Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 115 i 3D Artist

This year marks 100 years since women won the right to vote in the UK. Though we’ve come a long way since then, 2017 proved to be a momentous year for highlighting issues that some women may face across all industries – including ours. One of the responsibilities that we, as a magazine, have is to carry on the conversations with the aim to improve equality. There are so many ways to help, and Animated Women UK is just one organisation supporting women and promoting equal representation, so this issue we’ve brought them in to curate a special gallery. We’re celebrating women across a variety of artist roles, with expert tips so you can achieve amazing art yourselves. We’ve also harnessed the force to bring you some of the behind-the-scenes…

“In Maya I made several nHair systems based on the curves exported from ZBrush. Then I assigned a Paint Effects brush to those nHair systems and used the output curves to generate XGen hair. Later on I made about seven VRay Hair shaders for different types of hair strands.” Liudmila Kirdiashkina, Portrait of the Girl, 2017 Liudmila Kirdiashkina artstation.com/artist/liu_k Liudmila is a 3D artist focused on hard surface objects Software ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Mari, XGen, V-Ray, Marvelous Designer Work in progress… “ I’m the director of this test scene, working with Laurent Harduin, Jacob Norris, and Colin Thomas. The power of real-time rendering has come such a long way. This shot demonstrates the high-quality we are achieving internally when exploring content from an artist’s perspective” Yibing Jiang,…

LEARN YOUR CRAFT If you’re going to be a 3D artist, make sure you are a very good 3D artist. That quality bar is high and always moving, so practise, put the 10,000 hours in and create the best artwork you can. GET TO KNOW THE TECHNOLOGY If you are using a HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, it is vital that you really understand their strengths and weaknesses. Each one has its positives and negatives. PLAY TO THE STRENGTHS OF THE ENGINE Unreal is very different to Unity, which is very different to CryEngine. Really understand where you can push and where the limitations are. STRETCH YOUR KNOWLEDGE OUTSIDE YOUR ROLE Learn what others in the company do. If you can understand how the whole company works together, you will…

There is no shortage of animation styles, from detailed sketches, simple line drawings, 3D animation or long-exposure lighting techniques. Here filmmakers explain what draws them to their method of choice. Black-and-white illustrations populate the world conceived by Sol Friedman, such as with his short An Imagined Conversation: Kanye West & Stephen Hawking. “It’s a style that I’ve been playing with in previous projects,“ he explains. “It’s the immediacy of just wanting to get going and also in terms of how it connects to the drawings. I love the drawings and once you add colour they change a lot. Not always in a bad way but often it becomes more of a composition, while using just black and white allows the drawings to stay drawings.“ As for Threads, a simplistic approach…

While The Force Awakens concludes with the space battle over D’Qar, it’s the confrontation between the First Order and the Resistance that is used to welcome fans back into Episode VIII. “The Resistance ships are more worn down and grungier than the First Order. But there are also a couple of different aesthetics to the creation of those ships depending on what species that they come from,“ explains ILM London VFX supervisor, Mike Mulholland. “Every single film is a couple of years apart so we have to ingest the assets from the previous film, bring them up to date with the latest technology in terms of shaders, pipeline and rigging and then rerelease them. Poe’s [Oscar Isaac’s] X-wing is the same design as the previous film, apart from the booster…

Boris FX has donated 300 licences for its Continuum, Sapphire, and Mocha plugins to NFTS students. Boris Yamnitsky, Boris FX CEO explains: “We chose the National Film and Television School as our European film school partner because they focus on postgraduate education and on producing high-level career-ready graduates, which the VFX industry is crying out for. The partnership is part of our ongoing education programme and desire to support the next generation of talent and the industry as a whole by ensuring there are enough highly trained professionals to fill the many jobs available.“…

LIUDMILA KIRDIASHKINA artstation.com/liu_k Amazing artists like Liudmila show off their skills in a special gallery, curated by Animated Women UK. Learn top tips on textures, hair, modelling, posing and more from page 12. 3DArtist username Liu K JAHIRUL AMIN jahirulamin.com Double Negative VFX trainer Jahirul has returned to 3D Artist this issue with some unmissable expert advice on UV unwrapping a vehicle in Maya. Read it on page 64. 3DArtist username aminjahirul RAINER DUDA rd-innovations.de Rainer gives Maxon’s new release: Cinema 4D R19 a spin this month to look at the improved 3D tracking, new VR features and much more. Read his verdict on page 84. 3DArtist username N/A DANIEL D’AVILA davilastudio.com Daniel owns his own illustration studio in Sao Paolo, Brazil and this issue he takes us through the…

The work of artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron or Käthe Kollwitz stands out for me because it is so different to that of their male contemporaries. Despite working at times controlled by the patriarchy, these women did not try to compete by expressing themselves as men did, but instead embraced their female point of view. With that came a warmth we all recognise from our mothers and grandmothers – something that could be said to be uniquely female. We have come far in the decades since, as more and more female artists come to the fore, but still have a long way to travel before the perspectives of all genders are considered of equal value. Diversity is only achieved if the world we represent is as varied as the…

“We’re a blend of a creative digital agency and a games studio,“ explains Rogers of the type of studio that REWIND is and why more artists from games are joining the company. “We’re absolutely attracting top talent from the games industry, because we are so experimental, we offer diversity of projects and because we are defining new pipelines. It’s a great place to come and play, to be challenged, and define the future of immersive experiences!“ But REWIND isn’t just made up of talent from the games sector; “While many of our developers are coming from the games industry our directors and creatives are coming from films and commercials. It’s a bit of a hybrid.“…

Similar and different tools assist filmmakers to realise their creative vision even with contrasting animation styles, with prominent software programs being Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Maya, Harmony, Dragonframe and TVPaint Animation. “The first step in making the film was to design the set, which was based on a collage made up of snippets of photographs,“ explains Dominic Étienne Simard when discussing his short, Charles. “For example, I took a picture of the dresser in my room, which had belonged to my grandfather, so that it could become Charles’ dresser. Then I used Photoshop to put the picture together with pictures of a bed, a mobile, a chair and a window to create the room. That was done for each room. After that, it was time to start working on the…

Working closely with filmmaker Rian Johnston and production designer Rick Heinrichs, was ILM supervising art director Kevin Jenkins. “He works for me in ILM London but spends most of his time at Pinewood,“ notes production VFX supervisor Ben Morris. “Kevin comes from a visual effects background and knows how to put a shot together in visual effects.“ Small 3D models were printed as a way to test concepts for spaceships. “I would work closely with him, Rian and Rick to talk through any new designs and features such as the Resistance bomber and First Order Dreadnaught,“ explains Morris. However, designing in 3D provides quicker answers and enables ideas to be accurately represented. “We were able to model with all of the lenses that the DP Steve Yedlin proposed using, so…

DANIEL D’AVILA Fresh Salmon, 2017 Software Modo, Substance Painter, ZBrush and After Effects Learn how to • Plan to create a complex scene • Block basic shapes • Optimise mesh for sculpting • Prepare your mesh for Substance Painter • Export FBX files to Substance Painter • Bake maps in Substance Painter • Gather useful references • Export textures to Modo • Import and adjust textures in Modo • Lighting set-up tips Concept The idea of modelling a salmon came after seeing a very unique 2D drawing from the Italian artist, Vanni Vaps. This was an excellent opportunity to practise Substance Painter and include the software in my pipeline, since the scene is bursting with texture details and multiple shaders. The best way to quickly learn something is simply to…

SketchUp Free delivers the core of SketchUp’s 3D modelling tools online through a web browser. Artists can host models online, send invites to clients and colleagues for commenting, editing and feedback. SketchUp Free puts the future of desktop-based SketchUp Make in doubt as Trimble has announced no further development of Make is planned. Make will continue to be available to download in its current build.…

In 2017, Naughty Dog’s Andrew Maximov gave a fantastic talk at GDC regarding what videogame art production will most likely look like ten years from now. He prefaced the talk by referencing a story by David Foster Wallace, regarding two fish swimming and how one of them doesn’t know he is in water, or indeed what water is. It’s a great talk discussing the importance of not getting used to our environment and continually analysing it critically. It’s something I have tried to pass on to my students at Escape Studios, to try to be critical and analyse one’s artistic choices and to continually adapt your approaches and skill sets. As software becomes ever more sophisticated and the level of art needs to be of a higher quality, automation of…

“He jumps around a lot, he moves very fast, and he stands in a very specific way… I filmed a lot of my own video reference just to kind of act things out” Chris Goodall, Lead animator Company Ninja Theory Location UK Website ninjatheory.com Biography Having built up a reputation for great storytelling, finely-tuned combat and a unique art style, Ninja Theory has now become one of the more popular UK game developers, especially after the release of its cult hit Enslaved, a post-apocalyptic retelling of the classic Chinese tale, Journey To The West. Contributor • Chris Goodall Lead animator Despite the self-imposed limits that Ninja Theory thrust upon itself with Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice in trying to create a high-end title with the budget of an indie studio, the most…

01 Never by Vinicius Hernandes 3DA username poker82 Vinicius Hernandes says: “A simple image with a minimalist approach, trying to convey a concept through colour and composition. Everything done in Blender and Cycles.“ We say: A lovely scene from Vinicius here, we especially enjoy the almost stylised cactus plant – we can imagine an interesting story about the bubbles, like did a naughty child blow them on the cactus? 02 Kaiju by Placido Obama Mexia 3DA username PlacyObama Placido Obama Mexia says: “I designed this character for a ‘kaiju competition’. My main inspiration was a gorilla’s body and the Leatherback kaiju from the movie Pacific Rim. I was trying to catch the silhouette of my creature with ZSphere in ZBrush first, then I moved on to the anatomy,…

Animation did not go unrecognised at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, with the adaption of The Breadwinner having a world premiere and The Burden winning the Short Cuts Award for Best International Short Film; they were accompanied by a strong contingent that included the feature The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales and shorts Airport, Catastrophe, An Imagined Conversation: Kanye West & Stephen Hawking, Charles, The Tesla World Light, Threads, and Wicked Girl. Along with the filmmakers coming from countries ranging from Canada, France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Turkey and the Netherlands, was the desire to explore the medium in ways that go beyond simply entertaining children but also makes a commentary about contemporary life in a grown-up manner. Deviating from the source material of The Breadwinner author Deborah…

JAHIRUL AMIN jahirulamin.com Bio Jahirul is a VFX trainer at Double Negative. The training encompasses all stages of the 3D pipeline from data acquisition to shot lighting. He also teaches and mentors externally for higher and further education centres In this tutorial, we’ll be UV unwrapping a classic Sunbeam Rapier and preparing the asset for texturing and look development. UVing may not seem like the most glamorous of tasks, but it is the key to achieving a well-textured asset. Therefore, we’ll want to make sure it is done to the highest standard; cutting corners at this stage will only result in pain and trouble later. For this exercise, we’ll be sticking to the UV tools in Maya 2018, which have developed over the past couple of Maya releases.…

CONCEPT This piece was created for the Evermotion ‘Secret Garden’ Challenge. While looking for inspiration, I came across a beautiful set of photographs on Instagram that showcased Termas Geometricas, a Japanese inspired hot spring in Chile. I had never seen anything quite like it, so trying to create my own depiction of it was extremely rewarding. Gregory Rogers GregRogers3D.com  Greg leads the 3D visualisation department at WeWork, creating photoreal architectural renderings Software 3ds Max, ZBrush, Corona, Photoshop TermasGeometricas 2016/17…

To help minimise ghosting and make the work of stitching faster, Cara’s new GlobalWarp Node includes extra controls for lining up features in overlapping areas and uses constraints to reduce warps. Also, the redesigned Tracker supports automatically tracking a 360-degree stitch for stabilisation and creating a 360-degree match-move camera to assist in 3D corrections and CG insertion. For stereo, a suite of new tools adapted from the Ocula toolset deal with correction and clean-up. The suite updates the Disparity Generator Node, Disparity To Depth Nodes and adds a Stereo Colour Matcher. Craig Rodgerson, CEO of Foundry had this to say about the plugin: “To fully realise the potential of VR, we need to enable content creators to build experiences that are more immersive than anything before. The first iteration of…

Substance Painter 2017.4 In the latest Substance Painter update, Allegorithmic debuts Layer Instancing, enabling artists to share content across multiple texture sets that can be combined into a single unified stack to reduce time spent on look dev. The Live Link plugin has been overhauled to now support both Unity and Unreal Engine. Anima 3 Stand-alone character animation application, Anima 3, introduces a new Unreal Engine plugin for real-time integration of realistic 3D Human assets with refined UI featuring new drawing tools, multi-scene loader for working on multiple scenes at once, 3D viewport shader and performance improvements. Anyone who purchased in the last year gets a free update. V-Ray 3.6 for SketchUp Chaos Group’s V-Ray 3.6 for SketchUp rendering plugin features GPU/CPU Hybrid rendering for speed improvement and introduces Viewport…

RENDERING One of the goals of this project was to really convey the character’s personality in the final render. I used Marmoset Toolbag 3 because it offers a quick and flexible way of creating convincing renders. I learnt a lot about the importance of presentation as the lighting and props play a pivotal role in communicating the personality of the character. Kat Unsworth artstation.com/katunsworth Kat is a professional 3D character artist working at Automaton Games in Cambridge, UK Software 3ds Max, ZBrush, 3D-Coat, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag 3 KaelyatheBattlemage ,2017…

MODELLING I found real photos of this car first. Then I started to create it from the wings, and step by step I created a car. I have a library of car parts (wheels, engines and more) so I just connected the body with these parts. Anybody can create a library of details, and not only details but also objects and materials; it can help you to create your art faster. Vadim Ignatiev artstation.com/jamesobrien Vadim is 18 years old. He is a 3D artist mostly using Blender and GIMP with much love for Ireland and the streets of NYC Software Blender, GIMP FordPickup1940Dragster , 2017…