Innehållsförteckning för June 2022 från 3D World

COVER ARTIST Young Im Chang SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Arnold Renderer, R3DS Wrap, Mari 4.36, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Photoshop This issue we cover a lot of ground. We take a good look at the visual effects of Spider-Man: No Way Home, delving in to see how some of the incredible shots were put together. Then we take a wider look at the 3D industry as we explore how premade assets can be used to make projects more efficient, removing the need to model bespoke objects for each and every scene. The rapid progression that has pushed the quality of digital humans hasn’t abated yet, and this month we show you how to create your own in the form of three tutorials. One of an adult male, one a playful adult…

ARTIST Arystan Aubakir SOFTWARE ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag 4, Photoshop In ZBrush, I used the Dam Standard, Move, ClayBuildUp, Slash, Pinch and TrimDynamic brushes to refine the edges of the character, stylise the objects, and make the character’s shapes smooth. What I liked most about the sculpting process were the little details like the creases in the clothes, the accessories on the belt, the stylised scuffs, the dirt on the shoes… It all comes together to make a pleasing final image. ● artstation.com/h3ptapod…

ARTIST Kirill Klyat SOFTWARE Maya, Mari, ZBrush, Arnold, Houdini, XGen, Marvelous Designer, PureRef Usually I use Maya for my works, but this one I decided to create in Houdini too – so I’ve done every step in both software, in parallel. In my opinion, Maya’s XGen grooming tool is a winner for this kind of task – more flexible, a better viewport (specular), and more predictable results. I used the ACES workflow and Arnold, so render quality was great in both cases. The retopologise process in Maya is better too, but I liked the procedural generation of eyebrows/eyelashes in Houdini and the shading system – so every software has its own pros and cons. In recent versions of Arnold we have Light Mixer, and I use it a lot. I create…

“By far of all of the sequences, the Spider-Man and Doctor Strange chase was open to complete weirdness and was so fun,” states VFX supervisor Kelly Port. “It’s a new reality. A Mirror Dimension. We played with the idea of what we’ve seen before in Doctor Strange which is the rotating buildings. Then we talked about going into a different world like the Grand Canyon, because Doctor Strange is trying to get this box from Spider-Man and keeps throwing obstacles in the way, but Spider-Man keeps adapting to the environment because he’s so smart. That was probably the most exploratory and when we ran into Spider-Verse issues. You’re always trying to keep it something unique but still have it familiar.”…

AUTHOR Glen Southern Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He has been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 20 years. www.southerngfxcreativecourses.com There are so many ways that you can start a creature design in 3D, and in recent years we’ve even had the ability to create using an iPad or in VR. The granddaddy of digital sculpting is ZBrush, having started way back in the late 1990s, and it’s still the best option out there if you want to sculpt extremely high-polycount creatures. Quite recently, ZBrush (and Pixologic, who create the program) were bought by Maxon who are most famous for creating and developing Cinema 4D. Anyone who has dabbled with motion graphics will be familiar with C4D – it’s…

Glen Southern replies Hair, beards and fur have always been a hot ticket item for CG artists. Programs like Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender and 3ds Max have all featured the ability to add hair either natively or via a plugin for quite some time now. A lot of people seem to forget that ZBrush has a feature called FiberMesh that enables you to make really realistic hair and therefore beards. You can’t do any animation with the hair once you have made it (at least not inside ZBrush), but you can export it to other programs as geometry and then even convert that geometry to curves to guide hairs. The module for creating hair is found in the Geometry panel. The process is quite simple but has lots of parameters…

NAME Victor Wong JOB TITLE Visual effects supervisor, cross-media artist, NFT artist STUDIO vfxNova digital productions Ltd LOCATION Hong Kong ABOUT Victor’s artistic creations include visual effects, painting, digital animation, sculpture and public installations. WEB www.vfxnova.com I grew up in a family that ran a shop selling traditional papercraft work in Hong Kong and acquired a DIY skill set. After obtaining an engineering degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, I trained to find solutions by research and analysis. Then I set up my own VFX company in the early 90s and began developing a cultural vision to pioneer emerging digital creative media and explore new artistic potential for film. Today, I’m known for intertwining technology and beauty for both my VFX and my new media art. 08:30am I wake…

ARTIST Ornella Sessa SOFTWARE ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop This was a very difficult challenge, but I was able to get through it thanks to the rigorous mentorship of my artistic director Florent Desailly, who created and provided the concept that directly led my sculpt. He helped me a lot and gave me very good advice while working on this task. I did most of my sculpting work in ZBrush, then made my render shots in KeyShot, and finally enhanced them in Photoshop. The most rewarding part for me is to have worked on my character’s skin with alphas, a skin damaged with scars and weathered with time. For me, when you create an imaginary creature it’s important to use references from a real animal to make it feel grounded. ● artstation.com/ornella…

If I was to envisage a bright future for pre-made content, then it would be to see a rise in assets that can be customised once they’ve been purchased and placed in your scene. Imagine a plant’s shape that can be defined by its age or a bowl of fruit that is generated through user input. This idea is already at work with software like the FloorGenerator by CG-Source. Through an interface, users can customise the size, shape and intricacies of individual floor boards. Imagine the same but with any pre-made asset that you download. One of the immediate benefits is that you would see a much greater degree of variety across people’s work. Even if a number of different artists download the same model, they may customise it in…

AUTHOR Houra Ershad I'm a 3D character artist with a background in industrial design. I used to work as a 3D modeller for companies involved with cement factory pipelines, but that wasn't what I wished for. Being introduced to digital sculpting enabled me to pursue a career which brings together something from all I love to do. www.artstation.com/houra This project was my third complete character, and my second in which I focused on texture projection for skin and creating realistic eyes. In the first project, I did all textures hand painted/sculpted and the character had closed eyes, so I didn’t need to learn about how to apply skin textures in Mari or to create eyes in 3D. My second project challenged me in so many ways, learning how to model…

Pietro Chiovaro replies WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3D-world-digitalhumans I will show you an easy and powerful way to create a parquet material using Substance Designer. This material is only composed of a few elements, but the end result can be incredible. For this type of substance, I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/Roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic output since it is not necessary for this material. Now we can start to add the nodes necessary for this material, so from the Substance Designer library we need: the Directional Noise, and the Brick Generator pattern (these two are the main elements of the texture), the Height to Normal World Units filter (required for the creation of the normal map – alternatively you can use the Normal filter), two Levels filters, and…

How did you get started in CG and VFX? After graduating from college, I started a computer graphics workshop in Hong Kong with a Mac II doing photo-retouching. In 1991 I purchased a 4D35 Silicon Graphics Computer Workstation installed with SOFTIMAGE 3D and created Hong Kong’s first 30-second full CGI TV commercial. Since then, I’ve created animation, CG or VFX work for over 1,000 TV commercials and 120 feature films! Now I’ve expanded into the art world, but I still apply many of the techniques I honed for VFX, ranging from LED motion sculptures to AI-influenced robot painting. Your work spans paintings, sculptures, techart, animation, film and AI. How does this inspire your VFX work? Do you think digital artists should explore all forms of art? “VFX is art”. I’ve…

Back in 2016, Zero Density was a tight-knit team with a very big idea. There were less than ten people working on the company’s NAB booth that year, but they wanted to demo something that had never been done before. Their aim was to show that node-based compositing could work in real time, all with just two things: software and a computer. “It’s important to understand that at the time, game engines were starting to render more photorealistic graphics than broadcast engines, which were all based on code built back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s,” reveals VP of R&D at Zero Density, Kuban Altan. “Everyone in the industry was asking the same question: how could my $50,000 broadcast render engine provide worse graphics and photorealism than a $500 PlayStation?”…

PRICE Free | COMPANY Chaos | WEBSITE cosmos.chaos.com In recent years there has been an increasing trend in the 3D industry to utilise and take full advantage of off-the-shelf assets, with developers providing new tools that make it easier than ever to download and insert assets into your scenes. One of those examples is the Chaos Cosmos asset library. In essence, Cosmos is an easy-to-use collection of smart content that spans a variety of categories including models, materials and HDRI skies. It’s worth noting that all of these assets will only work in conjunction with V-Ray, so you won’t be able to make use of this content collection if you use a different rendering package. In that regard, this is a way for Chaos Group to tie you in even…

ARTIST Vahid Ahmadi SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Substance Painter, XGen, Arnold This work was fun to do, and for more accurate lighting results I used CAVE Academy 360 lighting tools, which features a beauty dish, softboxes and so on, helping you to gain a greater understanding of physical lighting tools. For skin pores I used the ZBrush displacement map for general wrinkles of the face, and then I used Mari to make two displacement maps – one with 16K HD 3D Scan Store and the other with 16K HD XYZ – and controlled them using masks and Plus Minus nodes in Maya. When we have three displacement maps connected together, values become a little different compared to what we always use, so it took me a couple of days to understand…

ARTIST Jonathan M. Krauss SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Arnold, XGen The idea for this project came to mind when I saw a friend’s picture in Panama. I could imagine myself there, so I decided to recreate a similar environment digitally to bring the audience the same feeling. Using her photo as a starting point, I used perspective match in 3ds Max to give me the reference needed for modelling the main elements in the scene. I also used Megascans from Quixel to add high-resolution textures and decals to the models. The HDRI works well in exterior lighting, so I used it to help me add subtle light variations. ● theartofjk.com…

When you’re downloading 3D assets, you will need to make sure you’re selecting good-quality meshes that are going to slot straight into your scene and not cause you any problems. You don’t want your scene crashing, for example, because you’ve got meshes with errors in. TurboSquid have a really handy way of ensuring that the models you download have passed certain requirements. They call it ‘CheckMate Pro’, but this list of requirements can be applied to any 3D model you download. To start with, you’ll want models that are created to scale. There’s no use downloading a model only to find that it’s either modelled far too small or way too big; you want it to slot in straight away. It also helps if the model itself is located at…

This time around, the mechanical tentacles for Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) are digital rather than puppeteered as they were in Spider-Man 2. “It has to be that character as if he had been pulled out of that universe and plopped into this,” remarks VFX supervisor Scott Edelstein. “Even though I couldn’t be on set because of COVID-19 protocols, it was fun to watch Alfred Molina get back into the role and assume that personality. We had to have the tentacles be able to scale in length, but you don’t want that to happen during a shot. From the beginning of the shot, you would set the length of the tentacle and that’s how it would be.” It was fun to give Electro a different look from The Amazing Spider-Man 2…

AUTHOR Young Im Chang I am a senior 3D character artist working for the game industry in Korea for over 14 years. I enjoy creating portraits and characters in 3D. bluehour.artstation.com I often receive emails from students complaining about their difficulties when designing a character. They are tired of the continuous modifications and the disparity between what they expect and the actual result. I also sympathise with their pain as a person who struggles alone to complete their work. So what is the most important thing when it comes to creating a realistic character? Sculpting, texturing, hair grooming, lighting and rendering – every single element is essential. If we neglect just one of them, our creation loses its life, exposing the mistakes. Sometimes, the little things treated as insignificant become…

AUTHOR Nayoon Levitin With a background in computer science, fine art and graphic design, I am currently in my final term as a student at Think Tank Online. Learning a new medium is challenging, and I enjoy sharing my journey in order to help other artists achieve success. artstation.com/nayoon This image was inspired by Lidia Vives’ work ‘Mad Mouse’. You can check it out, along with her many other creative photographs, on her website (lidiavives.com/pop/mad-mouse). The main focus of this project is to study anatomy and facial expression, and be able to sculpt details as realistic as possible. We will cover how to capture a photograph as a realistic, expressive and detailed 3D likeness, from initial base mesh to final render. Let’s get started! DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the…

dot big bang is an online multiplayer gaming platform looking to take game development by storm. Created by California-based company ControlZee, the project is striving to open up game development to anyone that has access to a browser and an internet connection, for free – effectively democratising the development of video games. It started in 2016 as a hobby project that veteran gamedev Robert Anderberg and artist Jon Stockwell worked on in their spare time. Now, just six years later, the company has 19 employees, has been through several successful rounds of funding, and has 1.1M plays on the Hub World welcome area, which launched in October 2021. Robert Anderberg, CEO of ControlZee, answers our questions. What does “the democratisation of game development” mean? And why is it important? In…

The Mac Studio is Apple’s latest workstation aimed at creative professionals. Looking a bit like a Mac mini that’s hit the gym, the Mac Studio is an impressively compact PC that comes with a huge amount of power. Remember the hugely powerful M1 Max that powered the MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch? Well, the Mac Studio comes with one as well, offering you the kind of performance that’ll make light work of even the most intense projects. Still not enough power? Well, the Mac Studio can also be configured to come with the brand-new M1 Ultra chip. This is essentially two M1 Max chips connected together via a low latency, high bandwidth connector, turning them into one large M1 Ultra chip, which offers double the cores, memory and bandwidth…

ISSUE 285 MAY 2022 UNREAL LIGHTING ● Craft dynamic characters with Unreal Engine 5 ● Explore an exciting, open-world Matrix experience ● Model a mech Part 2 – how to rig a multi-jointed robot leg ● Expert guide to building a fantasy world ● VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie talks working with Robert Zemeckis ● Downloads Free models and textures, files and more! ISSUE 284 APRIL 2022 CREATE A RENDER IN LOW-POLY ● Transform a 2D sketch into a low-poly 3D render ● Beginner’s guide to kitbashing, with advice from the experts ● Behind the scenes on Pixar’s Automaton short ● Model a mech in Part 1 of a new tutorial series ● Downloads Free models and textures, files and more! ISSUE 283 MARCH 2022 NEW YEAR, NEW SKILLS ● Grow…