Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från 3D World

The last time we put together a 3D World custom workstation build was over a decade ago. Even then we asked ourselves questions: is building your own workstation worth it? Does it still save money? Do better components last longer than pre-built computers? Spoiler alert: the answer to all those is yes! While many creators today are working on small Macs or laptops, our build embraces the classic power workstation; a digital professional’s dream machine, albeit coming in at an affordable price. We set a budget of £4,000 (or $3,600), which is the rough cost of a stock Mac Studio M2 Ultra (24-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 64GB memory, 1TB SSD) that we’ll use as our yardstick for comparison. As you’ll see, our build will easily match or beat all those…

1. Start with the motherboard In a way, this is just like assembling flat-pack furniture. Start off by laying everything out on a secure table, and be careful to avoid static electricity that could damage any parts. When building a PC, I generally like to populate the motherboard before installing it into the case. Open the CPU package, and make sure that you only hold the CPU by the edges. Place the chip in its AM5 socket on the motherboard, matching the orientation triangles on the chip and socket (top-left), then close the spring clamp (01a). Next, the two RAM sticks in our kit are inserted into the memory slots on the motherboard, leaving two more slots open for expansion. Press firmly to install them, but not so hard that…

The Pipeline Create an asset for AAA games UNREAL ENGINE | 3DS MAX | ZBRUSH MARMOSET TOOLBAG | SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER For this workshop, I’m going to guide you through creating a high-quality asset for a video game or movie – in this case a military-style walkietalkie. We’ll cover the process of creating the high-poly mesh, using ZBrush to add fold details, the best practices for creating a low-poly mesh, getting the most out of your UVs, tips and tricks for getting high-quality bakes, and achieving photorealism in your textures. At the end of this tutorial you should have a few extra workflow hacks on your belt, allowing you to create highfidelity assets for your portfolio. 01 CHECK YOUR METRICS The first part of creating any asset is blocking out your…

CHOOSING THE SUBJECT MATTER My main reference for this piece is one of the best-known figures in Brazil’s history. In the north-east of the country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a phenomenon known as Cangaço. This region of Brazil is known for being a particularly tough place to live. Cangaço was looked on as “social banditry” against the government of the time, leading to both men and women becoming nomadic, and roaming the arid landscapes in search of food, money, and revenge against the wealthier of the region’s society. CRAFTING A CENTREPIECE The cangaceiro’s hat is one of most recognisable elements in their outfit, usually very well ornamented. On my design, I tried to bring the same iconography to that element. My intention was to…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: CINEMA 4D Mike Griggs replies For those new to 3D, there are so many things to learn, but one of the most complex can be animation. Even if an artist has a background in 2D animation, working in 3D literally adds another dimension. Many professional artists learn on the job and, therefore, are looking for legitimate shortcuts to meet their client’s needs, where 3D applications like Cinema 4D (C4D) from Maxon come into their own. C4D has various animation tools, from a simple and intuitive keyframe system to a powerful, internationally renowned motion graphics system, plus a full character animation suite that can create complex animation rigs for a wide range of creatures, including humans. Sometimes, too many options can get in the…

The Hub TECHNOLOGY INSIGHT The Hub Leia Inc. News and views from around the international CG community 3D art is rapidly evolving. Advancing technology means there are always new levels of detail to strive for, more powerful tools to learn, and deeper layers of immersion to reach. But in this age of increasingly mind-blowing CG visuals, surprisingly few people ask why traditional display technology hasn’t been upgraded to show us real 3D. As artists, we’ve all been there. We want to craft and contemplate our work up close, in more depth and detail, in a way that slides effortlessly into our workflow. We’re designing in 3D, so shouldn’t we be able to see our work in it too? Ten years ago, that meant using stereoscopic glasses. Today there’s LeiaSR, an emerging display…

PROJECT INSIGHT The Hub The Faceless Lady The world of virtual reality (VR) is seriously heating up. Recent years have seen the release of feature-rich VR headsets such as the HTC VIVE Pro 2, Apple Vision Pro and, of course, the Meta Quest 3. The challenge, especially for Apple and Meta, is creating enough native content for these headsets to make them truly worth buying. Meta has taken a big leap forward by creating The Faceless Lady, its first liveaction VR television series. Available in Meta Horizon Worlds, the show follows six contestants who have converged on an old Irish castle to compete in a series of games. In their pursuit of the prize of inheriting the estate, they find themselves trapped by a vengeful ghost and in danger of becoming…

The Gallery CG art to inspire BASED ON THE CONCEPT BY YINTION J – JIANG GEPING (artstation.com/yintion) "I've always created characters for medieval fantasy concepts, so this character, which combines modern military clothing and technology, was quite a challenge for me. For the mechanical parts, I first sketched in ZBrush using DynaMesh, referring to Keos Masons' hard surface techniques. I then separated each part, retopologised them, and refined the details. The modern military-style clothing needed realistic folds, so it was created using Marvelous Designer. The most enjoyable part of this project was the texturing. I had fun working on it because there were many objects with various decals engraved. As an additional Easter egg, I also wrote the names of my favourite singers and songs on the wings. Lastly, I'd…

Feature Build a power PC on a budget CPU AMD has long been the darling of custom builders. While the Threadripper line entices, it was way out of our budget. Instead we chose the Ryzen 9 7900X, which benchmarks closely to the Mac Studio’s performance. Costing under £400 ($400), AMD describes the 7900X as a creator’s CPU as it boasts 12 cores, 24 threads, a base clock speed of 4.7GHz, and a boost clock of up to 5.6GHz. Its single-core benchmarks even beat its big brother, the 7950X. GPU We looked at two cards here: one from AMD and one from Nvidia. Both are designed for graphics and 3D professionals and are in the £480-580 ($500-600) range, but the similarities end there. Asus’ ProArt incarnation of Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti…

Feature Hyper Light Breaker Anyone who played Hyper Light Drifter fell in love with its colourful, impressionistic world rendered in tiny pixels. Our minds filled in the gaps and embellished every angular, geometric ruin and colour-washed 8-bit forest. With follow-up Hyper Light Breaker set in a 3D open world, developer Heart Machine is colouring inside the lines for us. Built in Unreal Engine, Breaker is a co-op roguelite adventure set within the Hyper Light universe that challenges players to hack and slash their way across its vibrant procedurally generated world. The myriad biomes and complex labyrinths that became so familiar to Drifter fans are now rendered in greater detail, with the artistic challenge being to match players’ imaginations. Translating the pixel art characters of the Hyper Light world into 3D,…

"INTEREST SHOULD BE YOUR PRIORITY. BOLD DECISIONS ARE USUALLY THE BEST ONES" MOWBY - CONCEPT SCULPT Software ZBrush, Blender Year made 2024 FOCUS ON INTERESTING CONCEPTS Mowby is a concept sculpt based on a rough whale study that I did. I try to keep the process simple when concepting so I don’t waste time, relying on Sculptris Pro and utilising a combination of the SnakeHook brush and custom brushes to quickly define the areas of interest. By adding an alpha to the SnakeHook brush, you can quickly create some interesting shapes and spikes for your model. For the scales, I copied the whale’s body, deflated it, and then pulled out shapes with clay brushes. Once you have something modelled, don’t shy away from duplicating it and reusing it in a…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: BLENDER Pietro Chiovaro replies This issue’s Q&A is a real sweet treat, as I’m going to show you how to prepare a realistic jelly material in Blender – you’ll have to provide the strawberries and cream yourself though! This is a relatively straightforward procedural recipe and can be done in three quick minutes. Before we get into this, make sure the render engine in Blender is set to Cycles in order to get more realistic lighting compared to EEVEE. With that done, begin by adding a circle and editing the vertices to make it a jelly shape. Now we want to apply a new material to the model. Give it a suitable name -following a methodology for material names is always a great…

Reviews KIRI Engine 3.5 SOFTWARE REVIEW PRICE Free Basic version / £12/$15 Pro subscription COMPANY KIRI Innovations WEBSITE kiriengine.app AUTHOR PROFILE + PROS Forward-thinking company Android and iOS apps Export to Unity and Unreal - CONS Processing can be slow at times Stronger alternatives SCANNING SHINY SURFACES By adopting Gaussian splatting, KIRI Engine is one step closer to being able to better support photos that include reflective and shiny surfaces. This method is far superior to alternatives when it comes to such tricky surfaces. This hasn’t quite been cracked by KIRI, but we don’t seem too far away from being able to not have to worry about the materials of our scanned objects. KIRI Engine has only been around since 2022, but in that time it has emerged as one…

Let’s face it, there's an ageold Hollywood adage that animals and children are the hardest to direct. And for a medium where every nuance counts in suspending the disbelief of the audience members, then why not use a computer where every pixel can be precisely controlled? That being said, nothing is achieved for free as everything has to be created from scratch, and fur and feathers remain tough simulations to achieve, especially when extra interactive environmental elements like light, dirt and water have to be added – no matter how good Houdini gets. The cost of achieving such excellence can be a double-edged sword. That was experienced by VFX company Rhythm & Hues, which won an Oscar for Life of Pi just after filing for bankruptcy, and resulted in an…

The Gallery CG art to inspire "This environment piece was created in Unreal Engine 5 and is fan art for the popular video game franchise Halo, which has been one of my favourite franchises going back to when I was younger. I created all the assets from scratch myself aside from the character models, which I found on 3D asset websites. I made the hard surface assets in Blender using various plugins such as BoxCutter and anything organic was done in ZBrush and SpeedTree. When creating any environment art, spend lots of time on the blockout and lighting stages, it’s the difference between your art turning out great or falling flat." artstation.com/jnaughton98 ARTIST James Naughton SOFTWARE Unreal Engine, Blender, ZBrush, SpeedTree, Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer, Photoshop…

The Gallery CG art to inspire "STUDYING HOW TO IMPROVE ITS DETAILS WAS THE MOST ENGAGING PART" BASED ON A CONCEPT BY MAREK KAPLITA (bit.ly/46RxNCE) "I was inspired to create this work after playing Dying Light 2 Stay Human and seeing a post by Marek Kaplita on ArtStation, which led me to make my own version of a crossbow. Studying the crossbow and understanding how it works and how to improve its details was the most engaging part. The main challenge was to maintain the original design while adding something new. After making the model in Blender, I moved on to the equally fascinating process of creating high-poly details and sculpting. The Dying Light setting implies an apocalypse, so depicting material wear and detail interaction was crucial. Working on this…

Our budget goes further today than it did 10 years ago. This allowed us to include some great creative extras without going over the spend. We were able to include the Wacom One pen tablet for £285 ($290) and the DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor at £245 ($295). Wacom One 12-inch This is sort of like the Wacom Cintiq that you can afford. The excellent full-colour tablet is among the best in its category. DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor Video content creators need to work fast. The Speed Editor gives you a customised keyboard for hotkeying your way through edits. It also comes with the Studio version of DaVinci Resolve, so essentially pays for itself. CSS Audio DIY monitor speakers If you’re building your own computer, why not build a pair of…

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills The character art style of Hyper Light Breaker combines the retro vibes of eastern and western 2D cel animation. It’s inspired by 80s and 90s properties like Studio Ghibli films, Evangelion, Masters of the Universe and more. In this series of tips, I’ll show you how the anime-esque angular shapes in concepts and models allow the toon-shaded characters to pop with minimal detail. Similar to 2D animation, shape, line and silhouette are most important here. I feel this is a really fun challenge in 3D. It requires an artist to focus on a less is more approach. I’ve worked on a range of 3D character styles over the years from realistic humans to toony creations, and began my…

SOFTWARE: KEYSHOT Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved Paul Hatton replies One of the best things about KeyShot is its ability to create and render realistic materials. When paired with beautiful lighting, product visualisations take on a whole new level of believability. When it comes to materials, KeyShot isn’t quite as advanced as some other rendering packages, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still able to create some killer materials. KeyShot offers over 850 premade real-world materials, all of which can be easily adjusted to suit your needs. I usually like to pick a material off the shelf as a starting point and then make small changes as required along the way. The addition of the KeyShot Cloud library opens up an incredible wealth of materials that can be directly added…

The Hub Shōgun PROJECT INSIGHT Building worlds is no mean feat, and for historical epics like Disney’s Shōgun, it becomes all the more challenging when artists need to recreate real places that have been all but lost to the mists of time. The digital matte painting team at Goodbye Kansas Studios (GBK) had a hefty task when it came to creating backplates, set extensions and environmental setups of ancient Japan for Shōgun. Post-production for a series of this scale is extraordinary, with effects ranging from crowd-building armies to sky replacement. Set in 1600s Japan, Shōgun follows Lord Yoshii Toranaga, who finds a mysterious European ship marooned in Ajiro, a small fishing village. While the show is filled with VFX, it was important for its creators to maintain historical accuracy, so…

MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a set of fantastic objects and build your own asset library with these industrial machine models from in our monthly model and texture giveaway. 15 TIPS FOR TOON-STYLE CHARACTERS Get expert advice for toon shading with Hyper Light Breaker character artist John DeRiggi. COLLABORATE ON FAN ART Pejman Rajabi explains how you can make your next project a winning team effort. NEXT MONTH Discover how the VFX were made for thrilling spy series The Sympathizer. ON SALE 8TH OCTOBER Subscribe today: www.bit.ly/3dworld-subs…