Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 131 i 3D Artist

TREVOR HOGG laika.com A regular contributor to 3D Artist, Trevor Hogg returns this issue to bring you a look behind the scenes on Laika’s latest project, Missing Link, which combines stop-motion with CG. Turn to page 22. GREG BARTA scivfx.artstation.com Veteran Houdini artist Greg Barta returns to the pages of 3D Artist this issue to delve deep into Houdini to help you learn to create fabrics using various simulation tools. Turn to page 38. GAEL KERCHENBAUM weacceptyou.com Gael was part of the team behind this stunning fox animation, created using Ziva. He and some of the other team members show you their process to get the very best results. Turn to page 46. FARID GHANBARI 3fx.com Farid is the art director at 3FX Inc. with over 11 years’ experience in…

Bio A Norway-based freelancer for many years who uses 3ds Max, ZBrush, Substance, Quixel, Corona workflow and has done everything from providing content to DAZ 3D to ads for AMD. Longtime writer and gamer. Currently working at Rizom-Lab Software RizomUV, 3ds Max, Substance painter Learn how to Performfastunwrapping Use keyboard shortcuts Quickly cut edges Use the UV tools to help with messy geometry Use the magic UV wand Stack, pack and export Concept Most of us know UV mapping basics by now, but we don’t always know how to speed up our workflow so we can get back to being creative. If you Google UV mapping, it will tell you it’s one of the least popular tasks in 3D. But with the new tools that have come out in…

When working on a mesh like the motorbike, with lots of capped cylinders and other superfluous polygons, you can either grit your teeth and keep unwrapping them, or you can put them in a group on the side, outside of the 0.1 UV space or your UDIMs as you go. To remove items from a group, press Cmd/Ctrl+G then move them to the group, select all polys in the pile and regroup by pressing G. You can then go to your modeller, select the polygons via your UV function and delete them. Remember to check before you delete, though.…

POST-PRODUCTION I put the render in Photoshop and applied some digital painting tricks on textures, skin, clothes and hair. Doing post-production in Photoshop helps me finalise my concepts faster – it would take weeks with different software. This way I can produce more concepts in less time. Gabriel Soares artstation.com/gabrielsoaresz Gabriel Soares is a professor of online and face-to-face digital painting, with experience in traditional clay sculptures. Software ZBrush, Maya, V-Ray, Photoshop Alita, 2019…

“The ice bridge was unique because that is truly a hybrid,” states Laika CG supervisor Rick Sevy. “We built the ends, and the centre section was practically constructed. The temple was both miniature and parts of it were full-scale. We had something physical to go off and could look at the reflections and refractions and make that in our shaders. We had to interchange between one shot on the practical centre part of the bridge, to the next shot where it is being destroyed, and we had to take it over. The look had to be exact.” A digital version of the bridge was made prior to animation. “We did the effect destruction pass on that in Houdini prior to animation as well,” explains Laika VFX supervisor Steve Emerson. “That…

“It can be difficult for women who have left the industry to have children to return to work. Visual effects moves so quickly that parents may feel that even taking one year out for parental leave is already too long out of the game. That’s why initiatives like Film London’s Return To Work scheme are so important. We recently had digital artist Hong Dam join Outpost on the scheme after taking some time away from her career to raise her family. For Hong, it was a chance to explore a new career path and a way to get back into the industry, all with a paid returnship, a mentor, training and hands-on experience in our studio. It’s also imperative to support new talent. Schemes like Access: VFX support the next…

The project resolution in professional studios is way higher than just 4K. Usually 8K is set as a professional studio standard, and that means workstations need extreme processing power to let compositors work on more than 30 million pixels per frame, which is needed for accurate tracking and keying. DaVinci Resolve 15 from Blackmagic Design supports RTX features in combination with REDCODE RAW footage, which can be viewed and colour-graded without lags by using T-Rex’s full Turing TU102 implementation.…

SCULPTING This image was based on the work of concept artist Johan Grenier. When creating the high-poly model, I was inspired by the works of my favourite artists, Ben Erdt and Jason Martin. Thanks to their creations, I was able to find a balance in detailing and sculpting this model. Much of my attention was concentrated on obtaining my desired result. ShapiroSergeyevich artstation.com/b_e_l_i_a_l Shapiro is a junior 3D artist at Sperasoft game studio, located in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Software ZBrush, Maya, Arnold, Photoshop Dragon Head, 2019…

If done well and taken from a far enough distance, a camera tilt shot can provide both a similar result to a ‘dolly’ shot (a camera running alongside the creature) and a ‘locked off’ (camera not moving) shot. It can be fairly straightforward to negate the camera movement of this type of shot, leaving us with the option to analyse the locomotion without camera motion. A tracking/matchmove department should have little trouble with this, but even a very crude 2D track by hand (where you just counter-animate the x/y 2D translation on an image plan) can be an effective way to analyse creature movement more easily.…

RizomUV is based on a custom algorithm, so it doesn’t normally use projections. This means what you focus on is cuts, seams, unwraps and distortions. To polish your UVs, use the brushes – UV, Optimise, Spread and Pinch. You can define radius, strength and algorithm in the Brush panel on the left. You’ll also find straightening, aligning and flipping tools in the Align panel on the left. Use these with the transform tools at the bottom of the UI to hone placements and alignments. Press Tab for a universal gizmo, and remember the panels and views windows are not dockable.…

When people talk about resolution, they often use texel and pixel density interchangeably. As you probably know, texels make up the smallest parts of a Texture map and pixels make up the smallest part of your screen. When exporting for Painter, for example, remember to define your map resolution. In the Layout panel, define your horizontal map resolution. Next, disable AutoFit in the Packing panel and set the initial scaling mode to Specified T:D – which forces the defined texel density when working with your map. If you hit P for pack next, the islands will be packed and will reflect the defined texel density.…

Outpost VFX, currently headquartered in Bournemouth, UK, has announced the launch of its first international studio in Montréal, Canada. “In response to the ongoing boom in highly creative HETV and film projects, the time felt absolutely right to open another facility to continue to provide exceptional service to our clients” explains Duncan McWilliam, founder and CEO of Outpost VFX. “With its generous film tax relief system, supportive government and incredible visual effects talent base, Montréal leapt out at us as the most exciting location for our first overseas studio. After more than 12 months of careful planning it’s fantastic to finally realise our goal of opening a facility in Canada.” The expansion means that the team will be better positioned to service clients across multiple time zones, and they intend…

Shotgun has announced two new integrations for the game development community: Jira Bridge and Adobe After Effects. The new Jira Bridge furthers Shotgun’s mission to connect game development art and engineering workflows, while the After Effects integration joins a suite of supported tools. These updates follow the recent announcements of Unreal Engine and Unity integrations. After Effects integration is available and Jira Bridge integration is in public beta. To find out more head to shotgunsoftware.com.…

01 Lady Eden House by Sérgio Merêces 3DA username smereces Sérgio Merêces says: “This was a personal 3D render image that I made between my daily work for clients, to have a break from the regular work pipeline and do something that I enjoy a lot – which is to produce a 3D render without having boundaries in my creativity.” We say: There’s a lovely ethereal quality to this piece, which gives it the feeling of a traditional painting. The colours and light help sell this magical mood. 02 Gateway To Paradise by Yones Bana 3DA username Yones Yones Bana says: “This scene is part of a ZBrush educational package that I produced last year. First, I made the low-poly model in 3ds Max, then added details in ZBrush and…

Rafael G. Moheno bit.ly/2VJNfei “The goal was to achieve a realistic look without appealing to excess damage; to make it interesting not by showing it deteriorated but used. Therefore, any wearing that the textures displayed had to be subtle. As you can see on the wings in this image, realism comes from the soft variance of colour tone. I find that subtleties play a huge part in achieving a convincing result”Rafael Garcia Moheno, The Outlaw Scout, 2018 Rafael began his career in 2D classical animation in Mexico City. He is now a modeller and texture artist at Method Studios. Software Maya, Mari, V-Ray, Photoshop, Substance Painter Work in progress… Quoc Anh Pham quocanh.artstation.com “My job now mainly involves low-poly modelling for games. I love to challenge myself and learn as…

“One thing that we realised once Mr. Link got out onset was that he was going to be in a lot of windy environments, and the puppet has hundreds of pieces of fur,” states Laika VFX supervisor Steve Emerson. “What we ended up doing was taking invisible UV paint, and we painted it densely on the tips of the fur. The fur gradually became more transparent towards the base. We would hit it with ultraviolet light and when you go to the different colour channels you have a solid white at the tip, more of a grey at the base, and then we were able to use that to drive distortion in a 2D package to get a believable wiggle on the fur. A particular character was a combination of…

Sue Lyster explains ILM London’s approach: “We broadly focus our efforts in two directions; recruitment and retention. We just need more women to enter the industry and then we need them to stay, develop and take on senior roles. In the area of recruitment we instigated a ‘blind’ recruitment process for our 2018 graduate intake, which resulted in a 5% swing towards greater female representation. Our runners team (a key junior route into the industry) is 50/50 male and female, and we ensure that our work experience slots are equally shared between female and male applicants. It’s important that young women see an industry that looks like them, so we’re trying to ensure that we have female representatives at recruitment events, on panels etc. We also hope to have more…

Arnold’s interactive preview rendering, especially with the GPU rendering features enabled, is most effective in terms of interactivity when the rendered scene fits entirely into the available GPU memory, to avoid unwanted translation times by shovelling data forth and back. Usually at production-level rendering, procedures such as object subdivision and displacement techniques are used to produce highly detailed assets as rendered output. But often this scene data can exceed the available GPU memory of lower-level graphics cards, meaning there’s the requirement for and use of professional graphics cards with large frame buffers, such as the Titan RTX with its large 24 GB video memory.…

A big time-sink for commercial artists is bad models. They may look awesome but can be an absolute nightmare to work with due to their topology. This goes for commercial models in particular. The time you think a purchased model can save can be eaten up by spending hours cleaning up double polys, loose objects and stripping unneeded faces from the model to make a retexture look good. So if you’re a merchant, take texturing and UVs into consideration from the get-go by cleaning up as you model, naming your parts properly and clearly and creating groups that make sense.…

Bio Kurtis is a character artist at EA Vancouver, who thrives on overcoming challenges and seeking new adventures. Software ZBrush, KeyShot, Mari, Photoshop Learn how to Createanoriginalsculpt Form emotive eyes Apply realistic textures Concept Discover how to create an original creature with a basis on real animals and creatures, texturing and lighting it to appear like a living creature very quickly. In this tutorial we will go through steps focused on creating an original concept’s sculpt, texture and lighting. We will focus on techniques that will speed up productivity and procedures that I have used in the visual effects industry working as a character artist. 01 Reference Gathering lots of references might be the most important step. I like to focus on anatomy traits that I find interesting. In…

Beyond the style and technical properties of the assets you’re working on, ask yourself what will be the point of view, in which conditions will your asset be seen, what level of detail is needed and where will you put them? This applies to assets but also animation, FX and everything else that is in your game scene or in your video sequence. You should check your work in these condition as often as possible, otherwise you may experience disappointing results later on – even with a good-looking asset.…

Arnold 5.3 Autodesk has unveiled Arnold 5.3 with Arnold GPU in a public beta. The highly anticipated release provides artists with a taste of GPU rendering for a set number of features and the flexibility to choose between rendering on the CPU or GPU. Arnold 5.3 is available as a standalone subscription or as part of the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection.Visit arnoldrenderer.com/news/arnold-5-3-gpu. Quixel Mixer 2019 This is the biggest ever update for Mixer, and it introduces the Mask Stack, which enables a slew of material-authoring workflows, procedural material creation, stylised textures, scan-based PBR materials from photos, terrain creation and much more, all in a simplistic package. If you want more information on Quixel Mixer then head over to quixel.com. Houdini 17.5 This update introduces Procedural Density Graph (PDG), which…

Job title Creative director at Ntropic and co-founder of NIM Labs Location Los Angeles, USA Website Ntropic.com nim-labs.com Biography Andrew Sinagra is creative director at Ntropic, where he has worked for over 15 years and is focused on commercials, music videos and direct-to-client work. He is also co-founder at NIM Labs, the world’s first studio management platform. Portfolio highlights Andrew Sinagra wears two hats of sorts: creative director at Ntropic, where he is focused on commercials and music videos; and co-founder of NIM Labs, where he’s helping studios to stay on track and be profitable through NIM, the world’s first studio management platform. “Seeing a project go from words on a page to images on a screen is probably the most satisfying…

DETAILING I added many details while being careful not to pollute the scene with too many elements. I had a lot of control over which elements were highlighted through the colours I used. I used a large area light on the left and a studio background, nothing more. The beauty of the design is all in the colours and lighting, it was all done very carefully. The biggest secret to achieving a good result in any project is to treat it with care. Gustavo Henrique behance.net/guutv Gustavo is as an art director and motion designer on 2D and 3D advertising projects. Software, Photoshop, Octane Render, Cinema 4D TreasureShop,2019…