Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 126 i 3D Artist

Whether you create interior or exterior architectural visualisations, or even if you’re from a different discipline and just interested in upskilling, it helps to keep yourself up to date with techniques! That’s why we’ve gathered top tips from a whole host of studios to help you build your best renders yet on page 24. With the release of Houdini 17, we’ve also teamed up with SideFX to get as many tricks as we can for the new version of Banshee! You’ll learn how to master new features like Vellum, as well as material-based fracturing, new UV tools for autoseams, improved terrains and white water solver and more on page 40. If you’re a beginner you can also make use of Houdini with our starter tutorial on page 60. It comes…

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01 Find the right composition Vignette marketing rendering is about selling an idea. In this case I want to sell the idea of comfort and intimacy in a restaurant so I first identify one of the feature seating areas, set my eye level as if I was sitting on one the chairs and then frame it with vegetation and bestow a glimpse of the bar in the background. 02 Set your camera and settings An important aspect when doing a vignette is to use the right focal length, which should be in the range of 70-200mm. For our restaurant scene, 90mm was used, while the camera was set to have a small aperture of f/14 and the depth of field option was enabled to have a nice blur in the…

“The director of Neanderthal: Meet Your Ancestors came to us and said ‘I need to see neanderthals doing all of this stuff and I don’t want it to look like a documentary’,” explains Tom Brass, creative director. “He had the faith to let us put together a complete visual pitch for it. We made the most realistic and emotive reconstruction of a neanderthal that has ever been seen.” Recounting the creative process he says, “We were given a scan of a real neanderthal skull, that then went to a forensic artist in Duncan of Jordanstone College up in Dundee and he did a full reconstruction of all of the musculature.” The team now had a scientifically accurate yet sterile neanderthal head, but they needed to inject some humanity. Brass continues,…

ANDRIY BILICHENKO vimeo.com/cgfaun 3D artist IAN BONIFACIC polymachine.com  Junior 3D artist at Polymachine LIAM HOYLE sidefx.com  MotionFX intern at SideFX SUNDEEP MUKALA sidefx.com  FX intern at SideFX JOHN MARIELLA sidefx.com  Senior production consultant SARA ABRIL RASCóN ESPINOZA sararascon.com  Technical artist at SideFX SEELAN VAMATHEVA sidefx.com  Senior software developer: games technology IGOR ZANIC vimeo.com/igorzanic FX artist RAJENDRA KHIRODKAR sidefx.com  FX intern at SideFX FIANNA WONG sidefx.com  Technical marketing lead at SideFX…

Instead of painting inside of Maya there is another option to paint your maps in an external software, such as Mari, and import these into Maya to use as your maps. This is particularly useful when you’re needing to use different paintbrushes to paint something specific for your hairstyle. You can do this by generating your Ptex map as mentioned in previous steps, then opening up your hypershade and viewing the file it creates and replacing the old Ptex with the new external map and clicking on the save icon to generate a new Ptex.…

‘Noise’ in 3D refers to a way of generating values using a mathematical algorithm. Rather than using, let’s say, a texture map along with UVs to apply values across the surface of the mesh, noise can generate these values and assign them to an attribute. Normally, you might use noise to help in texturing something… but in this case, we can assign this value to something besides the colour – aka the custom attribute that controls the black marble vs gold – and that’s how we can make it all work!…

“We’re the Guinness World Record holders for the most people motion captured in real-time,” says Brian Mitchell, “It was 19 hip hop dancers.” The attempt took place on 9 March 2015, at Audiomotion’s headquarters in Oxford, as two rival dance crews battled it out on the main stage. It was achieved with 36 F40 Vicon cameras, Blade software and Autodesk’s MotionBuilder. The dancers were organised by National Lottery-funded project, the Hip Hop Heritage.…

ALEX LANGLETZ alex-langletz.deAlex is a 3D artist and his amazing visualisation skills has landed him our cover art this month. He’s also given us his top arch viz tips alongside a whole host of other experts on page 24. 3DArtist username N/A SHAYLEEN HULBERT artstation.com/shayleenhulbert Character artist Shayleen divulges her top techniques for taking a character concept from 2D into 3D with plenty of production-ready tips. Read her tutorial on page 46. 3DArtist username N/A CRYSTAL BRETZ crystalmodelsthings.com Crystal is a modeller at Method Studios, and when we saw S W I R L Y 3D on Instagram we knew we had to get it in the mag! Find out how she created the character’s hair on page 54. 3DArtist username N/A TYLER BAY tylerbay3d.com Tyler…

01 Add noise to surfaces There’s no clearer sign that grass is CG than a perfectly flat lawn, so always add a noise modifier to your terrain to make sure there’s some gentle undulation. Add a high quality map to the ground too and don’t be afraid to let it show through the grass in places. A perfectly even density of grass is seldom seen in reality. 02 Create clumps of grass In order to cover large areas with grass, it’s inefficient to scatter hundreds of thousands of individual blades. Instead create 25-30cm radius circular patches using Forest Pack. You can get away with one patch, but several with different grass lengths and densities creates more realistic results. 03 Scatter the patches Nest the patches in another Forest Pack object…

“We mainly use Maya and Nuke across our VFX and animation work,” explains COO Luke Dodd, who is responsible for three key areas of Jellyfish’s business: talent, pipeline and production. His role entails spending vast amounts of time talking with artists and supporting their creativity. Dodd continues, “For modelling and texturing we use a combination of ZBrush and Mari with support from Photoshop. We then render using Arnold, Redshift and V-Ray.” Dodd stresses the importance of giving artists the latest software and providing them with the best technical to any given project, the result is a pipeline that’s constantly evolving. “We have also implemented Unreal Engine within our animation pipeline. Both Yeti and Houdini are utilised on FX work, whilst our motion graphics department is built on Photoshop, After Effects…

01 The main forms – Guide Advect I usually create basic forms using Guide Advect. Using various options for the advection operation and applying various geometries to the fourth input, you can very quickly create the basic shape of the hairstyle. I first used the advection operation Constrained Advection to properly direct all the little hairs along the surface of the body. 02 Mane proxy geometry Using modelling tools, I created proxy geometry for the mane. Houdini provides many tools for this (eg Topobuild, PolyExtrude, Boolean, Edit). To more easier manipulate the guides, I created individual proxy geometry. Then, I put several Guide Advects with Fill Collision Field and included Output Group of Affected Primitives. 03 Refinement and randomisation Now using the groups that I created in Guide Advect, I…

Bio Shayleen Hulbert is a freelance character artist specialising in stylised character modelling and sculpting, with extensive knowledge of current generation pipelines and methodologies for both console and PC. Software ZBrush, Maya 2017, 3D-Coat, Quixel Suite, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag Learn how to Block out your model in ZBrush Sculpt stylised hair Sculpt stylised cloth Apply depth and life to your textures Pose your character Present your model for a professional portfolio Concept The concept for Sakura is from the Nineties anime Cardcaptor Sakura. Growing up with the show as a child I couldn’t wait to recreate the look in 3D.…

The principled shader in Houdini is pretty convenient because it already contains fields that allow you to browse for the texture files right away. However, one thing you need to do is set the parameter you’re reading in to 1. For example, if I read a roughness map, the ‘roughness’ value on the shader will multiply against the texture map values, and on the shader, you’ll need this to be 1. This also provides a convenient way to multiply the texture map values if you need to.…

Cinema 4D offers great flexibility for experimentation, with layering noises. Experiment with different blending modes and opacities, layering different noises on top of each other and see how they interact together. A good tip is to hover your mouse over the Noise and use the scroll-wheel on your mouse to quickly flip through the different types of noises and see what they can do for your setup. Don’t go overboard with the subdivisions on the plane, you only need a rough visual of how the displacement is going to look once displaced in Octane.…

Jean-Marie Marbach’s video for L’oiseau qui danse by Canadian band Tennyson will be honoured with a Best In Show award for Siggraph Asia’s Computer Animation Program. The video was created entirely with particles and Trapcode Suite. Marbach says, “It literally feels like something I could only dream of, then wake up and think ‘damn, I dreamt I won Best In Show at SIGGRAPH Asia’. Hopefully I won’t wake up until the ceremony in Tokyo.”…

The partnership with Rokoko’s Motion Library will be hosted on Unity Technologies’ own Asset Store. A select amount of Audiomotion’s data will be available for developers to prototype and download, all within Unity’s real-time 3D development platform. New sets of data for the community are to be released over the coming months. “We hope this partnership will enable us to engage with a wide cross-section of the creative industries,” says Brian Mitchell. Rokoko will launch The Motion Library for developers on other platforms at motionlibrary.com.…

Unity’s multi-track sequencer called Timeline essentially allows a user to bring in and create animation clips and recorded animation. It’s here that you can create cinematic content, cutscenes, gameplay sequences, edit audio and create more complex effects. The ‘smart’ camera tool is called Cinemachine, which lets you set up and manipulate cameras inside Unity – essentially a way of framing shots and crafting a cinematic side to your project. Other tools inside Unity, such as the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), helped achieve Baymax’s emissive ‘night-light’ glow, while effects such as voxelisation were also crafted in-engine.…

Octane video guide & C4D files Video and accompanying files for the terrain tutorial 3 Premium CGAxis models A collection of models to use in your work 28 Textures from 3DTotal.com Download plenty of high-quality textures Log in to www.filesilo.co.uk/3DArtist Register to get instant access to this pack of must-have creative resources, how-to videos and tutorial assets  The home of great downloads – exclusive to your favourite magazines from Future! Secure and safe online access from anywhere Free access for every reader, print and digital Download only the files you want, when you want All your gifts, from all your issues, in one place Free for digital readers, too! Read on your tablet, download on your computer…

Banshee, the latest version of Houdini from SideFX, may just be the most powerful release of the physical simulation tool yet. New to Houdini 17 are a host of key features including a new Vellum multi-solver for creating fast cloth, as well as hair, soft bodies and grains. Material-based destruction tools also make it simpler to set up destruction and art direct too. Other new tools like Soft Constraints, Convex Decomposition will help prefracture materials including concrete, glass and wood while building constraint networks automatically to tie everything together. Another addition is that of new UV tools which automatically seam and provide accurate flattening, allowing for a fully procedural workflow. The Whitewater Solver is also now more organic, realistic and foamy with an accurate relationship to the source FLIP simulation.…

01 Plan out your HDA in advance Try to figure out how you’re going to use your windows/HDA and incorporate them/it in your workflow. Think about what you want to have as your entry data, so you can plan out your end data (end product). 02 It’s all about the scale This was one of the first problems I had, figuring out the scale from 3ds Max to Houdini and back. Changing units won’t help you here. The easiest thing to do is just use Transform node after the File node of your import geometry and scale everything by 0.01. After finishing your whole hierarchy, add another transform node at the end and scale everything by 100. This works perfectly. 03 Segment a problem When trying to solve complicated problems,…

Treating stylised characters as if they were paintings will help ground them visually. A trick to help sell the physicality and construction of your design is by adding contact ambient occlusion. This is used by adding a slightly different hue/darker shade where two separate components meet. This helps it look like two surfaces are touching rather than intersecting – small touches like these can really make a model look grounded. Adding further lighting information such as subtle highlights and tight shadows in cavities will push them out from the flat texture and further add depth to your piece.…

Bio Crystal Bretz is a model/ texture artist with just over three years of experience in the film industry and has worked on over 20 titles such as Marvel’s Black Panther and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald. Software ZBrush, Maya, XGen, Arnold Learn how to Create a realistic groom with XGen Shade dyed hair with Arnold Art direct your hairstyle for presentation Utilise XGen clump modifiers for layering Create XGen guides from proxy geo Concept The concept used for the hair in this tutorial is called S W I R L Y by Angel Ganev.…

“I would say my biggest takeaway from the challenge would be to really push yourself. Take it as a chance to learn something new, push yourself outside your comfort zone. Meet new people and get to know them, and learn from their work! Most of all remember to have fun, because that is what the challenges are for. Do something you enjoy, and it will show in the final piece!”Jared Chavez, 1st place winner, Game Character Art (Real-Time) ArtStation Community Challenges were created to help artists improve their skill and compete in the spirit of community-based learning and to celebrate artists’ achievements. To help artists push themselves, a talented team of professional artists are enlisted to work as Challenge Hosts providing regular feedback and sharing their production knowledge throughout each…

If you’ve ever heard folks talking about Houdini, you may have already run into these terms before. Besides being great for catchy rhymes, these terms also refer to contexts within Houdini. DOPs – Dynamic Operators – refer to the place in Houdini where you’ll have access to all the nodes that are responsible for building simulations. SOPs – Surface Operators – refer to the nodes you can find when working with geometry. Same thing with POPs – Particle Operators – and VOPs – Vex Operators.…

TEXTURING Utilising Substance Designer’s purely procedural texturing workflow and after several weeks of rigorous research and brain-bleeding analysis, this dead coral material came to life. The trickiest part about this texture is how the inner shapes are blended together with the outer outline, while keeping both consistent in detail. Reynante Martinez reynantemartinez.com A CG artist with passion for photography, composition, and lighting. Also an aspiring musician and a father to a lovely daughter. Software Substance Designer DeadCoralMaterialStudy , 2018…

CONCEPT I’ve always enjoyed adding mystery to nature, especially the ‘why is this here?’ question. I find that in general it really doesn’t take much. For this scene, the foliage was created using Megascans and SpeedTree 8 and I rendered the project in real-time in Unreal Engine 4. Alexander Dracott digitaldracott.com Alex is a real-time lighting and VFX artist and VFX lead on the real-time experience team at Oculus. He enjoys creating artistic content. Software Quixel Megascans, Unreal Engine 4, Photoshop, SpeedTree 8 ForestLights ,2018…

Presented by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Cospective received the award at the prestigious ceremony in Los Angeles on 24 October 2018. Other recipients at the awards ceremony include AVID and Lifetime Achievement winner Wendy Aylsworth. Bob Munroe, VFX Supervisor of science fiction series The Expanse says, “More so than in the past, directors, producers, VFX supervisors, and editors are spread out across different locations. From previs to post on The Expanse, cineSync proved to be invaluable collaboration technology given the new normal of today’s production workflow. I was thrilled to learn that the Television Academy is awarding an Engineering Emmy to cineSync. Remote video review has been key to expanding the visual effects industry as a whole.” Rory McGregor, CEO at Cospective adds, “We are thrilled to…

KeyShot 8 The latest update to the powerful 3D rendering software allows for real-time image adjustment. Users can also import their entire 3D model, no longer needing to cut it up beforehand. There are also improvements to liquids, which will no longer require separate surfaces. KeyShot 8 starts at $995 for the HD version, while KeyShot 8 Pro is $1,995. Visit buy.keyshot.com for more info. VizMove VR 2.0 VizMove is a scalable, certified solution for enabling large-scale, location-based or remote VR experiences. The latest update includes a new development engine and further support for third-party software or hardware. There is also added support for the latest versions of Unity and Unreal. VizMove 2.0 is available now at the website worldviz.com. Imverse LiveMaker Imverse has announced the public beta release of…

Job title Managing director Location Oxford, UK Website audiomotion.com Biography Brian has been with Audiomotion since day one and is now celebrating 21 years in the business. Amongst the projects he’s been most proud to work on is A Monster Calls, on which he got to collaborate with film legend Liam Neeson on a motion capture shoot. When not hard at work Brian enjoys a spot of golf and heading to the coast with his family. Portfolio highlights Twenty-first birthdays are a milestone, they mark a coming of age and a transition into adulthood. For Audiomotion it sets it out as the elder statesman of the motion and performance capture industry, and managing director Brian Mitchell has been with the Oxford-based…

Website unity.com Location USA Project Baymax Dreams Project description This new series of shorts based on Big Hero 6: The Series was made with the Unity game engine. Studio Unity Company bio Unity is behind the widely used real-time game engine now used in many areas spanning 2D, 3D, VR and AR experiences and virtual production. In recent times, the real-time aspects of the engine have been utilised to provide animation/ VFX houses with a new approach to production. Contributors • Simon J Smith, director A veteran of traditional CG animated features, director Simon J Smith helmed Bee Movie, Penguins Of Madagascar and Shrek 4D at PDI/DreamWorks. On those kinds of films, the animation and review process could be laborious, with changes often taking days or weeks. However,…

Job title President and CTO, at Animatrik Film Design Location Vancouver (main headquarters) and Los Angeles (secondary facilities) Website animatrik.com/services/facilities Biography Brett Ineson is CTO of Animatrik Film Design and president of the largest independent motion capture studio in North America. He will frequently head up shoots for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, as well as the most successful gaming franchises of the 21st century. Brett sits on the board of the Motion Capture Society and has worked in technology development with industry leaders Vicon, Lightstorm Entertainment and Autodesk. Portfolio highlights With a love for animation, cameras and technology since he was young, it could be said that the marriage of the two in the form of performance capture is absolutely…

Of the many films, TV and games in Animatrik’s portfolio, Ineson points out two that he feels the most affinity, “I still feel District 9 is my favourite, and it’s probably because that one was the first film we worked on. I didn’t have any employees at that time, so I contracted a couple of people to help me but I did most of the work by my own, so I’m quite proud of that one. The second one is probably Warcraft, that’s the biggest virtual production that I think has ever been done. It was really a big undertaking that I haven’t seen in any other film before, so to work on that was really exciting.”…

The indie scene, for both film and games, is booming. In historical terms, we see vastly more high-quality indie content. Yet, I believe that we have to do much better in supporting the independent 3D artist with newer, more affordable and universally available tools. We owe it the future of the 3D industry to give that support. And I don’t mean that in an esoteric, romanticised, way. It was no accident when Apple recently announced that, “[We] want all kinds of creatives to be able to create content [for AR]”. This statement lays bare that Apple, like many others, has come to recognise a profound truth: compelling content is vital in making the 3D industry fulfil its potential across film, gaming and XR apps. So to deliver on the promise…

MODELLING First, I started with a DynaMesh mesh, and the next step was to start the guidelines with Dam_Standard, making pieces separately. I then made a brush and added the tentacles and started to put up the divisions and added more cool details. I had to make sure every piece was good on this model because it was going to be printed in metal. Julio C B Macias juliocesarbenavidesmacias.artstation.com Julio is a 3D artist of collectibles with nearly two years in the 3D world, he lives in Mexico. Software ZBrush IronSpider , 2018…