Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 119 i 3D Artist

This issue, we’ve compiled an incredible 28 pages of game art to help you level up your skills. From artists like Danny Sweeney, character artist at Creative Assembly, to Matthias Develtere, a 3D artist at MachineGames, you can expect to hear triple-A techniques and learn step by step how they achieve their stunning assets. You can also hear from Mak Malovic from Bluepoint Games, who are the masters of the remaster. Malovic talks about reworking the beloved classic Shadow of the Colossus from page 36, or learn 35 tips to up your real-time game on page 44. Jody Sargent also gives us her top advice on creating a beautiful underwater scene in UE4 on page 72. As the next Jurassic World hits the big screen, we’ve ventured back into Jurassic…

STORYBOARD In the scene, the T. rex is able to break through the non-electrified fence where Jeeps carrying the characters have stalled. This storyboard was one of many created to flesh out the paddock attack sequence and work out which shots could be achieved with animatronic dinosaurs or CG imagery. DINOSAUR INPUT DEVICE Dutra operates the DID for the Jeep attack shots. Sensors attached to the DID armature fed back to a computer model of the T. rex and enabled stop-motion animators, who at that point had not had significant training in computer animation, to contribute their expertise to the film. ANIMATICS Having already invested significant research into dinosaur behaviour, Tippett Studio produced stop-motion animatics for key scenes, including the paddock attack. Here, senior animator Randal M Dutra animates a…

Visual effects are in a strange position. They are valued for their abilities to enhance a film’s vision but they are also criticised when used. Despite the talent of the studios working hard to implement something that is basically undetectable, there’s still an underlying stigma. “It’s really a problem with everything that we’re fighting for,“ says Gellinger. “There is something like two-thirds of all the artists involved in a film who aren’t in the credits. I mean, film directors are really promoting something now when they’ve built it for real instead of doing it in visual effects because it became something special.“ The problem is as much the directors and producers, who are constantly disparaging the use of VFX despite their regular and common use. “Christopher Nolan, for example, claims…

Claudiu Tanasie has been in love with drawing for as long as he can remember but it was only when he got his hands on a copy of 3ds Max in college that his passion for 3D art was ignited. It was pure chance that landed him his first freelance role for a studio in Hungary. “It was the first time I thought I could do this for a living without starving,“ he explains. Since then, Tanasie has worked on the likes of Call of Duty and The Witcher for AMC Pixel Factory before forging a successful freelance career that has seen him contribute to Dishonored 2, Doom and Lawbreakers. Knowing which software to employ for specific challenges is crucial to Tanasie’s work – “for example, Marvelous Designer for an…

“One of the challenges is bringing them up to current-day standards but keeping the original mood and feeling,“ Mak Malovic says about remastering beloved videogames. Malovic has been in the industry for seven years, the last four of which he’s spent as an environment artist at independent videogame developer Bluepoint Games in Austin, Texas. The studio has now garnered a reputation for delivering high-quality updates of much beloved games, even being dubbed ‘masters of the remaster’. During this time, Malovic has worked on upgrades of Gravity Rush and the Uncharted series but he admits that remaking the much beloved Shadow of the Colossus was the biggest challenge yet. “Since Shadow has such a large and dedicated fanbase, we knew that any changes we made would be highly scrutinised,“ adds Malovic.…

This tutorial concentrates on the development of the Dark Elf faction from Total War: Warhammer II – in particular, the Female Dreadlord unit. When establishing a new race for Total War: Warhammer, we need to build a strong visual foundation from which the artists can reference before full development can begin. The introduction to this guide will look at the preparation that is required before we can start developing the bulk of our character art, as well as the techniques we use to help ensure that each character within a faction looks consistent and of a high quality. Following this, we will talk in depth about the methods we used to create functional hard-surface armour while re-creating the Dark Elf visual style in 3D, taking weight, proportion and gestures into…

Zoom out It never hurts to zoom out once in a while – you can be so focused on a small piece that you forget the big picture. We don’t want to spend hours and hours on something that will never be noticeable. Plus, it never hurts to double-check the silhouette of shapes from a distance. Sometimes I over-detail things a bit but once I zoom out, I see that most of them just became noise factors. Don’t forget that these assets are for games – most people won’t even spend time looking at your singular asset. Avoid tunnel vision When you work on something for a long time, you start missing mistakes. Try to make a test render twice a week and paint over your model, just with arrows…

Sol Rogers, founder and CEO of immersive content studio REWIND, has been appointed chair of BAFTA’s new Immersive Entertainment Advisory Group, which will advise BAFTA on the future of immersive entertainment. The group will take over the work that has already been done by last year’s Virtual Reality Advisory Group and will deliver its recommendations back to BAFTA within the next 12 months. Each of the group’s 15 members represents the technological or creative sector in some way and brings a high level of expertise to the table. Sol Rogers explains, “The focus will be on educating and supporting BAFTA and its members on all things immersive. While the core team will be smaller than before, there will be plenty of opportunities for those interested and involved currently in BAFTA…

Unreal Engine 4.19 enables users to step inside the creative process, with tools becoming almost transparent so that more time can be spent on creating. A new Live Link plugin allows artists and creators to see what the finished product will look like every step of the way. Further improvements to Sequencer will give them more control over scenes in real-time and Animation tools now have pinnable commands. Meanwhile, a new Dynamic Resolution feature adjusts the resolution as needed so users can achieve their desired frame rates and make their worlds run faster than ever before. There have been many updates in the areas of workflow and usability, as well as 128 changes submitted by the community of Unreal Engine developers on GitHub. To learn more, visit unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-19-released.…

Company MPC Location UK Website moving-picture.com Project description MPC worked on Volkswagen’s ‘Born Confident’ campaign, with a 60-second hero spot directed by Nick Gordon at Somesuch and VFX by MPC. The ad opens with the birth of a young ram, delivered by a shepherd and his son on a dark and rainy evening. This self-assured little chap exudes confidence from day one, boldly stepping into the world to wreak playful havoc; leading his herd of sheep, standing up to a sheep dog, the farmer and an intimidating bull. But when the ram encounters the new Volkswagen T-Roc, he realises that he has finally met his match. Biography MPC is a multi-award-winning creative studio. As world leaders in visual storytelling for over two decades, with VFX studios in nine cities…

The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 opener sees the Abilisk release a good quantity of rainbow-like alien projectile vomit, otherwise known as ‘matter waves’, as it battles our heroes. “It was supposed to be something that’s very pretty and very dangerous at the same time,“ says Richter. “So the official brief was, ‘Make it like My Little Pony but terrifying.’“ “What it essentially consists of is a big rainbow cloud, which is a filament solve from Houdini that has been volume-ised and we added some colours to it, and then some spew-y confetti-esque stuff that flies about and when that touches the floor, it explodes,“ he explains.…

CHALLENGE YOURSELF Chappie, from the film of the same name, is the coolest CGI character that I’ve ever seen on the big screen and one day I decided to challenge myself to model a bust of him. The main goals were to make it very much like the original character and to keep the topology as clear as possible as the same time. John Olofinskiy 3dartist.com.au John is a student at CG Spectrum College of Art & Animation in Australia. His main focus area is hard surface modelling for cinematics Software Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Redshift ChappieBustFanArt , 2018…

DANNY SWEENEY artstation.com/DannSw  Danny Sweeney is a character artist at Creative Assembly, and he’s kindly gone through the triple-A techniques it takes to create a Total War: Warhammer II character on page 50. 3DArtist username DannSw MATTHIAS DEVELTERE matthiasdeveltere.com  Matthias is a 3D artist at MachineGames and was responsible for almost all the vehicles in Wolfenstein II. Who better to walk us through a high-poly asset on page 58. 3DArtist username DevMatt GREG BARTA artstation.com/scivfx  Greg turns his attention to lighting this issue, after his successful journeys in scientific weather phenomena. He gives us top tips to upgrade your lighting on page 66. 3DArtist username N/A ADAM BARNES adambarnes.info Adam took a trip to Germany’s this month to speak to one of Berlin’s biggest vendors, Rise FX. Find out about the…

Game art is an attractive prospect for many 3D artists as it provides them with the opportunity to help realise the visual elements that can make a video game iconic. It’s an endlessly diverse field, encompassing absolutely everything from vehicles to vegetation. However, one thing that remains consistent among them all is that every individual asset is the work of dedicated artists, constantly improving their craft. Here, five such artists shine a light on their contributions to the art of video games, from remastering beloved classics to creating memorable boss characters. They explain their go-to software, break down their workflows and tell us how they went from playing video games to making them. From hard surface modelling to texture baking, environments and weaponry, this team of industry professionals has got…

I use colour masks a lot in my work. They help to make different variations on plaster or other materials very easily and directly in the editor. I’ve used material blending a lot. It’s a really cool feature of Unreal Engine that helps to avoid tiling and bring more variety to surfaces. It works especially well on large areas like this level. I used a tool called World Machine to create the mountains in the background. It generates a height map, which I use to make landscapes inside of Unreal. For this level I have built an asset library of around 130 pieces including static meshes, decals and organic elements such as rocks. Can you tell us a little about how and why you started Artcore Studios, your game art…

INSPIRATION I spend hours on the road and I wanted to convey this and the feelings that come with it in an illustration. This idea came to me during one of my long journeys. I vividly remember the reluctant moment of leaving the warm Lviv LAZ-695 bus on a cold winter morning. I created the environment and it echoes distant places in the post-Soviet countries. Bohdan Kryvetskyy behance.net/bohdan_kryvetskyy Bohdan became familiar with 3D graphics as a teenager and works as a professional artist in architecture and product visualisation Software 3ds Max, Corona Renderer, Photoshop 06:00am , 2018…

Foundry, one of the leaders in creative software development, has announced that Google Cloud Platform is the cloud service provider for Athera. Known in beta as ‘Project Elara’, Athera is the cloud-based technology that is expected to transform visual effects workflows. Craig Rodgerson, chief executive officer at Foundry, adds, “The partnership with Google has enabled us to build an industry-leading tool in cloud technology. Google Cloud’s capabilities provide Foundry with the infrastructure that we need to scale up Athera and realise our goal of providing an end-to-end cloud services solution for VFX studios all around the world.“ Being hosted on Google Cloud Platform means that Athera will be able to incorporate Google’s unrivalled GPU, networking and storage capabilities. Athera itself centralises storage, creative tools and pipelines in one location, giving…

Flowbox v1.6 Flowbox’s update features F-Splines curves, allowing maximum flexibility. There is also the Hard Edge Checker to make motion blur easier and a Pause Viewer for real-time playback when using multiple viewers. Users can now crop their 4K plate to save memory and keep the best performance. Flowbox is $37 a month for a node-locked licence or $43 for a floating license. CRYENGINE 5.5 Over 260 enhancements and fixes come with this latest version. SVOGI is now available on consoles, enabling developers to cache SVOGI on the disk and calculate GI offline. There are also vast improvements to the terrain system. Elsewhere, a new level file format future-proofs collaborative editing and usage of version control systems. CRYENGINE is free to use. Photostory Premium VR The latest entry into the…

“The R&D depends on the task. With every project, we review our technology and we are constantly in contact with our software team. So we’re not saying that the technology we had a year ago, that’s as good as it gets. We can always take it further. If you look at John Lewis’ ‘Buster the Boxer’ advert and the Samsung ‘Ostrich’ that came right after, you can see that we always try to take a project further.“…

Rise FX has been located in the same complex for the entirety of its decade-long life, growing and expanding but never moving. “We’ve been lucky with our landlord,“ says Gellinger, “I think he’s interested in seeing what we produce.“ But even the building itself has had to change with the company, since Marvel’s regular involvement with the studio facilitated necessary alterations for greater privacy. “We actually had some Marvel [Studios] members work with us here in the studio, and that required us to change the open space, to build extra rooms.“ But it isn’t only the building itself that has grown with Rise. As anyone who has ever lived in one of the large capitals of the world will attest, ten years can change a lot about an area. Rise’s…

INSPIRATION AND REFERENCE Once you’ve spent time learning to model and render, it’s useful to gain an understanding of real-life mechanics. This helps to keep your own designs grounded in reality. To do this, I find myself looking at all kinds of references – for example, commercial vehicle designs or mecha toys. It’s important to not limit yourself to your own field. COMPETITIONS I feel that I do my best work under a deadline and with restrictions. Art competitions are a great way of pushing myself to work quickly while creating a design that fits someone else’s brief. At the moment, the ArtStation challenges are a great place for this. DETAIL RATIO With mechanical design, it’s important to follow a 70/30 rule with any small detail work. I find that…

“Before getting into the industry, I used to spend a lot of time experimenting with 3D modelling in a variety of mod tools for different games. From there, it just seemed natural to progress towards developing games,“ says Ethan Hiley of his path into the games industry. He began his career as an environment artist but a fascination with hard-surface modelling and building digital weapon models in his spare time eventually led to a change in direction. As Hiley shifted his focus towards props, vehicles and then weapons, he found himself overseeing the weapon art for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered. He continues, “Subsequently the opportunity presented itself to join the awesome team at Treyarch, and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.“ Hiley describes working on the…

Real-time rendering technology has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years and are now incredibly powerful tools are at our fingertips. We can achieve remarkable results using software that’s available for free – neither Unreal Engine 4 or CryEngine charge you to use them, and you just pay five per cent of your revenue when you publish. Unity is also free for personal use. If you haven’t done much real-time work yet, now may be the perfect moment to start! Over the following pages, we have tips and tricks from some of the top artists working today that will help you create incredible characters and environments in real-time. Our writers have discovered these shortcuts from many hours of trial and error, and now you can reap the rewards. For…

The idea behind this tutorial is to give you an insight into how to make your models in an easy and quick way. We will go over how to convert a standard motorbike idea into a 3D design that can work for animation purposes and function in both cinematic and game environments. This tutorial also comes with some extra modelling tips and tricks to make your life easier and to help you work in a nondestructive way. We will be using 3ds Max but you could use any 3D software package. It’s also important to note that this tutorial isn’t specifically centred around the Wolfenstein universe – I have tried to keep it as broad as possible so that you can apply these tips and tricks on your own work.…

“A welcome move that is certain to benefit content creators who use multi-threaded software applications” Compared with some of the beasts that have arrived at the 3D Artist towers, the £2,500 price tag of the Chillblast Fusion Render OC Lite P4000 Professional 3D Editing Workstation is relatively modest for a 3D system, but it’s still enough to cover a hardware configuration that will deliver blistering performance. It has an Nvidia Quadro P4000 graphics card with 8GB of graphics memory, 32GB of DDR4 memory, a Corsair H100i all-in-one water-cooling setup and an Intel Core i7-8700K processor, part of the company’s most recent Coffee Lake design, otherwise known as its ‘eighth generation’. For over a decade, Intel’s flagship mainstream Core i7 processor has never offered more than four cores, with the pricey…

Isotropix has released Clarisse 3.6 SP1, a new update that introduces the NVIDIA OptiX AI denoiser. Sébastien Guichou, Isotropix’s CTO and cofounder, says, “Integrating NVIDIA OptiX AI-driven denoiser technology in Clarisse was a no-brainer. It allows Clarisse’s renderer to converge faster to the final result. This is simply ideal for artists: they can now even make more creative decisions faster!” Artists can also enjoy some improvements to interactive feedback as well as the addition of a special command line tool that is designed to solve the issue of denoising renders on render-farms that may not be entirely equipped with NVIDIA GPUs.…

How much time do we spend on our mobile phones? The answer is, unsurprisingly, rather a lot. According to ComScore, we spend almost three hours scrolling through some 178 metres of content every day. That’s about 86 hours (or a five-kilometre fun run of scrolling) every month. Our daily feeds are bursting to the seams with engaging videos, flashy banners, colourful animations and more, all vying for our attention in an increasingly crowded online environment. Indeed, even a single, attention-grabbing Instagram post can make a larger impact today than a $500,000 television advert, so it’s no wonder brands continue to flock to the digital world to speak to their audiences. A diverse range of CGI, cinemagraphs, stop motion and simulation techniques are being sorted out to make mobile content stand…

Job title FX lead Location London, UK Website Framestore.com Biography Johannes Richter has had a varied and illustrous career in the VFX industry, with over ten years’ experience in FX. As FX lead at Framestore, his recent credits boast an array of VFX heavy Hollywood productions, including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Poltergeist, Everest, Dracula Untold and Robocop. Portfolio highlights • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, 2017 • King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, 2017 • Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2015 • The Martian, 2015 • Poltergeist, 2015 • Everest, 2015 • Dracula Untold, 2014 • Robocop, 2014 • Gravity, 2013 “The clients obviously want something fresh and new, but it also needs to be something comprehensible for the audience and not too convoluted”Johannes Richter, FX…