Innehållsförteckning för March 2024 från 3D World

ANDROID CHARLIE Software ZBrush, Maya, Marmoset Toolbag, Substance 3D Painter Year made 2023 HAND-PAINTED TEXTURES I started from a simple sketch, but needed an interesting idea for the ArtStation Neo Tokyo: Exponential Reality community challenge. Although it was quite a leap of faith, I went for an unconventional design of a Japanese deity-inspired technology. The piece was modelled with ZBrush and Maya, and used Marmoset Toolbag for baking and rendering, and Substance 3D Painter for texturing work. The trickiest challenge was the texturing. Painting directly onto Normal maps, I’ve figured out how to achieve a hand-painted look while still having the surfaces react to the light and shadow like a traditional PBR texture, without the need for any custom shaders. Achieving a consistent aesthetic with my texturing technique involves a…

01 UV EDITING WORKSPACE The first thing to do is get into the correct workspace. You can set up specific panels if you like, but I find it easiest to just pick the UV Editing workspace from Blender’s top bar. When in this workspace you’ll see your main view split into two panels, one with the 3D workspace and the other with the UV Editing workspace. 02 SELECT AN OBJECT AND UNWRAP Go into Edit mode and press ‘A’ to select all, which will select all the vertices in the mesh, then press ‘U’ and select Unwrap. This will use the default settings to unwrap your mesh into the UV space. It won’t be the most efficient packing of UV islands we can get, but that will be sorted out in the…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: BLENDER Pietro Chiovaro replies There are several methods you can use to make stylised wood materials, ranging from using actual photographs edited for a cartoonish appearance in programs like Photoshop, to procedural methods that allow you to create materials from scratch in a more free and creative manner. In this tutorial, we’ll look at a quick and simple way to procedurally create these materials in little more than five minutes with Blender. In this particular scene, I used the material for the barrels and other props. This specific render is a blend of stylised and photorealistic elements, and the use of the wood was essential to harmonise the different styles of the characters with the realistic environment. The first step is to create…

Reviews GROUP TEST We explore the latest software and hardware tools to see if they are worth your time or money Over the years, the number of renderers available on the market has steadily grown. This makes the process of choosing the right one more complex than you might imagine. There’s been an increasing demand for GPU renderers to power real-time interactive experiences, and many now support both CPU and GPU rendering. Both approaches have their pros and cons. CPUs are slower to render but can handle a lot of data, whereas GPUs are quicker but can’t handle as much data. The next question is whether you want it to be biased or unbiased. Biased renderers focus on delivering top results at the cost of accuracy, while unbiased focuses on accuracy…

Reviews MacBook Pro M3 HARDWARE REVIEW PRICE From £2,100/$2,000 COMPANY Apple WEBSITE apple.com AUTHOR PROFILE Rob Redman Rob is Editor of 3D World and also works as a creative director, producing 3D animations and VFX. When not at his desk, he can usually be found painting miniatures. robredman.co.uk FEATURES Up to 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU and 128 GB RAM 120hz XDA display Four USB-C ports Audio output socket + PROS Excellent build quality Great performance Gorgeous display - CONS Expensive Lack of user upgrades Apple has had a run of solid laptop releases over the past few years. Even the short-lived Touch Bar didn’t dent the reputation for performance blended with aesthetics, and each generation of Apple silicon seems to live up to the promise. The MacBook Pro M3 makes…

The Gallery “APART FROM THE DESIGN, THE DYNAMIC POSES THE SYMBIOTES ARE TYPICALLY DRAWN IN ARE INSPIRING TO ME” “I've always loved the symbiotes’ depiction in Marvel’s comics. Apart from the design itself, the dynamic poses the characters are typically drawn in are inspiring to me. One of the many challenges in this piece was to try and recreate this dynamism with a 3D asset. This required a lot of back and forth between ZBrush and Maya to find the right pose and proportions. I used a lot of references to know how to emphasise the anatomy. This was rendered in Arnold with a super short focal length to increase the perspective effect. The black veins were painted onto the body and then masked by intensity before being extracted.” artstation.com/antoineverneycarron…

The Gallery CG art to inspire “ This artwork was commissioned by an old friend of mine who wanted me to blend my interest for science fiction and sailboats. I started on paper, sketching out many ideas before transitioning to VR in Gravity Sketch, blocking out the main shapes while benefitting from the 1:1 scale to emphasise boldness over details. Once done, I switched to Blender and used a fantastic free model of an Irwin 38 boat, provided by the BoatUS Foundation through Sketchfab, for the hull. I modified this to my needs, and then built the engines, sails and masts. As a concept artist, my mind is always set on preserving the energy from my initial sketch, and doing so in a time-sensitive manner. The final image includes a matte painting…

Handmade from clay, Harold Halibut has taken nearly a decade to make and is one of 2024’s most anticipated indie games. While AAA devs push for graphical supremacy using Unreal Engine 5, the German indie studio Slow Bros. has turned to stop-motion animation and an artist-first workflow that celebrates the creative process as much as it strives to find a new way to deliver interaction. Harold Halibut, scheduled for its release in the coming months, features handmade clay poseable puppets and detailed model sets, which are then scanned and digitised into Unity, with some clever use of mocap suits from Xsens to bring the scenes to life. This is a modern and inventive merging of traditional animation with leading edge game technology, and one that celebrates the flaws and quirks…

BLENDER | CHARACTER CREATOR | AFFINITY PHOTO The Pipeline Make atmospheric concept art shots The shot I’m going to show you in this tutorial is part of a series from my personal concept art project Niko. It’s from the final scene, where we finish the story of an alien child who has been rescued by the local sheriff. With this image, it was vital to convey the end of the story and all the emotional charge that had built up. I thought nothing would be better than to go with all hell breaking loose in the finale, so I chose to have fire as the main motif in the last scene. To make the fire as believable as possible, I considered all the layers and the layering of the scene through…

SOFTWARE: CLEO | IPAD (M1 AND ABOVE ONLY) Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved Glen Southern replies The first caveat to this answer is that it depends what type of rendering you mean. To start off, let’s take it back to basics and explain what rendering is in this context. Imagine you’re creating a 3D model of a house. You build a simple digital model of the house called a wireframe, made of points and edges, that illustrates the locations of the windows, doors and walls. The next step is to add colour and textures, just like when painting and furnishing a room. The cool part is when you arrange shadows and lighting so that the house appears to be illuminated from various directions by different light sources. At last, the…

The Hub PROJECT INSIGHT News and views from around the international CG community In 2017, the film Loving Vincent was released to much acclaim for its unique oil-painted animation style, enjoying critical and commercial applause. Fresh from their success, husband and wife co-directors Hugh and DK Welchman embarked on a follow-up film created using the same experimental format, once again fusing live-action footage with 2D animation and CGI for The Peasants. Adapted from Władysław Reymont’s original Nobel Prize-winning novel, the film follows the travails of a young woman named Jagna set against the backdrop of tradition and patriarchy in 19th-century Poland. It’s intense and runs the spectrum of emotions from passion, including a memorably charged dancing scene, through to conflict, all told on-screen with stunning oil-painted visuals. To craft The Peasants,…

Enormous swirling vortex on your driving test? It’s okay, you’re with The AA. First car hit by an exploding meteorite on your 17th birthday? It’s okay, you’re with The AA. Husband broken down while you’re on a date with your toy boy? Not okay. But at least he’s with The AA. The motoring company’s 2023 campaign was comedy gold, with punchlines delivered through witty visual effects from the team at London studio Absolute. Comprising one 60-second hero film and three 30-second films, the campaign was devised by agency The Gate and directed by Si&Ad through Academy Films. As the advert develops, the scenarios sidestepped by the cast, all thanks to them being AA members, become more and more outlandish. Up first, is a father who makes an accidental diesel fill-up…

PRICE £25/$30 per month COMPANY Chaos WEBSITE corona-renderer.com Chaos Corona has been one of the most proactive renderers of recent years with Corona 11 coming out five months after version 10 hit the market. That’s one short development cycle. In reality, it’s difficult to compare this activity with other rendering companies because they all have different opinions on what should constitute a full version upgrade compared to an iterative update. V-Ray will release several new updates between each major revision. As you’d imagine, version 11 of Corona is therefore far from a significant upgrade, with only a couple of new features aside from a range of improvements. In my opinion, this doesn’t warrant a move from 10 to 11, but could instead have been part of an iterative update. The…

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 medieval hall-themed models from in our monthly model and texture giveaway. LEVEL UP VIDEO GAME ASSETS Learn how you can use Blender to create highly detailed, photorealistic assets for video games. SCULPT A CHARACTER WITH BITE Discover how to make and model stunning creatures with ZBrush, Maya and Substance. NEXT MONTH Go behind the scenes on the visual effects of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. ON SALE 27TH FEBRUARY Subscribe today: www.bit.ly/3dworld-subs…

The Gallery CG art to inspire “These images were commissioned for the IMPERIUM5 role-playing book that will be released in France in March. I used Blender for the blockout and sculpt, Substance 3D Painter for textures and Photoshop for the final overpaint. I always start off with a quick blockout in Blender, which I refine in Photoshop. Then I’ll model in Blender using add-ons like Hard Ops, Cablerator and Fluent Materializer for any small textures. For the characters, it's a mixture of base meshes with sculpting and maybe some kitbashing, Mixamo for the poses and Simply Cloth for the clothes, then photobashing for the final touches.” artstation.com/elnionio ARTIST Nicolas Souclier SOFTWARE Substance 3D Painter, Blender, Photoshop…

The Pipeline Sculpt a reptilian creature with bite ZBRUSH | MAYA | SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER | MARMOSET TOOLBAG Meet Crocodylus! He’s a creation of mine from the Mesozoic Era, and is inspired by the crocodiles found in the East Kalimantan province of my home country, Indonesia. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how I used a suite of 3D software to bring him to life. The 3D character pipeline involves several stages, each with its own set of tools and techniques. One of the most popular used for the sculpting phase is ZBrush, which formed the basis for Crocodylus. Its feature set includes digital sculpting tools that simulate the behaviour of clay, allowing artists to sculpt intricate little touches, add textures, and create detailed models. It offers various…

The Pipeline Animate a character with mocap RADICAL LIVE | UNREAL ENGINE Live link motion capture is becoming increasingly popular technology within virtual production workflows. The requirement for high-end and expensive hardware and software is almost non-existent with free or inexpensive options centre stage. The applications for this tech are widespread including film, TV, archviz, advertising and videos for education. Some cases will still need higher-end solutions, but for a lot of the industry these emerging tools will begin to take centre stage. Projects that could have benefited from some form of custom animation but didn’t have the budget will now find their options wide open. One example of this tech is Wonder Studio, an AI tool that transfers motion-capture data onto a CG character for use in a live-action…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: BLENDER Paul Hatton replies Blender 3.6 received upgraded and improved functionality when it comes to packing UVs. The new workflow and tools enable a much tighter packing and significantly more efficient use of the UV space itself. This is vitally important as efficiently using the UV space will result in higherresolution textures compared to inefficient alternatives. This is referred to as texel density and is a vital part of UV mapping. The new engine is great for large meshes specifically, and improves support for nonsquare materials. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, it’s helpful to have a good understanding of what UV mapping is. UV mapping is the process of specifying a given texture space so that it can…

Reviews Rendering software PRICE £80/$100 per month COMPANY Luxion WEBSITE keyshot.com + PROS Easy to learn and use Improved colour workflow 3D Paint texture painting - CONS Expensive option Very fast CPU required KeyShot 2023 is one of the easiest renderers for users to get to grips with. It prides itself in offering an intuitive interface that will guide you through the process of adding materials and lighting to your 3D models. Rather than acting as a plugin for a host program, KeyShot live syncs your model from your DCC into its own application. That means any changes you make to a model will be replicated straight away in KeyShot. Once the live sync has been successfully set up, artists can then add lights and materials using the easy drag-and-drop…

Reviews Rendering software PRICE £230/$295 COMPANY Nvidia WEBSITE nvidia.com + PROS Backed by Nvidia Physically based Includes great denoising - CONS Needs top-class RTX cards Not as established as alternatives REQUIRED SPECS OS: Windows 64-bit Processor: 64-bit Intel/ AMD multi-core processor Min memory: 16 GB RAM, recommended 32 GB RAM GPU: NVIDIA RTX video cards GPU memory: 4GB VRAM A mong the less well established renderers on the scene is Iray from Nvidia. By leveraging the power of Nvidia OptiX, CUDA tech, AI denoising and Material Definition Language (MDL), it’s plenty capable of generating top photorealistic renders, and at speed too. The more recent version of Iray includes RTX support that adds ray-tracing acceleration hardware support through RT cores. This is vitally important for any application making use of ray-tracing…