Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 108 i 3D Artist

Since Unreal burst through computers in 1998 with enhanced graphics, detailed texturing, integrated rendering, collision detection and an advanced software rasteriser, the game’s own, original game engine – Unreal Engine – has been one of the most popular development platforms around. In the close-to two decades since its debut, UE has since had its fourth version released as well as being used as the core engine behind notable games in franchises such as BioShock, Gears Of War, Mass Effect, Tekken, Borderlands and Street Fighter. UE4 was made free in 2015 for everyone, save for paying royalties if your game makes over $3,000. All of the technology that is used by Epic Games is available to all, meaning features utilised by senior triple-A artists can be used by indie studios and…

Baj Singh I am currently working as one of the lead character artists on the Total War: WARHAMMER franchise. Passionate about character art in general, I spend a lot of my spare time drawing and studying (and I am also the world’s biggest Fast And Furious fan!). Total War: WARHAMMER – Morghur, 2016 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop, Marvelous Designer, Quixel Suite, xNormal, Simplygon One of the DLC units created as part of the Wood Elves DLC pack. Total War: WARHAMMER – Centigor, 2016 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop, Marvelous Designer, Quixel Suite, xNormal, Simplygon One of the core units created as part of the Beastmen DLC pack. Total War: WARHAMMER – Khazrak, 2016 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop, Marvelous Designer, Quixel Suite, xNormal, Simplygon One of…

Final report of the colony starship Covenant: 3D Artist reporting. The visual effects crew led by MPC Film has superseded all of the CG work for Alien’s first prequel Prometheus. As the second film bursting out of the new trilogy, Alien: Covenant expands beyond the confines of a spaceship and shows us evolved creature designs among other horrors. The crew of the Covenant also sets foot on a planet filled with dense, verdant jungle environments as well as creepy, stark ruins. With the ever-terrifying chestbursters and xenomorphs finally returning to the fray, Alien: Covenant could be the most ambitious VFX venture from Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror franchise yet. We caught up with MPC’s Charley Henley, who was production VFX supervisor on the film, and MPC VFX supervisor Ferran Domenech to…

Gustavo Åhlén I’m the founder of Svelthe, a business dedicated to creating concept art, motion graphics and animation. For years I have specialised in human anatomy and traditional arts, and after improving my skills in these areas I began working in the world of CG. CG Particles Experiment 01, 2016 After Effects, Cinema 4D, Trapcode Form This image was for a personal CG particles experiment. The base mesh was made in Cinema 4D and exported to After Effects where a Trapcode Form effect was applied. CG Particles Experiment 02, 2016 After Effects, Cinema 4D, Trapcode Form Just like above, the base mesh for this image was created in Cinema 4D and then exported to After Effects, again with the Trapcode Form effect applied. CG Trapcode experiment,…

“This is truly a render engine for 3D artists, created with the artist’s workflow in mind” Corona Renderer from Render Legion returns with a strong selection of updates and new features for version 1.6. Before we start going through these, it is worth mentioning that Corona boasts an ‘up to 200 per cent’ speed boost when rendering HDRI-dominant scenes. Interactive rendering responsiveness has been improved and is now very close to a real-time experience, ideal for composing scenes. Another noteworthy feature is the zoom sampling focus. Zooming in on an image while using interactive rendering will only render what is visible until you zoom out again, which is a huge timesaver. One of the most exciting features is the updated Light Mixer. By adding a LightMix and LightSelect element you…

"2017 is a very exciting year for One Year On at New Designers as we expand our space and have more participants than ever. This year will be noted for its bold colour and graphics and insurgence of furniture makers"Rheanna Lingham, Curator for One Year On, New Designers Thousands of emerging graduate design talents from all across the UK will showcase the best of their art at New Designers. Held at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London, the exhibition returns for its incredible 32nd year to illustrate the creative prowess of leading design courses and entrepreneurial businesses in the nation. The exhibition is split into two parts, with Textiles & Fashion, Costume Design, Jewellery & Precious Metalwork, Ceramics & Glass, Contemporary Design Crafts and special showcase One Year On…

Available from May 2017, Clarisse 3.5 includes a new particle and property paint feature for directly painting particles to lay out geometry instances and drive attributes such as ID and scale. A new Bake Scatterer feature bakes procedurally generated scatterers to edit and control manually individual instances by using brush strokes. Also, the Light Path Expression, which is based on Open Shading Language (OSL) standard syntax, provides fine controls to output custom AOVs, describing specific parts of the light simulation for compositing purposes. New Standard PBR materials are also available, largely inspired by alSurface. Head over to isotropix.com/products/ clarisse-3.5 for more information.…

The end of February saw an update released by Chaos Group for its V-Ray renderer for 3ds Max. Chaos Group makes the claim that the update is its fastest and most powerful version yet, declaring that some scenes can be up to seven times faster. That’s quite a significant claim, so let’s dive in and see if that is true. Taking a look at this update, Chaos Group seems to have refined things pretty much across the board. This is primarily embodied in its new Adaptive Lights algorithm. Is this to be trusted? Well, Tomasz Wyszołmirski, studio director at Dabarti, claims that “a 54-minute render dropped to 7.5 minutes with Adaptive Lights! The difference is amazing.“ That’s quite a testimony. But things are not just quicker, which would have been…

The Blender Institute has premiered a teaser for its first feature, Agent 327. Co-directed by former Pixar artist Colin Levy, Agent 327: Operation Barbershop is proof of concept for what the Institute hopes will become the first major international animated feature created entirely in open-source software. Ten artists spent a year developing Operation Barbershop, with the film’s assets available under a Creative Commons licence. The work done in Cycles – which now renders scenes with hair and motion blur ten times faster – was rolled out in Blender 2.78b in February. “Agent 327 is the Netherlands’ answer to James Bond,“ said producer Ton Roosendaal, original creator of Blender. “He’s fighting international supervillains, but the underfunded Dutch secret service agency doesn’t have the resources of MI6. Rather than multimillion-dollar gadgets, he…

01 AMG E63 by Sina Mehralinia 3DA username gryphiz  Sina Mehralinia says: “This shot is my latest attempt at photorealistic rendering using Maya, Redshift and Photoshop. My main concern as a CG artist is to create accurate shaders. Using Redshift helped me a lot in this process and decreased my render time so I could do many test renders.“ We say: Great to see someone getting the most out of Redshift and creating a stunning render in the process. Awesome work. 02 The Last Ladybug by Radu Cius 3DA username RaduCius Radu Cius says: “Why a ladybug in ventilation? Because more and more animals are losing their natural habitat and it’s a tragedy. I worked in Blender and rendered the scene in Cycles.“ We say: This is a really…

“This image was meant to be texturing practice for Substance Painter, which I’ve recently added to my pipeline. But then the idea of doing a metaphor for people’s behaviours and their values came into my mind. It’s certain that their hunger for followers at any price and excess of vanity is leading to an ill society. The result is a visual with modern engraved coins” Daniel D’Avila, Contemporary Coins, 2017 Daniel D’Avila davilastudio.com Daniel is a generalist artist based in Sao Paulo working in the advertising industry Software Modo, ZBrush, Substance Painter Work in progress… “I wanted to create a portrait of myself that gives the viewer an instant read on who I am as a person: a laid-back, low-energy guy that works really hard and doesn’t take himself…

This tutorial on the creation of Isabella von Carstein from Total War: WARHAMMER will be a general insight into the workflow of producing a game-ready character, from the early stages of concept design to the final in-game asset. Some of the industry-standard tools that we used will be showcased here, from long-established programs like 3ds Max and ZBrush to newer tools such as Marvelous Designer and Quixel SUITE. Not only will you have an understanding of how the general production workflow is maintained, but you will also get an insight into how development teams work together to ensure that game-ready content has been produced to the highest quality, as well as methods for overcoming any hurdles that occur during the process. THE DESIGN STAGE Establish the blueprints of the character…

Months or even years before you can buy the latest triple-A game, teams of 3D artists are often hard at work on the first glimpses you might see of that game in the form of cinematics. These days, cinematics take all forms. They can be promotional trailers designed to communicate the mood or feeling of a game that may still be in development. Other times they are close to the final gameplay, or are created using the same rendering engine as the game itself. Then there are the in-game cutscenes that are approached just like these other cinematics. In each case, cinematics are the result of meticulous exploration of story and attention to detail, making them some of the most visually spectacular content around. Take a journey with 3D Artist…

Blair Armitage I’m a character artist based in the UK. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a variety of projects in-house, but currently I’m a freelancer specialising in stylised characters. I love to challenge myself with personal projects, and like connecting with the art community. Aigis, 2016 ZBrush, 3ds Max, Quixel SUITE, Marmoset Toolbag 2 My interpretation of Persona 3’s Aigis as a high-fidelity real-time character. This was a good opportunity to study realistic materials and practise challenging surfaces. Officer Hopps, 2016 ZBrush, Photoshop A fairly quick ZBrush sculpt of a human version of the Zootopia character. I wanted to try and see if I could replicate the current Disney style for female characters. Oniko & Tama, 2017 ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag 3 This…

“The best bit was looking at our work individually; it was a personable experience taking us through the specific questions we had” “The most powerful thing about Escape Studios is that it’s focused on industry, not just theory.“ We’re speaking to Aikaterini Valma, a recent graduate in 3D for VFX from Escape Studios. A part of Pearson College London, Escape Studios provides focused, industry-endorsed training in VFX, animation, games and more. This specialism led Aikaterini to enrol on the 3D for VFX short course to further her career. “I was searching for a programme that was industry focused, with less theory; a course that was short and gave me the platform to get into the industry as soon as possible,“ explains Aikaterini. “Escape was industry orientated. I had put the…

As with previous versions of V-Ray for Nuke, the expanded toolset is designed to enable compositors to accomplish more within Nuke, instead of switching to and fro between applications or returning shots to the 3D department. Existing V-Ray users will be instantly familiar with the new tools introduced as they have already debuted in Maya and 3ds Max V3.x releases. The tools predictably operate in a pretty similar fashion to their 3ds Max and Maya counterparts, aside from UI differences from being deployed in Nuke. With VRayVolumeGrid you can load OpenVDB, Field3D and Phoenix FD volumes and then manipulate the look and render settings. During testing using an off-the-shelf pyro FX Houdini explosion with highest-quality settings in V-Ray, there were stability issues and ultimately the script would load and instantly…

Community site VRTogether is hoping to develop ideas, projects and tech aimed at providing a positive social impact. VRTogether’s current board of advisors includes ‘the godmother of VR’ Nonny de la Peña, CEO of Emblematic Group; Mária Rakušanová, director of VR and New Media at Raindance Film Festival; Catherine Day, head of AR/VR at m ss ng p eces; and Sol Rogers, CEO/ founder of REWIND. The first project from VRTogether is a live project from Whales.org, which enables people to see in virtual reality the contrast between life in a concrete tank and life in the ocean for a whale or dolphin.…