Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 114 i 3D Artist

Coco is Pixar’s 19th feature film, and in many ways is unlike anything the studio has done before. Following the adventures of 12-year-old Mexican boy Miguel, as he grapples with his family’s celebration of the Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) holiday, Coco is packed with colour and culture, along with some of the richest detail ever seen in a Pixar film. With insights from several of Coco’s key filmmakers, including director Lee Unkrich, 3D Artist goes behind the scenes of the technical challenges of the film. This includes a look at the massive CG sets and lighting solutions required to realise the Land of the Dead, insights into the simulation of bridges made of marigolds, how Pixar crafted crowds this time around and what other new…

Whether it’s dapper Don Draper in the hit show Mad Men sipping a Scotch as he eases back in his loafers, or the very fact that Santa Claus himself only dresses in red because he was once used to advertise a famous cola – the impact of advertising on our culture is undeniable. For decades the industry has attempted to sell us dreams we didn’t even know we had using striking designs, catchy copywriting, celebrity endorsements or combinations of all three. Scribes and designers worked in tandem to pitch and, if they struck the right note, would have their ideas end up on a Saturday night ad break or a billboard. It was a world of pen and paper, actors and sets. But with rapid advances in VFX now being…

Entering the future noir world of Blade Runner 2049, which takes place three decades after the original, are Rodeo FX and Territory Studio. Guiding the design, creation and execution process was production visual effects supervisor John Nelson, who collaborated with filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins for two years on the sequel. “The orphanage was shot on location in Budapest and our onset supervisor Robert Bock spent about three weeks with them,“ states Rodeo FX president and VFX supervisor, Sébastien Moreau. “They had built a portion of an old rusty satellite dish reversed. We had to extend and create holes in it as well as fill the place with kids. They had 30 kids on location and we shot all of them on greenscreen at different angles and lighting…

Timothy Dries After finishing his studies in Belgium, Timothy moved to Cambridge and started a career at Frontier Developments. Passionate about game environments, he tries to push his knowledge and work on personal projects as much as he can. Lost and Found ArtStation Challenge, 2017 Maya, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Substance Painter A Chinese floating lighthouse environment, based on a concept by Victoriya Anda, for the ArtStation Challenge. This won the Honorable Mention in the end. Dense Forest, 2017 SpeedTree, Maya, Unreal Engine, ZBrush This project started out as an experiment in using SpeedTree to create foliage. I started out small and ended up having fun and creating a full environment. Hangar 62, 2016 Maya, Substance Designer, Unreal Engine Hangar 62 was a smaller…

Andrew Hodgson I am a senior hard surface modeller currently at Method Studios. Over the last four years I have worked on films including Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Guardians of the Galaxy. I focus purely on mechanical assets and design. The Journey, 2016 Maya, Arnold, Photoshop, Nuke My submission for ArtStation challenge, ‘The Journey’, which took an honourable mention. The process for designing this spaceship was the same as in this tutorial. Aircraft Concept, 2017 Maya, KeyShot After working on the Guardians of the Galaxy spaceships, I was inspired to explore my own aircraft design with interesting panels and exposed mechanics. NASA Octopus, 2017 Maya, KeyShot I wanted to take inspiration from nature for this design, yet make it in a practical…

RAINER DUDA www.rd-innovations.de Bio Rainer has over a decade of experience in the visual effects industry and owns a CG production company Blackmagic Design’s compositing software, Fusion, is an upcoming star in the compositing world and offers artists a large variety of incredible tools. In this tutorial, we are going to dive into the various nodes to create a NASA-like image of outer space, complete with a dwarf spiral galaxy. We will begin the process by covering the topic of creating outer space filled with stars in different regions and in various colours, with easy adjustments that enable colour changes over time. This will actually be a two layer process for small and medium stars. Some of them will be far away, while some will be closer to the viewer.…

“There’s a real desire among men to be more of a part of raising their children and that’s something we should absolutely all consider within the industry and we should be looking at. It’s not just the pressure on women”Louise Hussey, VFX chair of Animated Women UK Closing the successful debut week-long event of ACCESS: VFX was Animated Women UK’s ‘Meet The Parents’ panel. Led by Louise Hussey, VFX chair of AWUK and executive VFX producer at Double Negative TV, the panel featured industry parents Pete Levy – VFX producer, Double Negative TV; Nicky Bentham – film producer and founder, Raising Films; Tory Wire, HR director, The Mill; Una Mazaroti – animator and editor; and Rebecca Barbour, talent manager, ILM. With plenty of interactivity and frank discussion between the guests…

Daniel Bystedt My name is Daniel Bystedt and I work as a senior character artist at Goodbye Kansas Studios. I studied CG at Nackademin in Stockholm 2007-2009. I worked at studios and did a bit of freelancing until I finally ended up there. Wanderer, 2017 ZBrush, Blender, Substance Painter I wanted to create a robot with a design that was a bit more than what you usually see. Gear and clothes always tend to give more personality and echoes of a backstory. Alien Bust, 2017 ZBrush, Blender, Substance Painter Total comfort zone alien bust. Very generic, but what can I say. For this project I used the Filmic LUT in Blender for the first time. Small Walker, 2016 Blender, Substance Painter I wanted to…

“You’ll get the most mileage from the RadeonPro Duo using applications that take advantage of Open CL” The saying that you can wait ages for a bus, before three turn up at once certainly applies to AMD in the professional workstation market. Out of the running for years when it came to CPUs, last month we had a chance to give the new Ryzen line a thorough evaluation, and came away pleased with the results. Now we look at the most interesting high-end graphics card in the firm’s Vega line; the Radeon Pro Duo. Vega first popped up earlier this year and we covered it in the form of the Radeon WX7100 that shipped with the Chillblast Ryzen workstation last month, but the Radeon Pro Duo card is a bit…

Save the date! We are pleased to announce we are hosting an exciting, brand-new event – Vertex – for one day only on Tuesday 13 March 2018 at Olympia, London. Just like how a vertex connects everything, our event will bring the CG community together for practical inspiration and a fantastic networking opportunity. This special event assembles experts from every industry and discipline in CG, from games and VFX through to VR, covering character concepting, real-time creation and much more. You’ll be able to boost your skills with the help of leading industry artists and learn from the world’s best creative studios, no matter which area you specialise in. You’ll get hands-on advice and tips and hear about the newest developments at our top talks, including from CG industry veteran…

The two new editions of Unfold3D share the same features, except the RS edition gives CAD users a UV mapping solution by creating and handling UV maps in unnormalised UV space. The RS edition is built for real-world dimension pipelines, such as industrial and packaging design and laser etching or printing work. The VS edition is aimed at general 3D work including modelling for games, VFX, VR and photogrammetry. Version 10 introduces automatic seams with smart segmentation to divide models in one click, new UV packing system, multiple UV Channel management and FBX Support, and island aware welding.…

The Wacom Pro Pen 3D has three buttons, removing the need to rely on a keyboard for viewport navigation. The pen’s default settings for the third button control tumbling and rotation but this can be customised. “We created the Pro Pen 3D for our customers who expressed a need for a three-button stylus,’’ said Ed Neumann, senior vice president of marketing for Wacom’s Creative Business Unit. “The Pro Pen 3D facilitates a greater ease of use than ever before for digital artists and designers who value a streamlined, highly customisable workflow.“ The Pro Pen 3D has 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity and is available for £90 / $100.…

PROJECT FOCUS “The spline-based hand drawing tool is perfect to keep artistic control over the trees’ silhouettes”Paul-Emile Boucher, Environment & FX lead Beginning his games career at Ubisoft, Boucher’s worked on various projects, from Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, to Just Dance 4. Despite working on triple-A titles with varied styles, he’s always been attracted to stylised worlds with strong graphic choices. “As a player, I love exploring an original environment, with its own set of shapes, patterns and logic,“ he explains. If you’ve already played Absolver, or watched gameplay footage, you’ll have admired the dynamic landscape of barren land to rich forestry. Boucher explains that Sloclap wanted to avoid your typical greyish, post-apocalyptic scenery. “Exploration was an important part of the game, and we wanted to maintain a…

“This villa’s owner is a politician who is known for being classy and firm, so he asked that his room should express his own personality”Yahia Gamal Mattar, Immortalize, 2017 Yahia Gamal Mattar behance.net/yahia_matt4dbd Yahia is a freelance architect and architecture visualiser and his studio is located in Egypt Software 3ds Max, V-Ray and Photoshop Work in progress… “ This image is based on a concept by Jeff Delgado; a stylised rendition of Tim Murphy from Jurassic Park. I recently watched Moana and Big Hero 6 and was inspired by how well they mixed stylised shapes with realistic shaders. I wanted to tackle a character of a similar aesthetic focusing on lighting, expression and the hair especially”Omar Taher, Timmy, 2017 Omar Taher omartaher.com Omar is a 3D generalist specialising in…

TIMOTHY DRIES Abandoned, 2017 Software ZBrush, Substance Designer, Knald and ZBrush Learn how to • Create blockouts in ZBrush • Refine sculpts in ZBrush • Bake information from high poly 3D meshes onto planes • Use height maps to generate textures • Make tillable textures in Substance Designer • Get to grips with some of the nodes Substance Designer has to offer • Export to Unreal engine • Set up materials in Unreal Engine • Use vertex paint Concept The concept for this is based on the JN Adam Sanatorium in Perrysburg, which opened in 1912. It is now an infamous abandoned building. If you are inspired and passionate about abandoned buildings and urban exploration, you will love this tutorial. In it, we are going to take a dive inside…

ANDREW HODGSON Spaceship Concept, 2017 Software Maya, Photoshop, KeyShot Learn how to • Generate interesting silhouettes and construct a purpose • Consider how forms flow into each other • Speed up workflow through kit bashing • Manage your scene efficiently • Think outside the box to generate ideas • Reuse objects and prep for future works Concept This is a sleek spaceship concept which can quickly be made presentable using Maya and KeyShot. This tutorial presents some possibilities for creating spaceship concepts in 3D. It is not so much focused on learning the programs themselves, so previous experience is useful. The focus will mostly be on considering the shapes and how to explore them, with a lot of emphasis on silhouette and flowing lines. Silhouette is absolutely fundamental to design,…

ANDREAS BARDEN www.andreasbarden.com Bio Andreas is creative director at Elberfeld Kreation and he has a strong passion for animation, 3D, graphics, design, beautiful pictures, colours, lighting and shading Cloth simulation interested me as soon as I started working in Cinema 4D. Then while I was working on an editorial for an online magazine, I came up with the idea of creating textile sculptures. In the upcoming tutorial I will share my process for how I create the textile sculptures. The goal will be to create an abstract animation with cloth simulation. With each step, we’ll take a look at the various processes involved to give you the foundation you need to create your own textile sculptures. The creation process will start with some research to figure out what the textile…

“The capabilities of the particle engine and how 3D can be used are phenomenal” When Blackmagic Design released version 9 of its compositing flagship, Fusion, compositing artists around the world were eager to get their hands on it. The most anticipated feature was the certification for Apple ProRes on all three platforms. That means Fusion 9 Studio users are able to encode and save ProRes files. Another great feature is the planar tracking capability à la Mocha, along with the new 3D camera tracker that is exclusive to the Studio version. Finally, 3D tracking can be done in Fusion without the need of other software. Both the commercial and non-commercial versions have also received a new delta keyer. In addition to the delta keyer, there is now a pre-keyer known…

On the back of a sneak peek trailer that was released online showcasing the latest developments available in Houdini, SideFX was on hand in Toronto to launch the new release and give more of an overview of the latest features users can look forward to in version 16.5. SideFX also took the opportunity to reaffirm its strong commitment to providing solutions not only for effects TDs, but for tackling areas outside of its core VFX user base. This is demonstrated with the steady development of new toolsets for modelling, rigging, animation and general 3D pipeline work. “The SideFX R&D team has been packing a ton of new features and enhancements into Houdini and whether you’re using Houdini for film, TV, advertising, motion graphics, games or something else – there’s a…

HEATHER WRIGHT Executive producer and head of content partnerships at Aardman www.aardman.com What stories should we be telling each other about the NHS and our own health? How do we create a narrative that puts healthcare in a positive light for millions of people and opens our eyes to solutions and not just problems? Twelve years ago, Aardman took the idea of a bachelor and his dog and turned it into Wallace & Gromit – a story centring on the escapades of a cheese-loving inventor and his canine companion. As an animation producer at Aardman, I thought about Wallace & Gromit and the power of storytelling again when I was asked to prepare a talk for a recent King’s Fund event, ‘Ideas that Change Health’. We are all aware that…