Innehållsförteckning för Christmas 2019 från 3D World

DreamWorks Animation and Pearl Studio’s co-production Abominable, written and directed by Jill Culton and co-directed by Todd Wilderman, is about the bond between a teenage girl, Yi, and a young yeti she encounters in Shanghai. Together with her friends, Yi helps the creature – which they name Everest – return to its homeland. For DreamWorks Animation, the film would not only involve creating and animating a large furry CG character, it would also require delivering many instances of magic and several large-scale FX sequences. 3D World dropped into the studio in Glendale, California to find out how it created Abominable’s VFX and animation. A FURRY YETI DreamWorks Animation is of course no stranger to furry creatures, but that did not always make the process of crafting Everest any easier, as…

In 2017, TurboSquid developed an automated conversion process for artists called StemCell; the idea was to make it easier for artists to focus on doing what they love – making new models – without having to remake them for every major 3D application or renderer. With StemCell, artists make one model and it will work with 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, V-Ray, Arnold, Unreal, Unity and more. And while the StemCell tools were built for TurboSquid artists, the idea behind the process can work for any artist. When you build your models following these principles, all of which are based around a PBR workflow, you can ensure that your models will be as versatile as possible. Tools and software The great thing about building portable PBR-based content is that you…

01. SCULPT IN FORGER Sculpting in Forger is very similar to ZBrush, you can push and pull your forms and remesh at any point. It contains an object outliner and layers, so after a little practice, the interface becomes pretty familiar. Here I’ve imported some of my own stamps to create a layer of detail for the stamp brush, which only operates in drag rectangular mode. To make this work I have to ensure all my stamps have a decent feathering. Achieving this type of detailing is, I believe, a first for any app-based sculpting program – my final model is around 3.5 million polys. 02. RENDER IN FORGER Rendering in Forger is limited, but you can do some basic material assignments and change the location of the single light…

Cirstyn Bech-Yagher replies One of the things that can be a little time-consuming in Substance Painter is creating seams for stitching on clothing. Even though there are a lot of ready-to-use brushes and tools out there, as well as the wonders of the Lazy Mouse, it’s faster and easier to create something once, which you can then just load as a Smart Material and simply tweak as needed. And one way to do that is by using the UV Border Distance Generator rather than one of the Edge Masks from the Smart Generator shelf. For something as simple and lightweight as this, it’s also overkill to use the Mask Builder or Editor from the same Generator dropdown. Using the UV Border Distance Generator will generate a mask based on the…

01 BASE MESH It’s important to note that the CurveTriFill brush can only work on a model with frozen or no subdivision levels. Make sure the base mesh is ready before attempting to use the brush. 02 RADIAL SYMMETRY Choose the brush (Keyboard BCW) and go to Transform>Activate Symmetry>Radial, and choose the amount of instances you need to create. Draw out a curve to create the petals. 03 THE CURVE You can alter the start and end position of the curve, circles on each end of the curve, or even reshape the petals by pulling on the curve line. You only need to adjust the original petal for the instances to update too. Notice that the thickness of the created geometry is based on the brush size. 04 INSTANCES At…

Having cracked photorealistic visual effects with The Lion King, Legato is excited by the possibilities it holds for filmmakers: “You could apply it to anything. The Revenant was a very arduous film to shoot. Only having a couple of hours of light, rehearsing all day in the freezing cold. Now you can authentically create those images in a studio, and being comfortable allows you to push the envelope a bit more.” The ability to previsualise sequences extensively democratises the filmmaking discipline, allowing budding directors, cinematographers or visual effects artists to creatively explore ideas from the comfort of their own home. To visualise The Lion King’s IMAX sequences, Legato created a virtual reality cinema. “We had the exact 3D IMAX movie theatre that you would play this in,” he explains. “You…

In the age of Netflix and Amazon Prime there’s an endless scroll of content for film fans to sift through. Yet, I still struggle to find female-centric shows that are representative of how people actually look in real life and sit within the science fantasy genre. This is where the idea for DISPEL first began. I saw a niche in the market that needed to be filled. After all, if you can’t find the movie you want to watch, why not make it yourself? DISPEL premiered at the LA Shorts International Film Festival in July 2019, with additional screenings at Indy Shorts, BronzeLens, Comicpalooza, Lady Filmmakers, Black Harvest and many more. The film is now free to watch online for audiences worldwide. When ideas collide The script for DISPEL came…

SOFTWARE ZBrush, KeyShot Freelance creature and character artist Farzad Maleki spent a total of 400 hours, over four months, creating this piece of Greek mythology in 3D. Although his passion lies in sculpting, Maleki is skilled in lighting, texturing, animating and rendering. “I'm inspired by old paintings and sculptures,” he says. “What really attracts my attention is how they created the world's greatest artwork using only simple tools and their patience.” Maleki used ZBrush to create the clothes, which did not require many wrinkles or a huge amount of depth. “Boolean was a very useful technique for making some holes and wrinkles,” he adds. What Maleki enjoyed most was the composition stage, creating the scene in a way that showed principles of design such as balance, movement, rhythm and harmony. He…

SOFTWARE 3ds Max, ZBrush, Corona Renderer, Photoshop This image took Ubisoft RedLynx artist Tomi Väisänen just two weeks to complete. “I started working on this image in early July and spent a couple of days just modelling the main character,” he explains. “After that I focused on creating a simple kitbash set for all the props scattered around the scene. There are books, candles, etc, you name it.” Initially Väisänen planned to create simulated clothes for his main character, “that turned out to be quite a mess to fit in place,” he adds. “As the character sits in a wheelchair, there would be lots of interaction with the cloth and its surroundings so I just box modelled it. A pretty brute-force approach but it worked fine.” Compositing was the most enjoyable…

“It was my second scene made in the Dreams Creator Beta, so obviously I encountered some obstacles,” says Mrozinski of the artwork. “We wanted to make a piece of art that will give a basic conception about the mood and the plot of our game to the viewer.” The idea was to use the style of an acrylic painting, and so Mrozinski began with using brush-like flecks that stopped appearing. “Now I'm aware that there are some limits to the amount of strokes,” he adds. “I decided to create separate thin layers of sculpts and spray a texture over them. All of the parts of the character are done this way. There are many 3D elements stuck into the picture canvas or floating near it. This helped to speed up…

PREMO For many years – essentially since Antz – DreamWorks Animation had used its Emo spreadsheet-like animation software. This changed on the second How To Train Your Dragon film, with a move to the more GUI-like Premo system, which was used on Abominable. “The huge turning point when this came online was real-time feedback,” says head of character animation John Hill. “Things just got so much quicker and we got feedback earlier from the program, and it allowed us to make more mistakes earlier.” MOONRAY MoonRay is DreamWorks Animation’s physically based ray tracer render engine, replacing their previous lighting and rendering tool called Moonlight. “When we started using MoonRay here,” says visual effects supervisor Mark Edwards, “it was a game changer for us in that the geometric complexity that you…

The holy grail as a freelance artist has always been the ability to work remotely on as light and simple a device as possible. It’s simple logistics: the smaller your device, the less gear you carry, the more accessible you make yourself – and the more likely you are to be hired. Wouldn’t it be great if everything you needed fit into a backpack and was all contained on one device? No peripherals, no extra cables for ports you didn’t expect, no hard drives – just one device that could do everything. That day may be sooner than you think – and possibly not on the device you would imagine. Conventional thinking would be to explore something like the Wacom MobileStudio, a device that sets out to do just this…

If you are new to CGI, there are far too many tools to choose from in a dizzying array of software. This series aims to break everything in CGI down to the very basics so that every artist is armed with the knowledge of which tool is best. This month we look at Blender. Blender for years has been one of the great paradoxes of the 3D creation toolset. It is completely free and has one of the most diverse feature sets of any digital content creation application, and with cutting-edge render options… why would anyone use any other application? The reason was that Blender historically has liked to plough its path in the mechanics of how 3D is created. Blender is developed as an open-source application by developers from…

01 SET UP THE LAYERS Import and set up your asset in Substance Painter, and bake any maps you may need. Create a folder in Layers and call it Seam Lowered. Add a Fill layer into the folder. Add a material if you don’t like working in greyscale, and call it Seam. Turn off all channels bar Height. As you’re going for a lowered seam, set the Height channel to a negative value, in the example it’s set to-0.5076. 02 ADD THE GENERATOR Add a Black Mask to the Seam layer. Right-click and select Add Generator. Click Generator and pick the UV Border Distance Generator. You won’t see anything out of the box; tweaking Balance and other settings will make it show. In the example, Balance is set to 0.07…

Not only has Brian Mitchell been with Audiomotion since 1998, he has also been responsible for growing the technical capabilities of the company to become the largest motion capture studio outside the US. Along the way Audiomotion has bagged itself a world record and worked on countless blockbuster movies and AAA game titles. “As with many things in life, the mocap career found me, not the other way round,” Mitchell tells 3D World. “I was the network guy at a company with a keen interest in photography. The opportunity presented itself when I, along with the rest of the team, was made redundant. So myself and three others decided to give it a go, and the rest is history.” Times have undoubtedly changed since Mitchell and his partners took their…

It’s been ten years since Apple first unveiled the iPad as a lightweight device designed mainly for leisurely computing use, focused on email, web browsing and watching movies. Since then, each new generation of iPad hardware has become progressively more powerful, while the iPadOS software, its user interface and underlying ecosystem of APIs have become more sophisticated. The iPad has evolved to become a device that’s now just as capable of content creation as consumption, including audio and video editing as well as 2D and 3D graphic design. The most up-to-date iPads are now powerful enough to drive desktop-class 3D software, and are tools that can be used for modelling to a professional standard. In the past you could just about tinker with 3D and graphics on the iPad, but…

WORTH £40 100 Best Typefaces Ever With a few additions from the experts at Computer Arts magazine, the best fonts ever were selected for this book. In addition to defining the list, we’ve brought you some insightful background on each one. Get Started in 3D A special one-off publication from the makers of 3D World magazine. In this 164-page guide, you’ll get to grips with key 3D concepts. The Ultimate Sketchbook Collection Take a peek inside the minds of artists from all over the world as they share their designs and creations. Your special Christmas offer Upgrade to include digital for only £5 Order the gift that keeps on delivering www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/TDW/xmas192 or call 0344 848 2852 *Terms and conditions: Savings calculated against the…

1 CONCEPT A concept painting for the canola wave. The idea was that Everest’s magic would convert the field into a fluid-y formation. 2 COLOUR KEY A colour key is produced to provide a very clear sense of what the final shots should look like, both in terms of the colour and composition. 3 WAVE GENERATION The FX department then developed an underlying fluid simulation that would inform the final appearance of the flowers in wave form. 4 QUILTING Since the surface of the wave would be covered in canola flowers that needed to bunch up in specific ways, artists developed a quilting pattern. 5 FOAM Just like a real wave, a ‘foam’ look was achieved using the flowers and stalks themselves to give an impression that the characters were…

Although it would be great to be able to do the entirety of this process on the iPad, there is a benefit to knowing when to admit defeat, and the truth is that cleaning up scans is much easier in ZBrush, and it’s super fast to then render these creations in KeyShot. Combing the Heges app with these two powerhouses is a great workflow.…

Texture creation is reaching a level of breathtaking artistry both in real-time and rendered CGI. The team at Substance have long been leaders in providing texture creation tools that can quickly create a material for new artists, while also having the deep toolset that is demanded by the latest AAA games and feature films. Substance Alchemist, launching in November 2019, is the latest application from Substance and it provides an exciting new methodology for texture creation and management. While on the surface Substance Alchemist does not appear to have the depth of Substance Designer or Substance Painter, that would be doing Substance Alchemist a disservice. Substance Alchemist offers a totally new methodology for creating tileable materials from either an artist’s asset base or from the excellent Substance Source material archive.…

Maya Jermy replies In order to sculpt something quickly in ZBrush, we need to understand the tools we have available that allow us to cut corners and work more efficiently. We also have to take the project idea and break it down to the main components to assess and plan the workload ahead. When it comes to making 3D flowers, we usually focus our attention on the most visible petals, leaves and stem. Petals are the centerpiece, they grab the most attention and may seem to be the hardest or time-consuming to make. Imagine having to create a composite flower, like a sunflower, and making all those petals individually. It would not be efficient or at all enjoyable. Thankfully, there is a way to create a lot of them in…

I founded LoveLove Films when I was 25 years old after being made redundant. I had been working in the industry for a few years, but the redundancy really knocked my confidence. Looking back now, it was one of the best things that could have happened to me, as it allowed me to consider my next steps. Full of passion (and naivety!), I decided to start my own business. Through a combination of way too much coffee and a rented desk, I started to build my studio. In the early days of the company, I gained clients by approaching people, networking anywhere and everywhere, working around the clock and, most importantly, I’d like to think I was friendly. Running a business wasn’t always easy. I’ve found that it can be…

Shapr3D PRICE Free (for up to two designs) | DEVELOPER Shapr3D | WEBSITE shapr3d.com Hailing from Budapest, Hungary, Shapr3D is a professional-grade CAD modelling app, based on the Siemens Parasolid geometric engine and HOOPS Exchange translation software. Designed for exclusive use with iPads that support Apple Pencil, CAD has been a tricky area to translate to the tablet format due to the lack of required precision. But this limitation has been overcome, thanks to the 9ms latency of the Apple Pencil and the performance of modern iPad hardware. Shapr3D is sensibly offered for free as an entry point to learn the ropes of the application, limited to low-resolution exports and a maximum of two designs but crucially, still giving access to all modelling tools. The Pro version requires a reasonable…

Follow the link to download your free files www.bit.ly/3DW-254 VIDEOS + MAYA FILES RECREATE A STYLISED PORTRAIT IN 3D Use the provided assets and video to follow along step-by-step with Antony Ward’s tutorial on creating a stylised 3D portrait in Maya. VIDEO + IMAGES SUBSTANCE ALCHEMIST Mike Griggs shows us what Substance Alchemist, the next-gen material authoring tool, can do. VIDEO CREATE A CLAY POT MATERIAL Use Substance Designer to make a clay pot material with a guide from Pietro Chiovaro. SIGN UP! For content direct to your inbox, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at: bit.ly/3dworldnews FOLLOW THE VIDEO www.bit.ly/3DW-254…