3d Artist 118 - 2018 Uk

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RENDER MATERIALS IN

KEYSHOT MARI TECHNIQUES

T

SKILLS DISCOVER SEVEN INCREDIBLE PROJECTS TO HELP YOU EVOLVE YOUR PAINT NG

ZBRUSH ANIMALS

Tame your beast sculpts with Tony Camehl

ISSUE 118

UPGRADE YOUR V-RAY SHADER WORKFLOW

FREE VIDEO &

TUTORIAL FILES

Evolve Your Painting Skills Page 22

KEITA OKADA artstation.com/yuzuki Software ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Mudbox, Arnold, Photoshop

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Art Editor Newton Ribeiro Production Editor Katharine Marsh Group Editor in Chief Amy Hennessey Senior Art Editor Will Shum Contributors Hussain Almossawi, Orestis Bastounis, Tony Camehl, Paul Champion, Tanya Combrinck, Ian Failes, Farid Ghanbari, Safwen Laabidi, Maggie Oh, Daniel Ripley, Mark Smith, Oscar Trejo Photography James Sheppard All copyrights and trademarks are recognised and respected Advertising Media packs are available on request Commercial Director Clare Dove [email protected] Advertising Manager Mike Pyatt [email protected] 01225 687538 Account Director Chris Mitchell [email protected] 01225 687832 International 3D Artist is available for licensing. Contact the International department to discuss partnership opportunities International Licensing Director Matt Ellis [email protected] Subscriptions Email enquiries [email protected] UK orderline & enquiries 0344 848 2852 Overseas order line and enquiries +44 (0) 344 848 2852 Online orders & enquiries www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk Head of subscriptions Sharon Todd Circulation Head of Newstrade Tim Mathers Production Head of Production Mark Constance Production Project Manager Clare Scott Advertising Production Manager Joanne Crosby Digital Editions Controller Jason Hudson Production Manager Frances Twentyman Management !ǝǣƺǔ…ȵƺȸƏɎǣȇǕ…ǔˡƬƺȸ Aaron Asadi Commercial Finance Director Dan Jotcham Global Content Director Paul Newman Head of Art & Design Greg Whitaker Printed by William Gibbons & Sons Ltd, 26 Planetary Road, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 3XT

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volve your textures this issue with our seven incredible Mari projects. You can learn from pro texture artists from the likes of ILM and Ubisoft to discover new ways of working with Foundry’s incredible texturer on page 22! We’ve also put our headsets on this month to immerse ourselves fully in Ready Player One. Ian Failes has spoken to ILM and Digital Domain to find out everything there is to know about the latest Spielberg film on page 40. Meanwhile, Tony Camehl, one of the most exciting concept artists emerging in the game art sphere, tells

us about his ZBrush creature workflows and career. You can learn all about his techniques on page 34. We’ve also headed into stylised character territory with the brilliant Safwen Laabidi. He gives us his top tips and explains how to render his Biker Chick character in V-Ray. If that’s not enough, we’ve also got tutorials on KeyShot and medical visualisation, guides on Cinema 4D, an interview with Framestore about making the Star Trek-inspired Black Mirror’s ‘USS Callister’ episode a reality as well as reviews on the Renda G3-SWC Ultra and the latest X-Particles release. Enjoy the issue.

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his issue’s team of pro artists…

TANYA COMBRINCK

SAFWEN LAABIDI

DANIEL RIPLEY

N/A

artstation.com/safwen

daniel-ripley.co.uk

Tanya has been speaking to some incredible texture artists this issue to bring you seven wonderful Mari projects to learn from and be inspired by. Read her feature on page 22. 3DArtist username N/A

Digital artist Daniel comes from a traditional art background. His tutorial on page 54 is a brilliant re-creation of Game of Thrones’ Tyrion Lannister, with hair created in Cinema 4D. 3DArtist username Rectro

FARID GHANBARI

HUSSAIN ALMOSSAWI

OSCAR TREJO

renderburger.com

moxxawi.com

osc-art.com

An art director at 3FX Inc, Farid has used his expertise to explain how he used Cinema 4D, V-Ray and After Effects to achieve medical visualisation perfection on page 60. 3DArtist username Farid

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CG artist and character designer Safwen returns this issue to give us his expert guide on shading a stylised character with attitude. You can read his techniques on page 46. 3DArtist username safweno

International product designer Hussain lends us his product visualisation pro tips this issue to discuss how to set up lighting for a professional render. His tutorial is on page 68. 3DArtist username N/A

Oscar has worked on a variety of projects, from videogames to TV, jewellery design and 3D printing. We thought of no one better to teach us about materials in KeyShot on page 72. 3DArtist username Heretic Templar

MARK SMITH

PAUL CHAMPION

ORESTIS BASTOUNIS

marksmith.journoportfolio.com Mark has spoken to both the wonderful Framestore about all things space for Black Mirror and Motorsport’s Dean Wright this issue. Find his interviews on page 90 and 94 respectively. 3DArtist username N/A

behance.net/pchampion Paul has covered all of the latest news to hit the industry, from the latest Substance Designer update to the launch of Total Chaos and Wacom’s newest product launch on page 86. 3DArtist username N/A

twitter.com/MrBastounis

Taking the Renda G3-SWC Ultra out for a spin this issue, Orestis takes a look at the 4.5GHz clockspeed of the Intel Core i9-7920X to see just how speedy the processor really is on page 78. 3DArtist username N/A

What’s in the magazin

News, reviews & features 12 The Gallery A hand-picked collection of phenomenal and inspirational artwork

22 Boost Your Mari Skills

It is important to consider the flow of the muscles in the whole body as well as the texture of the dinosaur’s skin

Seven incredible artists provide expert tips to help you upgrade your texturing

30 Technique Focus: The Big Brother Rico Suyang Wang walks us through texturing the cat warrior

32 Subscribe Today! Save money and never miss an issue

34 Taming ZBrush Beasts Tony Camehl gives us his top tips for creating fantastic creatures

40 Ready, Set, VR!

Keita Okada discusses how he painted the T. Rex’s scales with Mari Page 29

Ian Failes talks to ILM and Digital Domain about the VFX behind Ready Player One

76 Technique Focus: Chameleon Nikie Monteleone talks pattern creation and detailing in ZBrush

78 Review: Renda G3-SWC Ultra Orestis Bastounis speeds through with this new PC from Overclockers 22

80 Review: X-Particles 4 Art director Farid Ghanbari gives us his verdict on the new release

Excel with product visualisation in V-Ray

98 Technique Focus: The Gladiator 69 Bondok Max reveals his use of references for this vehicle render

Discover Cinema 4D’s hair system

Save up to 20% Review: X-Particles 8

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Master medical visualisation

60 40

Ready, Set, VR!

The Pipeline

If you compare the anatomy of a human with that of a lion, both have the same muscles and bones

46 Step By Step: Shade and render a stylised character Sculpt a unique model, use Ornatrix and render in V-Ray

54 Step By Step: Discover Cinema 4D’s hair system

Tony Camehl gives us his top tips for creating incredible creature concepts Page 34

Re-create a character using ZBrush, Cinema 4D and more

60 Step By Step: Master medical visualisation Top techniques from Farid Ghanbari

68 Pipeline Techniques: Excel with product visualisation in V-Ray Hussain Almossawi guides us through professional V-Ray tips

72 Pipeline Techniques: Learn to render materials in KeyShot Create unique clay studies

The Hub 34

ISSUE 119

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Shade and render a stylised character

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84 Community News The Rookies changes things up for its eighth annual awards

86 Industry News Total Chaos brings Chaos Group to Bulgaria and Wacom adds new products to the Cintiq family

88 Opinion Maggie Oh The ILMxLAB technical PM talks motion capture in the fashion world

90 Project Focus USS Callister Framestore reveals the CG secrets behind the alien creatures in the Black Mirror episode

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The inspiration for this piece was the amazing concept by Gediminas Pranckevicius. My main aim in creating the image was to give myself the challenge of re-creating the natural look and appeal of the character in his context. It also turned out to be a great opportunity to learn new things like XGen and Arnold

Cristian Bolivar artstation.com/icarus_lives Cristian is based in Colombia. He works in advertising and is mostly focused on look dev, lighting and grooming Software Maya, Arnold , Substance Painter, NukeX

Work in progress…

Cristian Bolivar, Hummingbird, 2018

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The idea of this TTK project originally came from a high school assignment where I made a popup children’s book. I created some kid characters in Halloween costumes that could exist in reality and Harpy is one of them. After I discovered ZBrush, I brushed up those characters to make them look a lot nicer Ryohei Takama, Harpy (from TRICK ‘r TREAT KIDDIES project), 2017

Ryohei Takama headg.artstation.com Ryohei has been learning 3D sculpting to become a 3D character artist, sculptor and modelling artist since 2016 Software ZBrush, Photoshop CC

Alternative render…

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I wanted to develop some more characters for my portfolio and at the time I was trying to eat healthier and resist junk food. The end result reflects the temptations that were on my mind Design Lad, Junk Food on the Brain, 2017

Design Lad designlad.co.uk Design Lad specialises in 3D illustration, typography and animation. His work is bold, playful and colourful Software Cinema 4D, V-Ray, Photoshop

Work in progress…

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Anna Fedyukina behance.net/annafedyukina Anna is a 3D artist and interior designer from Lviv, Ukraine. She has a master’s degree in design and is interested in architecture

This image is a part of the Red&Green bedroom project and was started as a commercial interior visualisation. After the project was finished, I decided to use this 3D scene and play with new Corona Renderer features. The goal was to achieve special mood and artistic look with the Corona Interactive Lightmix feature and materials settings Anna Fedyukina, Red&Green, 2017 16

Software 3ds Max, Corona Renderer, Photoshop

Work in progress…

Upon realising that I had been stuck in the comfort zone of realism, I wanted to try to create something that was simple, bold and possessed a very striking ethos. Upon seeing the concept, illustrated by Serge Birault, I felt that it very well fulfilled those criteria. The shape language was very precise and stylised, as opposed to being subtle and realistic, so I figured that it would be complex enough for me to learn a lot from, and I definitely did Donna Urdinov, Military Girl, 2017

Donna Urdinov artstation.com/donna Donna Urdinov is a character artist who loves creating art in all sorts of forms, especially character-centric pieces Software ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag 3

Work in progress…

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In depth

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Simon Barle artstation.com/simonbarle

I drew a lot of inspiration from old-school fantasy titles like Diablo, Doom, Warhammer and He-Man for this environment. I wanted to do something that felt very hostile and was filled with smoke but still have some colour in it

Simon is an environment artist based in Stockholm, Sweden Software Unreal Engine 4, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, ZBrush, Modo, Photoshop

Work in progress…

Simon Barle, Evil Lands, 2018 19

TEXTURE Using only a few modular rock pieces with detail maps applied in the shader, I was able to quickly block out larger shapes and keep the texture density more even across the scene.

LIGHTING During the early blockout phase, I wanted to set the tone quickly and then start to build up my shapes around that and gradually light the scene more dramatically.

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COLOUR

MATERIALS

Even though the scene is pretty barren, I wanted to infuse some life into it in the form of some hellish fauna. These plants also bring some colour into the scene.

Using a combination of ZBrush and Substance Designer, I could make most of my materials in a nondestructive way and get new variations by adjusting a few sliders.

BOOST YOUR MARI SKILLS

BOOST

YOUR

MARI SKILLS Used in productions like Game of Thrones, Mari is a mainstay for top texturers. Artists at Weta, ILM, Ubisoft and more reveal how to master the tool

S

enior texture artist at Industrial Light & Magic Adam Elkins recalls a “collective sigh of relief” from texture artists when Foundry released Mari, on account of its exceptional power and suitability for working within a tight VFX pipeline. “I have been using Mari for around seven years now and have seen its toolset grow to include some amazing features like advanced layer blending, baking features and great procedural nodes,” says Elkins. “The latter feature is probably my favourite. I use Mari’s procedurals everyday in my work, whether that be for hard surface or organic assets, being able

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to adjust textures non-destructively is essential. Foundry’s strong connection with the industry means that most of the large VFX studios have adapted the software to suit their needs making for some great proprietary features developed in-house.” Over the following pages you will read about seven projects in which Mari was used to texture everything from shiny metallic surfaces to organic materials such as skin and hair. You’ll pick up tips and techniques from some top texture artists, learn how to experiment to discover interesting new effects and explore the software to get more out of it than ever before.

UPGRADE YOUR SKIN TEXTURES Learn how Weta Digital artist Tom Newbury textured a big mean giant TOM NEWBURY ---------------------Artist at Weta Digital artstation.com/ tom_newbury_cg

A TILEABLE TEXTURE COVER LARGE AREAS

The texture you are projecting may not always have the regions that you need from your character. For example, if the subject in your texture has hair, you won’t have much real estate for the scalp. I will create a tileable swatch in Photoshop using a small region of the forehead close to the hairline, which I then bring back into Mari to tile all over the scalp.

When I do my first pass of texture projections, I try to cover large surface areas in a single projection. This will reduce the amount of seams and clean-up needed at the end of the process and it also allows me to get broad coverage quickly in the beginning of the texture process.

BRUSH SELECTION I usually use the large soft brush that comes with Mari when projecting skin. This can be found under the Basic Brushes tab in the brush palette. If I want a more textured feel to the transitions in the texture, I will also use the tRex brush that is found under the Organic tab.

ZOOM IN To make sure you are getting the most resolution out of your projected texture, zoom in relatively close to the geometry. This will make sure you are getting the most out of your paint buffer’s resolution. If you need to zoom out while projecting, just increase your Buffer Size under the Painting Channel in Mari 4.0.

SCALE IS CRITICAL CLEANING UP Once you have finished projecting all over your surface, make sure to view your model in the flat shaded view. This will make it easier to see areas where the texture may be stretching or where hues don’t blend correctly. I call this the clean-up process.

When projecting on a face, the scale of the texture you are applying is critical. Try and use landmarks to make sure the scale of texture is consistent to the reallife scale of the photo you are projecting. For example, if I was projecting on the side of the head, I would line up the texture with the corner of the eye to the edge of the ear.

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BOOST YOUR MARI SKILLS

HANDLE DIFFERENT MATERIALS Experiment with Mari’s procedural nodes to get lots of results to play with CHANCE PAYNE ---------------------3D artist Freelance chancepayne.com

22 4K UDIM Tiles

6 TEXTURE CHANNELS DIFFUSE, SPECULAR, GLOSSINESS, BUMP, METALLIC, EMISSION

Can you tell us a bit about your background as a CG artist? I experimented a bit with early versions of Maya and 3ds Max in grade school but my first serious foray into computer graphics came when I decided to take an elective course in visual effects at the Florida State University Film School. I was there studying biology but I had such a good time learning compositing and visual effects at the film school that after I graduated I decided to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in visual effects at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Since leaving SCAD, I have worked as a freelance compositor, 3D artist and technical director with clients in several countries to create visual effects for international film and television projects. In addition to my freelance work, I am continuously working on personal 3D projects to advance my skills and experiment with new techniques.

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OVER

OVER

LAYERS IN MARI

MATERIALS

20

240

REPRESENTED

How did you approach the texturing of the image above? I began by breaking down the vehicle into its various materials – such as rubber, fibreglass, and metal – and created a layer group for each material in each texture channel. Each layer group received a layer mask in order to block out the parts of the vehicle made from that material, and this layer group mask was shared to the corresponding layer group in each channel so that a single mask could block out each material across all texture channels. From there I was able to start with a flat colour for each material and gradually build up more and more detail by adding layers to each material’s layer group. Can you give us a couple of cool tips for getting the most out of Mari? Use procedurals as much as possible! I used the Tri-Planar procedural to get quick, seamless

OVER 2GB OF FINAL TEXTURE MAPS

coverage across the vehicle for things like grunge map overlays as well as several Noise procedurals for dirt and scratches. I also utilised the Cube procedural to create the headlight design and the Oil procedural to achieve the heat-damaged, anodised look on the bike’s engine metal. Experimenting with Mari’s procedural nodes can get you a lot of different, interesting results very quickly and can make your project look better for it. Are there any extension packs that you particularly like and would recommend to other 3D artists? Mari Extension Pack 4 provides many useful additions, the most valuable to me being the extra procedurals and the edge wear functionality. While I didn’t use the Extension Pack on this project, I would definitely recommend it to those looking for some extra options inside Mari.

PROJECT TEXTURES ONTO A CAIMAN Improvise with other images to create the right look MARCOS SAMPAIO ---------------------CG generalist at NOTAN artstation.com/sampaio

01

Use references

First of all I studied references to understand the basic colour patterns in the animal’s skin. I decided I couldn’t use real photos of caimans to create the textures and so I used things like rust, concrete and old walls.

02

Create base textures

I created one image in Photoshop for each colour pattern that I identified in the caiman. There’s one with a dirt-looking yellow, one with dark spots that looks like rust and a mostly grey one that looks a bit like cement.

03

Apply the base textures I projected the

yellow texture in all of the caiman’s body as a base skin colour and adjusted the curves to make it orange at the top of the body. I then applied the dark spots following the patterns I saw in my references.

04

Use the displacement

I utilised the displacement map to refine the textures, giving a lot of contrast to the caiman and making the borders of the scales very dark. This image was used as an alpha to apply the grey between the scales.

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BOOST YOUR MARI SKILLS

CREATE METICULOUS MATERIALS Mari is great for materials, as well as the addition of dirt and grime ADAM ELKINS ---------------------Senior texture artist at Industrial Light & Magic adamelkins.com

Can you tell us a little about your background as a CG artist? I began my career in VFX over a decade ago now. While studying for a degree in industrial design, I quickly realised it wasn’t the path for me and after graduating I went to work for a small advertising studio where I produced CG assets and final renders for print. From there I spent two years at MPC London in their commercials department where I began texturing using Mari, not long after its initial release. Then I headed off to Double Negative in London where I took a break from texturing and spent a few years as a generalist working on all aspects of the 3D pipeline. I have now come back to texturing and recently took a position as senior texture artist at Industrial Light & Magic in Vancouver. What do you like about using Mari? I remember when Mari was released commercially, there was a collective sigh of relief from texture artists within the industry. While there were (and still are) other methods of texturing, the power of Mari’s UDIM support, colour management and camera projection make it perfect for working within a tight VFX pipeline.

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How did you approach the texturing in this image in particular? For this entry in ArtStation’s ‘Test Drive’ challenge, participants were given a preexisting design to texture. With this in mind, I wanted to make my submission stand out and decided to redesign the car by introducing different material elements and therefore changing the overall look of the vehicle. I wanted to see a combination and contrast of different textures that would help break up the design graphically and make it more visually interesting. To do this, I broke the asset down into different materials – car paint, rubber, metal and so on – and began texturing those elements individually then applied these base materials by masking each section. Once I was happy with that, I started to work on the details, decals, dirt and grime. What is your advice for doing great texturing work in Mari? Explore. Once you have got to grips with the basics, that’s when the fun begins. Explore all of

the different nodes and tools that Mari has to offer. There is a huge toolset at your disposal and I’d encourage new users to have a play and see what approach works for you, whether that be a traditional painting approach or something based more on procedures and nodes. It’s great fun seeing how other texture artists tackle an asset and it’s interesting when you see someone who uses Mari in a completely different way to you.

MAKE USE OF EXTENSION PACKS Extension packs are worth it as they achieve excellent results in less time JENYA FILIMONOV ----------------------Freelance texture painter jenyafilimonov.art

FINDING STRONG PHOTO REFERENCES Work begins with the search for a photo reference. You should not rely solely on your own life observations – you need to improve on them with good reference materials that have been collected for a specific task.

GET TEXTURING WITH XYZ TEXTURES These are the best assets I have encountered; I have long enjoyed using them while working at a large company, and now they’re available for a modest price. The level of detail is excellent, especially for creating things like pores and wrinkles. They’re available at bit.ly/2DoVdjc.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MARI’S ABILITY TO CACHE LAYERS MAKE THINGS EASIER WITH NODES I really like working with Mari’s nodes, as this way many operations become clearer and more flexible.

Be patient – we always want to see quick results but this tendency can interfere with your process. Remember that Mari can cache layers so you can return to them later.

USE THE JENS KAFITZ MARI EXTENSION PACK This package greatly simplifies working in Mari, adds dozens of procedural and adjustment layers, as well as workflow enhancements for management layers, channels and projects. It saves a lot of time. You can find it at bit.ly/2FK9CMl.

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BOOST YOUR MARI SKILLS

RUST AND DIRT ON METAL AND GLASS You can save time and build up a library of useful tools for future projects PIM HENDRIKS ---------------------Texture artist at Ubisoft phendriks.artstation.com

This project started with the need to find out how UVs react to different mesh smoothing methods but it quickly turned into a personal project for me to work in Mari some more and bring my textures into Arnold for volumetric lighting, rendering and compositing.

GIZMOS I always say that 70 to 80 per cent of anything can be automated – and so can texturing. I prefer spending a week on a little node that does a lot of work than doing the same thing over and over again. You will always end up painting for that final personal touch but when deadlines are tight, that little gizmo will be useful. Export them and make your very own library!

EXTENSION PACK I used Mari 3.2v1 with Extension Pack 4R1. This extension is crucial to my workflow as it drastically increases the ease and speed at which I work in Mari. In addition to this, I really like the subtle grunge texture packs provided by 3D Collective. I am using that in my Mari graph.

MESH SMOOTHINGI This project started with the need to find out how UVs react to different mesh smoothing methods. However, it quickly turned into a personal project for me to work in Mari some more and bring my textures into Arnold for volumetric lighting, rendering and compositing.

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FULL CONTROL

SHADERS

NODE GRAPH

What I like so much about Mari is that you can build a material from the ground up. You are in full control over what type of information goes into your Normal, Roughness or Diffuse. Wait, you need a three-layer packaged subsurface scattering mask for a character? Easy! If Mari doesn’t have the tools natively, EP will.

Shaders inside Mari are very useful to quickly look develop your material. For this project, I used the AiStandard to quality check my textures before I started the lengthy exporting process. Beware of the height variation parameters, though – they’re more likely to crash the software than to show the neat end result you’re looking for.

I’m a big fan of the Node Graph and I author all my materials and texture setups in this system. You can enable it in your preferences but make sure you keep your graphs clear and commented. I like to use Radio Nodes to hide connections, create Backdrops with names and I change the names of nodes to be able to revise older work.

EVOLVE YOUR PAINTING FOR A T. REX Make the best use of Mari and Mudbox to achieve high-quality models KEITA OKADA ---------------------Chief executive officer at Villard artstation.com/yuzuki

01

Create preliminary sketches of the scales First, create the dinosaur’s basic

model with ZBrush. Even though the sketch is supposed to be rough at this stage, it is important to be conscientious and firmly consider the flow of the muscles in the whole body as well as the texture of the dinosaur’s skin.

02

Sculpt the scales based on sketches Load models and textures in

Mari. You can directly paint textures onto the model in Mari, which allows flexible and efficient texture creation.

03

Use Mudbox to create Occlusion and Vector Displacement Maps

The advantage of using Mudbox is that it can handle far more polygons than ZBrush. By loading and integrating models in MudBox, you can export a beautiful map without any joints.

04

Paint the model When painting with Mari, mask the line with Cavity Map – you can paint gutters and scales gaps with pinpoint. For conversion of various maps, use a software called Knald that can generate various textures from 2D sources.

05

Use Arnold when it comes to rendering The advantage of Arnold is

that you can check various paths such as Specular and SSS by switching items on the upper left. Through changing the path settings, various paths can be checked.

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TEXTURING

Rico Suyang Wang suyang.artstation.com

Incredible 3D artists take us

behind their artwork

TEXTURING When I began texturing this project, I assigned the normal and AO maps, which were baked from Marmoset, into Substance Painter, along with others such as material ID, curvature and world normal position. With real-time rendering, we can see the results and make changes directly without waiting.

30

Rico has been in the art industry since 2013. He has worked on projects with studios such as Kabam and DeePoon VR and loves new technologies Software Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag

TheBigBrother,2017

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TAMING ZBRUSH BEASTS

ZBRUSH Tony Camehl gives us the lowdown of his journey and provides his expert tips for creating your own menagerie

W

inged monkeys, griffin hybrids and an anatomically accurate pose of a jumping fox – Tony Camehl has sculpted them all. You wouldn’t expect it from someone who initially studied business law but Camehl is actually one of the most inspiring artists to break into the world of creature concepts today. “I have always been interested in 3D since I was a kid and it felt natural to me to learn 3D and ZBrush even before I picked up a pencil and learned how to sketch animals and creatures,” he says. Camehl’s love for creatures began at home as his parents have always had pets. “They had the

34

usual ones like dogs and cats, my grandparents had ducks and geese as well so I kind of grew up surrounded by animals. Even to this day, my parents have got two wonderful and cute British shorthair cats called Fips and Mickey. I learned so much just by being around them and seeing how they behave with each other – how they play and sleep together.” Camehl says that there is something that draws him more to the study of animals than most. “To be honest, I feel much more comfortable when surrounded by animals than being with humans. You never have that pressure on you if you are alone in a room with

Camehl’s work often centres around animals and creatures, like this red cardinal

35

TAMING ZBRUSH BEASTS

PHOTOBASH FOR A REALISTIC ANIMAL STUDY Tony Camehl teaches us how he uses ZBrush 4R8 and Photoshop to create a quick red cardinal

your dog or cat. Your pets don’t expect you to do small talk. They don’t judge you like humans do. They deal with you the way you are and they aren’t trying to change you into someone else. So to make a long story short, I never considered doing characters, robots or environments. My true passions are only animals and creatures.”

FANTASTIC BEASTS

ZBrush to Photoshop plugin In

01

ZBrush 4R8, we have that great new plugin called ZBrush to Photoshop, which is perfect for quickly sending basic renders to Photoshop in no time. It is a great time-saver and is excellent for showing quick concepts or, in this case, to quickly have our polypainted red cardinal crest available in Photoshop.

Find a interesting spot Finding an interesting spot is kind of tricky. There are a few different methods out there, like the golden circle or the rule of thirds. We will use the rule of thirds to get an interesting composition. It is important that we don’t place our selling point, the bird’s head, in the very centre or on one of the crossing lines. We will play around and see what fits best for this particular composition.

02

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Photobashing starts now After we sent the polypaint model via the plugin to Photoshop and find an interesting composition, we now can start gathering high-definition images from the internet and cutting out the pieces we really need to lay on top of our base. Photobashing feels like a doing a jigsaw where we have to find matching pieces in order to continue. We have to keep the perspective and size in mind while searching for good photos of red-crested cardinals.

03

04

Use your intuition Looking at the

current stage of our final red-crested cardinal concept, something feels wrong. Sometimes it helps to just trust your intuition, which will tell us that the image feels empty. So to fix this we have many different options and now we will go with the least time-consuming one. We just go and place more branches in the background to populate it a bit more. Now it feels more balanced and right.

At Massive Entertainment (a Ubisoft studio) in Malmö, Sweden, Camehl is currently a creature concept designer, working in 2D, sketching and then moving onto 3D with ZBrush and KeyShot. He got his start in the industry by being a freelancer, initially working on smaller gigs like book covers and on independent film projects. “After I started creating my own creatures based on existing IPs, the technical art director at Massive Entertainment, Sebastian Lindoff, saw my work on ArtStation and one thing led to another,” he says. This creature work included his variations on Buckbeak, the fictional hippogriff from the Harry Potter series, which Camehl completed a full body pose of as well as three beautiful different profiles of head concepts. One version features stunning shimmering grey-blue feathers with bright topaz eyes. Another is a more stoic eagle-like concept with sleeker plumage. On the other hand, Camehl has also studied the realistic forms of mammals like African wild dogs, lions, deer and more. Some of these have taken the form of écorchés, which observe the minute details of the animal’s musculature with carefully and correctly placed annotations of every single muscle name. Knowing animal anatomy, he says, should definitely be a requirement in his field. “It is essential for any creature designer to know the anatomy of existing, real animals. That means for every artist who wants to work professionally as a creature designer, 90 per cent of your work will be researching existing animals, their behavior and anatomy, and how to draw or sculpt them to a realistic level. The missing ten per cent is using your knowledge to create believable creatures. So do your homework – it will pay off and is worth it!” One of the most notable things he’s learned about sculpting animals is the similarity to human anatomy, “If you compare the anatomy of a human with that of a lion, both have the same muscles and bones. Even the names are the same. After I learned that there is no real difference when it comes to the anatomy between different animals – that only the shapes look dissimilar – it became much easier to sculpt and draw them.”

MAKING THE MENAGERIE But Camehl doesn’t make a distinction between modelling real animals or fantasy ones. “To be honest I prefer sculpting or modelling both. Being able to create real animals in 3D helps you

It’s essential for any creature designer to have some knowledge of anatomy

One version of a body illustration of Harry Potter’s Buckbeak

Knowing how animals move is imperative

Another of Camehl’s projects It’s crucial to work closely to your references

Be sure to spend time studying the anatomy and muscles of animals

37

TAMING ZBRUSH BEASTS

An anatomically correct langur monkey

BE TOP DOG Seven tips to help you get ahead when creating incredible creatures in ZBrush

01

Transpose Line tool and Alt

If you ever struggle to create smooth curves on your model, try the Transpose Line tool while pressing Alt. For example, you created that beautiful eagle in full flight but the stretched wings looking stiff and straight. Switch to the Transpose Line tool, draw it out and while in move mode hold Alt on your keyboard to start manipulating your model.

02 A render profile of one of Camehl’s projects

design fictional creatures and push them to an almost real and believable level.” And no matter the creature, Camehl will start the same way, looking through his Pinterest for references and browsing his animal boards. It’s not just a few images saved, though. To date, Camehl has 65 boards with over 78,000 pins, meaning that he has a huge back catalogue to utilise, “Mostly I am looking for interesting behaviour or poses. I am not only looking for just one photo but a lot of them from different angles to get a feeling for the body in 3D space. During the research step, I also watch a lot of YouTube videos to help me get a feeling on how the animal is moving, how it interacts with its environment and so on.” As soon as he is finished with his research, he is either doing some quick pose studies in 2D or jumping into 3D right away for sculpting. “I think as an artist you should be able to do 2D as well as 3D these days. Being able to quickly sketch ideas using Photoshop or pen and paper is as important as transferring these sketches into a 3D space using ZBrush or any other 3D sculpting software,” he says. Camehl mostly uses ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop and pen and paper for his art. Recently, though, he got his hands on Oculus Rift and Medium, and saw some great potential in creating great work quickly in the virtual reality space. “It is just mind-blowing and it

38

definitely helped me [with my sketching] because in Oculus Medium you literally are able to ‘sketch’ in 3D space, which makes everything so easy. It is a real time-saver to quickly sketch a creature or animal and import it into ZBrush to push it to a finished level.”

NEVER STOP LEARNING As for the future, Camehl is already looking forward to what he can work on next. “There are so many animals and creatures I would love to work on. For example, I want to sculpt and learn more about birds. I also really want to get into dinosaurs and discover more about those wonderful and sadly extinct creatures. My plan is to sculpt and draw as much as I can during my free time. The why is easy to answer – but my time management is super bad!” And finally, he has one piece of advice for artists looking to improve their creature portfolio: “It is as simple as it sounds – do your homework. It is essential that you put the time and effort into learning real animal anatomy, behaviours, movements and so on. Be like a sponge and absorb as much knowledge as you can. “If you have difficulty going to the zoo, then use photos and videos. Preferably try to find places where you can interact with animals of all kinds. Even with your pets. You will learn way faster and a lot more that way than by just studying photos.”

Gather reference images This might be the most important step as soon as you plan on creating something new – everyone uses reference images and it’s definitely not cheating. When it comes to animals, it is also very important to watch a lot of videos showing how the animal behaves and moves.

03

Do your homework It is absolutely not enough to just dive in and do awesome artwork. Your very first step, besides gathering reference images should be doing your homework. What I mean by that is try and learn as much about the subject as you can: do anatomy studies, 2D action sketches or 3D pose studies.

04

Build a basemesh It is up to you if

you want to build your basemesh using ZBrush or another 3D application. It’s important that you create a basemesh because while you work on it, you are also thinking about the underlying structure and the muscles of your animal study.

05

Work in T-Pose For an animal study or any imagninary creature, it is good to first create a T-Pose version so you can come back and do several different action poses with it, saving you time.

06

Save time with a pop-up menu

07

Use polypaint Whenever you

To save time while sculpting, create a custom menu with all the brushes you use, the materials you like and the most important functions like ZRemesher or Dynamesh. Once it’s created, you can assign a custom hotkey to it and whenever you press it, your menu will pop up on the canvas.

create an animal study, make sure to use polypaint to give it some patterns that make it even more believable and real. You can also use a combination of Spotlight, textures and/or photos.

READY, SET, VR!

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READY, SET,

VR! Ian Failes dives into the real and virtual worlds of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One with Digital Domain and ILM

All images © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

W

hen people think of films about virtual reality (VR), it is perhaps 1992’s Lawnmower Man that might first come to mind. But now there is a new project likely to be forever associated with VR – Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, the director’s take on Ernest Cline’s future dystopian pop culture-filled novel. And the movie adaptation is certainly full of pop culture, too, as teenager Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) navigates the OASIS, a virtual reality of the future where people in 2045 spend more time than in real life. Watts, known as his avatar Parzival in the OASIS, is able to imagine virtually anything and this leads to all sorts of cinemainfused imagery, from Back to the Future’s famous DeLorean to Jurassic Park’s T. Rex and even the robot from The Iron Giant. Among the visual effects studios helping Spielberg bring this menagerie of imagery to life – both in the OASIS and in a future version of Columbus, Ohio – were Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Digital Domain. The former handled almost everything that was synthetic, while the latter played host to the virtual production shoot for the film, and then delivered visual effects for the real-world portions of the movie.

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) surfs the VR world of the OASIS from inside his RV

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READY, SET, VR!

PLAYING WITH POP CULTURE Among the many pop culture references in Ready Player One are three standout films among animation and visual effects aficionados

Director Steven Spielberg on the set of Ready Player One

BACK TO THE FUTURE -------------------------------------------As Parzival, Wade Watts chooses the famous DeLorean motorcar from Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future as his mode of transport in the OASIS. Scenes involving the car were filmed on the motion capture stage with a wireframe version of the DeLorean built out of steel mesh. “The DeLorean is such an icon and such a fantastical thing from that era of cinema,” says ILM visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett. “You can only imagine the effort and interest at ILM in constructing that DeLorean for the movie, and trying to understand the various design details, like the flux capacitor, and trying to capture all of that in our CG builds.”

THE IRON GIANT -------------------------------------------Brad Bird’s beloved 2D-animated feature is referenced in Ready Player One as part of a thrilling battle scene involving the metaleating robot. “He is just such a fantastic design,” notes Guyett. “So we had a lot of fun with all of those things and trying to match the style of the animation. We’d also research how the robot would work in a more realistic way, rather than just in the original movie. You can also go online and see 100 different versions of the Iron Giant, so it was like, ‘What’s the real one? How should it look in this movie?’”

JURASSIC PARK -------------------------------------------The T. Rex from Spielberg’s own VFX game-changer Jurassic Park appears in his new movie along with the giant ape from King Kong and many other characters from ‘VFXthrough-the-ages’ films. At some point, Guyett realised that many visual effects artists at ILM had likely worked on the films that Ready Player One references. “There are so many iconic characters and whether you’ve really worked on those movies or not, you become very familiar with them,” he says. “They’re all part of that DNA of the visual effects world and that geeky, nerdy world that we all exist in the visual effects world, too.”

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All images © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Sixers in Sorrento’s Innovative Online Industries and their virtual counterparts

MAKING A VR WORLD Inside the OASIS, gamers and geeks seek to solve a series of clues and missions to win a game constructed by the online world’s late founder James Halliday (Mark Rylance). The clues come from comic book, movie and videogame moments – that’s why you can find so much pop-culture eye candy in Ready Player One. Constructing this imagery, along with the digital avatars the ‘players’ inhabit inside the OASIS, was a mammoth challenge. It involved a significant motion capture shoot that was done at Digital Domain, with previs paving the way for how scenes were captured, and proxy environments constructed early to allow Spielberg to scout the virtual set for the best angles and action prior to the shoot. As with a number of virtual production shoots for recent films, the idea was to approach the motion capture “just like a live-action shoot,” asserts ILM visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett. “You have whatever you’re going to shoot that day, you scout that environment, make some adjustments if necessary and then start shooting on that environment with the actors.”

That also meant that if the characters needed to interact with key objects or pieces of the set, some kind of set piece would be built for the virtual production stage. “What Steven did,” explains Guyett, “was shoot his main coverage of those moments on the virtual stage. He’d probably walk away with 70 or 75 per cent of the basic camera ideas that he had.” But, of course, the original shoot was something that could be edited later via changes in coverage, animation and shot design. To do that, Spielberg employed a ‘v-cam’ – a virtual camera set-up where scenes and takes were played back and the director could alter things directly. “He’d go, ‘Oh, I need a close-up and I need a wide shot here, or I think it would be cool if we did a crane shot’,” notes Guyett. “We were loading the CG environment in with the motion capture and playing it back and you’re getting additional coverage for those scenes. Slowly, you’re building the movie up like that.” Footage would be edited together as the motion capture went on. It’s here that the original previs would merge into postvis, and where v-cam takes started forming part of the cut. More v-cam takes could also be

Avatars from the OASIS world peruse humans at work and play

Pretty much anything can happen in the OASIS. This scene is part of a zero-gravity nightclub

THE VIRTUAL DIRECTOR Spielberg is no stranger to the world of visual effects and he has made innumerable steps forward in filmmaking technologies

A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) -------------------------------------------To help visualise the neon-lit resort of Rouge City, Spielberg enlisted ILM to develop an on-set previsualisation system so that the actors could be filmed on bluescreen while the director could see an approximation of the CG set in the viewfinder. Such systems are now commonplace now but this was a leap forward at the time.

Columbus, Ohio in 2045 is littered with ‘stacks’ of RV trailers in a visual effects shot by Digital Domain

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN (2011) -------------------------------------------acquired to deal with any missing or extra scenes that the creative process of making the film brought up. “Then,” adds Guyett, “when we got into real post-production, Steven started turning over sequences just like normal visual effects shots. The great thing about this process is that you have a version of a shot that includes the camera move. Sometimes Steven would say, ‘I wish that was further panned to the left, or can we make these two shots run into one another and just make it a continuous beat?’ It was great to be able to make those adjustments easily.”

AVATAR TIME Translating the mocap shoot into a virtual world was certainly a major challenge for ILM, not least because it required thousands and thousands of assets to be built, often for only brief appearances in the film. But the visual effects studio was also required to develop several incredibly high-resolution assets in the form of digital human-like avatars for Wade Watts’ Parzival and the various characters he meets, including his love interest Art3mis, or Sam Cook (played by Olivia Cooke).

ILM has been at the forefront of digital humans in recent times – for example with Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia in Rogue One – but the avatars in Ready Player One required a different approach. They had to represent the feelings, desires, emotions and insecurities of each player but since they exist in the OASIS, they did not necessarily need to be photoreal. “We poured a lot of love into the design of each character, and in trying to capture what they were interested in,” explains Guyett. “At the same time, we didn’t want to make the OASIS just a completely parallel real world. So if you became a character within that world, you could have textured skin or more fantastical elements, or you might have a mechanised arm.” “We were trying to make sure that each actor’s avatar was the appropriate mirror of their performance,” adds Guyett, “and building elements of those actors into those designs so that you really were reflecting them as best you could.”

WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD Outside the OASIS in Columbus, many live in slums of RV trailers stacked high on top of

Spielberg partnered with Peter Jackson and Weta Digital to bring Hergé’s comics to life completely via virtual production. The main actors performed scenes in a motion capture volume while wearing mocap suits and head-mounted cameras. Weta Digital then crafted CG characters and expansive digital environments, effectively producing a fully animated film.

THE BFG (2016) -------------------------------------------Re-uniting with Weta Digital, Spielberg returned to the world of motion capture with this adaptation of the Road Dahl story. A continuation of Weta Digital’s past virtual production prowess enabled the director to rely on a simulcam set-up to visualise the digital character, played by Mark Rylance in motion capture gear, in both virtual as well as real sets in many scenes.

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READY, SET, VR! The Iron Giant is one of several pop-culture references in Ready Player One

All images © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

People prefer the virtual OASIS to the real world in Ready Player One

each other and indeed, these are known as the ‘stacks’. That environment was created by Digital Domain, which also worked on other set extensions, holograms and haptic suit enhancements. Scenes with the dilapidated ruins of RVs began as a partial set build, with Digital Domain then crafting an almost endless extension of the stacks. Part of the challenge here for visual effects artists was to ensure that the similar imagery did not feel too repetitive. “We ended up building enough pieces of different geometry that could be rotated and twisted in scale and moved around in order to give the illusion of complete randomness and infinite variation,” explains Matthew Butler, visual effects supervisor at Digital Domain. “Then we had to make sure that it didn’t break the bank in terms of being able to render, because we did break it and we broke everything.” At one point, the stacks are attacked by drones and explode. Digital Domain built those drones and then orchestrated a complex effects simulation for the explosion. “They were built to break apart in a certain manner and follow specific RBD solvers,” explains Butler. “They really did bend, yield, twist and snap, and also ping and topple and rip and shred – it’s not just a bunch of cubes with simple rigid body dynamics.”

PLUGGING IN One of Digital Domain’s signature shots in Ready Player One is a moment that follows Watts as he dons a pair of virtual reality

44

Parzival in his virtual DeLorean in one of several dramatic chase scenes in Ready Player One

Part of the challenge here for visual effects artists was to ensure that similar imagery did not feel too repetitive goggles inside his RV and heads into the OASIS. The shot gets extremely close to the character’s face and it was ultimately realised with a CG digi-double. “Steven really wanted to get behind the eyes of Wade, as it were, to tell the audience what he was experiencing,” says Butler. “Well, that was not physically plausible to shoot practically, so we used a digital Wade for a portion of time there in order to be able to get us that close.” “On set,” continues Butler, “I talked to the camera and rigging departments, and we worked out how we could get as much on camera as possible of Tye Sheridan. The best way turned out to be to forget the RV completely so he was actually sitting on an apple box on a bluescreen set and around him was an orbital track rig.” Sheridan performed the entire scene with a camera getting as close as possible to him but at a certain point this transitioned to Digital Domain’s CG Wade model, complete with macro-level detail of the actor’s skin, pores and hairs. Scans were acquired via USC ICT’s Light Stage.

Wade Watts takes on the avatar of Parzival inside the OASIS, a motion-captured digital character crafted by ILM

“We needed to get so close beyond the macro photography of the physical camera,” says Butler. “We had to model the surface peach fuzz of the delicate hairs that you see at that level. Extra detailed photography gave us pore-level topography as well as textural detail so that we could get it right in between the hairs of his skin to be able to pull that off.”

A VIRTUAL AND VISUAL EXTRAVAGANZA Time will tell as to whether Ready Player One will become ‘the’ film associated with VR but it was certainly considered a dream visual effects project by those involved in its making. It required both substantial VFX for the real-world scenes and a dazzling array of CG imagery for the OASIS. Both main supervisors from Digital Domain and ILM relished the opportunity to be a part of it. “To get to work with Steven was amazing, and I always enjoy working with ILM,” says Butler. “I thought we were doing some top-quality work and having fun doing it. So it was an absolute blast.” “It was quite an experience – very rewarding, very interesting and very challenging,” adds Guyett. “There were certain moments at the beginning where we were just looking at each other and going, ‘Wow, how are we gonna do this?’ And then, slowly but surely, you start laying those first bricks of the wall and you start making some headway and you start putting this thing together, but it was a gargantuan task.”

Expert advice from industry professionals, taking you from concept to completion

All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

SAFWEN LAABIDI Biker_Chick, 2017 Software ZBrush, 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Mari, V-Ray, Ornatrix, Photoshop

Learn how to • Create a stylised character with realistic details • Sculpt • Retopologise UVs • Texture with Substance Painter and Mari • Shade a model • Render with V-Ray • Properly place lights to highlight a specific area on your character

Shade and render a stylisedcharacter Discover how to mix realistic details with a stylised cartoon to create your own individual and unique character

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n this tutorial we’ll learn the techniques required to be able to make a stylised character with very complex details. From skin detailing to fabric and hair shading, we’ll be covering the process of sculpting cloth without using any simulation software in ZBrush and 3ds Max. We will also discover how to use ZBrush polypaint and mix that with Mari texture painting and then take everything to Substance to further enhance the look of the skin and create the tattoos. After that, we’ll explore how to create the haircut from blocking the base in ZBrush and make the actual hair in Ornatrix. Finally, we will do the lighting and shading in 3ds Max and render in V-Ray.

Concept This project started as a practice of stylised characters but when I delved further into the details, I had this idea of a badass biker with cool tattoos covering her body. I changed almost everything about her to get to this result using some real-life references of female bikers.

Block out the main form Before starting the sculpt, check some references to see how the character could look and also what type of pose she will be in. After finding everything we need, use a base mesh that you’ve made of a stylised female and begin sculpting the basic blockout. It doesn’t need to be anything special, just the usual brushes flike Clay Buildup and Move, Standard and Dam_Standard. To clean up the surface noise caused by the Clay Buildup brush, use Trim Dynamic to polish and smooth the surface without losing volume. If you use the Smooth brush, you will lose the volume and the basic shapes. After finishing the rough sculpt, split the mesh into four parts – head, hands, legs and torso – so that we can use the Transpose tool to pose the character without any problems.

Auto retopology wih ZRemesher When you work on a character for games or cinematics, it’s usually better to use ZSphere manual retopology or any tool of your choice because you need specific topology for skinning and rigging. In this case we’re using ZRemesher but we’ll have to make some polygroups to control where we need the edge loops. All you have to do is mask the part you want to group and then click Ctrl/Cmd+W to group it. After cleaning everything up using Polish By Polygroup, click on ZRemesher while holding the Opt/Alt key. Keep in mind though that you will have to check the Keep Group option that way as it will remesh the object and keep the polygrouping intact.

Edge flow for subdivision control Export the ZRemeshed body to 3ds Max so we can add some details and control the lip and eye edges better. Start by removing the triangles and ngons from the unnecessary places to prevent pinches later when we render the skin. Now that you have the topology and quads, extrude the lips inside a bit and add some thickness to the eyes. Add more edge loops around those parts to get a sharper chamfer for subdivision. Everything is now ready for us to start detailing the sculpt in ZBrush without worrying about losing volume when we divide. 02

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from filesilo.co.uk/3dartist • Tutorial screenshots • Hair+V-Ray_hair_mtl file

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Add displacement To add displacement to the face, use Texturing XYZ in Mari and ZBrush. We usually have three type of maps – primary, secondary and microdisplacement – but we won’t do that here because it’s a stylised character. Instead, we’ll only need the main displacement. Export the mesh after unwrapping it in ZBrush and use two different UDIMs, one for the face and another for the body, to get a very high-resolution texture. Also, don’t forget to split the face map up for the different features. Do the same thing for the body because Mari will crash if you try to paint a full 16k map. Since we already have the body in ZBrush, import the painted texture from the Alpha menu, go to Masking and click Mask By Alpha. Now you can use layers if you want to decrease the displacement. Go to Deformation for the Inflate tool and play with the number as you see fit.

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Create the jacket Everything about this project was about learning more techniques and being better at sculpting so we’re using the old workflow to extract the shapes from the body. Adopt the same method we employed to create the proper topology for the body using ZRemesher. After that, take it to 3ds Max to add the edge control like we did for the body. Now that everything is ready for sculpting, check some leather jacket references and some fold studies before starting to sculpt. For this, we are mainly using the Dam_Standard brush with and without pressing Opt/Alt as well as the Inflate brush on some of the folds because the leather material has a specific look. Once done, hit ZRemesher again and keep doing that until the sculpt is completed with all of its details, including the micromemory folds. You can add some realism to the leather in Substance Painter later.

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Make some details For the zip, we could just use the IMM Zipper brush from ZBrush but we want a nondestructive workflow with more control so we’ll use 3ds Max’s surface deformer to make the copies of the zip that we modelled in 3ds Max. Then make it follow the chosen surface by creating a simple plane. You can extrude it from the border of the jacket where you want the zip to be by creating a shape from both sides of that plane, and then making a surface from those shapes using the NURB modifier. Now make the zip with very simple box modelling, copy it as many times as you need and attach them all. Add the surface deformer modifier, pick that surface and you’ll have a zip. For the stitches, do the same thing except only use the path deformer following a simple shape. You can also use the same workflow for the belt but it will be one full mesh that follows a surface or a shape.

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Anatomy before posing Usually when working with characters in a pose you have to be sure that your anatomy is on point and correct. Even for a stylised character, anatomy is vital and you have to check the proportions before posing the character because after you get out of the T-Pose, fixing the proportions in an unsymmetrical object will be challenging and a waste of time – especially if you are just starting out. Once you start getting used to anatomy, you can practise your sculpting with an asymmetrical pose.

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Displacement When painting a displacement map, most people will use it as is straight from the software to the rendering engine. Most of the time you will pass it through ZBrush to control the places that require less displacement and also to add some more details. This is because you can only use that map two or three times before people start noticing that you’re using the same texture all the time and your characters will have different ages and different skin normally, so you would want that personal touch to your displacement to look more natural and unique.

Texture the skin Now that we have everything ready to be textured, start with the skin. We’ll use ZBrush first for the basic polypainting, follow some references and colour palettes for the colour tones on our faces. Use the Standard brush and change the alpha to get different looks. When you’re satisfied with the result, export the simple painting to Substance Painter in the form of a 2D map. Now export the body to Substance Painter and add the polypaint information. Mix it with the displacement map we painted in Mari and then start refining the skin using some fill and paint layers as well as the cool smart masks provided by Substance.

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Makeup and tattoos The makeup is very simple to do – just add a new fill layer with a black colour that’s just under 100 per cent black. Then black mask that fill layer and use the lazy mouse in Substance Painter to do the eyelashes – following some references, of course. Now that the eyelashes are done, you can add less roughness to the material to make them less reflective than the skin itself. Before we create the tattoos, however, we need to gather some references. We’re not going to make them from scratch and it’s not the purpose of this tutorial so in this project we’ll photobash some black and white tattoos, and we can paint over them to add some specific words. We’ll do the colouring ourselves using some gradient colours because real tattoos have a blue tint, like you see in veins, and that is usually caused by light bouncing off of skin, giving it that colour.

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Skin shading After exporting the maps from Substance Painter, we’re not going to use them straight away. First we need to adjust them in V-Ray with some colour correction. For the skin, use the new V-Ray alSurface shader – it’s pretty simple and doesn’t require a lot of maps so we have more control over the skin’s look. We’ll be using the base colour and the skin colour. For the other two skin layers, it’ll just be the default colour with just a couple of tweaks – that’s how accurate this new V-Ray shader is. For the reflection map, employ the map from Substance and mix it with the displacement map without making it very obvious. For the roughness, adopt a simple procedural map from 3ds Max called cellular and mix it with the same map to get a glossy variation. Don’t forget to use the GGX BRDF mode so that you have a reflection that changes based on the viewing angle. As for the displacement, just use the map exported from ZBrush as it is but with a small adjustment in the output to avoid inflating the geometry when it comes to rendering.

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Texture and shade the clothes Now that everything is in place and the skin shader is ready, try and make a good-looking jacket and jeans. For the jeans, use a simple jean texture and then take it to Substance Designer. Use a filter to process it, make tiles and tweak the normals, displacement, roughness and so on. Then take it to Substance Painter to add the details and that way we can add some damage to the colour and some variation in the normal intensity. It’s pretty much the same for the jacket except that we’re not going to use textures. Instead, we’ll use a Substance downloaded from Substance Source – it’s a free resource. Add some adjustments to it inside of the V-Ray material to make it look more like fabric with some Fresnel effects to get the frizzy look. For the leather, use Substance Painter to get the effect by starting with a simple smart material that looks like leather. Of course, since we have the back details we can make further changes to it to make it look a bit worn. It’s still a new jacket but we need to tell a story behind our texture. As the character is a badass biker, she must get into fights and so some dirt and scratches will make it look awesome.

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Block the hair in ZBrush Before you start working on creating the hair, you have to figure out what type of haircut you need. If we start using Ornatrix without any ideas about the style and just start grooming, we will never finish. Go to ZBrush and play with some curve brushes to get the main look. We’re going to use the CurveTube brush with a small modification under the curve modifiers on the Stroke menu. We’ll change the curve to make it taller at the end – that way, our blockout will look a bit more like hair.

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Set up the main hair strands After we have our haircut blocked out in ZBrush, export it into 3ds Max and freeze it so that we will be able to work on the actual hair without any problems with Ornatrix grooming. Before starting, paint a hair map in Substance Painter so we can control where we want the hair to grow from. Next, select a small part of the head model – we don’t want to select the whole head – and add the Ornatrix modifier. It’s worth noting that even if you have a map to control it, it will be heavy on your PC, so now that we have the small geometry selected, add the ox guides from surface modifier. After that, try to groom the guides to make it look like our blockout mesh. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t try to groom the guides with a high root count as that will make it harder for you to control. Try to use a low count instead and then work your way up until you’re happy with the look – after that, you can add the ox hair from guides.

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The key to realistic hair One of the common mistakes artist make when creating hair is not planning the hair creation steps and the details – they just go straight to the software and start grooming. Always separate your hair into many groups to have control over each part and you need to know the type and condition of the hair, too, as it’s different from case to case. As for the shading, never use flat colour with no hue variation as that will have a big impact on the final result. Playing with strand colour variation and roots darkness will add some depth to the hair and your character.

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Clothing creation In most case when making clothes, I always use Marvelous Designer or any simulation software. That’s fine except it’s not necessarily a good habit to have when you first start making clothes because there is an anatomy to clothes just like for muscles. Learning wrinkles, names and where tension happens will make the simulated cloth look much better because at game studios, or any studio, you will never take the cloth made in Marvelous Designer and just retopo and bake. You will always have to add better details and fix problems. You will never know how without doing fold studies and practising cloth sculpting in your preferred software.

Add hair variations Now that we have the main form of our haircut, try to add some hair variation – that’s one of the most important parts of hair creation. In order to make it look natural, we have to split it into different levels of detail so we’ll do the same thing that we did in Substance Painter and paint where we want the details to be. After that, copy every modifier you added to the previous hair but only those on top of the ox hair from guides – that way we get the same hair property but a different look. We don’t want different hair thicknesses as that will look bad when we render. Keep doing this until you have enough hair variation to get a natural look without losing the stylised feel of the haircut.

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Colour intensity variation Now we’ll go into Substance Designer to create a basic greyscale texture to represent different colour intensities in the hair. Since we don’t want it to be too uniform, we’re going to use an anistropic noise node. After that, add a blur_hq_ grayscale so that we don’t have a sharp transition between different greyscale values. Next, plug it into a histogram range node so that we won’t have any intense black or white values. Now we’re ready to go to 3ds Max to prepare our hair shader.

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Prepare the hair shader For the hair shader, we’re going to use the V-Ray hair material as it’s easy to use and gives a pretty good result. First add a V-Ray map called VRayHairInfoTex to the opacity slot. Swap the black and white colours, and change the bias value to 0.1 – that way the tip of the hair will fade out and that will help later with the antialiasing. Then go to the colours and add another VRayHairInfoTex map to the transmission slot in the output. Keep it on this colour and set a dark colour for A. For colour B, select a brighter colour – the same hue but a different intensity. Keep in mind that colours A and B will not be just flat colours as they’re V-Ray colours mixed with the texture we made in Substance Designer using the V-Ray dirt map to mix the two.

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Colours A and B will not be just flat colours as they’re V-Ray colours mixed with the texture we made in Substance Designer using the V-Ray dirt map 51

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Light the character When lighting your character, always try to have a purpose behind your choices. If you don’t, you’ll just get lost and keep adding lights without being satisfied with the outcome and not even know why it’s looking how it does. So for our character we’re going to start by adding the first light on her right side. This will be the key light and then we’ll start adding some more to highlight certain shapes and to separate her from the background to make her hair stand out. Add a backlight on her left back side to make her really pop and then use the reflection and the refraction filters to do some compositing later when it comes to rendering. Also add an HDRI with a very low intensity, too, for better reflection. 16

Safwen Laabidi With over six years of experience, Safwen works in research and developement at D-tek and is also in charge of modelling, texturing and shading organic and hard-surface modes.

Aiden sword, 2017 3ds Max, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marmoset Toolbag 3 This sword was first made for the character that I created for the ArtStation challenge but I then started improving it through textures and shading.

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Viking Medallion, 2017 Maya, SpeedTree, Arnold Created for a Viking warrior, I’m still working on the character that this asset was made for.

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Render and comp For the rendering we’ll use brute force for the primary engine and light cache for the secondary one. The rendering type is bucket and for a sharper render use the catmull_rom filter. In the image sampler, put 100 in the Max Subdivs and 1 in the Min Subdivs and put 0.005 for the noise threshold. The lower you get, the cleaner your render will be and the slower it gets. The reason for using the brute force engine is that it’s better for rendering specific characters details with high-detailed displacement. People will usually use an irradiance map and a light cache for arch vis and other projects. However, if you have something that requires high sampling calculation in every part of the model, you would want to use brute force. After we finish, we use the render passes like ambient occlusion, reflection, refraction and so on. We then make our comp in Photoshop using channel blending and some colour correction.

52 All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

Real time axe, 2017 Maya, SpeedTree, Arnold This axe was made for a masterclass I held on Substance Painter and this software is used for games.

DISCOVER CINEMA 4D’S HAIR SYSTEM

DANIEL RIPLEY Tyrion Lannister Portrait Fan Art, 2017 Software Cinema 4D Studio, ZBrush, Unfold3D, Substance Painter, V-Ray, Photoshop

Learn how to • Model organically • Understand the importance of UV mapping • Layer hair using Cinema 4D • Sculpt • Work with perspective • Texture • Light • Set up skin material • Post work in Photoshop

Concept The concept was to create a portrait that reveals the tough life of Tyrion Lannister using an ‘old age’ dark setting with warm tones that set the mood for this piece.

Discover Cinema 4D’s hair system Re-create a portrait inspired by Games of Thrones’ Tyrion Lannister with a focus on realism and detail using ZBrush, Cinema 4D and more

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or this fan art piece of Tyrion Lannister, we will break down how the image was created. We will cover the importance of edge flow when polygonal modelling and how each step plays a role in the final composition. We will also look at how certain tools can be used to speed up your progress within Cinema 4D. We will talk about the importance of clean UV maps, and the exciting process of setting up the final scene with its materials, lighting and composition. We will also explore which order to progress though the material setup to achieve balanced results, and how best to use the fantastic hair system within Cinema 4D. Finally, we will look at how we can get that final polished look when working with multi-pass layers in Photoshop. A project such as this primarily requires skills in polygonal modelling and sculpting – however, you will also need to develop skills and knowledge in basic anatomy, composition, texturing and lighting.

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Gather references When doing portrait work, the first step should always be to gather plenty of good-quality references. This is absolutely essential as it is from these references that your decisions will be directed. If, like in this project, you wish to model from a background reference image, you’ll need ones that have a good front and left-side profile. I used Photoshop to composite both pictures together, aligning features such as the ears, eyes, nose and mouth.

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Model the head I always make sure that the references are aligned to allow modelling in the centre of the world space. I start by placing down the first polygon for the eyelid using the Polygon Pen tool. This method is used for ultimate control by extruding the edges and making adjustments as I utilise a temporary reference sphere as a guide for the eyelid curvature. I give priority to edge loops around the eyes, mouth, jawline and ears. The polygon count is kept as low as possible keeping in mind that I will subdivide this model later on. The Grab tool is essential to attain form fast while modelling.

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Volume and detail After placing the essential edge loops down, start to fill in the gaps with quad-only polygons. Use the Grab brush to further tweak the volume of the head. I use the Iron tool to relax selected polygons before subdividing the mesh once. Having some anatomical knowledge of the skull will certainly help a great deal when you are considering how certain landmarks align to other areas of the skull, such as how the bottom of the nose aligns with the cheekbone. This informs you as to where the volume should be in 3D space. 02

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from filesilo.co.uk/3dartist • Tutorial screenshots • Cinema 4D hair files

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I add some edge loops to retain volume and I also like to make the inner shell slightly smaller before placing it inside the outer shell object. I then rotate the eye

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Create the eyes I make the eyes with two parts forming the outer shell from a Hexahedron. The standard sphere has poles, which is fine for the inner eye forms, but the outer shell is best with no poles in the cornea area for clean reflections. The cornea bulge is achieved by using the Move tool with soft selection while the iris is made from pushing in the centre polygons and extruding the pupil inwards. I add some edge loops to retain volume and I also like to make the inner shell slightly smaller before placing it inside the outer shell object. I then rotate the eye three degrees outwards.

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Refine the details Now we start getting the eyelids to fit perfectly to the eyes and then model the tear ducts separately. I usually spend a bit more time moving vertices around the tear duct area with the soft selection enabled, also using the Grab brush. Select a row of polygons from the lower inner eyelid to split from the geometry and then extrude from the water line between the eyelid and eye – this is essential for creating realistic eyes. The eyes get looked at a lot so you need to spend time and make sure to give a lot of attention to these details.

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Model the clothing For the clothes, I start off with a cube with two segments on the x, y, z. I make it editable then delete half of it. It’s then added to a Symmetry Tag, where I start to move the vertices using the Modelling Brush tool in Smear mode. When I model anything, I always make sure to shape the area I’m about to extrude from as best I can because this will result in less shaping work later on. Finally, I subdivide the mesh once and add extra loops at the front before selecting and deleting one loop for the opening of the jacket.

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Get the perspective Before you start to sculpt, you must set up the ZBrush Documents perspective to match Cinema 4D’s, which is set to the reference image. A portrait camera preset in Cinema 4D is 80 millimetres and this is a good start. I get a front-on perspective screenshot from Cinema 4D and bring this into ZBrush as a backdrop. I then use this to aid in setting up the ZBrush perspective by looking at how much of the ears I can see, or how long the face looks. You don’t want to have a perspective mismatch between Cinema 4D and ZBrush.

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Symmetry and likeness You’ll never find a face that’s 100 per cent symmetrical – even some faces that appear that way look like a completely different person when mirrored. Don’t expect to get total likeness at the modelling stage as we are working in symmetry using the Symmetry tag. At a later stage I will apply asymmetry in a nondestructive way by using Pose Morphs via the Advanced/Target field.

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Optimal results Aim to keep all polygons quads, and square where there are no creases needed. When sculpting, use the edge flow that we have taken our time to add to achieve a smooth sculpt, and this sets us up right from the beginning. The polycount level should let most expressions be made without subdividing the mesh. UV maps should be optimal to get the best texture quality and pixel space distortion-free.

Achieve the likeness The features of the face that protrude furthest into space can be seen from the side profile so start by getting this tweaked first using the Move brush. Then it’s time to begin working from the front by taking measurements from photo references. It’s important to use the rule of thirds, which allows you to get the differences from the ideal and then apply them to the sculpt. I work with layers at all times and especially when adding asymmetry. Remember: it’s paramount to rename the new sculpt, otherwise GoZ will overwrite the current model within Cinema 4D. It’s this new model that will get used as a Pose Morph.

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UV maps For UV mapping, I personally use Unfold3D. I like to unwrap with symmetry to speed the process up but on this occasion, our head model is asymmetrical. As the asymmetrical sculpting is in a layer within ZBrush, it can be turned off for this step. Once I have done the UV mapping and have got it as distortion free as possible, I update the model in ZBrush with the new UVs. Then, after turning the Asymmetry layer back on, I run the model though Unfold3D again to update the Asymmetrical changes. The new UVs are copied to Cinema 4D.

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Sculpt secondary details Sculpting detail is what everyone wants to do in ZBrush and this is where some of the most fun happens. I add another layer and subdivide only to what I need to because right now I don’t need millions of polygons. These are the secondary details where I sculpt in the bigger forms such as deeper creases, scars and imperfections. This will become the displacement map later on. I usually keep the displacement and highfrequency detail maps separate until I set up the V-Ray materials in Cinema 4D.

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Texture the clothing I use Substance Painter to texture the clothes. Using one of the leather smart materials, adjust accordingly to achieve the look that you’re after. I also use Substance Painter for the buckles and scarf in this project. There is a nice preset to export all Substance textures for V-Ray use and it’s very easy to set up a V-Ray material. Each UV island needs to be 1:1 scale to other Islands in order to get equal quality and this applies even more so for UDIM workflows.

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Sculpting detail is what everyone wants to do in ZBrush and this is where some of the most fun happens 57

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Texture the head For skin detail, I used XYZ textures and patched down segments in layers over a wire UV template within Photoshop. For the colour diffuse, use ZBrush by first projecting from a photo to give the tones. Then colour-pick tones around the face and hand-paint it all over until the original projection is gone. Bring in the skin detail map, applying it as displacement to a layer, then apply a cavity-inverted mask. I then filled the face with a darker tone to help colour-match the skin pores.

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Cinema 4D hair system The hair system in Cinema 4D Studio has many options that are well worth learning in detail. I make multiple hair objects to get the best control. The Hair brush tool has multiple modes such as Move and Smooth, which are the two I use most often. To curl the hair, I chose the Curl tool rather than adding curl in the material to give me better control over the results. You will need enough segments to use this tool. I use the colour option in the basic tab for each layer to separate them visually in the viewport.

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Scene and lighting I use three area lights – a key, a rim and a highlight. The key is almost front-on while the rim is used to highlight the edge of the hair and shoulders against the dark background. The highlight is a very small light placed to enhance specular spots like the eyes and face. I turn on one light at a time to adjust the balance. For the best results, be sure to use real-world-scale objects. Lighting and many other presets are set up on this basis. I use the Scale Project command in the Edit menu to scale the final model.

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Shade and render I use V-Ray as my renderer and AL Surface as my skin shader. I apply displacement first with no SSS. The displacement and detail maps are combined within Photoshop, kept in their own layers for mixing balance. The Reflection is then set up, which reveals how well the skin detail is showing. You need more detail than usual as SSS can remove some of it. I use maps to control the reflection strength, and then mix in the SSS and diffuse to produce the final skin effect. Multi-pass rendering offers more control within Photoshop.

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Post-production work The multi-pass setup has each light as a separate pass and the diffuse is contained within the SSS layer. I use seven passes – SSS, Reflection, Lighting, Key, Rim, Highlight and Hair. The main tools I employ in Photoshop are Burn to add darker areas, Dodge for highlights, Colour filters to add colour, Contrast, Levels, slight chromatic aberration and Smart sharpen. I liken the post-production process to mixing and mastering music – mixing should be where most of the work is done while mastering adds the polish.

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Getting the balance The whole process is about taking your time to do your best in each stage. I fix problems as I see them and it’s a balancing act to get all of the key areas to play their part. When experimenting with settings, try extreme values to see their effects and then mix them back in. Lighting and reflection are key to surface detail but your maps need to hold up well.

58 All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

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MASTER MEDICAL VISUALISATION

FARID GHANBARI Sperms and egg, 2018 Software Cinema 4D, X-Particles, V-Ray, After Effects

Learn how to • Create a medical rendering • Use X-Particles and Cinema 4D to create many sperm • Create a sperm shape with a spline • Use V-Ray Fog Box to illustrate medical visualisation • Set up lighting perfectly with V-Ray for Cinema 4D • Make medical rendering more artistic

Concept I was asked to create an image for 3FX, Inc that was to be published in the 2018 Medical Illustration Sourcebook, so I came up with this concept: sperm and egg.

Master medical visualisation Learn the best way to render medical visualisations using X-Particles and Cinema 4D with art director Farid Ghanbari

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his tutorial will teach you how to create a medical visualisation in the 3D world. Before starting the project, we need to gather some references to make sure that the sizes of the cells are scientifically accurate. We will use Cinema 4D and X-Particles as our main tools to set up the scene and learn how to use X-Particles to quickly create hundreds of sperm in a nice shape without dealing with each individual one. V-Ray will then be utilised to light the sperms and egg with its powerful subsurface scattering material.

Choose the subject The most important purpose of a true medical illustration is to educate the viewer. It must be clear and scientifically accurate, paying careful attention to good design, organisation of content and where you are leading the eye. It also provides us with a vast array of subjects that we wouldn’t normally consider illustrating. The real-life microscopic environments that exist in our own bodies can provide inspiration for imaginative landscapes. 01

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DOWNLOADS from filesilo.co.uk/3dartist • Tutorial screenshots • Animation of the medical process in action

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Create the egg To start the artwork, we need a nice egg shape as a base. Make a simple sphere in Cinema 4D and change the type from Standard to Hexahedron to get an even displacement over the entire egg. To add the details, you can easily put a displacer deformer and add a C4DNoise to its shader tag. Play with the noise type to get your desired details. You can also use layers and mask your first noise with a second one. Sharper details need more segments in your sphere parameters.

Make the sperm Since we have so many sperm, we need a way to create them instantly. X-Particles allows us to do that easily. First, we need an emitter and an xpTrail to see the emitter paths. Second, we need an xpFollowSurface modifier to conduct particles to the egg. Play with the distance and pull to get your desired form. We can also play with variation to add a little variation to it and make it more natural. Spend enough time at this level and ensure that you are getting the best result. 03

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Work with xpSplineMesher Once we get the nice follow path, we can start shaping the actual form of the sperm.Thankfully, we don’t need to deal with polygon modelling to do that and here you will see the power of the X-Particles plugin. Just put an xpSplineMesher and set your xpTrail as its source. It will create the geometry instantly. From here, we just need to tweak the setting and play with the SplineMesher spline curve to shape the sperm. You can follow your reference outline and play with spacing value and subdivisions to get the best result.

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Add a little art to the science Because we are creating artwork inspired by science, rather than a purely instructional medical illustration, we want to go a little further and make it more interesting. Of course, sperm in real world have a defined tail length but to create some nice details with thousands of tangled sperm tails, we can extend this. We can stop it wherever we want by setting different values on the lifespan on the emitter.

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Create mood for the environment Inside a real body, biological processes happen in total darkness, but that isn’t very interesting. Our medical-inspired artwork needs an environment that we can relate to. Here, to create this mood the best option is the environment fog but to have a better control of it we need to create a Fog Box to control the amount of fog and its depth on the hero asset. This will give your rendering a nice depth and pull out your main hero to really emphasise it.

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Secondary sperm As you may know, not all sperm reach the egg and there will still be a lot of them swimming in the fallopian tube after fertilisation happens. By having those secondary sperm, not only can we make our artwork a little more scientifically accurate, but we can also bring more depth to it and make a better composition. So according to our camera, we can put a few sperm pretty close to the camera to make an intense DOF, and put some far away behind the egg so that they will be out of focus but still we can see them.

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X-Particles plugin The X-Particles plugin for Cinema 4D is one of the best for creating particles and VFX. There are tons of different modifiers and generators that allow you to build whatever you imagine. We really recommend you to spend enough time to learn all about this plugin because it helps you handle your projects better and provides you with a better pipeline. As you will see, the reason that the sperm and egg image has such a straightforward pipeline is because of this plugin.

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V-Ray for C4D If you are familiar with V-Ray for Maya or 3ds Max, you will be comfortable with working with V-Ray for Cinema 4D. The interface is pretty much the same. Even if you are completely new to it, you will find it very friendly and easy to use. There are also several V-Ray materials but you can create most of the things you need just with one single material called V-Ray Advanced material. Everything you require – such as SSS, refraction, reflection and bump – can all be found in this material.

Start the lighting To start the lighting, it’s best to assign a V-Ray Advanced material and leave it on the default setting. We don’t want to mess with the materials at this stage. This helps you focus just on lights and make a better decision. Sometimes different colours, reflection and specular can be distracting and slow down the lighting process. As the first step, we just put a V-Ray Dome light with low intensity to see the whole scene with even lighting and no harsh shadows.

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Key light, different experience The majority of the egg and sperm will be illuminated by the key light and so this light has the most critical role in our lighting. Spend enough time playing with different angles and moods. Set your render sampling to progressive with a low-resolution image size to have some quick test renders that you can compare with. We can also try various directional numbers in the V-Ray light to have different brightness and harshness of shadows.

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Volume light The fog doesn’t work by itself but the combination of the fog and one volume light could make a stunning background. To establish that, create a V-Ray spot light and put it behind the egg. You can keep playing with this to achieve the best results. Inner and outer angles play the biggest roles in getting a nice gradient in the background. You can also add a little bluish or greenish tint to your light to make it more interesting.

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The colour palette Once we get a decent basic result with our lighting on a simple grey material, we need to assign colours to see how it works. At this stage, we recommend that you add SSS to your materials, since it affects the lighting a lot. You can play with the simple colours to get your desired colour palette, then create details like bumps, displacements and dirt. Because we are doing a science-inspired project instead of a truly scientifically accurate illustration, we can let our imaginations run wild with crazy colour schemes. But knowing what colours your subject would have in the real world can help create your palette, and this will make your artwork more consistent and easy to read.

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Because we are doing a science-inspired project instead of a truly scientifically accurate illustration, we can let our imaginations run wild 63

MASTER MEDICAL VISUALISATION

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Your best workflow Having a workflow is key to be able to finish a project on time. This could be different from artist to artist or even project to project. Also, it is completely normal to go back at some points to redo or tweak jobs that you have done at previous stages. But try to keep the project in your workflow and make it a straightforward, linear pipeline. After the concept stage, modelling, lighting, texturing and postproduction are the biggest areas in the workflow.

Rim light When you use Subsurface Scattering Materials, the rim light is one of the key factors to work on, just like the key light. SSS materials use the lights that come inside them from the opposite side of camera angle so try to put these in the best positions to achieve the most satisfying scattering effect. You may need to play with SSS parameters such as scattering radius, subsurface colour and overall colour at the same time. Don’t forget to try different tint colours on your rim light.

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Final tune at lighting You will always need to redo some work during the process, whether it be textures colours, lights or even slight changes to the models and positioning, and this is completely normal. At this stage, look over your rendering and try to just tweak it to get the most satisfying result from your vision. Turn your lights on and off separately to see how they work with your scene.

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Set up the render setting Thankfully, V-Ray for Cinema 4D has made everything a little easier for users – you just need to take the most care with your sampling. For this render, use Bucket type for sampler with 0.004 Threshold. Set the Max Subdivision to 100 and put the Min to 0. Don’t forget to enable Ambient Occlusion, which comes under Indirect illumination. Since we have created a V-Ray Fog Box, you don’t need to turn on the Environment fog in your Environment tab.

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Render passes To create your render passes in V-Ray for Cinema 4D, you need to open the V-Ray multipass Manager window from the main V-Ray Bridge tab. Select your desired passes and make sure that they are all checked. Now you just need to add a post-effects pass on the multipass menu in your Cinema 4D render setting window. Here we have created different object ID and the Z-depth pass to have more control at post-production stage.

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Making your own art If you want to be an artist, you have to create art. Since there are tons of CG work published online everyday by all artists around the world, you need to have your own style that can be be distinguished by others. Sometimes this could be defined by your own colour palettes, or it might be specific detail that you always add to your objects. No matter what it is, it really matters to be unique and remarkable. To enhance your work, study the history of art and practise as much as you can. You will see your own style develop over time as you create more projects.

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You will always need to redo some work during the process, whether it be textures colours, lights or even slight changes

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MASTER MEDICAL VISUALISATION

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Apply DOF Without depth of field, we would have a boring, flat image. In the real world, we would only be able to see these tiny cells through a microscope. Microscopes have a very shallow depth of field so in homage to that, using depth of field as intensely as possible can help represent that. Here we have used Lenscare’s Frischluft plugin in After Effects to achieve a nice depth of field. But no matter what software you prefer to use, since you have an accurate ZDepth pass, you can use it in whichever application you happen to be most comfortable with. 16

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Farid Ghanbari Born and raised in Iran, Farid has been a 3D generalist and lighting artist for ten years. He is now the art director at 3FX Inc in Philadelphia, US.

Bottles of Life, 2017 Maya, V-Ray, Substance Painter, Photoshop The idea came to me when I saw some oil paintings on Pinterest. They all had perfect lighting and were eye-catching images with just some brush touches.

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Post-production Since we did the most of the rendering in-package and we now have a nice-looking result, we may need to do just a little colour correction but there are no big changes in post-production. The only things we will add to our image at this final stage are the clouds. For this, you can simply find some PNG files online and put them close to the egg. Besides making your rendering more artistic, they will give an unexpected sense of scale to surprise and delight your audience.

66 All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

Autumn, 2017 Maya, SpeedTree, SolidAngle Arnold I came up with the idea of a fun, colourful, autumnal scene and so I tried to create some abstract trees just for a bit of fun.

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Expert advice from industry professionals, taking you from concept to completion

All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

3DS MAX, V-RAY

HUSSAIN ALMOSSAWI moxxawi.com

Excel with product visualisation in V-Ray

Bio Hussain is an international product designer based in New York, working at the Adidas Brooklyn Creator Farm. His style is a combination of modern, minimal and futuristic.

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68

I

n this tutorial, we will be looking at a product visualisation workflow. In this case, I will be taking one of the toys that I have designed and explaining how to render, colour and present it in an interesting way. Designing the product is usually half the challenge but then the way in which we present it to the world completes the story full circle and can either elevate a product and take it to another level or kill it and make it undesirable, even if it’s a pretty cool design. In this tutorial, we will be talking about some of the key elements when it comes to rendering, the kinds of materials to use, cameras, environments and choosing the most interesting angles and views to render your product in. I see all of these things as a recipe to a great and exciting outcome to a project, whether it’s a car, bike, shoe or anything else. This tutorial will be short but it will cover the key points that you can consider and start to apply when the time comes for you to start rendering your own projects for your clients or portfolio. I urge you to explore each tip further and see what you can make out of it. For example, when we are discussing lighting, every kind of lighting setup could result in a different mood for your render. It could feel vibrant and fresh instead of serious and dry. In terms of software, the points covered are applicable to any program but I will be using 3ds Max and rendering in V-Ray, with the final touch-ups done in Photoshop. Enjoy the read and let’s make some exciting work together!

01

Set up studio To start with, I usually go with a pretty basic-looking studio set-up in most of my scenes. I start off by creating my backdrop, a simple L-shaped plane, curved or chamfered smoothly at its corner. I tend to make the backdrop 100 per cent white or 98 per cent black as they both look pretty cool at the completion of the project. If I’m going with black, I try not to make it pure black, though, so that I don’t completely lose all of my floor shadows at the end. For this tutorial, we will be going with a white backdrop.

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HDRI lights HDRI lights will completely set the

tone and mood of what your finished scene will look like. Every scene and render should give the viewer an experience and feeling with a unique kind of depth using reflections and shadows. HDRI is like using spices in food – it’s often the secret ingredient. In 3ds Max, press 8 on your keyboard to pull up the Environment window and load a V-Ray HDRI Map in there of your choice. I strongly suggest that you try out a few different maps and see how they look roughly using V-Ray RT.

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Camera composition There are two kinds of shots that you want to think of – one is the overall product, which will be your Hero Shot, and the other is a detailed view where you close-up on certain parts to show more details. A good practice is for you to navigate your screen in Perspective view and when you feel like you have

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the right angle, turn it into a camera using Ctrl+C. For the Hero shot, I usually go with a camera angle that is on the same level as the product or closer to the ground to exaggerate its size and perspective.

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Work on depth of field The depth of field is

one of the most important factors in any scene – try rendering one with and without it and you can clearly see the difference. It makes the scene look much more beautiful and professional, focusing on the product and giving a level of blur to the backdrop. I would sometimes put one product in focus and its duplicate in the back where it gets blurred. In your camera settings, turn on Enable Depth of Field and place your camera target on your product. Play with the Lense Breathing and Aperture settings to see the results in your viewport by waiting a few seconds.

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Add some details for realism Adding details

will always show another level of complexity to your product and it doesn’t have to be something crazy. Once I am done with a design, I like to go in and start adding labels, texts, shiny patterns on matte surfaces and so on. In this case, for example, you can see the ‘Space Explorer’ text. There are also other details around its body with random numbers, recycling and environmental labels, and a ‘Made in…’ tag that makes it feel much more complete. I usually apply these graphics by unwrapping my model and using a V-Ray Blend Material.

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TECHNIQUES

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Textures and environment surfaces Now

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that we have our cameras, lights and studio setup, we can use the same settings to apply an environment. The environment should be another asset that adds a level of complexity, tying in to the story of the product. In this scenario, to make it interesting, I created a square plane, applied a TurboSmooth with ten iterations to subdivide it well, and then applied a displace modifier with a noise map. I then applied a hi-res sand asphalt material, which made the scene feel like it’s in outer space.

Render passes Go to your Render Settings window and choose the last tab, Render Elements, to add the Denoiser, Wire Color and VrayEdgesTex. The Denoiser pass will give us an amazing collection of passes that will allow us to control our reflections, refractions, shadows and GI later in Photoshop. The Wire Color will give you a pass with each element in the scene rendered in a different colour, which is very useful for masking objects in Photoshop. Finally, the VrayEdgesTex will be the Ambient Occlusion, giving us our shadows. To make that work, add a VrayDirtMap in its material slot.

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Composite the passes At this stage, we will

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Retouch in Photoshop Finally, on top of all the

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start to transition to Photoshop. Export all of your passes and take them into Photoshop to start playing with the blend modes. It’s usually Screen, Multiply or Overlay that work best and adjust their opacity levels. In this scene, since his head is made of glass, I rendered the toy with and without the top cover, just to get better colours on the brain. Then, using my Wire Color pass, I was able to mask out the Diffuse Filter pass of the brain without the cover and overlay it on the original render with the glass cover. My favourite method is to take the World Normals, desaturating it and setting it to Overlay. The depth of your scene will be at a much higher level with that one layer.

layers, create a Curves adjustment layer by clicking on the circle at the bottom of the Layers panel. Slightly move that curve around to give your scene more depth. Add another Adjustment Layer for Hue/Saturation, and control the saturation level of your scene. To give a nice touch of detail, I would place an image of scratches or small dust particles and overlay it at ten per cent.

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My favourite method is to take the World Normals, desaturating it and setting it to Overlay HDRI mods If I create an HDRI map that lacks reflections, or certain colours, I load it in Photoshop and add some soft blurred squares as a way of putting soft boxes into the scene. This gives some nice reflections. If you do end up trying to choose between two maps that give you either nice lighting or reflections, a nice trick is to set the blend mode of one to overlay on top of the other in Photoshop. To get the best of both worlds, use it as one HDRI map.

70 All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

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TECHNIQUES

ZBRUSH, KEYSHOT

OSCAR TREJO osc-art.com

Bio Oscar is a 3D artist from Mexico. Thanks to the power of the internet, he has been able to work for over sic years in a variety of different projects from videogames and TV, to jewellery design and 3D printing.

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from filesilo.co.uk/3dartist • Tutorial screenshots • Fingerprint alphas

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Learn to render clay materials in KeyShot C

lay renders are always useful – they’re the perfect way to show details in a model without having to focus on textures. However, I believe that they sometimes tend to look a little on the boring side. The fact that they’re meant to be simple doesn’t mean that you can’t add your own recognisable style to make them stand out from the crowd. Some months ago I decided to challenge myself by making a daily sketch with ZBrush. I didn’t care about the topology or the texture – I was just focused on becoming faster and better in my sculptures. But eventually I encountered an issue: I had a lot of models but I hadno time to create a new scene with a new material each time that I wanted to render them. So I created a material that I was able to assign to all of the models without having to modify a lot of the settings. In this tutorial we will create a material in KeyShot that resembles a handmade sculpture and we will save the material in the KeyShot material library so we don’t have to go through the process every time we require the clay material. We will start in ZBrush, where we will sculpt some details that will help to give the handmade look – however, this part is optional.

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Prepare to sculpt First of all, if you’d rather not

sculpt anything into the model then you can jump straight to Step 4 – the sculpting part that I will explain in this step isn’t really necessary as it’s just so that we have a bir

more control over where you want the fingerprints to be located. For sculpting those details, we are going to need a mesh with enough subdivisions to create the desired details. For subdividing your model, go to Tool>Geometry and hit Divide (the hot key is Cmd/Ctrl+D). The number of polygons is up to you here, but for this example I have used almost three million. Once we have the subdivided mesh, we need to save a Morph Target in order to sculpt details in a nondestructive way. For this, go to Tool>Morph Target and hit the StoreMT button.

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Sculpt with alphas Now we can fashion the

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Use surface noise To have more control over the

details using the alphas that are included. In order to work in a nondestructive way over the detailing process, I prefer creating a new layer to have control over the intensity by going to Tool>Layers and pressing the Plus button. Then, using the Standard brush, with the stroke as DragRect and loading a Lonefinger as an Alpha, I sculpt the fingerprints where I believe they should be. Remember that the rest of the model is going to be covered by a bump map with more fingerprints so try not to abuse this. After you have finished this, use the slider of the layers to adjust the intensity of the details and the morph brush if you need to erase some parts.

details of the fingerprints, we will use surface noise – that way we won’t have to sculpt that much. After storing the morph target, go to Tool>Surface>Noise. This will open a

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new window with a preview of how the noise will look on our mesh. On the bottom left, hit Alpha On/Off to load the Blackfinger file – once you have loaded the Alpha, you will be able to edit how it affects the mesh. Set the Mix Basic Noise to 0 and then adjust the slider of Alpha Scale and Strength and once you are happy with the result press OK, then Apply to Mesh. You will need to have enough polygons to do this – if it doesn’t look right, try adding one more subdivision and repeat.

Head over to KeyShot The easiest way to export everything from ZBrush into Keyshot is with the bridge. Go to Render>External Render and turn on the KeyShot button. Another option is to export the file by going to Tool>Export. Since the model is going to have a lot of polys, this will most likely take some time, so the third option is decimating the model before exporting it. To do this, go to Zplugin>Decimation Master and press Pre-process Current. Next, go to the same location and hit Decimate Current to reduce the quantity of polygons even more. Lower the % of Decimation slider and decimate it again. Once that this has all be done, go to the tool menu and then export the file. Inside KeyShot, use the Import button to load the exported ZBrush mesh.

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Set the specular First, assign a material to the entire model. Hit M to open the material window and then go to Plastic>Black Rough Plastic. Drag and drop it over the model – it should turn black, making it easier to see the specular. Now right-click the model with the black material and go to Edit Material. Click Material Graph and over the node canvas, right-click Textures and then TextureMap to select the node and load the WhiteFinger file. Right-click Utilities>Color to Number, and connect the nodes in this order WhiteFinger>ColorToNumber>Specular. Click Color to Number to change the image’s contrast, blacks and whites. Hit C to see how the map will apply to the model. By going to the Texture node, you will also be able to change the size of it.

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73

TECHNIQUES

06

Set the diffuse For our diffuse, we will add a

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curvature node. The negative curvature should be a dark colour close to black to make the cavities that colour. Zero curvature is the base colour and for this I used a dark colour. For the positive curvature I used a brighter version of the base colour. To add this node, right-click Textures > Curvature and assign a colour to each of the curvatures. Hit C while the curvature node is selected and play with the Cutoff and Radius to make your desired effect. Finally, add a Color Composite node by right-clicking Utilities > Color Composite and connecting the Curvature to Source and the C.Composite to the Diffuse of the main material.

Set the Bump Now we will add the bump to make the Curvature node looks less intense. Right-click Textures>TextureMap>BlackFinger. Connect the node to the Bump slot. Selecting the final node and going to Textures>Bump will allow us to change the intensity of it – I usually use low values unless I want it to be more present on the final render. Sometimes the size of the texture will be off, especially if the model doesn’t have UVs. To fix this, go to the Texture Map node and view the Size and Mapping options. I recommend that the bump and the specular be different sizes. If you want to make the curvature a little more dominant, you can always go to its node and modify it.

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Set the SSS The next step is to make the material a little more translucent. Go to the final node and under Material Type, select Translucent Advanced. The material will change and we can now modify the colour of the Subsurface. Under Translucency, the bigger the number the more translucent the material and the stronger the subsurface colour. Instead of having a diffuse, we have a Surface map that is connected to our curvature. We need to go back to the Color Composite and select a similar colour to the main one in the Background slot. This node will allow us to have control over how much Curvature versus Subsurface we want in the material – the lower the Source Alpha number is, the less the curvature will appear in the diffuse and the more translucent it’s going to be.

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Save the material Once we have the material,

we need to save it in our library. Press the Space Bar to show the project window and then go to the Material tab. On the top is the name of the current material, which we can overwrite. Next to it is the save button – once pressed, it will show us a window asking where we want to save it. I chose Miscellaneous. Now each time we create a new scene, we just need to go to the material library by pressing the M key and drag and drop the new material over the

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Importance of UVs Although having UVs is not a requirement for this tutorial, it definitely helps to improve the look of your model – especially when using surface noise and while adding the different textures in KeyShot. You won’t have to tweak the parameters of the bump and the specular as much. If this is the case and you have the UVs, go to the Texture Map node and view the Mapping Type. For models, the Without UVs box usually works fine but in case your mesh has them, change it to UV.

74 All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist

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PATTERN CREATION

Nikie Monteleone nikiemonteleone.com

Incredible 3D artists take us

behind their artwork

PATTERN CREATION I love creating patterns in my work so I thought a chameleon would be a fun character to get really detailed with in ZBrush. I hand-painted all scales in a mask and then used Inflate Balloon to extrude the scales out. Before clearing the mask, I used Clay Polish to soften the edges. Lastly, I used the Dam_Standard brush to define the cavity details.

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Nikie Monteleone is a senior surfacing artist at HouseSpecial and is obsessed with all types of textures and surfaces Software ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Arnold Renderer

Chameleon,2018

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Industry experts put the latest workstations, software & 3D printers through their paces

Renda G3-SWC Ultra Overclockers’ new PC gets put through its paces to see if it really is built for both games and 3D art

I

t’s a blurred line that divides gaming PCs and workstations – particularly any intended for 3D art rather than engineering. In both cases, performance is king, since all that ever matters is throwing as many polygons and pixels across the screen in the fastest possible time. For many of us, particularly anyone in game development, a single computer fulfils both roles as a production environment and a personal gaming system. The Renda G3-SWC Ultra, from veteran UK PC supplier Overclockers, is a machine that could perhaps be described as a hybrid that combines a custom water-cooling loop and an overclocked processor, more commonly seen in a gaming PC, with workstation-grade hardware. It has a 12-core Intel Core i9-7920X processor, overclocked to 4.5 GHz, with a custom water-cooling loop, paired with 32GB of DDR4 memory and an Nvidia Quadro P5000 graphics card with 16GB of on-board GDDR5 memory. Joining this tasty specification is a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 SSD, extra 2TB hard disk, 800W Seasonic Power Supply and an AsRock X299 Taichi motherboard, housed in a Phanteks Enthoo Pro chassis. The memory can be expanded, of course, which may be worth doing if you’re constantly switching between design applications, editing multiple detailed models in high resolutions. Overclockers made its name selling water-cooled PCs and overclockers processors, with a custom water-cooling loop in the Renda G3-SWC Ultra nearly entirely comprised of top-brand EK kit, including the reservoir and radiator. Inside, the PC build is neat and tidy, as expected, with plenty of space to spare in the case – admittedly due to it being a little on the large side. Thankfully, noise is kept to a

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minimum as the case and radiator fans only make a gentle whir when the system is running under load. Overclockers tells us its standard warranty is three years collect and return. AMD’s 16-core Threadripper processor is still fresh in our minds, as it made a showing in our labs recently, delivering some record-breaking, multi-threaded results. With Intel’s Core i9-7920X, you lose four of those cores – but Intel certainly has the upper hand with per-thread performance. As we found in our tests, when combined with the 4.5GHz overclock, this leads to some great results. The Renda G3-SWC Ultra gave us the fastest SPECViewPerf results in all but two tests, reaching 195 points in Maya, plus the fastest Cinebench results we’ve seen and the fastest 3ds Max render times yet. In the case of Cinebench, this is the first time we’ve had a PC manage a 3D score of over 200 points. It’s not all bad news for AMD. The sheet power of Threadripper’s 16 cores, and the strong OpenCL performance of Fire Pro cards, means that its hardware retains the top spot in a few tests, with over 3,300 points in the multithreaded Cinebench CPU render. But despite having fewer cores, the Intel Core i9-7920X still snaps at its heels with 2,900 points, delivering a serious processing punch across the board and not just in multi-threaded tests. It’s definitely hard to not be impressed. Unfortunately the price tag puts a configuration such as this out of reach for freelance artists who are just starting out with their 3D career. However, in professional media production environments with busy workflows, this workstation will feel right at home. Orestis Bastounis

MAIN The G3-SWC Ultra is enough to chew through multithreaded software tasks with ease BOTTOM LEFT It might not come cheap but RENDA has hit the right spot with every aspect of the G3-SWC Ultra BOTTOM MIDDLE We’re still waiting on a successor to Nvidia’s ageing Pascal series of graphics cards, but the P5000 puts on a great show here BOTTOM RIGHT A 4.5GHz clock speed gives the RENDA G3-SWC Ultra a real performance edge that puts it at the top of our benchmark leaderboards

OUTSTANDING

The PC build is neat and tidy, as expected, with plenty of space to spare in the case

Essential info £4,999.99 overclockers.co.uk Intel Core i9-7920X 2.9GHz 8Pack Team Group Xtreem Edition 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C16 3600MHz Hard drive Samsung 960 PRO Polaris 512GB M.2 Graphics Nvidia Quadro P5000 16GB GDDR5X

Price Website CPU Memory

Summary Features Performance Design Value for money

Verdict It’s the fastest workstation we’ve tested, breaking records in nearly all our tests. Worth every penny

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X-PARTICLES 4

X-Particles4 Could Insydium’s latest release of the particles and FX sytem revolutionise particles in Cinema 4D?

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verall, when we say particles, many plugins or even standalone apps come to mind. But X-Particles is one of the best out there for creating real-time simulations with hundreds of various modifiers. In a new version of X-Particles, there are several mind-blowing features that could enhance our production at a high level. We can now simulate nicely accurate fire and smoke with xpExplosia, but the best part is the ability of interaction smoke with particles with the Advection feature. You are finally able to shape your particles around smoke. Now, xpFluidFX allows you to simulate stunning fluid dynamics on medium and large scales. You have full control over the viscosity, surface tension and all parameters to shape your fluid as you wish. With XpFluidPBD, you are allowed to create beautiful, artistic tendrils in small-scale fluids. The amount of fun you can have with this feature is endless. The xpClothFX is an all-new dynamics system with which you can create highly detailed cloth forms fully integrated with all of X-Particles’ modifiers – and it’s much easier than you think. The new xpFlowField also brings remarkable custom velocity field effects into your workflow. Particles can be conducted by splines, object Tangents or even C4D shaders and the number of abstract forms that you can create with this field really is infinite. Perhaps the best feature of X-Particles 4 is the new fantastic xpSplineFlow, which behaves in real-time and gives you control handles along any spline. All of these can be adjusted separately by position and scale, giving you the power of control over your particles to art direct the flow. The other fantastic new tools are xpCirclePacker and xpCellAuto. XpCirclePacker enables you to emit particles without intersections. We have created a beautiful corn (see the image to the right) with this tool just by emitting particles. The speed with which we achieved this is unbelievable when you would expect a slow simulation because of all spheres collisions. XpClothFX was also a great pleasure to use as it was easy, quick and fully integrated with modifiers. You can control the wrinkles on cloth surface through your base object segments and xpTurbulance. We decided to mix several new features together in one render to see how much this new version could be handled practically. The rendering was all very easy and pretty straightforward with some of the new features. XpExplosiaFX, xpCirclePacker, xpFluidPBD, xpSplineFlow and xpVertexMap Maker had the

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most important roles during the render process. First of all, to create the abstract shape of human body, we were able to easily use xpVertexMap Maker to project the xpExplosia smoke form onto our body object. Without this new feature, it could have taken several hours to create this abstract form. VertexMap Maker works great with different options like VertexSpeed, Polygons, Splines and textures, meaning that you can use this stunning feature to create hundreds of animated vertex maps. XpCirclePacker worked amazingly to create thousands of spheres with no interaction and shaping the fluid around the character was a huge pleasure with xpSplineFlow. There’s the ability to adjust each controller separately as well as adding or removing them with just one click. XpFluidPBD had a nice smooth reaction with the Turbulence modifier and it gave us different details and tendrils with different viscosity and exit pressure amounts. To sum up, we can strongly say that the new features in X-Particles 4 are really handy and easy to use, which only accelerate your pipeline. The software has also revolutionised the particle systems in Cinema 4D – you have more power to art direct your project and manage most of FX you need in-package. So, download this software now and start having endless fun as you visualise your art and creativity. Farid Ghanbari

OUTSTANDING

MAIN XpClothFX is pretty fast and works great without any trouble with all of the X-Particles modifiers. The simulation time was really surprising BOTTOM LEFT With xpCirclePacker you are allowed to emit thousands of particles while dynamically avoiding intersections. Sizes are adjustable by both minimum and maximum value BOTTOM MIDDLE XpCellAuto generates particles based on three Cellular Automata Algorithms. Elementary mode, Game of Life and Diffusion-Limited Aggregation BOTTOM RIGHT This is a great ability in the new version of X-Particles. You can simply project xpExplosia smoke onto any object and create a nicely animated vertex map BELOW Working with xpSplineFlow is a real pleasure as there are fully adjustable controllers and they react in real time. xpFluidPBD also provides a nice fluid shape by adjusting the exit pressure and viscosity

Essential info Price £540 / 616.09 / $716.36 Website insydium.ltd OS Windows7andup/MacOSX10.8.5andup CPU Intel Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 Intel Core 2 Solo Software Cinema 4D version 13 and up RAM 4GB minimum Disk space 7GB

Summary Features Performance Design Value for money

Verdict Overall, it’s a fast, powerful plugin for particle systems and the new features are very beneficial

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The inside guide to industry news, VFX studios, expert opinions and the 3D community

084 Community News

The Rookies The Rookies Awards returns for its eighth year, with entries open now

086 Industry News

Total Chaos Chaos Group debuts its event in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Unite 2018 announces its schedule for the year

088 Opinion

Maggie Oh The ILMxLAB technical PM tells us how mocap was brought to London Fashion Week 2018

We want to clear up the confusion as creative skills are very different to traditional business skills

090 Project Focus

USS Callister Framestore takes us on board the Star Trek-style Black Mirror episode

094 Industry Insider

Dean Wright The Motorsport creative video director talks to Mark Smith about 3D motor designs

Andrew McDonald, Cofounder, The Rookies

096 Social

Readers’ Gallery 84

To advertise in The Hub please contact Chris Mitchell on 01225 687832 or [email protected]

The latest images created by the 3dartistonline.com community

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COMMUNITY NEWS

Sponsored by Autodesk, The Rookies has announced the call for entries to their global competition and mentor programme

Welcome to the best The Rookies Awards yet It’s time to start preparing your entry because The Rookies has announced this year’s call for submissions from the industry’s outstanding emerging talent

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need to display in their portfolios when applying for jobs. he eighth annual creative media competition is We want to clear up the confusion as creative skills are back, and this time round cofounders Alwyn Hunt very different to traditional business skills where you just and Andrew McDonald are working to take The take an exam to prove your knowledge. It’s a lot more Rookies one step further by introducing online courses complicated and needs clearer guidelines before it’s too and an official certification review process. late,” McDonald confirms. “Judging the awards highlighted to me why we need The official categories for 2018 are: Feature Animation, some kind of certification process,” McDonald says. “I Digital Illustration, Visual Effects, Game Development, came across a recent honours graduate who had studied Virtual Reality, 3D Motion Graphics, Product for five years. While reading the student’s bio you could Visualisation and Architecture Visualisation, Film of the feel a sense of accomplishment and self-worth but it was Year (Visual Effects, 2D Animation and 3D Animation), actually one of the weakest portfolios I have seen to date and Game of the Year (Console and PC, Virtual Reality and there was absolutely no chance that they were and Mobile). Since 2009, The Rookies has successfully industry ready.” helped to place 89 students in work The goal of the official across Asia, Canada, Europe, Oceania certification is to allow digital and the US. Past highlighted students artists access to a pathway that’s have gone on to work on films like designed to enhance their Wonder Woman, The Mummy and credibility and career success movies in the Marvel Cinematic through passing a review process Universe plus AAA-level games such that is recognised by schools, as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Far Cry employers and industry and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. stakeholders. “It will provide all For applicants, The Rookies offers digital artists with a clear checklist Andrew McDonald, cofounder, The Rookies students a ‘stamp of approval’ as they of industry-approved skills they

It will provide all digital artists with a clear checklist of industry-approved skills they need to display in their portfolios

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Submit your artwork before 31 May 2018. The competition winners are due to be announced on 7 July 2018

Alvaro Claver was a finalist in The Rookies 2017 VFX category

Allan Bernardo’s entry won him the animation prize in 2017

transition from school to production, enabling their work to be seen and commented on by experts. Applicants can also find out where they stack up against their peers and become industry certified. “Young talent inspires us and along with The Rookies, we’re excited to support the great animation, gaming, visual effects, digital art and virtual reality content the next generation of creative professionals are creating,” says Amy Bunszel, senior vice president of design and creation products at Autodesk. Prizes for this year’s winners include internships and scholarships. Weta Digital, Framestore, Method Studio, NetherRealm Studios, Monolith Productions, Rewind, Virtual Immersive, Trixter, Axis Animation, The Third Floor, Monkeystack, CVDVFX, Halon Studios, Electric Theatre Collective, Polygon Pictures, Ninja Theory, Plastic Wax, Architecture Office and Greenhaus GFX are all offering fully paid internships and training programmes to some of the winners throughout Asia, Canada, Europe, Oceania and the US. Entries are now being accepted. To be eligible to enter you must be 18 years or older and have attended a certified higher educational training facility between January 2017 and May 2018. “We are really proud of our judging panel this year, which has a strong female voice from amazing talent like Pavani Boddapati, a CG supervisor at Weta Digital,” says McDonald. “We also have the incredible John Howe joining the panel this year, who is famous for his work based on the worlds of JRR Tolkien,” says Hunt. Head to therookies.co to find out more about how to enter and the rest of the judges.

Get in touch…

Andrew McDonald and Alwyn Hunt founded The Rookies to showcase creative talent emerging from educational facilities

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INDUSTRY NEWS

Total Chaos will be the perfect new event for rendering enthusiasts

Unite 2018 Global reveals schedule Unity releases the dates and locations for its upcoming slate of Unite Conferences

Chaos Group start Total Chaos Chaos Group bring together world-class CG experts for Total Chaos Chaos Group is launching a new premier event for rendering called Total Chaos that will be held in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 18-19 May 2018. Chaos Group’s debut event will bring together experts from architectural visualisation, automotive design, games and visual effects with the goal of combining art, craft and code tracks that explores rendering in some depth. New technology for V-Ray and Corona will also be on display alongside special talks that will be hosted by the teams behind V-Ray and

Become V-Ray certified The opportunity to get V-Ray certified is available for all attendees at Total Chaos on 18-19 May. The hour-long exam will have a series of true or false and multiplechoice questions, and you’ll need to score at least 70 per cent to pass it. It’s recommended that all those who want to take the exam have at least one year of experience using V-Ray.

Corona, which will demonstrate the latest innovations including new features and technology. Furthermore, lead developers Vlado Koylazov and Ondrej Karlik will be presenting their ideas on the future of rendering. “We’re excited to host Total Chaos and open it up to a worldwide audience. Bringing artists and developers together in one place will provide a unique opportunity to talk about the art and technology of computer graphics. It’s a chance for everyone to share ideas and get inspired,” says Koylazov, Chaos Group’s cofounder and chief technology officer. The speaker list includes artists and technology experts from Blur, Nurulize, Method Studios, Intel, Porsche, Brick Visual, Blur and more, an up-to-date list is available at bit. ly/2pmBgp3. There are also hands-on workshops and masterclasses that focus on production workflows with early registration advised due to limited class sizes. Total Chaos tickets are available now and can be purchased from the event website in either Student, Professional or Masterclass form.

At this year’s Unite events, Unity will demonstrate real-time rendering made possible by Unity 2018, explore new technologies and give a sneak peek at what Unity will bring in the future. “In 2018, we once again can’t wait to get on the road and meet with developers and creators, learning together and making the world a better place with more creativity,” says Brett Bibby, vice president of engineering at Unity Technologies. “We’ll be out in force around the world offering expert talks, instructional demos and curated panels covering a full range of topics. Whether it be creating content or programming, performance or high-end rendering, or innovating on the next generation VR and AR experiences, we’re excited to share this deep-seeded knowledge with our community.” Dates and locations are: 2-4 May, Coex Convention Grand Ballroom and Auditorium, Seoul; 7-9 May, Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo; 11-13 May, China National Convention Center, Beijing; 19-21 June, STATION Berlin, Berlin; 23-25 October, JW Marriott and the Orpheum Theater, Los Angeles.

For more information about each event and to book tickets, visit unite.unity.com

HAVE YOU HEARD? ArtStation has launched Marketplace for artists to sell products from profiles and websites 86

Modo supports Facebook 3D Foundry and Facebook develop a custom workflow for sharing Modo 3D assets to news feeds

Unreal Studio opens beta New tool eases artists from the architecture, manufacturing and design fields into Unreal Engine Unreal Studio will feature Datasmith, a toolkit for efficient transfer of CAD and 3ds Max data into Unreal Engine, video tutorials, technical support and 100 Substance materials. “Datasmith simplifies bringing Unreal Engine into architecture and design pipelines with automatic lightmap and UV creation along with scripted workflows to organise, optimise and clean up geometry,” says Marc Petit at Epic Games. The open beta registration is available now at unrealengine.com/en-US/studio.

Software shorts Substance Designer 2018.1 The spring release is aimed at the VFX industry by introducing a complete UDIMs workflow. Bakers now give full support to UDIMs and the reworked 2D Viewer gives real-time, high-res feedback to artists during baking. Performance is improved too with a partial core rewrite. Perpetual licences cost $149 and rental options start at $19.90 a month.

Brandon A. McDonald

Facebook recently launched glTF 2.0 support to enable content developers to create and share 3D objects and VR content to their news feeds. With glTF 2.0 compliance comes support for textures, lighting and realistic rendering techniques. The new partnership between Foundry and Facebook has led to a custom workflow for Modo artists to easily export Facebook-ready 3D content and includes shader support. Shane Griffith, senior product manager at Foundry, comments, “Facebook 3D posts are an exciting new way to share 3D content and one that Foundry was keen to get involved in from the start.”

Wacom expands Cintiq family Cintiq Pro 24 and Pro Engine combine to create a modular all-in-one creative studio Wacom has expanded their range with the mid-sized Cintiq Pro 24-inch pen display featuring 98 per cent Adobe RGB colour accuracy and an improved pen-on-screen experience. A pen and touch display will be available in May 2018. The Cintiq Pro can be converted into a high-performance workstation with Cintiq Pro Engine, a compact Windows 10 computing module featuring an Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphic card. Pro Engine memory and SSD are exchangeable and can be upgraded. “The Wacom Cintiq Pro Engine provides a beautiful, easy-to-use solution for creatives everywhere,” says Faik Karaoglu at Wacom.

T Cintiq The q Pro 24’s etched g glass screen mimics the natural feel of pen on paper while drawing

Bringing you the lowdown on product updates and launches RealFlow | Cinema 4D 2.5 The integrated version of fluid simulation software for Cinema 4D gets a new visualiser for previewing, adjusting and evaluating force-based daemons. There are also three new Vertex Maps for Vorticity, Age and Weight to add greater realism and they can be previewed in the viewport in real-time. A node-locked licence costs $795.

Cheetah3D 7.2 After a complete rewrite of the movie import/export code, Cheetah3D harnesses the AVFoundation framework for faster movie export with support for movie codecs including HEVC and the addition of a ProRes workflow. The unbiased render engine Falcon gains support for IES lights and Filmic tone mapping. Cheetah3D is available for $99.

DID YOU KNOW? The Ottawa International Animation Festival 2018 is accepting film entries until 25 May 87

OPINION

Making real-time motion capture fashionable MAGGIE OH Technical PM at Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB ilm.com/ilmxlab/

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LiveCGX brought CG-enhanced improvisational performance to London Fashion Week – and it was all controlled by the performer

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little over a year ago, my manager pitched an idea to me. He said, “Just hear what I have to say with an open mind. If you’re not in, okay, but it’s impossible to imagine you won’t be.” The result was LiveCGX, which represents the first step towards a completely new type of live performance – one that connects real-time visual effects and human-driven expression. It’s an evolution of Lucasfilm’s rich history with technology and storytelling. LiveCGX has the potential to be used for any film franchise, as well as non-movie applications like sports, music and fashion. The latter helped to shape our first public deployment at London Fashion Week (LFW) and the fashion and storytelling collaboration was with the University of the Arts London: Fashion Innovation Agency’s designer Steven Tai (steventai) via Matthew Drinkwater and the GREAT British campaign for 2018’s LFW. Steventai’s Autumn/Winter 2018 fashion presentation marked the global debut of LiveCGX. It was used to digitally transform the venue as well as pieces from steventai’s Macau-inspired collection. On a giant LED display in Durbar Court, located in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Westminster, London, we saw the setting transform in real-time with elements from Macau layered onto the environment. While live models showed off steventai’s latest Autumn/Winter collection on stage, another model performed in a motion-capture suit. Her avatar was visible within the environment on screen, modelling two steventai-designed digital garments. While historically much has been done with sophisticated projection in highly choreographed performances, what made this presentation unique was that the digital elements were responding in real-time to an improvisational performance. Rather than the digital presentation controlling the performance, now the performer was driving the presentation. Microsoft Kinects were used to capture the depth buffer of the people on stage and in the audience as we wanted to real-time composite the CG elements and the live video feed of Durbar Court. This allowed for convincing interaction between the avatar and the models – they could hug each other, look at each other and pass by one another. Eric Landreneau piped the depth buffer into Unreal Engine’s compositing module Composure to be able to accomplish this.

Peter Malnai also devised a waypoint-driven traversal system so that a CG character could auto-locomote between waypoints without colliding into real-life objects. The system was set up so that a gestural trigger started the auto-movement, which was shown in the finale when the avatar walked among the on-stage models. The garments were created in Marvelous Designer with cloth simulation in Unreal Engine. In Unreal, Omar Skarsvaag simulated the movement and drapery of the items of clothing. Yoon Kim and Mohammad Modarres modelled and look-dev’d the Origin and Destination garments shown in the presentation. The environment enhancements were created by Ben Nadler and Tommy Alvarez Rodriguez. Throughout the show, the audience could see the environment change from Macau’s jungle to Macanese neon signs. We wanted to show that we could transform both the environment and garments in real-time. Lucasfilm was extremely fortunate to have access to the ILM Chiswick Stage. Matt Rank, Chris Jestico, Jack Brown and Laura Millar were all very helpful in not only loaning us their set of Vicon Vero cameras, but also with the camera set-up and testing at Durbar Court. The Vicons were used to set up a motion capture stage at the show so that Vita Oldershaw, our mocap artist, could drive the performance of the avatar. The next steps for LiveCGX will be to find ways to explore letting audiences view the content through handheld devices. We would like to get this sandbox toolset into performers’ hands to create a unique experience for their audience members. We would also like to scale LiveCGX up to be part of a live sports event or concert in a larger venue. Ron Radeztsky is already planning a refined code architecture that is scalable for deployment for events like this, and we’d like to enhance the sandbox nature of LiveCGX as a platform. LFW was exhilarating for the team and we would love to continue our fashion collaborations in the near future, as well.

ABOUT THE LFW2018 COLLABORATORS ILMxLAB is Lucasfilm’s immersive entertainment division based in San Francisco, California. Steventai, London College of Fashion’s Innovation Agency and the GREAT British campaign have collaborated with ILMxLAB to bring this unique fashion presentation to life.

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PROJECT FOCUS

USS Callister Taking a look behind the scenes of the VFX on Black Mirror’s spacebound homage to Star Trek Company Framestore Location UK Website framestore.com Project description Framestore worked on the VFX on the Black Mirror episode ‘USS Callister’, including numerous environments like those in outer space, the USS Callister spaceship, the nightmarish CG Arachnajax creature, and the many visual effects, matte paintings and graphic replacements. Biography Formed in Soho in 1986, Framestore is now a Bafta- and Oscar-winning creative studio that specialises in a range of visual effects, production, direction and post-production services for film and advertising clients. It is notable for its VFX work on blockbuster films such as Gravity, Avatar and the Harry Potter franchise. Contributor • Russell Dodgson VFX supervisor and creative director

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ver since its first episode debuted in 2011, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series has both wowed and challenged audiences with some of the most thought-provoking and visually striking stories on television. Skilfully mixing aspects of sci-fi, thriller and mystery with liberal sprinklings of Brooker’s trademark acerbic wit, each standalone show puts its own spin on issues facing society today, particularly with regard to the unanticipated consequences of new technologies. The show’s highly anticipated fourth season recently opened with ‘USS Callister’, a story based around a shy chief technology officer named Robert at a technology company who had created his own virtual reality world designed to look like a tongue-in-cheek homage to the classic Star Trek episodes. However, it takes a sinister twist when Robert – played by Jesse Plemons, who television fans will probably remember as Breaking Bad’s sociopathic child-killing hillbilly Todd – finds a way to crew his fantasy ship with self-aware digital ‘clones’ of his real-world workmates. His often aggressive and brutal treatment of them – such as making one character’s faces disappear – isn’t, shall we say, quite up to Captain Kirk’s standards of HR compliance. The episode has already been hailed as one of the best of Black Mirror’s entire four-season run and having already done some work on the previous season with the episode ‘Playtest’, when Framestore were asked to produce the VFX for ‘USS Callister’, they knew they were getting into something special. “We were thrilled when we were asked if we could pull off ‘USS Callister’, which would again be our largest VFX undertaking by quite a large margin,” says creative director and VFX supervisor Russell Dodgson. “Charlie Brooker and [producer] Annabel Jones are such lovely people to work with and when you do VFX reviews with them, you are constantly reminded that everything is in service of the story and the viewer.” One of the toughest challenges for a creative team working on this particular show was how to make something a homage without completely ripping it off. It had to evoke feelings of nostalgia without being an out-and-out copy of the iconic programme that it was trying to emulate. To get around this, the design of the ship, for example, looked more like a conventional aircraft than the unmistakable saucer and nacelle structure that everyone knows to be the USS Enterprise. “Our art department did a lot of very different concept sketches and took quite some time to narrow in on a final

Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones are such lovely people to work with… you are constantly reminded that everything is in service of the story and the viewer 90

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INSIDE THE SHIP Bringing the world of the USS Callister to life meant bringing a distinct touch of nostalgia to the bridge Although the bulk of how the ship looked inside wasn’t achieved by modelling, it still fell on the VFX teams to make the physical sets sing by adding some elements of realism. Russell said, “For the glass and reflections of the main windows, one of our lead compositors created a setup using V-Ray for Nuke that created a multi-layered reflection of an HDRI projected on to the set geo. This meant that we had a lot of flexibility to tweak this in comp. “The interior set also had a variety of lighting states, so we always had to have this in mind when creating the colourful space exteriors. The last thing we wanted was to create an overpowering colour palette or a background that clashed.”

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01 The aim of the episode was to create an homage to classic Star Trek 02 Framestore was excited to work on another episode of Black Mirror 03 The ship was designed to look more like an aircraft than a spaceship 04 The cast of ‘USS Callister’ 05 ‘USS Callister’ has been heralded as the most cinematic episode to date

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PROJECT FOCUS

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MAKING THE TECH WORK In a show that’s all about technology and its impact on society, how do you make the VFX serve the story, rather than vice versa? Black Mirror is a show perhaps like no other on British TV in that, despite being all about the future and trailblazing issues just coming to the fore, it often views technology in a dystopian way. With that in mind, the team were glad to be part of a wider network of talented individuals to ensure the story informed the tech, not the other way around. Russell says, “The rest of the team is amazing, they have an incredible production design department led by Joel Collins, great editors and the series attracts really strong directors and actors. ‘USS Callister’ was really blessed in this way as Toby Haynes was a great director to work with and the cast was fantastic.”

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Star Trek is obviously a strong influence, as in many ways it defines the genre, but we weren’t trying to make a Star Trek ship

06 There were a number of sketches before the final designs were agreed on 07 The USS Callister crew land on planet Rannoch B in search of Valdack 08 Framestore created the outer space scenes as well as the interior ones

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idea,” says Dodgson. “Star Trek is obviously a strong influence as in many ways it defines the genre. But we weren’t trying to make a Star Trek ship – there is a bit of Stingray in the design, some old American car shapes and some Star Trek-style detailing. It is also a bit of a blend of the cues you’ll find on military planes conceived in the 1970s, French curves and the greeble methodologies that you’d find in sci-fi ships.” For modelling the ship’s exterior, the team turned to a firm in California that they’d collaborated with before, which provided the initial build and texture for the ship. Dodgson explains, “When working on something this physically big with flowing lines, you really benefit from precise control over your curves and NURBs give you that. You need to be able to look along the line and see no kinks, no inflections. “With that in mind, our low-poly sketch model was turned into a nice smooth polygon model so we could re-create the plans as NURBs projections over the base mesh, and have accuracy for all the features we needed to add such as panels, channels, everything.” One of the most striking pieces of VFX in the show was the Arachnajax – a giant, insectoid creature that is discovered by the ship’s landing party on an alien planet. It turns out that this huge creature used to be a digital version of one of Jesse’s old colleagues – from the marketing department, in fact – but he’d given her a redesign after a fit of rage in yet another sinister twist in the tale. So how tough was it designing a creature that not only looked alien, but also conveyed something of the helpless victim trapped within too? Dodgson said, “The Arachnajax was indeed all about character, and we wanted be able to get across some relatively gentle emotion with it. However, at the same time, she needed to come across as a horrible, screaming monster that was designed for killing in computer games. The main elements that gave us the light and shade here were the small, Velociraptor-like arms on its torso, the eyes and the tentacles. These became nice devices for us to show its character and personality.” He continues, “The tentacles were there for huffing and the small hands could show fidgeting, conversational gestures and subtle comedy, while the eyes helped us with creating a sense of solemnness. All of this coupled with the awkward movement, and the idea that she curls up a bit like a dead spider when she sits down, gave us plenty to work with.” With projects like Thor: Ragnarok and Paddington 2 in its portfolio, Framestore is no stranger to bringing impossible creatures to life on the big screen as well as the small. However, there’s actually very little difference between working on the two, adds Dodgson. He explains, “In both mediums, you approach creatures from the viewpoint of how ‘featured’ they are and what they need to do. You have to ask questions such as, how do we want the rig to work? Does it need sliding, skin, deforming muscles, fur? These answers inevitably define how you approach it.”

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INDUSTRY INSIDER

Dean Wright Creative video director Dean Wright tell Mark Smith how he brings motor racing to life Job title Creative video director Location London, UK Education Exeter College: Art Foundation course Bournemouth University: Computer visualisation and animation Website getwrightonit.com Biography Dean Wright is creative video director at motorsport.com. He oversees the production of creative video projects for Motorsport Network including visual effects, motion graphics and series branding. Prior to that he worked on television, film and advertising projects, with stints as creative director at commercial animation studio Get Wright On It, and at Nvizible where he worked on Eddie the Eagle and King Arthur. Portfolio highlights • Autosport Racing Car of the Year, 2017 • Eddie the Eagle, 2016 • BB-8 in London (Personal), 2015 • Williams FW37 Concepts (Personal), 2015 • Mario Jumps Into Battle (Personal), 2015 • Rapid Tech, 2015 • NHK Olympics, 2014 • The Pirates! Band of Misfits, 2012 • Tree Fu Tom, 2011 • Primeval, 2008

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ew sports inspire as passionate a fan following as motor racing. Every detail of the cars, the tracks and the drivers’ records are poured over, scrutinised and discussed ad infinitum by a fan base for whom the devil is always in the detail. But for those same fans, it’s also arguably one of the least accessible sports. Touching the hugely valuable cars, or even seeing them up close, is out of reach to most. So bringing those details to life, making them feel real and capturing all the excitement of the grid in a way that makes the fans feel truly involved is something the motorsport industry and those covering it are harnessing technology to make happen. One of the creatives at the forefront of this new wave of 3D motorsport design is Dean Wright. A visual effects supervisor for motorsport.tv, the job of his four-man team is to make it easy for fans to visualise the things they might not otherwise see. From a video of how air flows around a car to a rendered image of a vehicle that looks like it’s been driven right into the office, his team make it happen. “Coming up with creative solutions to problems on a moment’s notice is the daily challenge,” he says. “Compared to working in movies or TV, which normally work on monthly or at least weekly timelines, we are a news outlet at the end of the day. That means most projects are topical and very time-sensitive, so it’s about finding the fastest workflow to get the message across to our viewers as clearly as possible.” The team rely heavily on tech such as Maya, Redshift and After Effects for the bulk of the work – but it’s behind the scenes with real engineers that makes the designs truly sing. Wright says, “We worked with ex-Ferrari F1 head of aerodynamics Willem Toet to produce our airflow animations. A lot of the visualisation in this field you see on TV is watered down or the visuals have come first, not the technical. So by working with Willem and other experts like him, we are attempting to bring more real principles of race engineering to a broader audience.” As technology advances, Wright says the future of the motorsport design industry is going to be just like the sport itself – all about speed, speed and more speed. He explains, “Specifically in our field, I think we will be looking at real-time or near real-time rendering solutions. With the need for topical news coverage, being able to render out quick-turnaround projects on the day of breaking news will be a game changer. So investigating the use of game engines such as Unreal or Unity is a definite consideration for the future.” So what advice would he give to anyone wishing to follow in his footsteps? “Make cool personal projects!” he says. “Many of the big steps forward I made in my career were off the back of creating things in my spare time that I wish I could be doing as a job. The passion you have for those projects will show in the quality and with a bit of luck, the right client or company will hire you to make more!”

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FULFILLING A FINAL FANTASY How an animated movie made him ditch his plans to become one of the bean counters Wright didn’t always seem destined for the motorsport industry – nor, for that matter, the design sector – until a heady mix of friendly advice and an anime inspired by a legendary PlayStation game sent him along a new path. “Back when I was studying my A Levels, it was either economics, which I was good at, or art, which I wanted to do. Luckily, a friend of mine introduced me to an art foundation course at Exeter College where some friends showed me Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and I was blown away.” Wright freely admits he didn’t have the freehand design skills to excel as a 2D animator but found his niche with 3D tech. “I loved working with computers and seeing that film made me realise 3D animation was the path for me.”

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All images © motorsport.tv

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Coming up with creative solutions to problems on a moment’s notice is the daily challenge Dean Wright, Creative video director 01 The team designed a car to appear in the office of F1 analyst and illustrator Giorgio Piola so he could talk fans through its features 02 A meeting with a legend – David Coulthard was so impressed by the team’s work he stopped by to say hello 03 Some of the finer details on the Ferrari designed by Dean and his team 04 Design work truly brings the inner and outer workings of the race car to life 05 A wireframe image of a Ferrari that looks almost indistinguishable from the real thing 06 Harnessing technology has allowed the channel to show how the physics of racing really works

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Images of the month Here are some of our favourite 3D projects submitted on 3DArtistOnline.com in the last month

Editor’s choice

01 Mountain villa by Nguyen Thành Vích 3DA username vic nguyen Nguyen Thành Vích says: “This is a villa project from the United States, bordering Canada. The customer requested a snowy environment among other things, such as it being highly realistic and artistic. I initially found this project very difficult because I have never painted snow and I have never seen snow in Vietnam. Luckily I got quick, great results from the SnowFlowPro software.” We say: Wow, for someone who has never seen snow in real life before, this is a great effort from Vích. Outstanding mood, too.

02 Earthworm

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by Massimiliano Lai 3DA username _m.v.l_ Massimiliano Lai says: “This is a 3D remake of a concept that was created by Alberto Camara. The image summarises the humour and the comic, colourful atmosphere of Earthworm Jim’s world.” We say: It’s not easy to add so much character and humour to a 3D rendition of Earthworm Jim but we really think Massimiliano has achieved it. Fantastic!

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03 Wasp 17 Dart Gun by Emre Karabacak 3DA username Emre Karabacak Emre Karabacak says: “This wasp dart gun is based on the concept art of Michel Verdu, which I found on ArtStation. My work usually focuses on highly realistic guns and scenes so I wanted to try something different to challenge myself.” We say: Emre’s Wasp 17 Dart Gun is a brilliant piece and you can clearly see the inspiration in his work. We especially like the brushed metal look paired with the plastic yellows.

04 Beautiful Dystopia by Pieter Léon Vermeersch 3DA username Astopia Pieter Léon Vermeersch says: “I wanted to make a cool-looking building with a unique design. I started designing the shape in 2D first and then over the course of the project I transitioned to 3D.” We say: This minimal-futuristic building from Pieter is set among a great almost neo-dystopian background. We love the contrast of the sharp edges against the curves of the mountains.

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Create your own gallery at www.3dartistonline.com

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98 behind their artwork

REFERENCES References are often the key to great artwork. Depending on what you are working on or what you want to create, and before getting to start in details of your design, keep the big picture in mind and block out the composition. Ensure that you do not move onto the next step until you’re completely happy.

Incredible 3D artists take us

The Gladiator 69, 2017

Software 3ds Max, V-Ray, ZBrush, Mari, Quixel, SpeedTree, World Machine, Photoshop

Bondok has been doing CG for about seven years, working on 3D environments and lighting

be.net/bondok_max

Bondok Max

REFERENCES

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