the areas of modelling and shading MODO Matthias Develtere develterematthias.wordpress.com Matthias is a 3D artist at MachineGames. He has a burning passion for hard surfaces and anything tech related iClone, Unity Mike D McCallum reallusion.com Mike has worked freelance in animation, 3D applications and game development, as well as indie films Procedural shading is something that can become an incredibly useful skill to learn, as it can allow you to generate reusable assets, which can come in handy in larger projects. The skills it requires can also help when shading actual textured assets since it gives you…

Most 3D artists are always looking for better, easier and faster alternatives to render out 3D scenes, and the good thing is that new technology is helping developers to create powerful tools for us. Nowadays there are so many different types of render engines that we can choose from. Recently I was asked to try Radeon ProRender, an impressive physically-based render engine. Radeon ProRender is a hugely powerful tool, giving you interactive workflows facilitating the production of photorealistic images. I regularly use four different renderers including Arnold, mental ray, RenderMan and KeyShot, and now I am including a fifth, Radeon ProRender. Its technology is great because it uses both the GPU and CPU to compute your complex scenes. Radeon ProRender also uses GI (Global Illumination), which is great for accurate…

“Bundled content includes a limited library of photoreal actors and mocap files” AXYZ design has released a new version of its standalone crowd animation software for visualisation professionals. The first thing you’ll notice is a brand-new UI that enhances ease of use and discoverability of features with a new WYSISYG editor. There are two UI modes to switch between: Drawing, which is for scene populating, and Editing, which is for customising actors. Before populating a scene you’ll first need to import an environment. To help minimise performance issues, it’s good practice to only import what’s essential and use low-poly proxy geo where characters will interact with the background and props. For crowd setup, the Walkway tool is used to plot waypoints on terrain and then customise the walkway as desired.…

“We pretty much had to work across all the departments and the whole pipeline just to make sure we could hit those deadlines”Rachit Singh, Atomic Cartoons Website atomiccartoons.com Location Canada/Australia Project Beat Bugs Project description Beat Bugs is an animated comedy series aimed at children, broadcast in Australia on Channel 7TWO and on Netflix worldwide Studio Atomic Cartoons Company bio Atomic Cartoons is a leading full-service animation company, creating 2D and 3D shows, commercials, music videos and much more in the heart of the animation hub of Vancouver, Canada. Contributor Rachit Singh, head of technology For a series that has been in production for one and a half years, Beat Bugs has been a catalyst for tremendous change at Atomic Cartoons. The Netflix show – based on…

Imagine being able to wake up at essentially whatever time you need to, go for a morning jog, have breakfast and go back to bed before you even begin your day’s visual effects work in your home office. Then imagine doing that for TV and film titles no matter where you live in the world: whether it’s the islands of New Zealand, the rainforests of Australia, or by the ports of Pennsylvania. For many in the industry, and across the VFX hubs in London, Los Angeles and Vancouver, this is likely an unattainable dream. But, for VFX Legion, it’s very much everyday life. In just over three years since its inception, VFX Legion has already worked on a variety of shows and feature films including Hardcore Henry, The Purge: Election…

BLAIR ARMITAGE 3D character artist Freelance www.blairarmitage.artstation.com Unity is a cross-platform game engine by Unity Technologies and is used to develop games for PC, consoles, mobile devices and websites “Unity is a very intuitive, user-friendly engine that allows you to create a diverse variety of games, both in game mechanics and art style. I’ve used it within small teams to rapidly iterate game prototypes in pre-production, as well as on longer projects, which required attention to detail such as fine-tuning character materials. “It’s important as an artist to be able to work on assets with real-time feedback, and Unity is great for being able to instantly show updated textures, as well as having the Scene view, which provides accurate representations of your assets without having to spend time building the…

ERIC KELLER Tiger Beetle Rendered in the Unreal Game Engine, 2016 Software ZBrush, MARI, Maya, Substance, Unreal Engine 4 Learn how to • Model a realistic tiger beetle in ZBrush • Retopologise surfaces in Maya • Layout UVs • Bake Normal maps • Create an Unreal Shader in MARI • Paint Color texture maps in MARI • Paint metallic textures • Export Maps from MARI • Import models and textures into the Unreal game engine • Create a physically based Shader in Unreal using the textures This tutorial covers techniques you can use to create a realistic tiger beetle that can be used in a real-time game engine. As virtual reality becomes more mainstream, the demand for artists that understand how to create textures for physically based shaders is going…

In this tutorial we will go over how to design a model in roughly six hours. These are just some quick guidelines on how not to get bogged down with a big game asset. In this industry you don’t always have the luxury of a concept, nor do you have too much time to spend on your work, so here we will use some quick techniques to get our design done fast. We will be using MODO to show some quick prototyping hints and tips. These are exclusive features for MODO. For rendering we will use some unique features from KeyShot, before wrapping up with some post-production steps and general tips and tricks. This tutorial comes with two extra videos showing how to make a quick render in KeyShot. For…

PARTICLES I filled a basic form with smoke using animated balls. Later, I took the form away so physics could do its job. I then advected and wedged millions of particles from smoke, reloaded the particles from cache and deformed them with Depth maps. I shaded and lit the particles, created the mist with volumetric clouds and used AFX to render the stars. Teun van der Zalm www.salmonick-atelier.com Teun is a digital artist. In 2015 he began to research a new project: what lies beyond the edge of the observable universe? Software Houdini, Photoshop, AFX NTO001.07, 2016…

“Each artist approaches the creation process slightly differently, so we wanted to show how that unfolds live”Andrea Ragni Schubert, communications manager at Oculus Seeing what you sculpt on a computer monitor is the standard nowadays, but what if you wanted to go above and beyond using the typical software? Better yet, what if you wanted to learn how to create art right in front of your eyes, in virtual reality, and get top techniques and tips from some of the best minds in the videogames, film and VR industries? That’s what sculpting app Oculus Medium is hoping to inspire artists to do in VR with its new Facebook Live sculpting events. Every month, a different artist is featured in a live Artist Spotlight video on the Oculus Medium Facebook page.…

01 Mantis Anti-Air Platform by Tomi Väisänen 3DA username Tomi Väisänen Tomi Väisänen says: “With this work, I tried a lot of new modelling techniques and tried to improve my overall workflow. I also developed my procedural shaders a bit further. Most of the textures are procedural and objects are mostly boxmapped. I modelled in 3ds Max and rendered with Corona, with post and compositing done in Photoshop.“ We say: This is an incredible example of Tomi’s hard-surface prowess and a cool overall design as well. 02 Red by Rakan Atef Khamash 3DA username Rakan Khamash Rakan Atef Khamash says: “Red is a little cute monster that I based on a 2D concept by Creature Box. I loved the mix of hard and soft elements. It was sculpted in…

“I tried reproducing the mood of an early morning in Japan. So with artist Yoii’s character and rooftops as a focus point, I used a low sun to get soft shadows and also mostly diffuse reflections and a shallow depth of field to keep a smooth atmosphere. I also used light coming from down the street to break the shadows on the character”Julien Crochet, The Observer, 2016 Julien Crochet juliencrochet.wixsite.com/  portfolio Julien graduated from LISAA animation in Paris in 2014 and now works as a 3D generalist Software 3ds Max, V-Ray Work in progress… “I started modelling this robot to improve my hard-surface ZBrush skills. First I created a low-poly version to define a basic shape and find the right proportions. Most of the robot’s protective shells originate from…

01 Enable the microdisplacement This feature is still in the experimental Cycles engine, so we’ll have to set that up first. With your renderer set to Cycles, go to the Render tab and select Experimental in the feature set. Microdisplacement uses lots of RAM, so you can experiment with CPU and GPU rendering if you’re getting memory errors. 02 Prepare the mesh Before we add the material, we’re going to make sure we have our object set up properly. Ensure that you have a clean mesh topology with evenly-sized quads. In the Modifiers tab, add a Subdivision Surface modifier and set it to Adaptive. This will enable the displacement to subdivide your mesh. 03 Create the material In the Node editor, create a new Material for your object. Add a…

MARTIN TEICHMANN Environment Modeler Naughty Dog www.martinteichmann.com Hugely popular, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has won countless awards and is a popular choice for both indie and triple-A development teams “Unreal Engine 4 has to be the weapon of choice for my personal projects. The powerful material and lighting system is embedded in an easy-to-navigate and master UI, and this gives me everything I need to create my side projects. “For me, I enjoy the simplicity of the engine to start with and how it’s still complex enough to achieve unique ideas. Materials and lighting work well together and, combined with the strong light map solution, it’s possible to achieve stunning results with minimal fuss. An incredibly vast amount of different styles can be carried out using just that toolset. “For…

GUSTAVO ÅHLÉN CG merged with footage, 2016 Software After Effects, Element 3D Learn how to • Use Focal Length • Use ISO and Aperture • Use Shutter Speed parameters • Merge 3D geometries with real footage • Interpolate foreground objects with footage • Adjust Film Level Values • Adjust Film Colour Values • Adjust the scene lighting • Get a balance in colour grading CG integration techniques with raw footage might seem fairly straightforward at first glance, but as we go further merging filmed footage with CG sequences, you’ll see that the process becomes much more complex than expected. The filming techniques that I am teaching through this tutorial will be mainly focused on how to set up the camera settings and CG object integration with raw footage interpolating the…

Jerry Perkins I am a self-taught 3D artist who started out in Blender. I have a YouTube channel with over 400 videos and am a Blender Foundation certified trainer. H6, 2016 Blender, OctaneRender Robots and helmets are a passion of mine and these two are just one of many designs I’ve made over the course of testing Hard Ops. Deux V3, 2015 Blender, Photoshop Deux is my personal mascot and is representative of my current skill and technique. He is reborn over and over using better and better techniques. Hard Ops Time, 2016 Blender Hard Ops was being tested to the max in the making of this timely piece. For a moment I was considering this one as the topic for the article you’re reading now.…

“Creating VR content isn’t just for triple-A studios, as tools are available to make VR possible for anyone” Beyond science fiction, virtual reality enables you to immerse yourself into new worlds using a variety of VR equipment and software that can make the modern-day holodeck a reality. Learning the process of creating VR-ready content isn’t just for triple-A studios, as tools and hardware are readily available to make VR creation possible for anyone with some imagination and a little bravery. I’ve found a way to quickly generate characters and environments for VR using Reallusion’s iClone and Unity 3D – and without the need to write a single line of code. Thanks to free utilities from Oculus and HTC, we can drag and drop our way onto a viewable VR platform…

BFX 2016 returned to the Bournemouth International Centre this year and was a huge success. There were standout presentations from Double Negative’s Mark Ardington, who discussed rigging techniques in Ex Machina and brought his Academy Award to Bournemouth, Pixar’s Steve LaVietes on the new rendering tech implemented in Finding Dory,and from ILM’s Mike Mulholland and Kevin Jenkins on the digital effects built for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The BFX Careers Hub on 14 October was packed with prospective students and plenty of computing and sculpting-related activities adorned the schedule for the BFX Family Weekend. The winners of the BFX Competition 2016 were also revealed at the Awards Ceremony. Competing teams of visual effects and animation students worked for seven weeks to create a short advertisement for charity. Alpaca Chinos…

Project Felix is a new tool from Adobe that enables the compositing of 3D models and assets onto a 2D image. Project Felix will also allow the adjustment of lights, materials and perspective for “state-of-the-art photorealistic rendering”. Richard Curtis, principal solutions consultant at Adobe, said: “There are two things that we are hearing from our customers. First is that they would like to use 3D objects and scenes to complete their tasks, without having to learn complex 3D tools… Second is that they are under pressure to deliver more content than ever before and need tools that are fast [and] intuitive… Felix was born from a combination of these needs, as well as modern intuitive experience, allowing a 2D designers without any 3D skills to make use of 3D objects,…

Planetside’s scene rendering software has just gotten incredibly more photorealistic and more efficient for artists. A Ray-Traced Preview feature enables instant feedback for tweaking objects, lighting, shaders and so on. On the official release page, Planetside calls Terragen 4’s Multiple Scattering in clouds a “major breakthrough” that has taken years of development. The result is the simulation of light scattering hundreds of times to produce softness, inter-cloud and cloud-surface interactions. There is also now simulation of the absorption of light in the ozone, animation controls for adding motion blur, lens effects taking into account light sources, specular reflection intensity and much more.…