Innehållsförteckning för December 2024 från 3D World

“We went back and forth between how funny this needed to be, how scary for her, or how hard it would be,” explains Zibach. “Then we started throwing in these moments of beauty to break it up, and the wonder that the robot would have. Roz was designed for a world that’s almost prefab and perfect, and here she is in a location that isn’t that, but is beautiful and wondrous. There are all of these natural things going on around her and the butterfly moment captured that. When that was storyboarded we saw the potential for it; it’s poetic too. This robot is being dazzled by a natural event that’s so beautiful. We knew we had something special in that and it helped us to unlock what that sequence…

At first the idea of Robert Downey Jr. playing five different characters known as the Priest, Auteur, Congressman, Professor, and CIA spy Claude seems rather outrageous. However, given that Park Chan-wook is the co-showrunner, director and writer for The Sympathizer it becomes less so, as making bold, non-conventional choices has become his trademark, demonstrated by Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Decision to Leave. This latest dark satire takes place at the end of the Vietnam War and revolves around a police captain in Saigon becoming a refugee in America, secretly reporting back to his communist superiors. Park directed Episodes 101, 102 and 103 while Marc Munden and Fernando Meirelles handled the remaining four episodes. “On his own episodes there is a ton of planning,” says visual effects supervisor Chad Wanstreet,…

Discover Red Giant Geo’s handy tools AFTER EFFECTS | RED GIANT GEO The Pipeline April this year saw Maxon release a new Red Giant tool with Geo. It’s partly for artists who want to render 3D files in After Effects while skipping the step of rendering an object as a sequence of stills with alpha channels in rendering software, then adding these into their motion graphics software. But there’s another aspect to Geo too: it performs the playback and rendering of thousands of objects, at speed, and is well worth considering if you need to create a potentially dangerous and expensive scene like a rockfall or underwater setting. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating the Moon using Geo, with a little help from a UV map from NASA, and adding a…

Artist Q&A SOFTWARE: CINEMA 4D Mike Griggs replies When working as a 3D artist, trade-offs always have to be assessed while running through a project, and one of the most fundamental is learning how to optimise a scene for the available hardware resources. It’s common for a 3D scene to become sluggish when you’re just starting out. The obvious and easiest answer is to invest in the fastest workstation with the biggest graphics card. While this might make the scene feel a bit faster, it hasn’t dealt with the potential reason why it became bogged down in the first place: because the scene itself isn’t very efficient. So what is an efficient scene? As with many things in 3D creation, the film set analogy can work well. On a film set,…

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £240/$275 COMPANY Intel WEBSITE intel.com For decades, Intel GPUs were a dirty word, synonymous only with basic integrated graphics that are no good for 3D whatsoever. But now Intel is finally taking a more active role in discrete 3D graphics, and adopting an interesting pricing strategy to boot. The Intel Arc A750 costs just £250, making it the most affordable card we’re testing, and one of the few options for building a 3D-capable design workstation if you’re on a severely limited budget. These specifications are also good for the low asking price. Based on Intel’s Xe architecture, made up of 448 XMX matrix engines, 224 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 112 ROPs (render output units), the A750 has a decent enough…

Reviews PRICE £680/$680 | DEVELOPER Gigabyte | WEBSITE gigabyte.com Nvidia’s Super versions of its graphics cards are secondgeneration hardware that can mean major increases in processing power and render times over the original variants. Considering the RTX 4070 was already a popular sweet spot in the original Ada Lovelace lineup, the RTX 4070 Super is now even more compelling as it sees the most hardware improvements of all the updated cards. It’s variety of enhancements include many more CUDA cores, without any increase to the MSRP. The 4070 Super offers 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM over a 192-bit memory bus, which results in 504 GB/s of bandwidth. Increased pixel and texture fill rates, a higher core clock, more L2 cache and added streaming multiprocessors mean the 4070 Super can deliver a…

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £900/$930 DEVELOPER Sapphire WEBSITE sapphiretech.com AMD’s modular “chiplet” design has proven itself in Ryzen desktop and Epyc workstation CPUs, and the 7900 series now brings this to graphics cards via the RDNA 3 architecture. The RX 7900 XTX is AMD’s full-fat, top-end GPU, taking aim at Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and 4080 Super, rather than the high-priced and highperforming 4090. At this tier the 7900 XTX proves itself with hardware and performance advantages that, in some circumstances, may be better for 3D than Nvidia’s offering. Its 57.7 billion transistor 5nm die features 6,144 cores, 384 TMUs and 96 compute units with a 384-bit memory bus, which is the same as the RTX 4090. In terms of pricing, physical size and power consumption,…

News and views from around the international CG community Long-time FutureWorks collaborator and VFX supervisor Jay Worth turned to the studio’s visual effects team to create one of the most iconic composites of the 16-times Emmy nominated Amazon Prime hit Fallout. In addition to the ideation and delivery on the look of The Ghoul, the FutureWorks team delivered over 700 shots for the series, including set extensions and clean-ups. VFX supervisor Gouri Shankar worked closely with Worth and over 150 FutureWorks artists to bring the character to life. “Jay has been a long-time partner of FutureWorks,” he explains. “We were fortunate to work with him on projects like Westworld, The Peripheral, and more recently the Apple TV+ limited series The Lady in the Lake. Naturally we jumped at the opportunity…

The Gallery The best digital art from the CG community BASED ON A CONCEPT BY T.B. CHOI (artstation.com/artwork/3XgeE) ARTIST Ivan Gubarev SOFTWARE ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag, Photoshop "I recently came across the amazing work of Blizzard concept artist T.B. Choi and decided to recreate one of her fantastic sketches in 3D. I was hooked by the awesome dynamics and intrigued by the fact that she'd only used two colours. I used ZBrush to create the piece and then rendered in Marmoset. In general, the work wasn't technically too hard, for example the gloves are mostly made up of primitives, as much as the silhouette, the direction of the lines, and the overall flow I was trying to convey, which are often much more important than the detail. Working on these types of…

The Gallery "I began by limiting my reference pool, using a very simple sprite taken from the MOTHER video games as the main reference for the entire design process. My inspiration was taken from traditional ceremonial French armour from the 16th century, along with not-so-traditional armour such as those from Elden Ring. While sculpting, I kept my subdivision levels and baked the Normal maps preemptively. That way I could maintain high-quality details along with a low-poly mesh that could easily be modified. After the texturing, I brought the model into Character Creator, where I used the magic of AccuRIG to get a basic rig for the model. I then finalised my project by making a few keyframes and used Blender's EEVEE Next to get a fast render before switching over…

The Gallery CG art to inspire "It was a pleasure to work on Leda, a project proposed by the Bulkamancer 3D art team that initially seemed daunting due to its complexity. Nevertheless, I decided to take on the challenge and learned a lot in the process. This was a tough project for the entire team, from sculpting to cutting, and supporting it was likely the hardest part for everyone involved, but they did an amazing job! I’m incredibly grateful to Bulkamancer for the opportunity to work on this character and for their efforts in making it printable. I used Marvelous Designer for the fabric simulation and ZBrush for sculpting and detailing. The most difficult aspect was applying the pattern to the cloak and dress. Replicating the concept’s pattern required UV…

Feature The Wild Robot Undoubtedly it’s easier for animation studios to have an in-house style, but this isn’t the path DreamWorks Animation decided to take when adapting the illustrated children’s novel The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, where a ROZZUM unit 7134 robot gets stranded on an isolated island teeming with wildlife. “The magic is in how every aspect of this movie, we altered the animation process to fit the style and story that we’re trying to tell,” states Chris Sanders, the film’s writer and director. “Our animators worked closely with the rigging department. It’s something we’ve become much better at in letting the animators take the lead as far as what they need for these characters and what expressions are required.” Being open-minded is a vital part of being a…

Feature The Wild Robot “We looked at stuff like Saving Private Ryan; the storming of the beach footage,” states head of layout Chris Stover. “There was also The Revenant, where there’s a lot of action happening in front of the camera and the camera’s reacting to it. We have a lot of tools on the backend of production for bringing that to fruition. We have Cartoni heads that can do pan and tilt type of stuff against the live performance once animation is finished. We also have camera shoulder rig systems that can capture the shoulder rig sensibility against live performance. We took an integrated approach between keyframe animation and at the same time leaning into practical rigs we could use to do the final camera to ground that camera…

The Pipeline Design striking sculpts at speed ZBRUSH | SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER | BLENDER Over the two years that I’ve been working in the video games industry, I’ve increasingly realised just how highly valued it is to work on projects efficiently. That’s why I’ve decided to take some time to perfect my working process. To enhance my skills, I chose to model the Fat Baby Boto design by artist Fred Rambaud. When I discovered his art, I knew it would be perfect for improving my process. Baby Boto is simple yet impactful in terms of shapes and design. The blend of hard-surface and organic elements also makes it ideal for practise. The workflow I’ve developed helps me to create projects so much faster while improving my finishing techniques, which is…

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £420/$450 DEVELOPER MSI WEBSITE msi.com FEATURES 8GB GDDR6 memory 4,352 Nvidia Ada Lovelace cores Entry-level rendering performance VERDICT 7.0 OUT OF 10 When you’re building a 3D system on a tight budget, you’re no doubt considering any possible saving that won’t severely impact the ability of your system at getting real 3D work done. The RTX 4060 Ti meets that requirement, since it’s the most affordable Nvidia GPU we’re testing, and can deliver in all 3D applications. It doesn’t offer the ultra-fast rendering times of the most expensive cards, but it absolutely gets the job done, while saving you about £200 over the next tier up in the RTX 4070 Super. That saving, unfortunately, does mean giving up a lot of…

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £550/$570 DEVELOPER Sapphire WEBSITE sapphiretech.com You may well be looking at GPU prices and quietly crying in a corner. The top-end cards are as much as a good laptop alone. But the cheapest Nvidia card we’ve included, the RTX 4060 Ti, is nothing special. It has a narrow 128-bit memory bus, a paltry 8GB of VRAM, and offers relatively middling performance, all told. AMD’s modus operandi in both graphics and CPUs is to challenge larger competitors with products that may not be more powerful, but offer significantly better bang for the customer’s buck. The RX 7900 GRE is trying to do just that, squeezing into that critical gap in the market for something relatively affordable that’s also darn good. “AMD HAS…

Reviews PRICE £1,870/$1,830 DEVELOPER MSI WEBSITE msi.com FEATURES 24GB GDDR6X graphics memory 16,384 Nvidia Ada Lovelace cores Powerful, but expensive VERDICT 10 OUT OF 10 The GeForce RTX 4090 is the current all-conquering top dog in the world of graphics cards now that Nvidia has seemingly moved away from it’s Titan branding of this elite upper echelon of GPU performance. The 4090 is a massive jump over the 4080 Super, featuring 16,384 CUDA cores compared to 10,240 in the 4080 Super. The AD102 chip has 76.3 billion transistors, a wider 384-bit memory bus, 512 TMUs, 176 ROPs and a hefty 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM. This translates to faster rendering times than any other card on test, almost across the board. It also costs a lot more. The Founders Edition RTX…

The best CG in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is hard to pin down, as there’s just so much of it at such a high quality. When it comes to sheer quantity of visual effects shots, one could argue Marvel Studios has created an offshoot industry, as thousands of shots have been created by an army of visual effects studios that span the globe, and literally works 24/7 when factoring in the time-zone differences. In order to manage the huge demand for digital content, several visual effects coordinators are assigned a particular set of VFX companies to support the production visual effects supervisor and producer. The process alone is as epic as its end products, which are perennial nominees for the Oscars’ Best Visual Effects crown. There’s a lot of material…

Feature The Wild Robot “We started with a retrofuture look to Roz and she was more complicated,” reveals Zibach. “However, early on a modeller said, ‘I have an idea.’ And he tried this thing with more circular designs that were based off something that character designer Nico Marlet did, but different because he was talking about how her body could be like a Rubik’s Cube. That idea affected how we looked at her design, because until then we were looking at her as a humanoid, but that little bit of exploration showed a lot of potential to how she’ll change. What she can do with her body pays a lot of dividends throughout the film. We took that initial concept of design, worked on top of that and that became…

“For the fire, we wanted it to be something that would be so foreign to these animals,” explains Budsberg. “It’s an homage to Bambi in that it feels different and threatening, and we wanted to lean into something different than the stereotypically burnt orangered style of fire. We wanted something that felt unnatural. You get this visceral reaction from the audience when you see that pink-red fire because you’re going, ‘Oh god, this isn’t good.’ It’s jarring. You want to almost feel it from the animals’ point of view that this is something they’ve never seen before. That’s where we leaned into this high contrast and saturation palette.”…

“The predominant thing in this show was reflections and wetdowns,” reveals Wanstreet. “We see it every time we shot at night. It’s always wet, they’re always playing low camera angles, and there’s always all of these reflections. Then we took that after we’d filmed and that became a dominant element when we got into the tarmac scene in Episode 101, because when we shot it, it was a dry tarmac. We couldn’t possibly wet down that entire thing, not without a lot of time that we didn’t have. Time wasn’t our friend. When we started back up in post that became the dominant element we wanted to work out: how do we add a wetdown that doesn’t exist to seven minutes of visual effects shots so that we could see…

The Pipeline Create a canyon environment GAEA | BLENDER | QUIXEL BRIDGE | ADOBE LIGHTROOM Becoming a successful 3D environment artist has been my goal for a long time now. After a few years of testing, technique research and learning by myself, I’ve been able to use several different workflows to get the results I’m looking for. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce one workflow that I use regularly to create my environment art, which I’ve titled Canyon Absorption. The workflow will facilitate your way to achieving a great aesthetic result. After that, you should be able to understand and master several aspects of creating environments in Blender including volumetrics, scattering and plenty more. We’ll mainly use Blender, plus Gaea and Adobe Lightroom. Although they’re not free, there are always alternative…

ZBRUSH | MAYA | SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER | BLENDER The Pipeline Build and animate a fun-filled robot Getting acquainted with a variety of software is vital for virtually every digital artist today, as all of them have their particular strengths to help you along in every part of the creative process. In this tutorial I’m going to explain my step-by-step workflow for creating this gorgeous robot character, including posing it and making a basic animation using Blender’s physics options to help capture more stunning renders. To get all this done, I’ll be using ZBrush, Maya, Substance 3D Painter and Blender. I should note that the entire process can be done using a single program if you wish, but this time I wanted to use an expanded toolset to get the result…

SOFTWARE: KEYSHOT Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved Paul Hatton replies The placement of objects in any 3D scene requires a certain amount of attention to detail to ensure models don’t overlap when they shouldn’t. This is especially the case for product or small-scale visuals, where it would be immediately obvious if there was an issue. In most 3D software packages you have to rely on your eye or, more helpfully, the built-in snapping tools to ensure accurate contact but nothing more. Snapping tools are an absolutely essential part of any modelling workflow, but they can be a bit cumbersome when you need to adjust the properties and make sure you’re snapping to the right parts. The KeyShot team has come up with an innovative way of ensuring objects are positioned…

Reviews GROUP TEST We explore the latest software and hardware tools to see if they are worth your time or money When building a PC for professional 3D work, you‘ll want to dedicate the majority of your budget to the graphics card, or GPU, rather than any other component. 3D software will render scenes in the quickest time when run on a GPU. They say time is money, so investing in the best GPU you can afford means you’ll finish projects sooner. Unfortunately, the best graphics cards now make a serious dent in your wallet. The top-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is currently the most powerful graphics card there is, but you won’t find one for under four figures. Even opting for something less powerful is quite an investment, and…

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £860/$850 DEVELOPER Asus WEBSITE asus.com Until Nvidia released the Super range of 40-series GPUs, the 4070 Ti was the best card for most people. It offered great performance and wasn’t insanely expensive, unlike the 4080 and 4090. But now the more powerful 4080 Super has had a price cut, things have changed and the 4070 Ti doesn’t stand out as much. But Nvidia has refreshed the 4070 Ti as well, and the Super version has had a lot of improvements, including 25 per cent more transistors, an increased core count of 8,448, a wider 256-bit memory bus, 16GB of GDDR6X ram and increased clock speeds, resulting in an approximate 10 per cent performance uplift to what was already a stunning graphics…

Everyone has their own personal Goldilocks zone of just the right amount of performance they need in order to match their budget. The RTX 4090 is a no-brainer for anyone who makes a living from 3D design. If long rendering times are what holds projects back from completion, then the 4090 can pay for itself in time. For everyone else, it’s a bit more tricky to decide. At the budget end – for people who may just be getting started in 3D, students, or those simply unable to afford the top-end cards – beware of false economies. Spending as little as possible can mean frustratingly slow renders, which is why we feel the approximate performance level of the 4060 Ti is the lowest we’d choose for comfortable 3D design work,…

MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a really rocking set of models and build your own asset library with these stones from CGAXIS in our monthly model and texture giveaway. BUILD AND ANIMATE A FUN-FILLED ROBOT Expand your horizons with Julio Benavides’ tips for creating a charming hard-surface character. CREATE A CANYON ENVIRONMENT Make a stunning desert setting in Blender with a walkthrough from Romain Eboli. 3D WORLD MAGAZINE 2000-2024 Thank you!…