Innehållsförteckning för September 2021 från 3D World

#2 DEVELOPING SHOWS AND UNIQUE LOOKS The production of an animated series wouldn’t be possible without the development process. From pitching and writing scripts to developing a unique look and establishing a target audience, the development process is key to ensuring that production has a strong focus and an animated series is the best it can be. Working with internal or external talent, producers and co-producers to develop an animated project is a key part of Blue Zoo’s creative process, before and after pitching a show to platforms or networks. In this second part of 3D World’s in-depth series on Blue Zoo, we look at how the animation studio develops and pitches animated series based on existing and original IP and get acquainted with its talented look development team. We also…

hrdesign.artstation.com Alexey Druzhkov is a material and environment artist from Russia, currently working for KitBash3D as lead texture artist. NURBS MODELLING IN SUBSTANCE DESIGNER Inspired by different bottles on Pinterest, I got the idea to try and create something similar in Substance Designer, which is comparable to NURBS surfaces and Revolve in Maya. The Curve node in Substance Designer was great for creating almost any silhouette of bottles, all silhouettes were made with a curve and I also created my own bezier curve node. The material is based on a simple cylinder, but I changed its proportions to match the values of the range 0-255 HeightMap with the displacement depth. This was necessary so that I could bring together the walls of the flasks and get sharp flask caps.…

When the global pandemic hit in 2020, people around the world weren’t prepared to spend as much time in their homes. Most offices closed. Remote work became the norm, and the need for a home office or dedicated workspace quickly rose to the top of many people’s priority list. With this demand, designers need tools to address the interior and architectural needs of their clients. Enter Vectorworks design and BIM software. Vectorworks Architect is an award-winning BIM software solution that enables you to sketch, model and document any size project from concept to completion. From initial sketch to coordinating full-scale construction plans, Architect brings efficiency to workflows and data-rich insights to the full design process. Vectorworks Architect 2021 includes the customisable Smart Options Display, Quick Search capability, Excel Import/Export and…

Cloth is one of the hardest things to sculpt when you’re starting out. For something that sounds so simple it is actually a very complex subject. You have to factor in the shape of the cloth, how light hits that form and a huge amount of real-world physics when it comes to the folds and interacting with its environment. There are dedicated programs such as Marvelous Designer that actually work out all the physics for you, even when the character you are trying to clothe is animated. In recent years a few programs have added those sorts of dynamics, but sometimes you just want to be able to sculpt material without worrying about how it animates. There are now a few programs that have dedicated cloth brushes including Blender, 3DCoat…

STEP BY STEP REPLACE A SCREEN IN A RENDERED ANIMATION 01 RENDER PASS SETUP The most important way to make sure that any potential changes can be easily sorted out, without the need to rerender, is to ensure that there are suitable render passes. For this example of a tablet, which could need its screen content tweaked in the future, I have utilised four render passes: a full-colour Beauty pass; a Cryptomatte that generates colour by material; a specific pass to isolate the screen only; and a Specular layer that only renders the highlights. 02 CINEMA 4D COMPING SETUP Usually Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects play well together, and a native Cinema 4D scene can be imported without needing to be saved as a ‘Cineware’, which can create a…

markochulev.com Marko Chulev is a model supervisor with over 15 years VFX industry experience at Industrial Light & Magic. MODELLING I started from the ground up and actually built a full skeleton and muscle model, which made it easier to layer the rest of the pieces on top and achieve more realistic and accurate results. Using few anatomical photo references I built the anatomy in ZBrush using Sculptris Pro, it’s a very artistic approach and almost like an unlimited supply of clay so you can focus on the artistic part and not worry too much about the technical at an early stage. Once happy with the sculpt, I decimated it and brought it over to Maya to do a proper retopology.…

Studio Gobo, the Brightonbased team of leading interactive designers and game developers, recently announced that Xu Xiaojun will take over as Head of Studio. Founded in 2011 and a part of Keywords Studios since 2018, Studio Gobo works with AAA video games publishers the world over, partnering with companies such as Ubisoft, Disney, Tencent and Warner Bros. Starting with a team of fewer than 20 people, Gobo now has more than 100 highly talented development staff working across multiple platforms and projects. Having joined Studio Gobo soon after it was founded, Xu Xiaojun has been an integral part of growing the design department over the past 10 years, and plans to take on 20-30 new hires by the end of 2021. Best known for his role as game director on…

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To begin, I in no way consider myself a great concept artist. It’s something I do for fun, mostly to try to learn more and push my understanding of anatomy and other aspects of character/creature creation. While I’ll even admit that this project itself is in no way a perfect example of my anatomy knowledge, it was a fun exercise and I wanted to experiment with different forms to see if I could make it work. Delving into the themes of this piece, such as Lovecraft or Princess Of Mars, has been a great joy over the course of this creation process. While we all need to expand our skills in order to become better artists and succeed in our careers, we must remember that for most of us, we…

An indie studio based in Romania, Alien Pixel takes pride in delivering games with unique artistic flair, and upcoming title Unbound: Worlds Apart is no different. Portalling onto PC and Nintendo Switch on 28 July 2021, Unbound: Worlds Apart allows players to explore fantastical, hand-drawn Metroidvanian worlds. Unbound: Worlds Apart is an atmospheric puzzle-platformer where the main character, Soli, travels between different realities and worlds in order to learn more about the catastrophe that has ravaged his world. By conjuring interdimensional portals, players acquire unique abilities such as inverse gravity, time manipulation and super strength that can be used to solve puzzles, outsmart creatures and unravel mysteries. Artwork is the backbone of this player experience in Unbound: Worlds Apart, transporting gamers from the banal to the beautiful. The game’s aesthetic approach…

Another frequent flier in the question department concerns commercial models. We often get asked whether a model looks good enough for a promo render – UVs included. I’ve covered this topic before, but it won’t hurt to repeat some of the basics if you’re looking to make some extra money this summer. Should you go down this road, it’s important to always keep these two things in mind. Number one: a business, even a brokerage, is never your friend. You may be friends with people in the company, but it has the same goals as you: making money for itself and its shareholders. For you, this means that what may be good for the business may not always be good for you. Make sure to figure out what’s best for…

STEP BY STEP WORK WITH CLOTH BRUSHES IN ZBRUSH 01 SET UP A BASIC SCENE FOR THE CLOTH Start by creating a basic scene so you can add some cloth as a starting point. I used a chair and table and then added a 3D plane to act as the cloth. Turn the floor on so we can see how the cloth reacts once it hits the floor. In the Subtool menu, for the table and chairs, hit the second button along (two circles), this means it will act as a collider object. 02 TURN ON THE DYNAMIC SYSTEM On the top menu you will see a Dynamics panel. Drag it to your sidebar for ease of use. Now we can change some settings before we start. Turn on Collision…

Building a rig from scratch can be a time-consuming task. It can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on what you’re rigging and its intended platform, so it is no surprise that many companies opt to use automatic rigging tools. These can dramatically speed up the generation of all those joints, nodes and constraints, leaving more time to focus on other tasks. So, with this being the case, why do we still build rigs from scratch? Well, I’ve been working in the industry for over two decades now and there have only been a handful of occasions when a client has asked me to use their in-house tools to rig their characters. I find that for the most part, clients want unique, custom-built rigs which…

Henrik Eklundh has worked in the industry for over 15 years, and specifically with cinematics for the last ten. He has had a hand in most of the cinematic trailers coming out of Goodbye Kansas Studios, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077. Eklundh has a great passion for his work and is a firm believer in teamwork, having everyone pitch in with as little hierarchy as possible in projects to gives artists a sense of ownership over what they do. Here Eklundh breaks down a typical day working at the Stockholm-based studio. 08:00am Hopefully(!) the kids are off to school and I'm on my way to our office in Stockholm. When I first arrive at the office I’ll grab myself a coffee and check in on any renders that…

It’s about 20 years now since I started learning computer graphics, and I have done everything from creating digital environments, hardsurface modelling, look development to today, where I create 3D motion design, TV commercials and NFTs. In recent years, I also focused a bit more on the generation of fractals and growth motion. While it may seem abstract, this topic has always fascinated me and it is one of the main driving factors that led me to become not only a digital artist, but also a toolmaker. I developed the tool GrowInfinite, which allows you to create flora, animate plant growth and generate complex structures. What drove you to create the GrowInfinite tool? I had the chance to work with several plugins that could create vegetation, but as I wasn’t…

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It can be hard to wrap your head around just how far the computer graphics industry has come. Within many of our lifetimes, buying software capable of creating 3D has gone from costing thousands – an option reserved only for the wealthy few – to something anyone can do from home, even for free using open-source systems like Blender. These advances have quickly revolutionised what it means to produce a CG image. Leaf through the pages of this very magazine, in fact, and you’ll find renders created by individual hobbyists all the way to the biggest global studios. Jump from render through to feature-length animation, however, and the narrative changes. Creating an animated film is still known to require big teams and deep pockets in order to get the quality…

artstation.com/mb14 Max Bedulenko is a concept artist with over six years’ experience creating weird architectural stuff. TEXTURING My approach is quite simple, but making it can take a lot of time. I usually create textures in the ordinary way, through a mapping node or using Texture Paint mode in Blender. So by having simple textures, I proceed to overpaint in Photoshop. I can spend a lot of time manually working out all the rough edges, emphasising the light and adding more details. After a few days of work, the whole picture looks different, it looks more picturesque and solid. I like it when 3D artwork looks like a 2D piece. Overall, my main suggestion is to put some time and love into your art.…

This tutorial will introduce you to two powerful NVIDIA AI-driven tools: Virtual Background and the Body Tracker. These new features are directly integrated into Notch and open up hundreds of exciting uses for motion graphics and real-time artists. For example, the Virtual Background removal workflow eliminates the need for green screen keying, and the Body Tracker tool simply uses a 2D video of the human form to create a 3D skeleton rig that tracks a person’s movements. We’ve packaged the Virtual Background technology into a single node in Notch to make it easy for users. This node uses NVIDIA RTX-enabled GPUs to pick out human forms in videos or images and remove them from the background, outputting a greyscale mask. The mask will isolate talent from their environment in both…

STEP BY STEP CREATE COMMERCIALLY VIABLE MODELS 01 NAME YOUR STUFF! Make sure to name your models and their elements. Not doing so wastes our time, especially when we're on a deadline, if we’re required to sort through unnamed layers or groups filled with objects named ngon34, object 121423, shape 083, to find the ones you need to fix or retexture. 02 PROPER UVS Please don't tick that ‘UV mapped’ checkmark if your unwraps are full of distortion and tons of different texel densities. It's better to say the model is not unwrapped, than having bad UVs we have to spend time on doing over from scratch. Many applications now have AutoUVs which, for all their fragmentation to avoid distortion, are way better than no UVs. It’s important to remember…

There are few things as good for a 3D artist than looking at their fully rendered animation, at final 4K quality, comped and graded, at the end of a weeks-long process. The animation has been seen by the client, who loves it and is about to go to final delivery. Suddenly, however, the client realises a key piece of content is wrong and needs to be changed, and the deadline has to stay the same – which is tomorrow. This potentially disastrous situation is one that can be solved very quickly if the 3D artist has accepted the fact that no animation or VFX project is ever final until it is shown to its audience, and has planned accordingly. Situations like this can be very common when it comes to…

A recent report in The Guardian* showed that nearly two thirds of adults played video games in the UK as a way of keeping themselves entertained during the 2020 lockdown – an increase on numbers from previous years. And while young people are still most likely to get into gaming, there was a noticeable uptick across all age ranges as British adults looked for new forms of entertainment. So, with that in mind, James Burrows, technical director of Immersive Studios, takes a look at some of the Immersive team’s favourite games for the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, from golden oldies to exciting new challenges. SUPERHOT Top on the list, with universal approval, is Superhot. This fresh take on bullet time pits you against enemies made of glass – with…

“THE PROCESSING POWER ESSENTIALLY GIVES THE USER A RENDER FARM BUILT INTO THEIR WORKSTATION” Discerning audiences have high expectations when they sit with the popcorn to see the latest visual effects laden movies. Cutting-edge effects not only support the narrative but sometimes drive it, so believability and realism, as well as the wow factor all contribute hugely to the success of a shot, scene or film. This is why it is so important that creators, in all fields, from ArchViz, product design and entertainment, have dependable tools that allow them to build new worlds, showcase their products and engage with audiences in exciting new ways. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro is at the forefront of this creative support, with a multitude of technologies and abilities that allow the creative mind to…