Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 112 i 3D Artist

With such a diverse range of texturing tools out there, it can be difficult choosing just one to cover in the magazine – let alone choosing one to learn if you are just starting out. For some of the beginners or more seasoned texture artists out there, you may want to learn something new. Perhaps you may want to find out how to achieve stunning materials or painting. Well, we’re covering tips and tricks from six of the most popular software this issue, so that you don’t miss out on a single technique! Fresh off of the release of Destiny 2, why not learn how to create materials with Bungie’s lead environment artist Daniel Thiger for example? Don’t miss it, it’s over on page 24. We also take a look…

No matter what you’re working on, how you apply textures to your model will make the difference between a final project that’s outstanding or just mediocre. There’s no point putting hours into producing a fantastic sculpt only to let it down with some subpar texturing, so we’ve collected advice from eight top artists on advancing your technique to help you produce realistic, compelling texturing effects. Staying organised is a big part of good texturing – keeping your graphs readable will stand you in good stead when working with others, and saving every happy accident that occurs or new technique you discover into a well-kept folder will improve your overall texturing arsenal. Making sure you have a process that performs tasks in the right order is also important, as it will…

LIGHTING This is a real-time depiction of Dumbledore’s office created in Unreal Engine 4. It is based on references from the movies and the descriptions in the books. Lights are a key component of composition. I make sure that lighting puts an emphasis on key areas of the scene and gives depth. Next step is adding volume to the lighting through fog. Ognyan Zahariev artstation.com/artist/ognyan Ognyan studied game art at Escape Studios. He works at Ubisoft Sofia, and has worked on The Division and multiple Assassin’s Creed titles Software 3ds Max, ZBrush, Quixel Suite 2, Marvelous Designer Dumbledore’s office, 2017…

GABRIEL D’ORAZIO Mat by Vincent, 2017 Software Substance Painter Learn how to • Set up brushes and materials • Work with the height map • Bake maps • Use generators and smart masks • Work with layers • Create different materials in a single mesh • Get better results with the Lazy Mouse • Set up hard surfaces from the Shelf • Add post effects Concept The concept was inspired by one of my favourite painters, Vincent van Gogh. The idea was to mix the meaning of ‘painter’ into the context of the software, using van Gogh’s paintings in a creative and funny way. “It is important to lower the Brush Flow and Spacing options when you are making subtle volumes, such as the wrinkling of the character’s clothes” Toy…

Designed by veteran artists, incredible architectural kits are the first asset libraries to be released in the KitBash3d store, with more kits to be added monthly. The models feature clean geometry, mid-poly counts, pre-UVed textures and are application agnostic for seamless integrating into workflows. “I’m twice as fast now, and my designs are twice as good,” said Nick Hiatt, art director on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, who has already developed concept art using the kits. Each kit retails at $199.…

Job title Creature and concept designer Location California Website nevillepage.com Biography Neville Page is a British-American film and television creature and concept designer. He was the lead creature and concept designer for James Cameron’s epic Avatar and he is currently a judge on the Syfy television series Face Off. After he graduated with honours in 1990 with a degree in industrial design, he then went on to teach students in Switzerland. He has continued to teach throughout his career, making regular appearances at Gnomon School and with his popular Gnomon Workshop Tutorials. He holds an advisory board position at Gnomon. Portfolio highlights • Star Trek Discovery, 2017 • Star Trek Beyond, 2016 • Star Trek Into Darkness, 2013 • Prometheus, 2012 • Face Off, 2011-Present • Green Lantern, 2011 • Super 8, 2011 • TRON: Legacy, 2010…

TANYA COMBRINCK N/A  Tanya takes a look at the major players in texturing to discover expert, triple-A techniques in creating materials, painting textures and much more. Don’t miss her six-software guide on page 24. 3DArtist username N/A NEIL MCKNIGHT artstation.com/neilmcknight  Neil is lead 3D artist working on Star Wars: Battlefront II. Check out his incredible tutorial on current-gen techniques for a sci-fi environment in 3ds Max and UE4 on page 44. 3DArtist username Neyull GABRIEL D’ORAZIO gabrieldorazio.com  Gabriel is a 3D shading/lighting specialist. He’s shown us how to literally paint like a painter with his winning image ‘Vincent’ in Substance Painter this issue over on page 52. 3DArtist username gabrieldorazio ANG LU anglu.artstation.com  Lighting artist Ang has imagined a beautifully detailed portrait of a Chinese empress, using ZBrush, Maya, Mari…

PARKERISED STEEL MATERIAL I started this material by adding a clean, solid colour layer with nothing but the specular value of steel as the base for the material. To create the parkerisation, I began by adding the dusty steel material, decreased its specular value to the dielectric range and removed the colour as well as brightened the albedo. This specific material comes with a very nice texture pattern in both the roughness and albedo that suited this application nicely, and is great for emulating shallow surface damage not digging all the way through the finish. BAKELITE GRIPS The material for the bakelite grips started off with one of the standard plastics included with the program. After tweaking the base parameters to my liking, I mixed in the surface roughness details…

GARY SZABO CEO “The pleasure that we get out of the work, it’s like listening to a record – a certain song – and it takes you back to a certain place and time, and not necessarily representing the quality of the music but the reflection of your state of mind at that time. [With] Walking With Dinosaurs, that had a real sense that nobody had done this before and so there was a sense that for every single aspect of that project, people were pushing boundaries, so it was like we were all jumping off a cliff together. I was only a colourist, so my role was not as demanding as some of the CG artists that were on it, but the fact that we had a sense of…

As the Millennium Falcon is iconic to the Star Wars universe, the Intruder holds the same position in the world of Valerian and is considered to be the main source of inspiration for the smugglers’ spacecraft conceived by filmmaker George Lucas. “Designing the Intruder was extremely exciting,“ remarks Rodeo FX visual effects supervisor François Dumoulin. “Luc Besson called the Intruder the first character of the movie. The design from the comic has evolved through the ages but is still dated and feels like the Sixties. The Intruder is a circle with wings, so not super dynamic. It worked as a drawing but definitely not as a moving object. Another reason for why we were superexcited is that we had to own the design and share the Intruder with ILM, which…

LIGHTING Green Bike has unique lighting. I just used two V-Ray lights for this. The key light is a V-Ray rec light in directional mode coming from the right side, and the diffuse light is a V-Ray dome light with a simple blueish colour! I didn’t use any fog in Maya, but just added a foggy effect with a simple gradient in Photoshop where the key light comes to the scene. Farid Ghanbari RenderBurger.com Farid has been working for several years as a CG generalist artist. His main software is Maya Software Maya, V-Ray, Photoshop Green Bike, 2017…

TEXTURING Boneless Juan was one of my pieces for my student demo reel at Think Tank Training Centre. In order to obtain a photorealistic render, I used a real skateboard to provide good texture references and to better understand the behaviour of each material. Small details make a big difference and can add a lot of realism. Every detail tells a story. Jose M. Florez Victoria artstation.com/artist/josefoguel Jose is a 3D artist from Colombia, and is finishing his studies at Think Tank Training Centre Software Maya, Mari, V-Ray, Photoshop, After Effects Boneless Juan, 2017…

The developers of Corona Renderer, Render Legion, have recently become Chaos Group’s largest investment to date. Through the deal, the Render Legion team will continue the long-term development of Corona. “Our mission has always been to help all artists and designers visualise anything they can imagine,” said Peter Mitev, CEO of Chaos Group. “This is something we have in common with the Render Legion team. Now that we can our share ideas and resources, we’ll be able to address the needs of this growing market and develop the future of rendering faster than we ever could before.” Ondrej Karlik, co-founder of Render Legion, adds, “We were looking for a strategic partner who could help us grow and shared the same vision. Chaos Group was able to offer us important knowledge,…

Deadline 10 Native integration with the AWS Cloud is included for flexible expansion of render farm workflow by enabling access on-site, in the cloud or hybrid. By-the-minute render time in the AWS Cloud is also now available to buy through Thinkbox’s Marketplace. Deadline 10 with support is available for $48 per year. Flowbox v1.5 The node-based rotoscoping software now features individual tracking per shape or folder, shape stabilisation without tracking, LiveQC, multi-threaded caching, background rendering, Isolation Mode for complex shots, lifetime options and smooth or linear interpolation for roto animation. Prices start at $37 per month. World Creator 2 BiteTheBytes real-time procedural landscape terrain generator gains full GPU support and ships with export options for transfer to Unity and Unreal Engine. The update includes terrain creation up to 16K x…

When asked, “How do I succeed in my career?“ by students, Page has one recurring piece of advice: “You’ve got to work with your strengths.“ He also advises not to be precious with your work: “Always know that you’ve been hired to realise somebody’s dream – somebody else’s dream. You’re being given a paycheck to be a tool (and I mean that in the most positive way), to be a tool to somebody who’s trying to conceive their ideas.“…

Job title Product designer/ art director Location New York City Website moxxawi.com Biography Hussain Almossawi is a designer based in New York City who has worked for major firms such as Nike, EA Sports and advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. He now works at the adidas Brooklyn Creator Farm, a think tank tasked with focusing on what the future of adidas products could look like. Portfolio highlights • Ultimate Powerup, 2016 • Nike Shoes of Paradise, 2016 • Enfuse, 2016 • 3D Terrain Art, 2016 • Ninja Turtles Shoes, 2015 • Light design, 2015 • Nike Kobe Fade to Black Shoebox, 2014 • nCycle, 2013 • nThree, 2012 • Type fluid experiment, 2011 “Back then, not a day would pass without knowing that I learned something new”Hussain Almossawi, Product designer/art director There probably aren’t many teenagers who stay up…

Not satisfied with helping to shape the future of one of the world’s most iconic sportswear brands, Almossawi has lent his considerable design talents to a project that aims to help people suffering with sickle cell disease. Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder in which the haemoglobin in the blood is damaged and can’t carry oxygen properly to the body’s cells. He said: “I am currently finishing up a project called Oxygem, which I am very optimistic about. Making medical products with a group of scientists to try to save people’s lives is always a privilege and an exciting thing to be part of.“…

01 Monster Hunter, Target Rich Environment A collection by Larry Correia by Kurt Miller 3DA username KMI Studio Kurt Miller says: “An assignment by Baen Books to illustrate the author on his own Monster Hunter series. A photo was taken of him to import it as a texture wrap on the 3D model.“ We say: We love how creative this is – a brilliant mix of 3D and photo! 02 Destroyed Room by Giovanni Flauto 3DA username giovanniflauto Giovanni Flauto says: “A room made with the help of 3ds Max with V-Ray; for processing I used the 5SRW method. I spent all post-production in Photoshop.“ We say: The scene composition and lighting is what attracted us to this render. The different brick and wall textures are…

There is, of course, a set of typical programs and tools that Smoke & Mirrors makes use of over the course of a project. “We have Flame and Nuke and editing software,“ says Djordjevic. “We’re pretty eclectic, there is everything from VFXER, Premiere to Final Cut because it has to cater to one group of scenarios when we work with clients. And on the CG side it’s Maya and all kinds of render solutions like V-Ray and Houdini.“ Nothing here will be a surprise, then, but Djordjevic does add that the work that they do – primarily advertising – commonly follows the same set of expected software used by the film industry. “It’s pretty much software that is a global standard. Everything that features are being done in today is…

In order to handle the visual effects work for the biggest project Rodeo FX had ever worked on, a new pipeline had to be implemented. “Valerian was the show where we made the transition to Maya from Softimage XSI,“ states François Dumoulin. “We had to develop our own set of tools for nesting assets for the environments.“ The pipeline transition ran into some complications. “I hit the wall with the instancing of sub-assets within assets inside of Maya. The Maya viewports did allow us to see all of the nesting and sub-nesting, but you were only able to see the entire sync up together once you hit the render button. I was not happy with that so decided to switch to Houdini for the set dressing of the most complete…

Neil McKnight Neil is a lead 3D artist working on Star Wars: Battlefront II at EA Motive in Montreal. He has worked on a number of titles including Mass Effect, Forza Horizon and Star Citizen. He has been a guest speaker at several events and released various video tutorials. Gladius, 2015 Maya, V-Ray, Photoshop The Gladius ship created for Star Citizen. This ship became the test bed to prototype the updated damage technology seen in the game today. Digital Binoculars, 2015 Maya, V-Ray, Photoshop These digital binoculars were created in order to effectively demonstrate the different texturing tools inside of the Quixel Suite software.…

ANG LU Empress, 2017 Software Maya, ZBrush, Mari, Nuke, Photoshop Learn how to • Use Arnold 2.0 • Create hair with XGen • Model in Maya and ZBrush • Make texture maps Concept For creating a realistic portrait of a fictional historical figure, the best references are film and television programmes. So I found the Chinese TV show Empresses in the Palace as an appropriate character prototype for my creations. “We’ll use Decimation Master to maintain the details with the lowest poly count, while keeping the UV” In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a realistic portrait image using software such as Maya, ZBrush, Mari and Nuke. We will take you through the process of modelling, texturing, shading, hair creation, rendering and composing. Instead of using external plugins…

“MASH objects can now interact with other MASH objects or environments, adding new possibilities to the motion-graphics side of Maya” Maya 2018 is the newest version of Autodesk’s popular 3D computer graphics software. This year’s release brings a range of improvements and new features and also solves problems and stability issues from previous releases. Once you open the new release, the first improvement you’ll notice is the updated Viewport 2.0. The new Maya has ditched the legacy viewport modes and completely switched to Viewport 2.0. The new viewport can accurately display the Arnold 5 lights, shaders, subDs and even geometric displacement. This includes real-time previews of ramps, adjustments to texture file attributes and multi-tiled UV textures. Plus, viewport performance has been improved. From the modelling side Maya has received several…

Page’s parents were supportive of his first forays into design but “we didn’t know that you could make a living making monsters.“ Having heard industrial design could be a path to the entertainment industry, Page pursued a degree in the subject. Although this wasn’t his passion, it did ultimately help him achieve his goal – it was his experience in the medical field making wheelchairs that got him his first big gig designing the vehicles for Universal Studios’ Men in Black ride.…

LIGHTING A complete darkness inspired me to describe this incredible design, playing with shadows and camera movements with just one V-Ray main rectangular light and a few additional lights. I have used a V-Ray softbox map or gradient map to design reflections. Depending on the shots I sometimes used a directional light to achieve sharp shadows. Djordje Ilic djordjeilicvfx.com Djordje is a CG generalist from Novi Sad, Serbia, mainly focused on lighting and look dev. He is currently working at Double Negative Software 3ds Max, V-Ray, Nuke, Mari, Photoshop, Premiere Pro Legend 964, 2016…