Innehållsförteckning för December 2023 från 3D World

There can't be much doubt that the Star Wars universe is one of the biggest IPs out there. It's such an established aesthetic that finding fresh ways to portray such well-trodden worlds must be a particularly difficult task. However, that hasn't stopped Lucasfilm which, teaming up with a number of animation studios, has brought us a second volume of Star Wars: Visions, each with a distinct style yet still very much grounded in the universe that we all know so well. This issue we delve into the creation of this second season, talking to some of the top creative minds behind the different projects. Not only that but, as I'm sure you'll have noticed by now, we also have a fantastic Star Wars: Visions cover up front this issue! Of…

Feature Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 Many will argue of the post-George Lucas age that animated anthology series Star Wars: Visions, streaming on Disney+, has been the best in capturing his innovative spirit and telling stories that expand the universe populated by Jedi, Sith, droids and Wookiees. Going beyond the boundaries of Japan, Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 provides a platform to showcase the artistic and narrative talent of studios situated in South Africa, France, the UK, Ireland, India, Spain, Chile and South Korea that make use of techniques ranging from stop-motion to 2D and 3D animation. Starting things off is the painterly episode Sith from Madrid-based El Guiri Studios. “The graphic and pictorial approach of the short film makes perfect sense,” believes Carlos Salgado, the art director. “Lola uses…

MESHROOM | BLENDER | PHOTOSHOP The Pipeline • Create 3D scans with photogrammetry Pietro is a freelance 3D artist and YouTuber with more than 10 years of experience in different fields of 3D production, from animated movies to VFX and game production. He shares many of his creations on his YouTube channel. pietrochiovaro.com From VFX to video games, developers and artists are always looking for ways to achieve virtual realism, and one of the most-used methods nowadays is that of creating 3D-scanned models. The process behind this is called photogrammetry, and it's a powerful and versatile technique that has revolutionised the capture and reconstruction of the real world into the virtual one. Photogrammetry uses the principles of optics, geometry and computer science to transform two-dimensional photos into accurate and realistic 3D…

Artist Q&A SOFTWARE: ZBRUSH Your CG problems solved Glen Southern Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire based studio specialising in character and creature design. He is a Wacom ambassador, VR artist, and accredited ZBrush instructor. youtube.com/c/SouthernGFX/videos Paul Hatton After graduating with a first-class computer science degree, Paul Hatton has spent nearly two decades working within the 3D visualisation industry. Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a digital content creator with over two decades of experience creating VFX and CGI for a wide range of clients. www.creativebloke.com Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is a freelance 3D artist and YouTuber. An expert in the creation of game assets and environments, he shares many of his creations on his channel. www.pietrochiovaro.com GET IN TOUCH EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO rob.redman@futurenet.com Glen Southern replies Before we dive into ZBrush, let's…

01 ENABLE COMPOSITING By default, real-time compositing is switched off; you don't want it using up unnecessary resources if you're not using it. Enabling it is super simple. Use the dropdown arrow to access the Viewport Shading settings and enable compositing. It will now be using the Compositor node tree to generate a final image within the Viewport. Create a second View panel and set it to Compositor view, and make sure the Use Nodes checkbox is ticked. 02 COLOUR CORRECTION You should now have a Composite node and a Render Layers node. Colour correction is one of the most commonly required compositing steps and it's simple to achieve in Blender. Simply add a Color Balance node, or any of the other colour correction nodes. With the Color Balance node, you just…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: BLENDER Pietro Chiovaro replies There are several ways we can bring a higher level of detail to our work, and usually it's small details that make all the difference. To help finish your stunning scenes, whether for a stylised or architectural project, I'll show you how to create realistic clouds in Blender. The first step is all about the creation of the cloud models. At this stage it's important, but not essential, that the models actually aren't perfect. This will make it easier if you're working on a cartoonish scene, and you can also consider creating a specific shape with rounded parts and a flat base. In this project, even though it's stylised, I chose to make the clouds as realistic as possible. Once…

Aymeric Perceval and Guy Hancock break down the software used for Extrapolations Perceval explains: “The show's visual effects were developed using the usual software tools you encounter in a traditional VFX pipeline like the one we have at DNEG: Maya, Houdini, Substance 3D Painter, Mari, Photoshop, and Nuke were our base, as well as Clarisse, which was still in use at the time. Of course, each of these DCCs are enhanced with proprietary tools developed over the years to help our artists give us their best creative input. Additionally, MGFX incorporated Illustrator, After Effects and Cinema 4D into the workflow.” Hancock adds: “Throughout the series there was a huge amount of MGFX, with 484 shots involving graphics or a graphics asset. As a result, there was a vast amount of…

The Hub FLITE PROJECT INSIGHT An image of a girl on a hoverboard, teetering on a window of a luxury high-rise building deciding whether to breakaway in a semi-submerged London of 2053 and the concept of a Memory Investigator provided Framestore's VFX supervisor and creative director, Tim Webber, with the chance to create and direct a short film utilising FUSE [Framestore Unreal Shot Engine]. FLITE was shot over five days and assembled into a 14-minute sci-fi drama. It revolves around a stranger trying to assist a young female champion hoverboarder attempting to leave her oppressive manager by recounting what he saw to local law enforcement. Providing a guideline for the production methodology was the blockbuster feature film that saw Webber rewarded with an Oscar and BAFTA Award alongside Chris Lawrence, David…

“THE FREEDOM ALLOWED ME TO BE MORE FLUID WITH THE ART DIRECTION AND COMPOSITION” ARTIST Angelo Tsiflas SOFTWARE Maya, Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer, ZBrush, Affinity Designer, DaVinci Resolve, Unreal Engine “Red Hills was created during ArtStation's Grand Space Opera challenge. Starting off without a concept was a first for me. My main inspiration were TV series The Expanse for its grounded depiction of man-made elements meeting alien nature, and video game Astroneer for its vibrant art direction. It was a struggle to get going, but this freedom allowed me to become more fluid with the art direction and composition of the final scene. I also had to come up with fast and iterative texturing and material workflows, which gave my scene its unique art style.” artstation.com/tsif…

Tha Gallery CG art to inspire “I WANT TO GIVE A BIG SHOUTOUT TO THE BLENDER TEAM FOR THEIR FANTASTIC WORK!” ARTIST Dennis van Kessel SOFTWARE Blender, Photoshop “The primary aim of working on this project was to become more proficient with 3D tools, as my focus has typically been on 2D techniques for creating images. During a training task at Atomhawk, I had the opportunity to dive into Blender and develop my skills with the software. I used Blender in combination with assets taken from Quixel Megascans to construct the 3D model. Thanks to the extensive work done in Blender, I didn't have to spend as much time on the overpainting in Photoshop, which made the overall process quite efficient. I'm impressed by the fact Blender is completely free…

Celebrated for blending 2D and 3D animation techniques to create illustrated characters and worlds that inhabit the pages of a comic book, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse established a high bar for its sequels to follow. But rather than rest on its laurels, the creative teams at Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks decided to up the ante by multiplying the number of dimensional settings visited, and giving them their own unique animation style for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Transitioning from being a CG supervisor on the original to the visual effects supervisor on the second installment of a planned trilogy is Mike Lasker. “This one is definitely a different animal,” he admits. “We have taken what we did on the first Spider-Verse for Miles’ world and brought it to…

01 PREPARE TO USE BOOLEANS To use the Boolean function, it's always a good plan to work out where you want to separate the model. I often just paint it where I think the logical split needs to be. You can use the Masking tool and Floor Fill areas to give you an idea of the split lines. Notice in this image the arms come a lot lower than the body, so we need to work that bit out before committing to a Boolean. 02 CUTTING TOOL You can use any model as the initial Cutting tool. All you need to do is cover one half of the model with the Cutting tool made from basic geometry. Here I'm using a cube. Once I have the initial portion covered over, not…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: CINEMA 4D | UNREAL ENGINE Mike Griggs replies Epic Games’ Unreal Engine is gaining traction as a fully fledged content creation tool within the digital content community. While many artists may associate it just for interactive and game-related content, the enhancements to Unreal's animation workflows have made it a compelling choice for many artists, especially when combined with its blistering render speed. While Unreal is fantastic at using content, at the moment it's not great for generating bespoke content such as motion graphics animations. For this, software such as Maxon's Cinema 4D is still very much needed. The issue was how to get the files in quickly. While exchange formats such as Alembic and USD allow object interchange, they can be confusing, especially for…

The Hub INDUSTRY INSIGHT Prepare for the metaverse News and views from around the international CG community Alot of times when I talk to artists about the metaverse, I think back to when social media became more widespread. We already had radio, television, newspapers and the internet, but now we had a handful of new online channels to connect with others. And of course, companies followed along to get their products and services in front of those audiences. The metaverse isn't too different from that, which can be a little refreshing if you're confused about what it is. If you're new to it, a metaverse is an online real-time 3D space shared by multiple people. An easy way to sort them is by if they are or aren't on the blockchain. Ones…

Feature Cornelius Dämmrich Cornelius Dämmrich Cornelius is a 3D artist from Germany, who specialises in CG environments using a combination of software and tools. corneliusdammrich.com Cornelius Dammrich was born in 1989 in East Berlin and is a self-taught 3D artist currently living in Cologne, Germany. He made his first digital steps at age six when drawing Michael Denio's Captain Comic in an early version of PC Paint, and went on to study communication and graphic design. His portfolio includes several published and awarded 3D artworks, far-future concepts for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and works for clients like Atlantic Records and BMW. I understand that you got into the world of 3D as a teenager. What were those early years like for you? I liked technology and I was always the…

PILLARS Software Unreal Engine, Blender, Substance 3D Designer, Substance 3D Painter, Gaea Year made 2022 FINDING THE RIGHT ANGLE Pillars is a fully 3D scene running in Unreal Engine. It was built to resemble a traditional painting more than a game environment, so I crafted it with a single viewing angle in mind. This was a big time saver and allowed me to nail the composition and lighting. I opted to not use Unreal Engine's Lumen system here, and instead the lighting was achieved by using a directional light, fill lights to fake global illumination, and traditional fog cards. The pillars of rock and terrain in the scene were all hand-sculpted for maximum control over the shapes, and supported by scanned Heightmaps for a realistic result. I textured the rock…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: BLENDER Paul Hatton replies Traditionally, compositing has been a separate part of the visualisation workflow. Images, singles or sequences would be rendered to external files and then imported into the likes of Photoshop, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve or one of the other countless non-linear editing applications. This workflow is probably still the most widely adopted, but in recent years we've seen an upsurge in 3D modelling and rendering software offering compositing inside the application, removing the need for another piece of software. We've seen this with V-Ray and Arnold, for example. This technology, across the board, is still relatively new and the features are rather basic compared to dedicated alternatives, but there's still definitely room for what the likes of Blender offer, both for…

01 CINEMA 4D SETUP Using Cinema 4D 2023, I've created a simple scene using a Mograph Cloner with two cubes that each have a Redshift material applied. The cloner is procedurally animated by a Formula Effector, which shrinks, moves and spins the cubes. In the Project Attributes (CTRL+D), ensure that you have all of the caches ticked in the Cineware tab. This ensures Cinema 4D saves the mograph animation in the file. 02 CREATE AN UNREAL SCENE Start a new Blank Project in Unreal Engine under the ‘Film/Video & Live Events’ tab. In this tutorial, Unreal Engine 5.2 was used. Make sure to save the project somewhere logical and give it a name. With Unreal Engine, it's easy to have a wide variety of projects with the default name of ‘MyProject’, which…

Earlier in 2023, a new drama series entitled Extrapolations was released on Apple TV+, which showcased visual effects to depict a future driven by climate breakdown. Spanning the years 2037-2070, the series envisages the dystopian reality future generations might experience based on decisions being made and not made right now. Immersing and anchoring viewers in the chaos and devastation of climate change, the VFX and MGFX (motion graphics) work of DNEG takes a leading role in the storytelling, developing neverbefore-seen phenomena and technologies through impressive and ambitious, yet sometimes invisible, effects. Our conversation with DNEG's VFX supervisor Aymeric Perceval and the MGFX supervisor Guy Hancock starts with a reflection on the project's challenges; fundamentally in terms of the creative dynamic explored between realism and something more heightened. Perceval begins: “It…

Aymeric Perceval talks through the ways that research informed Extrapolations’ creative choices “It was impressive to discover episode after episode that it was all based on research. For example, the calcium carbonate release at the end of episode four. This is full-scale geoengineering. It has never been done in the past and this kind of experiment doesn't come with a Ctrl+Z option, so there were no references we could use and we had to come up with our own logic and aesthetic. “Alongside Ashley [Bernes, VFX supervisor], we looked into existing phenomena like glowing trails of SpaceX shuttles in the night sky of LA, and fallstreak holes; circular gaps that form in clouds when water freezes suddenly. And then our FX, lighting and compositing departments did a magnificent R&D job…

 MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a set of fantastic textures from and build your own asset library with these free heating-themed models from in our monthly model and texture giveaway. 14 PRO ZBRUSH WORKFLOW TIPS Master your next sculpting session with this collection of expert tricks from Oscar Juarez. GET STARTED WITH 3D SCANNING Pietro Chiovaro helps you get up and running with his veteran advice for photogrammetry. NEXT MONTH Discover the powerful VFX work of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer ON SALE 7TH NOVEMBER Subscribe today: www.bit.ly/3dworld-subs…