Innehållsförteckning för November 2019 från 3D World

Social media has become an invaluable tool for 3D artists over the last decade and a half. It can be used to engage with an audience, showcase art and enhance your skill set–the only limit to its usefulness is determined by the artist’s imagination. With so many creatives spread out across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and a host of other platforms, standing out from the crowd can be tough. That is exactly why 3D World has chosen three masters of social media to share their experiences and insight, as well as practical tips for building an audience and presenting your online portfolio. DEVELOPING A BRAND Product developer INSYDIUM is as enthusiastic about nurturing a community as it is about providing pioneering 3D software. “If it wasn’t for the INSYDIUM community, we…

CAGED-IN The scene called for the camera to gently zoom in on a rat in a cage, as the animal starts twitching and then eventually spectacularly dissolves into goop. Production filmed the shot several ways, including with a puppet rat (which does not appear in the final shot), just an empty cage, with no cage bars, and with a silver ball to be used for lighting reference. This would give Rodeo FX a number of methods for compositing its final rat disintegration into the shot. RAT-SPLOSION! The goop that the rat explodes into had to be connected to what the larger Mind Flayer creature would look like. Amongst other things, the art direction for this look included, essentially, chunks of meat floating around and influencing each other. Within that goop…

Scanline VFX built hybrid simulations of the Iron Throne melting scene using Houdini and the company’s in-house simulation toolkit Flowline. “Joe Bauer wanted us to deliver the most complex and realistic melting simulation ever seen on the screen,” Mousavi recalls. “We got constant feedback from the executive producers to push the resolution, so we came up with some very advanced and clever shaders to get insane amounts of detail on top of the simulations. We were able to send dozens of different looks of the shader in one go to narrow down the final look, which was very helpful considering the tight schedule we had.” Joe Bauer was very methodical when it came to the simulation layout and wanted to make sure everything was physically correct and not cheated for…

AUTHOR Donovan teaches modelling and animation classes at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. He has worked in 3D since 2002. 3ds Max, ZBrush, Mudbox and Maya are his favourite 3D programs. www.donoman.com PART 3/4 Welcome to Part 3 in our four-part series on creating a unique fully rigged robot using only a CAT Rig in 3ds Max. Applying a texture using UVs is an essential first step in adding realism to many 3D scenes. The same applies to the robot we are creating. The texture alone will inform the viewer that the robot is old or new, metallic or wooden, and even if it is transparent or solid. What makes this tutorial so unique is that UVs are not generally applied to bone objects, and there are some very specific…

Pat Imrie replies Artists and studios are constantly striving to improve efficiency and speed in their respective pipelines, and one area that can always cause problems is moving between different software packages quickly. Working back and forth between Maya and ZBrush is one of the most common workflows that I deal with on a day-to-day basis. Previously it would require exporting multiple OBJ files back and forth, requiring more steps in the pipeline to keep everything organised. Pixologic then began to include the incredibly helpful plugin GoZ, which allows us to bridge the gap between ZBrush and the software of our choosing, be that Maya, 3ds Max, KeyShot etc. It even helpfully sets up Maya displacement shaders (assuming you set everything up properly in ZBrush first). As useful as GoZ…

01 ACTIVATE WIREFRAME Select your model and bring down its subdivision levels to 1. Activate the Draw Polyframe button (Shift+F), and turn off polygroups visibility (Fill). If applicable, deactivate Polypaint to make the wireframe more visible. You can apply a white Flat Color material to make the lines stand out even more. 02 POLYFRAME SETTINGS Open the Preferences>Draw menu and you will find a few polyframe settings. By adjusting the PFrame slider you can change the polyframe opacity. Deactivating the VariablePFO button will affect how polygon borderlines are displayed depending on the subdivision level. Notice that with this option ON, the level 1 polygons are drawn thickest, and level 2 lines are thinner. With each level, the corresponding subdivision lines get thinner and thinner. If the VariablePFO button is OFF,…

News and views from around the international CG community Creative studio Found recently partnered with design agency Cubo to create a landmark campaign for renowned whisky brand, Ballantine’s. The campaign, entitled Too Good To Hide, tells the story of the three signature single malts hidden inside the famous blend. “Cubo approached Found off the back of our short film, Mondegreen,” says Mike Sharpe, founder and creative director of Found. Set in a surreal museum of mishearing, Mondegreen features a series of kinetic sculptures representing different words that sound like Found. “Inspired by Mondegreen and eager to create a House of Ballantine’s for their next campaign, Cubo’s creative team invited us in to explore the concept in a single bid pitch process,” adds Sharpe. To explore Cubo’s vision of the House…

You may think that speakers are an odd item to find reviewed here, but I think there are many items worth exploring that help improve the day for creatives. With that in mind we will be looking at not just the latest 3D software, but all the support gear found in a modern creative studio, from desks and chairs to sketch pads and tablets. One element of an animation that should never be forgotten is sound. An average visual supported by quality audio is still watchable, but even the best Hollywood visuals are painful to watch if the sound quality is bad. Plus, we all love to listen to music while we work, and that is where the Edifiers come into play. These are large units with high-end materials used…

01 ARTSTATION After the death of CGHub, ArtStation has become the go-to place for posting 3D art, getting inspiration or searching for artists to hire. It’s a no-brainer if you want to be visible. 02 TWITTER Twitter is huge for network building and for connecting all sorts of dots. It’s people talking about things you’re interested in, in this case, computer graphics. 03 YOUTUBE I have a soft spot for YouTube because we couldn’t have reached hundreds of thousands of people otherwise. Video tutorials for 3D software are booming. 04 SKETCHFAB By definition, Sketchfab should be an important online platform for 3D artists, because its native format is three-dimensional models. 05 INSTAGRAM I know it’s a popular choice, but Instagram is largely based on pretty images, so it’s worth giving…

ON SET Oftentimes actors and crew are required to imagine a CG creature during filming despite nothing being there to look at all. For the Tom/Bruce Monster sequence in Stranger Things 3, production visual effects supervisor Paul Graff instead had a stunt performer act out the creature wearing a red spandex suit and a shiny metal helmet. It provided not only camera framing reference, but the helmet itself acted like a giant reflector ball pass built into the shot. MONSTER-MAKING Rodeo FX then took the original plate (plus a clean version) and was able to composite its animated Tom/Bruce Monster effectively into the scene. The helmet was particularly useful because the scene included a large amount of flickering fluorescent lighting–an ever-present phenomena when the Mind Flayer is at play–that was…

In recent times, Milk VFX has been behind a raft of many memorable animated characters and ‘objects’ in a variety of TV shows and films. These include the heavenly and hellish beings from Good Omens, sci-fi ships in Altered Carbon and Origin and an ocean of effects in Adrift. For our second journey into the workflow of Milk VFX, we asked members of the studio’s animation team about what it takes to bring soft-body characters and hard-body objects to life, and what tools they use to do it. Like many other studios, the central toolset there is Autodesk Maya, but there are a multitude of plugins and different approaches that the team uses to craft animated performances. This new story is part of our ongoing series inside the workings of…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills AUTHOR Greg is a VFX artist and scientist and has a passion for cinematic scientific visualisations. Details–along with relevant Houdini resources (i.e. the UI mods in these screenshots)–are on his ArtStation profile. scivfx.artstation.com My inspiration for this project originally came from this year’s Chernobyl miniseries. Pripyat, the city where so many brutalist apartment blocks are, has unique charm because of its story and the post-apocalyptic look. Sadly, many cities all around the world have a chance for such a future, and I’m not talking about the nuclear fallout, but due to climate change and pollution. Indeed, the main intent of the series creator Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck was to depict how the denial of facts can…

01 CLEAN UP YOUR MESHES It is of key importance that your meshes are clean before you export them as an FBX. This will ensure that we reduce any possible errors. Start by going to Edit>Delete All by History, then go to Modify>Freeze Transformations and then Modify>Center Pivots. Last, make sure that all Normal directions are pointing in the right direction by going to Display>Polygons>Face Normals. 02 NAME YOUR MESHES This step is in my opinion the most important part of this workflow. Not taking the time to name your meshes might seem okay if you only have five or ten individual parts, but once you get into the hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of meshes it becomes essential to the success of your project. For this example I used the…

Antony Ward replies When it comes to rigging, each technical artist will have their own approach to building the base systems used to drive a character. This doesn’t mean that some are right or wrong: if you get the desired results, the approach shouldn’t matter. One debate I hear often is whether it’s better to use Set Driven Keys (SDKs) or Utility Nodes. Being key based, Set Driven Keys are ideal for elements that need to animate. You essentially plot a series of keys along an animation curve, controlled via an attribute rather than the timeline, so this gives you the flexibility to add more accurate movements. The downside is, once created, these movements are pretty much baked into the rig. Yes, they can be edited via the Graph Editor,…

It’s easy to get lost when creating game environments, whether working on a personal project or to a brief. Thankfully, MA game art students at Escape Studios, Rhodri Thomas and Stephen Nevin, have shared their thoughts on how to create a consistent design that pulls together all the elements of an environment. As part of their course they were responsible for creating a project based on The Order: 1886. “Having a clear vision is crucial, this is why you need to identify essential elements or pillars to refer back to,” explain Thomas and Nevin. “These stand as the cornerstones of your design.” Beginning with this and making sure that assets and composition conform to it will help the artist produce a visually cohesive environment. The pair identified their pillars as…

Colour grading is one of those tasks that not everybody who works in 3D or visual effects has a hand in, but one that it’s pretty clear is vital to the success of any finished product. Many artists are aware of doing things like curves adjustments, levels tweaks and adding a ‘look’ to a render without realising that they are actually grading. Filmmakers have been doing this to a very detailed extent for many years, with the industry standard tool being DaVinci Resolve, from Blackmagic Design. Resolve happens to be a fully featured suite of tools, including the VFX and motion graphics tool Fusion. For colourists out there Resolve has the leading tools for the job, but they can be quite specialised. While a mouse and keyboard can be used…

In each season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, its intrepid young cast seem to encounter more and more gruesome other-worldly creatures, and that’s certainly true for Stranger Things 3, which introduces the Mind Flayer. Ultimately presented as a chunky multi-limbed monster, the Mind Flayer builds itself up by collecting bodies, reducing them to goop, and absorbing them into its own body. This starts with rats and then turns to humans, with devastating effect. Working under production visual effects supervisor Paul Graff, visual effects studio Rodeo FX was responsible for creating the different incarnations of the Mind Flayer, from rat to large monster. Here’s how they pulled off the scary scenes for the streaming hit. IT STARTS WITH GOOP Before it becomes a large-scale creature, the Mind Flayer first exists as amorphous…

“Scanline and HBO had been looking for a chance to work on Game Of Thrones together for the past few years,” explains Mohsen Mousavi, the VFX supervisor for Scanline VFX on the show, “and when better than the final season?” Scanline was approached in March 2018 and asked by Steve Kullback (VFX producer) and Joe Bauer (VFX supervisor) at HBO to tackle the FX development work for the iconic ‘Throne Melt’ in episode six of the final season of the Game Of Thrones series. In fact, Scanline VFX was the lead vendor on the last three episodes of the final season of Game Of Thrones by HBO. The studio worked on over 600 shots, over an hour of high-end visual effects including the Battle of King’s Landing in episode five…

ANIMBOT Animbot, made by Alan Camilo, is a set of tools for Maya aimed at speeding up workflow. “It can really streamline your animation,” says Milk’s Chris Hutchison. “Say if you wanted a character to look more screen left and you've been animating him looking screen right the entire shot, all of a sudden you can just tweak one controller and it will re-adjust everything to go left instead of having to tweak each individual controller manually afterwards. There’s so many little useful tools in there.” STUDIO LIBRARY A free tool for managing poses and animation in Maya, Studio Library hails from Kurt Rathjen. Milk VFX uses it to quickly store and share specific poses. “It’s able to store animation,” says Milk’s James Berkley, “so if you've got poses, you…

AUTHOR EJ is an award-winning freelancer, 3D designer and educator. He runs a company dedicated to helping people master Cinema 4D. www.eyedesyn.com Rigging 3D characters can be a complicated and very technical process that intimidates many 3D artists, including me. This is why I wanted to create a rig that removes all those technical barriers, to allow anyone with any skill level to be able to get into rigging and animating 3D characters in Cinema 4D. Bendy Limbs Rig removes all those complex rigging concepts and turns rigging into a very simple and intuitive workflow, so you can focus on being an animator. This is a non-joint rig, so no laborious weight painting (sorry Bob Ross, there is no joy in weight painting). Bendy Limbs Rig has already helped empower…

01 DEFINE WHAT IS GOING TO CHANGE As mentioned, I will go over making fast changes when needed and one of the most practical examples is changing a wall material, which, along with the floor, might be one of the most common inevitable changes we have to deal with. Plus, if we are testing several materials we like, this is a really fast way to make up our mind on which one we like the most. So, let’s pick the wall we need. In this case I have already added a UVW map so we can have the texture in the right position, scale and coordinates. Now it’s time to organise the materials so we can use them in the CoronaSelectMtl. 02 ORGANISE MATERIALS As I always say, organisation is…

In collaboration with We Are Social Shanghai, Final Frontier has created an intergalactic battle epic to promote Acer’s Predator range of gaming hardware. The short is directed by Paulo Garcia and Zombie Studio. The concept itself needed to sell the Predator range’s unique heat-battling technology, tackling a common problem for hardcore gamers. To that end, Final Frontier executive producer Gus Karam worked alongside We Are Social from the outset to shape the storyline. The story takes place amid the human race’s colonisation of the galaxy. In one of the darkest recesses of the universe, planet ZB-02 has been ravaged and occupied by the Go’Re. Made of fire and sustained by molten heat, the Go’Re travel from planet to planet, purging the land and drilling into the planet’s core to release…

PRICE £3,090 | COMPANY Asus | WEBSITE asus.com The Asus ProArt PA90 mini workstation is part of a recent trend towards custom-designed, compact PCs that are properly equipped with the right hardware to tackle the most heavy-duty software tasks. Inside its cylindrical chassis is a workstation that would deliver impressive 3D performance even in a traditional PC case, only here it’s been precisely designed to squeeze a powerful PC specification into a case that measures 176 x 176 x 365mm. It bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s current ‘trash can’ Mac Pro, the ageing black cylinder version, and it fills the same niche. It’s perfect if you want to be able to get on with proper 3D design but don’t have a lot of space, or are simply…

CHARACTER RIGGING USING CAT Part three of our rigging course by Donovan Douglas, you’ll learn how to build on the skills and techniques covered in the previous instalment. Look out for part four in issue 253. Q AND A Get the full-sized screenshots and files that accompany this issue’s Q&A section. PROCEDURAL BUILDINGS Greg Barta shows you how to create procedural cityscapes using Houdini. SIGN UP! For content direct to your inbox, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at: bit.ly/3dworldnews FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/3DW-252…