Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 130 i 3D Artist

For our ten-year anniversary issue, we’ve collected one hundred expert tips and tricks that are guaranteed to help improve your CG skills and make your work stand out from the crowd. Whatever CG you’re into, make sure you check out the practical techniques that industry veterans, such as DNEG’s Andrew Gordon, anatomy guru Ryan Kingslien, and Anthem artist, Patrik Karlsson have shared with us over on page 24. You can also learn from the ‘Master Builders’ as we go behind the scenes of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. Find out how Animal Logic dealt with the unique challenges of creating this animated feature, CG brick by CG brick; now with added glitter! Plus, you’ll find the usual mix of practical tutorials starting on page 58. Here you’ll discover…

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LIUDMILA KIRDIASHKINA Freelance 3D artist artstation.com/liu_k NON-DESTRUCTIVE GEOMETRY A Lattice deformer enables you to smoothly deform a high-density mesh without having to adjust each vertex manually. You can also use Soft Selection with a high radius and Move/Rotate/ Scale tools to transform a specific part of the mesh. NURBS MODELLING When making curved hard-surface objects, it is sometimes better to use NURBS modelling rather than polygon modelling, as it could be easier to modify geometry with the help of curves and CV points. You can convert NURBS to polygons afterwards. STEP-BY-STEP MODELLING PROCESS Start modelling by blocking out simple primitive shapes. Try not to jump into too many details at the beginning. It is better to refine your geometry gradually, keeping all the elements at roughly the same…

OLIVIER BUCHERON Co-founder and master of creation at Bisous Production bisous-production.com PATH TRACING Use Octane’s Path Tracing mode, which enables you to have a physical GI. With physical rendering engines, it is particularly important to work well with textures since materials reflect light according to their physical properties. TEST, TEST AND TEST The way you’re going to light up your 3D scene depends a lot on the mood and feeling you want to create. Once you’ve worked out the ambience you would like and lit it appropriately, you have to test, test and test again to find the right settings to match your idea. VISUAL HOOKS Find some small visual details, such as luminous materials – on the character in particular – and use light to emphasise them…

Suji bachi kabuto, 2019 Bio French environment artist, Vincent, started working in the games industry in 2010 and is now a texture environment artist at Ubisoft Québec, in Canada. Software Substance Designer, 3ds Max, Marmoset Toolbag 3 Learn how to • Create atlas materials • Sculpt volumes in Substance Designer • Generate HD models with displacement Concept The idea behind this project was to create an iconic and challenging art piece, a Japanese helmet, or kabuto. I wanted to practise volume creation in Substance Designer, using tessellation to create a high-resolution model with atlas materials.…

FMX has announced a host of industry stalwarts for its 2019 edition, which will return to Stuttgart, Germany from 30 April to 3 May. The confirmed speakers at the conference include Jan Pinkava, creative director of Google Spotlight Stories, Shelley Page of DreamWorks Animation, and Rob Bredow, head of Industrial Light & Magic. Pinkava will give a keynote in line with this year’s theme of ‘Bridging the Gap’, discussing his work at the interface between art and technology. After working on A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Ratatouille for Pixar, Pinkava is now at Google Spotlight Stories, exploring immersive and interactive storytelling across mobile and VR. Having previously earned a PhD in Theoretical Robotics and an Oscar for his work on Pixar’s short film Geri’s Game, he…

‘The quickening’ shows a journey through Aquaman’s mind’s eye. “Effects artist Thomas Cant whipped up the fibres of the iris and the volumetric clouds we traverse through in a matter of days,” says Cunningham. “Over a few weeks, Thomas and talented generalist Chris Herrick pulled all of the CG elements into place. Chris look-developed all of the creatures, animated the camera and laid out the shot. The two of them made sure their work coalesced so we had perfect light integration between emissive threads, volumes and creatures. It was a mammoth task, and all of the CG was owned by those two.”…

MODELLING When working on a personal piece in ZBrush, I prefer to start from a DynaMesh sphere instead of using a ready-made base mesh. Apart from being good anatomy practice, it helps me to push the shapes to the extreme and play with the proportions without any boundaries. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate some parts of your character, but remember to maintain a good balance between large, medium and small shapes. Yulia Sokolova artstation.com/yuzach Yulia’s a Russian freelance artist and tutorial instructor based in Spain. Software ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Marmoset Samurai , 2019…

IAN FAILES vfxblog.com VFX journalist and regular 3D Artist contributor, Ian, talks to the Animal Logic team about how they brought the Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to the big screen. Turn to page 50. 3DArtist username N/A EMILIANO COLANTONI artstation.com/emiliano_colantoni Italian 3D artist and concept designer, Emiliano, reveals how to use Blender’s new real-time renderer, Eevee, to create a short animated feature, using his own Spectre to demonstrate on page 58. 3DArtist username N/A VINCENT DéROZIER artstation.com/vincentderozier French artist, Vincent, has worked in the games industry since 2010 and is now a texture environment artist at Ubisoft Québec, in Canada. He shows how to create hi-res props on page 66. 3DArtist username N/A ARTEM GANSIOR artstation.com/gansior Artem works as a character artist at Blur Studio creating characters and…

PATRIC VERSTRAETE Creator of high-end 3D visualisation at Nanopixel www.vizcon.be RULE OF THIRDS The ‘rule of thirds’ is one of the first things that photographers learn, so this could help you to create a balanced and interesting image. The rule of thirds identifies important parts of the image that you should consider as the key story elements in your frame. TEXTURING AND SHADING Shading is the most important step in creating something believable. It’s what determines how your surfaces appear. It shows your clients how soft, reflective or flexible it might be. All of your materials should have some level of reflection and have maps assigned to their glossiness and reflection slots. DEPTH OF FIELD Depth of field or blurred background is one of the easiest ways to…

TOOLS: “The tools themselves to place the textures are not anything out of industry norms,” says Rix. “It’s just that we’re fastidious from a creative point of view about layering texture after texture after texture to create all the warpage, the chipped edges, scratches, fingerprints and all those kinds of things. It’s just layered up in our shader. We have proprietary shader technology to make the shader – we can’t use the industry standard ones as we’re using our own internal render, so our tool to build the shader network is also proprietary.” INJECTION MOULDING: Our modellers of surfaces have become expert in injection moulding,” adds Blasset. “They know not just how the process works, but also how to pick up every little imperfection from the manufacturing process. Whenever we…

Spectral, 2018 Bio Italian 3D artist and concept designer with over 15 years of experience for clients such as Fox Networks Group Italy, Turner and Discovery Media. Software Blender 2.8 Beta, Blender 2.79, Inkscape Learn how to • Analyse the concept • Plan out the scenes • Create a cinematic camera • Set up PBR materials for real-time rendering • Set up the post-processing effects • Optimise EEVEE • Post-produce the final rendering Concept I’ve always been fascinated by rendering in real time, and with the introduction of Blender 2.8 and its new real-time renderer, I decided to experiment with it on a sci-fi short film.…

POST PRODUCTION This was an experiment to see how much of the character design process I could finalise within 3D. I was able to reach about 80 per cent of the final look by the render stage. I wanted to get as close to my initial sketches as possible. The finished model was rendered using one of the standard indoor HDRi environment lighting setups. Neeraj Menon neerajmenon.com Neeraj is a freelance artist working in Pune, India. He works as a comic colourist and concept artist with clients worldwide. Software ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, KeyShot, Photoshop Qhel , 2018…

When you blend two volumes in Max mode, subtract your previous volume from the one you’ve just combined. It isolates the outer part of the volume you max-blended. Now clamp it with a histogram scan and add an edge detect to select the outline. Blur that selection, and you now have the mask of the intersection of your two volumes. Go back on to blend max step, blur it slightly, and blend it with itself according to the mask you have just created. That way you can smooth the intersection of two separate elements and have something that feels less artificial.…

Polywink’s new Animation for iPhone X automatically generates the 52 blendshapes needed to use the iPhone X as a powerful and accessible mocap device. It works for any character and morphology, from photorealistic 3D models to stylised characters, preserving the user’s topology. The Unity ARKit plugin enables anyone to animate their 3D characters in real time and save the animation data afterwards. Developers can also animate 3D models live in the Unity Editor using ARKit face tracking. Discover more at polywink.com.…

5 CGAxis premium models & PBRs Five models, two HDRIs and tileable textures Renderhub texture & four models Models and textures to use in your work 30 textures from 3DTotal.com Download a selection 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 to your computer…

PATRIK KARLSSON  Principal character artist/ craft director, BioWare artstation.com/polygonemperor A STANDOUT PORTFOLIO This is the first thing a potential new employer/client looks at, so it is very important. There are so many things to consider when making a good portfolio, but the key is that you make sure your skill shines through in your work. Other important aspects are that you can handle a variety of tasks and be flexible. DON’T BE INVISIBLE You can have the best portfolio in the business, but if you don’t have your work out there and promote yourself you might end up being invisible. Posting your work on key media outlets and sharing it with others who can forward it on can be the difference between you getting the job and somebody else. A…

JONATHAN BENAINOUS Senior texture artist artstation.com/jonathan_benainous CREATE HEIGHT AND NORMAL MAPS FIRST The Height map is the key to accomplishing good game materials. All the information extracted to create the Normal, the Albedo, the Roughness maps etc. relies on the completion and polish of the Height map. With current game engines, height is mostly used for blending materials and needs to be set with a realistic scale to get great results. WORK BY ITERATION As a game artist, working iteratively from large to smaller shapes is fundamental. It’s true for materials, but it’s also true for modelling and level art. Creating a block out, with grey box assets, is always the first step in the completion of any environment. Then, once your composition is working in the big…

The main tool I used was Maya. I also just played around a bit in LEGO Digital Designer [a free-to-download tool from LEGO]. It’s actually really powerful for a little freebie program. We just throw things together in there, and then manipulate them in Maya. In Maya I get in and move things around, and I try and present small camera moves as early as possible – just to bring the set to life, because you can present a whole series of stills, but it won’t really mean much to the director until they can feel like they’re in that environment. So just the smallest camera move you can bring always helps. We also do paint-overs on top of stills. And, early on, we do sketches on everything. Sometimes I’ll…

Many of us create by starting with an idea that then turns into creative chaos, so it is essential to define a structure in order to keep your project in shape. The fundamental points of this structure are theme, reference and final. Theme: to be clear about what we want to talk about. Reference: defining the visual imagery in which we want to immerse the viewer, or our point of view on the topic. Final: how the story will end, in order to have our ‘lighthouse in the fog’.…

This traning will cover how to build a Japanese helmet in Substance Designer. This prop is going to be composed of a simple 3D shape, on which we will apply high-definition materials with displacement. The UV unwrap will set up the material structure, which is going to be broken down into main graphs called Helmet, Mask, Props and Neck, as well as sub-graphs. Those secondary graphs will contain tools or little height parts, such as knots, and be instantiated in order to save time. All the main graphs will handle Height maps first, from general to particular, before creating the Albedo and Roughness maps to become a full PBR material. 01 Set up the project Start by creating the helmet in 3D in simple shapes, and unwrap your UVs. This…

“If your current rig is getting a bit long in the tooth, now is the time to upgrade” Nvidia’s Turing-based Quadro RTX series has finally arrived with the Quadro RTX 4000, 5000 and 6000 looking set to dent the wallet of 3D animators everywhere. Mainstream and mobile Quadros are bound to follow but for now, Chillblast has been quick off the mark in sending us a next-generation workstation packed with high-end hardware, including a Quadro RTX 5000, to showcase what these cards can do. That also applies to the Intel Skylake-X Core i9-9920X processor, which launched in late 2018. It’s a 4.5GHz 12-core, 24 thread chip, and another component that makes a suitable companion for an expensive Quadro in a typical high-end workstation configuration. We covered the basics of Turing…

French VFX school, ArtFX, won the Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project category at this year’s VES Awards. The title was bestowed on the 2018 graduation film, Terra Nova. ArtFX was the only French school nominated and it was the only school without professional experience as an admissions prerequisite – meaning among the four films nominated in the Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project category, Terra Nova was the only film created by students who had not yet worked as professionals in VFX. Terra Nova was created and directed by a team of four students; Thomas Battistetti, Mélanie Geley, Guillaume Hoarau and Mickaël Le Mézo. They were assisted by three student specialists on the same five-year Digital Arts programme; Cindy Libbrecht, Dorian Perceval and Alex Brossard. The film…

Pixotope Norwegian technology and creative services company, The Future Group, has unveiled a new software suite, Pixotope. It enables users to create virtual sets and AR experiences with cinema-quality, real-time graphics, working with single- or multi-camera productions. Pixotope is available now as a subscription service, for more information visit futureuniverse.com. Clarisse iFX 4.0 The latest update to the 3D and VFX creation tool introduces the Transform Manipulator, designed to speed up set dressing and layout work. Users can also now constrain scene items to any animated geometry with deformation on. Isotropix has also announced a range of new pricing options, which can be found at isotropix.com/products/clarisse/whatsnew. Forest Pack 6.1.5 The latest version of iToo Software’s scattering plugin for 3ds Max enables users to see and edit Forest objects live during…

TEXTURING In order to create this beautiful CG woman, I tried using Multi-channel Faces texture from Texturing.xyz. The technical goal of this project was to express the fine details. Texturing.xyz and XGen really helped me to achieve this. I projected a Multi-channel Faces texture to the model, with a Photoshop UV workflow. You can see how to do this here: bit.ly/2WGHDCZ Tsubasa Nakai artstation.com/tsubasan Tsubasa is a director and CG supervisor working in Japan. Software Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop, Mari, Substance Painter Anemone ,2019…

Building 3D content, whether for animation, games, VFX or immersive, rarely happens in a vacuum. You might be working on the next mega-blockbuster or building a student short film, but the chances are there is someone else providing feedback, and probably a team of others working on the project with you. Bringing stories to life in 3D takes a team. Teams can move as quickly and nimbly as a school of fish, or can get caught up in bottlenecks and traffic jams that get in the way of making good art. In a team of any size, artists might end up investing valuable creative time doing non-creative task management work, which can cause friction when a project is under the gun. The best creative team runs in a way that…