3d artist 120 2018

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Zbrush 2018 TEChNIQuEs In-depth workflows Pro artist verdict Beta testers’ top tips

oFFEr worth $35 The Pixel Lab material pack

Vr asset guide Ue4 & animated TV enhance your backplates realistic grass environments

TEXTurING

Build a watch with just substance Designer

rENDErING

Upgrade your scenes in our V-ray render masterclass

EFFECTs

Discover how to animate a beach diorama in houdini FX

Issue 120

Get into gear with

ZBrush 2018 Page 30

NELSON TAI artstation.com/nelsontai Software ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop

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W

e didn’t expect ZBrush 4R8 to come after 4R7. We also certainly didn’t expect the next one after that to be ZBrush 2018, the new nomenclature for Pixologic’s phenomenal tool.

With new features like Sculptris Pro, Project Primitive and PolyGroupIt, ZBrush has never looked more exciting especially as it’s a free upgrade for all existing users.

So we gathered a bunch of beta testers to talk new worklows, getting the most out of the new version and to talk in-depth about creating more eficient art.

Check it out on page 30.

As well as this, we’ve got a step-by-step guide from our cover artist Nelson Tai on creating pro hard surface vehicle designs with ZBrush 2018 on page 38, as well as an expert review from Pablo Muñoz Gomez on page 80.

Elsewhere, you can learn from a pro V-Ray rendering masterclass with Farid Ghanbari, make a watch from scratch with only Substance Designer with Daniel Thiger, create a beach diorama in Houdini, build a game asset perfect for VR, design realistic grass environments, enhance your backplates in Clarisse and more.

Enjoy the issue.

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This issue’s team of pro artists…

nelsOn Tai

artstation.com/nelsontai

FariD ghanBari renderburger.com

Nelson is a concept designer at FATface in Hong Kong. He lends his expertise to our feature on ZBrush 2018 on page 30 and teaches us how to create stunning vehicle designs on page 38.

3DArtist username ntai

luCas sTringheTTi lucasvfx.com

Lucas is an art director and VFX artist with a strong working knowledge of natural phenomena simulations. He reveals how he created this beach diorama animation on page 66.

3DArtist username lucas.string

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Farid is a CG generalist at 3FX Inc, and this issue he has returned to 3D Artist to give us a masterclass on rendering and on V-Ray. You can read his techniques on page 54.

3DArtist username Farid

ian Failes vfxblog.com

Ian has spoken to ZBrush 2018 beta testers on page 30 and animator Peter Monga this issue to ind out how he used UE4 to create a 3D animated series. Read the interview on page 94.

3DArtist username N/A

paBlO MuñOZ gOMeZ

greg ZDuneK

zbrushguides.com Pablo returns to 3D Artist to give us his expert verdict on ZBrush 2018 after previously having beta tested this new version. Read his review on page 80 to see what he thinks.

3DArtist username Pablander

vertexlibrary.com Greg is a CG generalist. He is also the owner and founder of Vertex Library.

Find out how you can use a sample pack to create realistic terrains over on page 74.

3DArtist username gregz

Daniel Thiger artstation.com/dete

Daniel is lead environment artist at Bungie. His expertise has seen his collaboration with Allegorithmic for their Signature Series. Learn from his excellent texturing skills on page 46.

3DArtist username danielthiger

rainer DuDa rd-innovations.de

Rainer is a VFX industry professional as well as university lecturer. He also owns a VFX company and this issue is teaching us how to boost our backplates on page 76.

3DArtist username Rainerd

KurT Kapser kurtkupser.com

Kurt is an environment and look development artist currently working at The Coalition. This issue he gives us his tips for creating a game asset for VR on page 70.

3DArtist username N/A

What’s in the magazine and where

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

I would use Project Primitive at the start of designs to explore more shape possibilities Nelson Tai on ZBrush 2018’s new features Page 34

22 Inside the Virtual Revolution We speak to the movers and shakers behind an exciting world of immersion

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30 Discover ZBrush 2018 Ian Failes gets on board with beta testers to ind out the latest innovative features

64 Technique Focus: Scooter Trouble Jiwon Park tells us how she used V-Ray to create environment fog

80 Review: ZBrush 2018 Pablo Muñoz Gomez gives us his expert verdict on Pixologic’s tool

82 Review: Pulldownit 4 for Maya 2018 Paul Champion takes the CG destruction tool out for a spin

91 Technique Focus: Triumph Motorcycles Tiger 1200 James Elderton of Wonder Vision tells us how they lit this spectacular bike

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98 Technique Focus: Albert Einstein 3D Portrait

beach simulations in Houdini FX

Alexander Beim reveals how he modelled this fantastic piece without much referencing available

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Model and texture a backpack for Vr

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enhance backplates with clarisse

The Pipeline

There are always some parts of a a model that need to be lit separately

38 Step By Step: Build pro vehicle designs in ZBrush

Farid Ghanbari on using different lights Page 60

Learn to use ZBrush 2018 features

46 Step By Step: Create a watch procedurally Model with Substance Designer

54 Step By Step: Learn from a pro V-Ray masterclass Render like an expert

66 Pipeline Techniques: Beach simulations in Houdini FX Create an amazing diorama

70 Step By Step: Model and texture a backpack for VR Techniques for a game asset

74 Step By Step: Create fields of grass with HyperGrass Build realistic grass

76 Pipeline Techniques: Enhance backplates with Clarisse Boost your scene 54

issue 121

The Hub 86 Community News

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90 Opinion TheLaserGirls How 3D printing levelled up cosplay

92 Project Focus Beck – Colors The Mill on music video and VFX

create a watch procedurally 46

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Create your gallery today at www.3dartistonline.com

Tanaka Musewe 3DArtistOnline username: VLANN.Z Tanaka is a self-taught 3D artist with six years’ CG experience.

He is studying visual arts Software Blender, Photoshop, Substance Painter

Work in progress‌

Over the years of my creative journey, I have come across many challenges as a self-taught 3D artist. I have gained most of my experience from participating in various competitions and challenges. This image is somewhat a celebration of the challenges and constraints I overcame, the king being a representation of the artist left standing over the battles he conquered Tanaka Musewe, King, 2018

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This is a personal project that I did in my free time.

I got inspired by dioramas and wanted to create something similar, with a focus on realistic rendering and cartoony proportions. I gathered references from Paranorman and Frankenweenie. Fun project!

Fellipe Beckman, Tiny House, 2018 Fellipe Beckman artstation.com/fellipebeckman Fellipe is a self-taught artist from Brazil. He spends his free time devoting himself to learning more Software 3ds Max, 3d Coat, FStorm Render, Photoshop

Work in progress‌

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Alla Chernova Alla is a 3D generalist artist.

She studied at Fine Art University and at Gnomon Software Maya, ZBrush, XGen, Mari, Substance, Photoshop, V-Ray, Nuke

Work in progress‌

Credits: concept by Marco Bucci (Instagram: bucciblog)

artstation.com/allachernova

I wanted to do an image that has an interesting story and a stylised look, and to study the way Pixar approaches its shots. The technique is to apply realistic, not proportionally scaled up textures on stylised shapes. It makes it look cartoony, but also part of a world that could exist Alla Chernova, Nightmare, 2017 15

This came together when me and my very talented student Kazhal Javanmardi saw the potential for an awe-inspiring mood in this environment. The image is the result of our teamwork, so I asked her to begin modelling and I worked on the artistic lighting, shading and post-production Mohsen Hashemi, Luxure, 2018

Mohsen Hashemi renderexpert.info Hashemi is an arch vis artist, master of architecture, illustrator and photographer Software Maya, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop, V-Ray

Work in progress‌

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ByungMoon Kang artstation.com/goat ByungMoon is a 3D character artist working at EA Spearhead in Seoul

I had to make a male character with plenty of strength and charisma. In order to do this I found a variety of materials for unique hairstyles and clothing, which I combined to create the impression of the character ByungMoon Kang, Raphael Soto, 2016

Software Maya, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop, V-Ray

Work in progress‌

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In depth

Arnaud Valette arnaudvalette.com Arnaud is a freelance concept artist in the film industry. He is involved in character, creature and environment design Software 3ds Max, KeyShot, Photoshop

Work in progress‌

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‘Mining Planet, District 102’ takes place

in an industrial universe; we are not on Earth but on a planet crowded with volcanos. In the image, we see a factory that extracts lava from the planet. The company extracting the lava found a way to use it as a fuel for human purposes Arnaud Valette, Mining Planet, District 102, 2017 19

Thick ATmoSphere For that world, I imagined a really thick orange atmosphere, and since I used KeyShot, I rendered a Depth map to help me create that feeling. I use that pass as an alpha in Photoshop, I love working that way. Alphas are powerful.

mAke The lAVA In order to create a fast lava effect, I gathered a lot of online references from erupting volcanos, clouds, explosions and so on. Once I am happy with that, I go to Photoshop and I ‘extract’ the effect from the reference by doing an alpha. I keep the effect and remove the rest of the image.

20

lighTing wiTh keyShoT

DeSigning wiTh 3DS mAX

Since I use KeyShot, I also use geometry from 3ds Max 2015 as lighting sources. In the bottom right, I used a plane that produces light in order to illustrate a tank filled with lava. This process saves me lots of time to get my lighting right.

To build the assets, I used 3ds Max 2015, as I am really familiar with it and love how you can stack Modifiers. I first designed on paper some rough ideas and then I jumped into my favourite software to build each asset.

INSIDE THE VIRTUAL REVOLUTION

INSIDE THE

VIRTUAL REVOLUTION We gather industry professionals and forward-thinking artists to ind out if this immersive reality is here to stay

T

here may be a plethora of questions surrounding virtual reality in 2018, but one thing that has never been in doubt is its potential. For decades the likes of The Lawnmower Man, The Matrix and Ready Player One have dared to dream up the possibilities in popular iction. Now 3D

22

Artist is lifting the lid on its current potential and where it might be heading.

When Oculus kickstarted the virtual revolution at the beginning of the decade it didn’t take long for fellow creators and innovators to take notice of the opportunities this new technology presented. The likes of

Google and Valve began to work on rival hardware while creatives explored ways in which to incorporate the ledgling medium into their art. We spoke to two such creators, as well as senior members of the studios working tirelessly to push the boundaries of this ever-growing industry.

Kilograph’s groundbreaking architectural visualisation

Once Sol Rogers started REWIND in 2011 as a high-end CGI and VFX company, it didn’t take long for him to realise that immersive entertainment could be the way forward. “When we got our hands on an Oculus DK1 on day one of release we immediately saw the potential and quickly turned our focus to immersive content creation,” he explains. “When we started, there were no stitching tools for 360-degree video and stills, so VFX pipelines with Nuke were devised to create a quality of content that no other studio was producing. The CG artists with a thirst for interactivity, who wanted to push boundaries and had a skill for problem-solving, started looking at Unity. It wasn’t long before we made one of the irst commercial approved projects on Oculus – Red Bull Air Race simulator. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Since then REWIND has gone on to produce a multitude of boundary-pushing immersive experiences. “From Home – A VR Spacewalk for the BBC, to the launch of the I-PACE in VR for Jaguar, we are always pushing technology, and

ourselves, to stay ahead of the curve and ensure we deliver outstanding and memorable content,” says Rogers.

Never ones to shy from a challenge the team even produced a Ghost in the Shell VR experience, for both Oculus and Samsung, in just seven weeks, something Rogers highlights as their toughest project to date. “Everyone dug deep and put their heart and soul into the project. We were lucky that we were able to drive the quality, pushing to deliver an Oculus version as well as the Gear VR version (which was originally penned), and deliver both in the time allocated.”

When asked what makes VR such an exciting proposition for the entertainment industry, Rogers attributes it to the transportative capabilities of the technology in telling stories.

“Presence allows you to live a story rather than being a passive observer. There’s no fourth wall, we’re not trying to suspend the disbelief, we’re instantly in it. We don’t have to try and tell you the narrative, or use cinematography or music and editing to trick you into believing you’re

there – you are there. Story-living is the next generation of storytelling.”

The inherent sense of immersion offered by the software is equally important to the artists currently using VR headsets in their work. “You aren’t looking into a screen with your creation, you are literally in the room with it as you create.

It can be as big as a house or as tiny as a mouse, you can even walk around and inside it,” says Glen Southern.

Southern has been modelling in 3D since the early Nineties. Initially just a hobbyist, he later became a full-time artist running his own studio.

When discussing his irst forays into the virtual space, Southern explains that curiosity got the better of him after he watched the technology develop and he invested in an Oculus Rift at the tail end of 2016. “The irst program I stumbled onto was Oculus Medium and I’m lucky enough to work with them all the time now,” he adds.

In fact, Southern believes in the technology so much that he has become an ambassador for the immersive 3D modelling software, Oculus

23

InsIde the VIrtual reVolutIon

Home allows the user to traverse the International Space Station

Magic Butterfly immerses its audience in the world of opera

Medium. Even as he speaks to 3D Artist he’s at FMX in Stuttgart, Germany giving workshops on creature design in Medium and spreading the word on this new method of sculpting.

Medium is also the preferred tool of modeller, animator and character designer Steve Talkowski. After 30 years of producing 3D art, Talkowski found himself craving the extra immersion and interactivity that only virtual reality can provide. Discussing what excites him most in his new venture, Talkowski is quick to point out the time-saving effect it has on his worklow: “I can quickly crank out fully formed 3D sketches that can be brought into my apps, where I can texture and render them to a inal presentation state.”

Despite utilising Oculus Medium in much of its VR and AR work, visual creative agency Kilograph employs an array of different platforms across its projects. VR engineer Jackson Doherty praises HTC Vive for its usefulness in room-scale creations. He elaborates: “We’re taking advantage of this with

24

REWIND strives to work on the bleeding edge of technology

a current project in development – Suspension House – which uses a more spatial language for locomotion involving volumes that the user steps through. It’s much more natural than the traditional point-and-click teleportation that you see in many VR experiences, especially when blended with spatial audio.”

Doherty also notes that game engine Unity has proved particularly useful in developing Kilograph’s mobile-based AR apps. “The ease it provides in creating 2D interfaces as well as its mobile rendering ability – in general, it just has a really intelligent modular design and keeps getting better and better,” he adds.

The increasingly populated landscape of VR and AR platforms on offer is, in part, what makes the area so exciting for creators like Doherty. “The technology has reached a critical point in which compelling and useful experiences can be created if carefully made.

This has led to a surge in interest and rapid improvement in hardware and software. This engineering innovation is mirrored in art and

design – it’s really the Wild West right now in terms of storytelling, narrative, user interface design, among other things.”

Despite the exciting possibilities that virtual reality software presents artists there is no doubt that something has to change before it becomes a viable option for anyone and everyone. “It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation,” explains Rogers. “Headsets are making their way into people’s homes, but it’s going to take a while before they’re as much a part of the furniture as a remote control. Great content will create demand for HMD (headmounted displays), driving growth, but whilst distribution is limited, many companies are questioning reach and ROI, which limits the amount of content made.”

From the perspective of the artists, developers will need to continue reining the hardware and incorporating the full range of industry standardisations into the software, before it becomes a universally accepted medium for 3D art. “I would like a subdivision

REWIND has helped companies like Jaguar realise the future of press events

THE REALITY OF VR lon Grohs, chief commercial oficer of Chaos Group, debunks the myths surrounding Vr

Models in Vr will never be high quality due to budget constraints.

CG - There are virtual reality solutions that modelling package in VR,” adds Southern, acknowledging that there are still some areas yet to be catered for.

Incorporating VR software into a worklow also means dedicating vast amounts of time to learning how it can be utilised – not exactly an enticing proposition for an artist that has spent years mastering the tools of their trade.

However, Southern makes it clear that the hard work will pay off: “I literally spent every day for four weeks learning each tool, feature and worklow. I made hard-surface models, spaceships, cars, bikes. Organic models, dragons, robots, demons, the usual fantasy stuff.

After that month I was ready to go. I kept recording my progress and posting it online and that’s when the dev team called me up and asked me to do training content for them. From then, things started to grow and we began doing all sorts of concept sculpts in Medium.”

Relatively speaking, virtual reality is a technology still very much in its infancy, thus much of the conversation surrounding it concerns its future. Rogers has some very particular thoughts about where that future might potentially lie. “The combination of VR and AI offers a big opportunity. Their integration will provide a new range of experiences and opportunities that respond in a more human way. Suddenly, that virtual environment

becomes more intelligent and more personal.

Taking a 3D virtual world and combining that with a smart system that can replicate a human offers a new level of engagement.”

For Southern, the future of virtual sculpting lies in blurring the lines between virtual and augmented reality, the latter denoting technology that superimposes computergenerated imagery onto the user’s real world view. He adds: “I like to sculpt virtually but I would like to see the room around me as I do it.

Wireless is needed, removing the sensors and making it a headset-only experience too. Then we can see VR evolving into mixed reality and augmented reality, and watch it develop at a tremendous rate.”

Doherty predicts basic improvements such as smaller and more powerful headsets, improved comfortability and a move towards more fashionable designs. However, he admits to a certain amount of uncertainty yet hopefulness for the technologies’ place in our world. “How the technology will bleed into society is harder to predict. I would expect a steady increase in enterprise involvement, until perhaps a tipping point is reached in user experience such that many people want these devices in their homes.

You can imagine a couple, in the comfort of their own living room, scanning through potential homes located around the world.”

can provide full, photorealistic immersion without the detail limitations of a game engine, including lightields and point cloud solutions like Nurulize.

Spending time in virtual realities could satisfy a user’s social needs to the degree that they withdraw from our physical society.

CG - We can’t turn off our biological need to interact IRL. Even smartphones, which can be isolating, haven’t stopped that. Social VR just provides another way to connect.

Vr will never be viable outside of video games.

CG - Architecture is already adopting VR at a huge rate. We recently surveyed 5,700 architecture professionals and 50 per cent are already using it, with two thirds planning work in 2018.

Most virtual and mixed reality technology won’t become inancially attainable for consumers anyway.

CG - Prices will come down. It’ll eventually just come with your mobile phone. The most-used VR headsets – Gear VR, Google Daydream – are already inexpensive.

Cheaper than a smartphone, for sure.

25

InsIde the VIrtual reVolutIon

four tips to master vr sculpting Freelance artist Steve Talkowski teaches us how to get the most out of sculpting characters in VR 1. stamp WorkfloW Being able to import custom objects and use them in a kitbash fashion is a powerful and quick way to build up a piece while also retaining a personal design language.

2. resolution management Keep in mind which layers will require more resolution.

Base layers can be at the lowest level, while smaller pieces require resolution levels two and above. This will ensure nicer renders without having to deal with retopology.

3. learn to Work Within the limitations There are many tools and functionalities still missing in VR. I work in additive/ subtractive mode constantly.

Working in conjunction with layers makes this easier. For example, if I want to design some custom, hard-surface objects, I start with the base object at a medium to high resolution, then add another layer with the required detail. I then go back to the base and perform any negative Boolean operations using other primitive shapes.

4. layers Taking advantage of proper layer management is crucial.

For example, if I’m working on a robot character, I break up my layers into logical components: base layer for simple armature followed by a joints layer, then working my way up from the general to the speciic. This makes it much easier to break out your objects and materials when I am back inside Maya or ZBrush.

26

top left Talkowski has 30 years of experience as a 3D artist top right Talkowski specialises in character design, modelling and animation middle left Each character starts life as a fully formed 3D sketch middle right Upon going freelance Steve Talkowski successfully launched his own company, Sketchbot Studios left This image was sculpted in virtual reality and finished up in ZBrush

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dISCOVER ZBRUSH 2018

R E V O C S dI 2018’s beta h s u r B Z f o l a r e ev Ian Failes asks s on a test run and discuss s testers to take u with its newest features s their experience

re. The 2018 is now he ixologic’s ZBrush ing tool pt ul the digital sc latest release of ures. But at fe w athe of ne comes with a sw the world, ere unveiled to before these w ta testers wade be o pr group of Pixologic had a w brushes, are to try out ne through the softw s. ow and new workl new deformers out ed rn tu those testers In the process, y. er ag im e impressiv some incredibly e a selection of th d ke as 3D Artist es nc rie pe eir ex group about th ZBrush 2018, g in st te ta be in their best and for some of s. ck tri tips and

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2018

H S U ZBR

The BeTA TesTers NACHO RIESCO GOSTANZA Freelance digital sculptor nachoriesco.com

TOMAS WITTELSBACH sculptor and designer inkmetal.com

OSCAR TREJO 3D artist osc-art.com

NELSON TAI Concept designer, FATface artstation.com/nelsontai

MARLON R. NUNEZ Character artist mrnunez.com

MAARTEN VERHOEVEN Freelance digital sculptor artstation.com/mutte

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dISCOVER ZBRUSH 2018

SCULPTING AN OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD ALIEN Looking to test out the PolyGroupIt and sculptris Pro features, Nelson Tai tackled this alien helmet design

Get started The starting point was DemoHeadFemale in LightBox. I inserted a sphere, then DynaMeshed it in low-res to explore shapes. Main brushes used at this stage: TrimDynamic, ClayBuildup, HPolish, Move, MaskPen, selectLasso and ClipCurve.

Dam_Standard was used to deine different parts of the helmet. It’s helpful to use StoreMT to easily undo or erase the lines with the Morph brush.

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Try out PolyGroupIt I used the new

PolyGroupIt feature in order to easily PolyGroup parts. To do this, you simply click on areas where you want a new PolyGroup, and the plugin will be able to deine that new group based on the sketched lines. The PolyGroup selection can also be reined with the slider.

Simply enable ‘Extend’ to remove any gaps between PolyGroups.

Find new shapes Project Primitive allows you to ind interesting new shapes. I projected spheres to the alien head and modiied the shape of it with the gizmo (scale, transpose, rotate). Increasing the value of ‘blend’ helped make the projection more natural here as I continued to reine my sculpt.

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Take on sculptris Pro Finer details and colour were done with Sculptris Pro Mode on. The texture of the skin was crafted with Standard Brush set on Spray mode with a small alpha. Colouring was also done simply with ‘rgb’ turned on and ‘Zadd or Zsub’ turned off for the brush.

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Final steps Further details are done with alphas, IMM brushes and PolyGroup and panel loops. I like to assign colours and materials during the design to better visualise the inal result. Last adjustments were made using the ‘deformer’ feature to help reine shapes or to make parts it better.

Rendering was done in KeyShot with Photoshop for presentation and touch-up work.

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sCULPTrIs PrO LeADs NeW FeATUres Let’s take an overview of what’s new in ZBrush 2018. The big-ticket item is Sculptris Pro Mode.

The dynamic tessellation system inside Sculptris, already part of ZBrush, has been updated so that artists can ignore any of the constraints of polygon distribution and get on with the job of sculpting. Sculptris Pro can dynamically add, tesselate, remove or decimate polygons at the whim of the sculptor (in real-time via what’s called ‘Tessimation’).

“For me as an organic sculptor, I love the Sculptris Pro feature that is added to ZBrush 2018,” says freelance digital sculptor and beta tester Maarten Verhoeven. “You can start developing shapes and forms without going in technical. DynaMesh was a start, but this is just magic. Why? Because you can modify the density on your model on the ly while you’re discovering shapes. Sculptris Pro will change my worklow for blocking out shapes, and I’ll cut down heavy on using basemeshes when I’m discovering shapes.”

“Sculptris Pro is the star of this new version because it provides a new starting point,” adds fellow beta tester and freelance digital sculptor Nacho Riesco Gostanza. “It’s great to create base meshes where you’re just focused on sculpting without any concerns about topology.”

One of the major beneits of Sculptris Pro is being able to smooth areas where you don’t need any details, while tessellating others that require more. Beta testers also called out the combination of Sculptris Pro with the default SnakeHook and new SnakeHook2 brushes. “It makes it really easy to pull out shapes when blocking out characters and creatures,” observes FATFace concept designer and beta tester Nelson Tai. “The whole sculpting experience feels much more organic with this feature.”

GO DeFOrMers, AND sMOOTh rUNNINGs WITh POLYGrOUPIT A total of 27 deformers are available in ZBrush 2018 along with the already introduced Gizmo 3D manipulator system and other deformers.

One singled out by several beta testers is the new Project Primitive deformer. With this, artists can use multiple primitives for reshaping a mesh or building from a separate mesh. The idea is to be able to take something like a sphere and turn it into a sculpt that is much more complex.

“For me,” comments beta tester and character artist Marlon R Nuñez, “The major new feature in ZBrush 2018 is the Project Primitives feature. I was always looking for a good worklow to get into hard surface, using either panel loops or Booleans, but both have their limitations. With the Project Primitives, I have the chance to create all bunch of shapes in no time, so the creative low is very intense.”

Riesco, who concentrates on jewellery sculpts, found the Project Primitives feature to

Gnome by Maarten Verhoeven, who started with one sphere and split off parts and then re-sculpted with Sculptris Pro and IMM brushes. Stitches were achieved with the elastic option for Curve Mode, and the beard sculpted with the new SnakeHook brushes

Wheelbike, by Marlon R. Nunez, which took advantage of the new Project Primitives feature

Art deco Panther,

by Nacho Riesco Gostanza

Nelson Tai sculpted his ZI’BA Trooper with and without a helmet

Ring, by Nacho Riesco Gostanza

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Discover ZBrush 2018

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BLACK dRAGON MARLON R NUÑEZ ----------------------Character artist mrnunez.com

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Character artist Marlon R Nuñez sculpted his ‘Black dragon’ character based on a concept by Dongjun Lu. He used the new Sculptris Pro feature to help with the blockout, and then other new brushes such as SnakeHook2 and the elastic feature. In addition, animal displacement textures from Texturing.xyz were used for the skin.

New snakehook brushes The new SnakeHook2 brush was very handy, as it can extrude across the normal from the surface. This along with Sculptris Pro saves a good amount of time during the sculpting process.

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separating the mesh By dividing the mesh in various pieces, I got enough polygons to be able to re-create the displacement maps from Texturing.xyz. It is important to keep the seams from the geometry clean.

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sculptris Pro During the blockout process it was very handy to add more detail in areas like the eyes.

This in conjunction with ZRemesher allowed me to control the mesh density.

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IMM Curves features Thanks to the new

features such as elastic and liquid, it is faster to place straps around any object.

be useful in creating ring shapes mainly for bigger shapes as signets, where he could play around with blending forms. “All of the new Deformers added to the Gizmo have tons of possibilities,” he says. “It’s really worth spending time playing with them. They change the game because they offer new ways to approach things that were previously only able to be done with other tools or worklows.”

One further update is a fresh way to create polygon groupings called PolyGroupIt. This evaluates the surface of a model in real-time and generates ‘intelligent groupings’, or PolyGroups.

The idea here is to further aid an artist’s worklow inside ZBrush towards clean inishings.

NeW FeATUres, NeW WOrKFLOWs Okay, so there’s a bunch of new features in ZBrush 2018, but how do they impact on artists?

For some, it was about moving from one tool that had previously been relied upon to quickly embracing a new feature.

“I no longer work with DynaMesh,” says Nunez. “Thanks to Sculptris Pro, I can now

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smooth areas where I don’t need details and tessellate any that need further details. So it is great and faster. In terms of hard surface, it opened me to this world, as I never felt luent on it, and for the irst time I was having fun for real!”

3D artist and beta tester Oscar Trejo enjoyed the changes in ZBrush, especially with Sculptris Pro. “It gave me even more freedom and made the irst stages of sculpting even quicker, especially when you are just sketching stuff in ZBrush. You no longer need to adjust the quantity of polygons over and over.”

Those beneits continue during the sculpting process, as describes Tai. “The new features make it more fun for me throughout the design process. I would use Project Primitive at the start of designs to explore more shape possibilities.

PolyGroupIt speeds up splitting off SubTools [compared to] the old mask plus PolyGroup method. Sculptris Pro Mode is powerful in both the early and inal stages of organic sculpts. Not needing to further subdivide or increase DynaMesh resolution for adding details is very helpful to keep ZBrush running smooth.”

In fact, as Tai notes, it’s not really one new feature in ZBrush 2018 that the beta testers clung to; it’s several. Sculptor and designer Tomas Wittelsbach declares after the beta testing process that both the ability to tune a model after decimation brings a dramatic change to his worklow, and Sculptris Pro “adds an incredibly versatile new block-up process for me. There are more real tools in the toolbox for sure – not just cosmetic changes,” he says.

Wittelsbach also adds: “The new features in the Gizmo and the PolyGroup from paint are both super helpful. The remesh options in the Gizmo allow me to use Sculptris Pro in my worklow more organically. I can do a quick blockout in Sculptris Pro and then quickly remesh it in many ways depending on where I’m going with the model. Also, using Sculptris Pro after decimation and preparing for print allows me to tune the model for print without losing the ine details after decimation. The PolyGroup with paint allows me to create fast wire form shapes that we are always hunting for in jewellery design.”

let’s Go huntinG With ‘hunter’, Oscar Trejo sought to try the new sculptris Pro for a creature with personality

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01 Z-dragon, by Nelson Tai, which let the artist explore the SnakeHook brush along with Sculptris Pro

The eyes are everything I started

everything from a sphere. I used Dam_Standard with Sculptris on to draw where I wanted the eyes, the nose and the mouth of the creature, and also used ClayBuildup to deine the muscles of the face. Since the very beginning I deined the shape of the eyes because they were important for the inal composition.

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Neck and shoulders To create the

neck and shoulders I would usually add another sphere and then DynaMesh it, but this time I masked the bottom part of the head and then by using the SnakeHook brush I was able to extrude the neck and shoulders. Also, I started to deine some of the main wrinkles.

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Growing fangs I inserted a sphere that I modiied to look like a fang. One of the new smaller features is the ability to duplicate multiple meshes. While having the fang selected I pressed W to move it with the Gizmo, held Cmd/Ctrl and moved it. I released Cmd/Ctrl while pressing the left click and moved the Gizmo. Doing this creates duplicates of the model in the same distance as the irst.

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Pose a hunter I posed the

head by masking the neck and shoulders and on the Gizmo selected Transpose All Selected SubTools. After that, I used the deformer of Remesh by DynaMesh to have the same resolution across the whole model.

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Discover ZBrush 2018

Tomas Wittelsbach’s Cicada jewellery pieces. due to the high detail of his pieces on a small scale, Wittelsbach uses high subdivision levels and does the majority of his sculpting to the highest level

ZBrush 2018 top tips

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Using Project Primitives

When working with Project Primitives, try to break things into various SubTools. Don't try to project all in one; it will just cause a very dense mesh and in some cases be dificult to work from. Marlon r Nuñez

Customise your setup Customise your UI to have easy access to your favourite tools. Sculptris, Snakehook and PolyGroupIt are in my UI’s bottom tray now.

Set a hotkey for Sculptris Pro Mode! I have it set for Opt/Alt+S to easily turn it on and off.

Nelson Tai

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The remesh options in the Gizmo allow me to use Sculptris Pro more organically Tomas Wittelsbach, Sculptor and designer A BeTA eXPerIeNCe Even though their beta testing experience is only just over, several members of the group are already looking forward to continuing to play with ZBrush 2018’s new features. “I’m looking forward to trying out more possibilities with the Project Primitive deformer,” says Tai. “And I’m looking forward to using more Sculptris Pro features to do character and creature designs.”

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Trejo wants to create more with PolyGroupIt. “This makes doing hard surface stuff easier. You can paint or sculpt to have everything separated into PolyGroups, which is something very useful when creating hard surfaces.”

Riesco also wants more time with PolyGroupIt. “As it is a brand new way of creating PolyGroups I’m still a bit insecure with it. Maybe I haven’t found the right model. But I’m sure that it will be a big improvement.”

For the ZBrush 2018 beta testers, getting their hands on the software early was an engaging process. During the period, testers worked on several mini-projects and challenges, where they could try out new features and continue to receive support from Pixologic if necessary.

The calibre of testers was high, notes Trejo.

“My experience was a mixture of being really humbled to be among so many incredible artists, and excitement to try the new stuff and being able to contribute to make the software better. It was one of those things I always wanted to do.”

“Being part of the beta is a wonderful experience,” adds Verhoeven. “You get introduced to new features you not always have thought about in your worklow. But after playing with them they mostly feel quite familiar.

For me, the best part of being on a beta, is to be there with other artists, seeing and studying how others approach problem and solutions, it’s a small look in of how creative brains work. This can only enrich you as an artist.”

Tessimate, plus Masks Use the new Tessimate feature in combination with Masks. You can mask or unmask the areas of the model that need to be tessimated or decimated to avoid a general effect and then tweak just the necessary surface. Nacho riesco Gostanza

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staying on top of sculptris Pro

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Using remesh by DynaMesh

Use the Move brush for changing the volumes in Sculptris Pro Mode. Don't use the Inlate brush on big surfaces in Sculptris Pro Mode, as this will eat your memory. While using Sculptris Pro, try to work with as many different parts as possible to keep your worklow streamlined. Maarten Verhoeven

This is such a powerful tool – it’s one of the new deformers, and is perfect for doing the glomming for 3D printing, but also super useful if you want to switch between a mesh created with Sculptris to DynaMesh, since with the new cone system you control in a non-destructive way how many polygons you want in your new mesh. Oscar Trejo

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

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

NELSON TAI 918Z, 2018 Software ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop

Learn how to • Design vehicles in ZBrush • Use new ZBrush 2018 features (Project Primitive and PolyGroupIt) • Use ZBrush techniques for hard-surface designs

Concept I wanted to design a car and explore the possibilities of ZBrush 2018’s new features in the design process. The iconic Porsche 917K was the main inspiration for this piece.

Build pro vehicle designs in ZBrush Learn how to use Project Primitive and PolyGroupIt in ZBrush 2018 to create incredible 3D vehicle designs

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sing ZBrush for designing vehicles is a fun way to explore shapes and form. We are going to use new features of ZBrush 2018 to help us deine the shape of the car. Project Primitive will irst help us get the rough shape of the car, then a combination of techniques with DynaMesh sculpting, ZRemesher and deformers will help us further reine the shape. PolyGroupIt, Booleans and Extraction will then be used to create different parts of the car to complete the design sculpt. We will inish the presentation by rendering in KeyShot and doing the inal touch-ups in Photoshop.

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Sketch out the main form with Project Primitive Starting with a sphere, use Project Primitive to block out the main form of the car. It is important to keep the design loose and explore more possibilities in the early stages. Play around with the ‘blend’ cone and ‘modiier’ cones to ind interesting shapes. When you are happy with a projection, select Accept (white cone) and continue projecting additional shapes to build up more interesting results. Use Symmetry and the Gizmo (transpose, scale, rotate) to further customise the projected shapes.

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Refine with ZRemesher and deformers When you have a good base shape, but are inding that some areas of the shape can’t be further adjusted by using Project Primitive, use DynaMesh and ZRemesher to further reine the shape. DynaMesh the mesh (keep a low resolution) and use a large Move brush to reine the shape, then ZRemesh it. With the shape cleaned up, you can continue to use Project Primitive for additional shapes to blend, or use the deformers to reine the overall form. The ClipCurve brush is also useful to cut any areas of the car that should be lat.

Use Booleans for the front window Use ZModeler on a cube to roughly shape out the front windows.

DynaMesh the cube if needed to further modify with ClipCurve or TrimDynamic. Also use deformers to shape the cube to work for front windows. Duplicate the window SubTool so that one can be used as the actual window and one for subtractive Boolean. Apply different colours to the front window and the main body SubTool before doing a subtractive Boolean for easy polygrouping after (Polygroup From Polypaint). The polygroup created from the Boolean can be used to create a frame around the window by ZRemeshing and Panel Looping.

subscribe today Go to page 28 to learn more

It is important to keep the design loose and explore more possibilities in the early stages.

Play around with the ‘blend’ cone and ‘modiier’ cones to ind interesting shapes 39

BUILD PRO VEHICLE DESIGNS IN ZBRUSH

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Create the headlights Use the Mask Pen brush to draw out the headlights’ shape. Use Extract to create a new SubTool based on the masking (thickness of 0.0005 is suggested). With the extracted mesh automatically selected after extracting, press Opt/Alt+W to polygroup the masked area. Select this new polygroup

by Opt/Alt+Shift-clicking on it. Delete the hidden mesh and use Polish By Features to reduce possible rough edges.

ZRemesh this to a lower polycount so that it will be suitable for use with ZModeler. Duplicate this SubTool so that one would be used for subtractive Boolean and one would be the headlight glass itself.

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Inside the headlights Now hide the headlight glass for a bit while we create the headlights inside.

Using the IMM Primitives brush, insert a cylinder and split it into a new SubTool. Mask half of it and extrude it outwards to create a long pill shape to create the headlight holder. Now add a Capsule primitive on the cylinder and also extrude it outwards to create a simple headlight source. We don’t need to further detail this, since we are only looking for a light source shape to use for the inal image rendering.

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Rims and tyres Insert cylinders into the side of the body in order to decide where the wheels are going to be. When happy with the position, duplicate the SubTool and use it to Boolean cut an opening for the wheels to sit. Remember to scale up the SubTool a bit to give clearance to the tyres. Now create the rims with the irst cylinder using ZModeler’s QMesh and Bevel functions.

The spokes are done by ZModeling one spoke from a cube and are then duplicated and rotated around the cylinder.

The tyres are simply another cylinder with the middle punched out with QMesh.

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always keep duplicates of your subTools Help keep your design options open by retaining duplicates of your SubTools before making major changes. It is more convenient and eficient than saving multiple versions of your ZTL ile. Even duplicates of the SubTools you use for Boolean operations are worth keeping. ZRemeshing the Boolean SubTools and using ZModeler can easily enable you to add additional parts to the design. This car design uses this technique to add the rubber seals around the windows or the headlight gasket.

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PolyGroupIt with Polypaint Another way to create polygroups instead of drawing lines with the Dam_Standard brush would be drawing lines with Polypaint (ZSub/ZAdd off). For example, ill the car body SubTool white and use the Standard brush (RGB on, ZAdd off) to draw black lines for the doors and other panels. Select PolyGroupIt From Polypaint in the plugin. Note that the outlines need to be closed paths to create polygroups.

Sketch and PolyGroupIt Sketch out the doors and other panels that you would like to split off with the Dam_Standard brush. It is helpful to store a MorphTarget before doing this so that you can erase lines with the Morph brush. Subdivide for higher resolution to get cleaner lines. Set a high LazyRadius and LazySnap to 100 to allow smoother lines. When you are happy with the lines, launch the new PolyGroupIt plugin. Click on the doors to plant a polygroup ‘seed’ and adjust the slider to expand/reduce the polygroup coverage. Use X symmetry and turn on Extend to remove the gaps between the polygroups. Click OK to apply the groups.

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IMM and DragDot for bolts Using the Standard brush, select DragDot mode and select Alpha_06.

Set the Focal Shift to -100 and increase the Z Intensity. Set a small brush size and hold Alt when sculpting to sculpt inwards to the surface instead of outwards. Repeat this for where you want to add bolts. When done, switch to the IMM ModelKit brush and select a bolt to use. Reduce the brush size to roughly half the size of what you used to create the slot. Insert the bolt into the slot by dragging out the bolt from the middle and then holding Cmd/Ctrl to lock the bolt’s size to the brush size.

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Side skirts and front lip Add a cube to the side of the car to block out the side skirt design.

DynaMesh the cube and use ClipCurve to further reine the form. Now use deformers to warp the shape to it the car’s design. Further detail the side skirt using masking and Booleans to add vents. The same techniques are used for the car’s front lip.

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Rear wings Project Primitive can also be fun to use during the later stages to add interesting new shapes to your sculpt. We can use this to add rear wings to the car. Explore the primitive types to see which works best for your design. Primitive Type 3 can achieve a triangular shape which works well for wings. Further reine the shape with the Move, Smooth and ClipCurve brushes. Note that Project Primitive may not perform as fast on a dense mesh and that ZRemeshing may help.

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Project Primitive can also be fun to use during the later stages to add interesting new shapes to your sculpt. Explore the primitive types to see which works best for your design 41

BUILD PRO VEHICLE DESIGNS IN ZBRUSH

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Make rear diffuser and exhaust The rear diffuser and exhaust can both be created using ZModeler and DynaMesh. Start the rear diffuser with a cube and the exhausts with a cylinder. Use QMesh, Bevel, InsertEdgeLoop and Transpose to block out roughly the design you want. Turn the parts into DynaMesh if you are further looking to detail or add alphas to the design. If DynaMesh is not required, then add Creases or Bevels to edges to keep the shape and turn on Dynamic SubD to get a smooth result.

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Decimate and clean up With the sculpt close to done, we can start decimating the SubTools to help reduce the ile size and improve the overall performance in ZBrush. Use the Decimation Master plugin to pre-process and decimate the SubTools to a lower poly count. Adjust the decimation percentage to make sure the poly count is low while keeping the details and shape of the mesh. If there are problems decimating, a possible ix would be going to Tool>Subtool>MeshIntegrity and clicking Check Mesh Integrity. If there are errors, click on Fix Mesh. This should ix most decimation process problems.

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Colours and materials Assigning colours in ZBrush will give you a better sense of the overall design before sending everything over to KeyShot. Materials and colours can be applied to SubTools and polygroups with MRGB turned on and then clicking FillObject under the Color menu (assign hotkey Opt/Alt+F to FillObject for faster access). KeyShot recognises different meshes by SubTools or materials, so it is important to assign different materials to different parts of the mesh if they are grouped in the same SubTool.

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Extra props Props can be added to the scene to make the presentation look more interesting. Something simple would be light designs to make the car presentation more appealing. The lights for this project were made by modifying the Capsule found in the IMM Primitives brush. These props should be kept simple so that it doesn’t distract from the car design.

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Use Decimation Master to decimate the SubTools to a lower poly count. Adjust the decimation percentage to make sure the poly count is low while keeping the details and shape of the mesh 43

BUILD PRO VEHICLE DESIGNS IN ZBRUSH

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nelson Tai Nelson is a concept designer. He works at FATface Hong Kong and has been involved in the designs of sci-fi film Warriors of Future.

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Render in KeyShot Send your ZBrush scene over to KeyShot by enabling KeyShot under the Render menu and pressing Render. To create a nice relective ground surface for the car to sit on, add a Ground Plane and set the Ground Material’s specular colour to a light grey and set a low roughness value. Set the Environment Background to Color to have a solid background. Add decals and logos onto the car by adding them in the Material’s Labels. Create different Scene Sets to try out different colour and material designs of the car. Make sure to include a Clown Pass when you render to easily select parts to touch up in Photoshop.

SpaceCrew, 2017 ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop This character was created to push my ZBrush skills. I always wanted to design a spacesuit and it was fun creating weapons for it as well.

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Neon Midnight Blues, 2017 ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop Originally a motorcycle design project, this expanded into a bigger cyberpunk project that included a character, weapon and a bunch of concept artworks in the end.

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Reine the inal image in Photoshop Use the Clown Pass to mask out the car to add atmosphere elements in the background. Give the lights a stronger effect by using a white soft brush on a layer set to Overlay. Use Levels, Color Balance and Hue/Saturation to further adjust the image for the desired look. It is best that the adjustments are done on individual layers instead of directly on the image so that your work is non-destructive. The Patch Tool is also very useful to clean up any noise that the render may have. Other elements you can add to enhance the image can be lens lare, depth of ield, camera dust, chromatic aberration and noise to give it that inal touch.

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

TGR5 Droid Unit, 2017 ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop The TGR5 droid unit keeps the streets safe from crime. It wields a powerful railgun with four little drones that help it scout out the surroundings.

Create a watCh proCedurally

DANIEL THIGER Compass Watch, 2018 Software Substance Designer and Marmoset Toolbag

Learn how to • With minimal modelling, create intricate geometry for your renders • Create hard surface shapes and details in Substance Designer • Create stunning product renders in Marmoset Toolbag • Set up and use parameters to drive the positioning and rotation of shapes • Create logic to step through an atlas texture based on parameters

Concept Create high-quality product renders without hours of modelling work by using procedural worklows to maintain lexibility on all aspects of the design. Quickly and iteratively play around with a selection of material types and colours. The style of the artwork is photorealistic, with inspiration drawn from the different types of design and materials seen in watches.

Create a watch procedurally With little-to-no modelling work necessary, discover how to create and render a complete wristwatch procedurally by utilising Substance Designer and Marmoset Toolbag

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xploring the possibilities of utilising Substance designer as a modeller is one of my favourite pastimes, my goal being to experiment and ind scalable solutions to 3d problems. the results are often comparable to those achieved with traditional modelling software, with the added beneit of remaining lexible in terms of shape and design using procedural techniques.

In the spirit of exploring how far the boundaries can be pushed with an exclusively Substance designer and Marmoset toolbag worklow, I will walk us through how to create a wristwatch in 15 steps. Starting with the basic shape creation to a fully rendered scene, we will be exposed to the lexibility of this worklow.

Focus is placed on how to control the look of the wristwatch, the logic behind setting up the dials and digital displays, setting up parameters for material options and rendering techniques. ultimately we will learn the approach behind working within Substance designer to complete a modelling project from start to inish.

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Create the case body we will start by creating a hexagon shape using the polygon node to represent the case body of the watch. Next, we’ll create additional shapes to carve out details of the base hexagon using Blend nodes set to Mindarken and Subtract. here we 01

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your

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begin to see the case take form. to generate a more machined-looking shape, we’ll use directional warp to offset blocks of detail. pay close attention to your reference at this stage to make sure your scale and details are realistic. also keep your end result in mind, as you’ll want it to feature a suficient amount of intricate shapes with angles that can catch the light nicely in your renders.

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Make the watch face shape to create the watch face we start with a paraboloid shape and a curve node to create an adjustable compass ring. Splatter Circular together with a Blend is used to carve out some detail around the edges. For the remaining details, we will use a combination of radial Splatter, transform, Cartesian to polar nodes for text and other small radial details.

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Digital display this project features a hybrid watch, with digital and analog displays. the numbers in the digital display are created with an atlas texture, which holds all of the minutes from 0 to 59. to set the time of our watch, we will create hour, minute and second parameters that will step through the texture and draw the corresponding number. we’ll next use the Crop Gray Scale and simple logic to step through the texture based on the parameter input.

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Create a watCh proCedurally

Make sure to include interesting angles and shapes that can catch the light in interesting ways Dial shapes Since each hour, minute and second dial looks different, we will need to create individual shapes for each of these elements. In order to generate some uniquely shaped dials, we need to transform and combine several square shapes until we start to see some interesting angles. when we are happy with the result, we’ll simply apply a horizontal mirror. Next, we’ll run an edge detect on the whole shape to round off the sharp edges. For some of the dials, we’ll create a cutout detail. we can achieve this by running an additional edge detect to carve out some around shapes that are then removed from the main shape.

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Dial calculation to set up the dial calculation, we’ll put the dial shapes we have created into a Splatter Circular. we then need to create an expression under the ring rotation parameter. to explain the logic, let’s examine how to set up the minutes. First, we’ll create an empty function under ring rotation. to access the minute integer, we’ll use the Get Integer node, cast it to a loat and then multiply this number by 1/60 to get the percentage of rotation that will occur in a full rotation. Finally, we will add 0.25 to make sure the minute dial will start at 0 degrees, instead of 90 degrees, which would be 15 minutes.

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Create the wristband the wristband will only be tileable horizontally, so to get a bit more variation we’ll set up our graph to be a 2:1 aspect ratio. Since the type of wristband we’re making consists of links, we’ll start with a tile random (y:3 X:6) to deine the links, set the offset to 0.5 and also add a slight amount of interslice. to round the links, we’ll use Flood Fill Gradient together with curve nodes. we will then use a tile sampler to create the pegs that connect the links together. Finally, the pegs and the links are height Blended together. as mentioned previously, make sure to include interesting angles and shapes that can catch the light in interesting ways for an eyecatching render, while staying true to your reference.

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The iner details to achieve a brushed steel look, we’ll use the built-in Scratch Generator Normal. you should set the Spline Number to an extremely high value, for example somewhere between 2000-5000.

Make sure there is minimal distortion and random rotation in order to retain directionality. For our diffuse and roughness, we’ll use a combination of directional Noise and Fractal Sum Base to get interesting metallic variation. play around with these values and blends until you achieve something similar to your reference.

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Deal with compression the default Substance ile format pNG has some noticeable artefacts when rendering. Since this project features a variety of smooth, rounded and shiny surfaces, these artefacts will be particularly visible. the solution is to switch over to tIF, which fortunately eliminates the issue completely.

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Double-sided geometry when rendering scenes in Marmoset, sometimes you will run into the issue of light passing through the backside of your geometry. to solve this problem, simply uncheck the box for Cull Backfaces on the geometry node itself. this will allow you to get double-sided geometry.

Wrist-locking mechanism Next we will create the watch’s wrist-locking mechanism. we’ll use similar techniques to those used in creating the wristband. as with all shape creation steps, it’s crucial to pay close attention to your reference. with a combination of shapes and transforms, we can subtract and add different compound shapes together.

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Combine shapes Now that we have created all of our shapes, we will begin the task of putting it together. we’ll start by creating a separate graph and then dragging in the body and face sub graphs. we will blend these together using a Material height Blend node. this is a great node for blending complex materials together. then we need to set up the channels to relect our inputs, and lastly, scale the watch face to it the body shape.

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Set up parameters the ability to create and drive elements with parameters is one of the most powerful aspects of Substance designer. It’s with parameters that we really see the beneits of creating procedural materials compared to traditional worklows for this type of project. For this particular wristwatch, the parameters we will enable are wristband type, wear/ damage level, roughness/colour for different elements, time, day and material type. to set up parameters, you need to simply ind the parameter in the property ield and select expose parameter.

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as with all shape creation steps, it’s crucial to pay close attention to your reference. with a combination of shapes and transforms, we can subtract and add different compound shapes together 10

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Create a watCh proCedurally

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HDrI haven For projects where the available lighting presets aren’t suitable, consider checking out hdrihaven.com. It’s a great resource for hdr images that is completely free.

Consider making a donation to keep resources like these available to the community.

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Set up geometry one of the goals of this project was to have minimal focus on modelling. to achieve our renders, we will rely heavily on tessellation and displacement in Marmoset toolbag. the breakdown of the geometry is essentially one cylinder mesh for the tiling wristband texture. then separate planes for each of the body and face, hour, minute and second dials, and inally, for the sheet of glass covering the watch face. we can create the geometry in Maya and import it into Marmoset as one ile, while keeping each of the element separated.

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Establish the scene Start by setting up the materials in the scene. In Marmoset, load the unreal 4 material template. taking the body material as an example, we will enable displacement using height and then load our height texture. then enable Subdivision pN triangles, and crank up the tessellation all the way up to maximum. Be wary that this may affect your frame rate. Next, load the normal, roughness, diffuse, metalness and ao maps accordingly.

Go to the transparency slot and enable Cutout, and load the alpha map, which will mask out unwanted parts of our body shape. the last step is to load the emissive texture. repeat these steps for the glass, wristband and dials.

Finally, apply the materials to the geometry we created in the previous step.

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Lighting setup within Marmoset, we have access to a variety of predeined sky images. For this project, however, those presets might not be the best it. Instead, we can download external hdr images of a higher resolution to get more crisp relections. once downloaded, load the image using the Image button under Sky light, click inside the light editor window to create light sources that can cast shadow and add interesting highlights. load a separate mesh as a ground plane and create a glossy material so we can get some nice relections going.

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Create a watCh proCedurally

14

Daniel Thiger Thiger challenges himself with projects that push the bar of what’s possible with Substance Designer.

His ArtStation account is a documentation of his experiments, as well as a blog with useful tips and tricks. Through his Gumroad account and YouTube channel, he provides resources to the community.

Parasitic Worms, 2018 Substance Designer, Marmoset Toolbag as a challenge to himself to create something that looks both photorealistic yet alien, thiger created these ‘parasitic worms’. the entire parasitic series can be found on his artStation account.

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Render settings under render, enable local relection, high res Shadow and Global Illumination. we can crank up the voxel resolution and tweak the voxel settings until we get the best results. under Camera Setting, we can play around with tweaking the contrast saturation and bloom.

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Cracked Desert Cliff, 2018 Substance Designer, Marmoset Toolbag thiger is known for his large collection of photorealistic rock materials. he relies heavily on studying his references for subtle details, while always experimenting to ind new techniques.

15

Create an alternate version In order to explore how lexible and iterative this worklow is, we’ll create a brand-new version and design of this watch. Since all of the groundwork has already been laid, and the render setup complete, we can very easily generate an entire series of wristwatches. all we have to do is to go back into Substance designer, and create a couple of new base shapes. here is an example of another wristwatch I created using the same setup, where I simply reused the face and built a new body and wristband.

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

Seattle Sidewalk, 2018 Substance Designer, Marmoset Toolbag drawing inspiration from his surroundings, thiger routinely stumbles over these as he walks to and from work. this is an accurate representation of the sidewalks you might ind Seattle.

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LEARN FROM A PRO V-RAY MASTERCLASS

Learn from a pro V-Ray masterclass Discover techniques for high-end rendering with perfect studio lighting with the help of V-Ray engine

I

n this tutorial, we will focus on lighting tips and tricks in V-Ray to create an inspirational render. We will learn how to make this process faster when we have a high-res texture on our model.

We start the project by modelling our concept from scratch. Then we will jump into Substance Painter to create a 4K high-detailed texture and export this texture to V-Ray in Maya. The rest of the process from here will cover setting up our studio lighting with V-Ray. We will also learn how to place emphasis on the model with the help of the great Directional parameter for V-Ray Rectangle lights.

Finally, we will learn a simple and quick way to add extra splendour to our image. V-Ray Rect lights and V-Ray fog box are the main things that we use to stabilise studio lighting in Maya.

54

We will focus on lighting tips and tricks in V-Ray to create an inspirational render

55

LEARN FROM A PRO V-RAY MASTERCLASS

01

FARID GHANBARI Warrior Dog 641, 2018 Software Maya, Substance Painter, Photoshop

Learn how to • Do V-Ray studio lighting • Emphasise your model by using V-Ray’s Directional lights • Create a fog box • Use V-Ray sphere lights to highlight our model • Use relection layer to make your render eye-catching • Correctly use Substance Painter-exported texture for V-Ray

Concept I always appreciate the beauty of anatomy. However, I am not good at it. I found this running greyhound dog so beautiful and froze the moment in CG.

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Design the concept with a handy sketch Warrior Dog 641 needs its own unique design, so if we want to have something unique then we have to design it irst before jumping into modelling. The easiest way to do this is by drawing with a simple pencil. If you are comfortable with digital drawing then that would be better, but if not then traditional drawing is ine. Also, if you are not that good at anatomy you can simply print a real dog model picture that you have already chosen as your reference, and then start drawing on top of that.

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Start to model You can start from scratch, but here we prefer to have a base to have a more accurate anatomy and scale. This way, the modelling process will go much faster and you can use the awesome Maya quad draw tool to follow the base shape and do the modelling based on you irst sketch design. If you think you may lose some details by looking at your sketch and drawing in Maya, you can import your sketch as a blueprint to Maya.

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Reine modelling To create a nice-looking render, irst you should know that it really depends on the amount of details in our model, not only the texture and light. If we have a bulky model without enhanced details then we won’t be able to get an eye-catching inal image, even if we do our best at texturing and lighting stage, so let’s reine and add some tiny details. Screws, nuts, wires, cables, caps, springs or even buttons can be used as extra details. We can also tweak some vertex positions to make it have more imperfections and make it look more like it has been crafted by a human, or to represent damage.

04 YoUR

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DownLoaDs from ilesilo.co.uk/3dartist • Making of Warrior Dog 641.mp4 • Tutorial screenshots

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Create multi-tile UVs To bring the model into Substance Painter, we irst need to create the UVs. It’s up to you to decide how many materials you prefer to have for your scene. You can apply different V-Ray material to certain objects and then make UVs for each one separately, or you can apply one V-Ray material to the whole model and then create multiple tiles for it. Since Substance Painter works perfectly with UDIM textures, we recommend creating one material with multi-tile UVs – this way you don’t need to repeat the assigning textures process several times.

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High-detailed modelling If a painter wants to create a beautiful painting, then irst they need a well-designed base drawing with some nice details, then gradually add colours to it. In the CG world we have exactly the same story. A CG artist irst needs a great model with some enhanced details, then they just need to add the textures and lights to it. This is really important at this stage. One of the most common mistakes that a CG artist makes is thinking that a great rendering process equates to great texturing and lighting, but even before you go into this, it is the modelling that can grab the attention of the viewer.

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Texture in Substance Painter If you lit an object with a simple solid colour texture, with perfect V-Ray physical-based lights, you may get a result that looks nice, but isn’t very realistic. To achieve that high-end result, we need a perfect texture. Substance Painter can create realistic textures by providing curvature, world space, normal or ambient occlusion maps. You just need to bring your object with UVs into it and bake it. Here, we used a default machinery metal texture for the coat, and one steel texture for the base. To blend these two textures, we used one the smart masks to emphasise the edges that are naturally aged by the time.

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Enhance the texture in Substance Painter Do not leave your texture with basic parameters, even if you think it’s ine. There are several options in Substance Painter that can help you to enhance your texture. Use different brushes to add some imperfections to the roughness. This helps a lot in making your inal render realistic for when you light the texture. There is a great text tool now in Substance Painter that allows you to add some text with your desired font and style. Also, you can use great alphas in the Hard Surface library and add more modelling details without dealing with polygons and vertexes.

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Export the texture for V-Ray After inalising the texture, you need to export it for use in Maya. It’s pretty straightforward; you just need to set V-Ray UDIM as your coniguration and set your desired resolution for each texture. We recommend exporting textures at 1K resolution as a test, and then for inal render you can export that at 2K, 4K or even 8K. This way, your testrendering process will be much, much faster.

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LEARN FROM A PRO V-RAY MASTERCLASS

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Key light When you start lighting, it’s better to start with the key light. It is important to decide which side you have to put your key light. We think the best side for the key light is the one on your object that has the most details and hero parts. For example, here, our Warrior Dog is a horizontal model with a lot of nice details on top of it, with wires and screws and nuts. If we put a key light on the left or right then we may lose all these beauties.

Correct setting to create the V-Ray material This stage is one of the most critical, and you need to make sure that it follows exactly the correct setting. Even a single different setting could achieve a different result.

Follow these settings: set Diffuse texture to V-Ray Diffuse Color with sRGB colour space. Set BRDF type to GGX, and assign the relection texture to Relection Color in sRGB mode, and of course don’t forget about the V-Ray texture input gamma. Set the rest of the textures as their related slot with Raw mode colour space. You can also ind this setting info on the Allegorithmic website.

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Set up the scene in Maya Our Warrior Dog has great modelling details and texture, but we can add more spice to our rendering by telling a story there. For example, we could add some feather around the dog with two blood prints that show our warrior has killed a bird. We don’t want go too crazy because we don’t want to take the audience’s attention from the dog itself; just tell a simple story to make the render more interesting.

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Start the lighting We already have our texture, but to have a better worklow we start the lighting with a simple grey V-Ray material. Other than creating a faster test render, we will be able to make a better decision on lighting because the details on the texture can be a little distracting. You need a key light, which we used to light the dog from the top, here. Just play with this light to get the most beautiful top line of your model.

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Add a V-Ray fog box To create the fog box in V-Ray, we need to create a simple cube, then assign a VRayMtl to it. In our VrayMtlSG(shading group) tab, there is Volume material slot. We need to assign a V-Ray Environment Fog to this slot. If you have a test render then you will see the box with no fog. If we want to the volume material instead of the VRayMtl, we have to turn down the opacity to zero. Now we add a perfect fog box, which we can change the depth of using the fog distance.

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Combine warm and cold The mood and overall colour of your render is not just to do with the texture diffuses. Lights always determine the inal look of your textures. A green light on a blue texture may give you a purplish inal colour. If you want to have a more cinematic rendering, we recommend blending warm and cold colours together and playing with light colours. Experiment with them to see what makes you happy. Here, we lit the dog with blue from the left and red from the right. We may need to do some tweaks when we assign the texture.

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Fill light Usually, HDRI works best when illing light for studio lighting. You can use a V-Ray Dome light with a simple HDRI with low intensity to work as a ill light.

However, you may need to tweak your light linking and remove the loor plane to avoid seeing the end line behind the dog. Alternatively, you can use a V-Ray Rect light in front of the dog as the ill light with low intensity.

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V-Ray Rect light Directional One of the most powerful abilities that V-Ray Rect lights has is the Directional parameter. This is probably the best thing to focus on and emphasise on during the lighting. Besides that, you can get stronger shadows in Directional, which can add more detail to your rendering and make it much more interesting. In order to achieve the best result, we recommend that you play with the Directional parameter in V-Ray Rect light to experience different types of light focuses and see the effect of soft and harsh shadows. You will notice that a more directional light mode will require a less intense multiplier.

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LEARN FROM A PRO V-RAY MASTERCLASS

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Assign PBR texture and adjust the lighting If you recall, we recommended exporting low-res textures from Substance Painter at irst, and then after achieving a desired rendering, exporting the high-res one. At this stage we can assign the texture and tweak lights to get the inal setup. Low-resolution textures help you to achieve a quick test rendering. We don’t care about all of the details on the texture at this level.

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Highlight details with a V-Ray sphere light The key light, rim light and ill light are the main lights that will light our model and make it look beautiful. But there are always some parts of a model that need to be lit separately, because they could be in dark areas behind other parts of the model and be in shadow. This is of course normal and will make it look even more realistic, but since we are going to create a CG artwork, we can place emphasis on some special parts with a couple of V-Ray Sphere lights. We have to play with different positions and light colours to get the best result.

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Background colour One of the best methods of using studio lighting is via the fog box. This gives you a depth and you can control the depth with fog distance, which also brings a mysterious feeling to your scene. Adding a little blue tint to fog colour will create more contrast with our yellow dog texture. You can also export your alpha channel with your inal render elements, and easily change the background colour in post. But irst, it is important to get the best result with the fog background colour.

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LEARN FROM A PRO V-RAY MASTERCLASS

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Farid Ghanbari Farid works as a 3D generalist and lighting artist with experience in games, advertising, arch vis, motion design, medical animation and VFX. He is a CG generalist at 3FX Inc.

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V-Ray render elements To have better control of your inal image, it’s better to have separate elements rather than one inal image. In this way, you are able to change the relection, specular, lighting, colours, ZDepth or even the fog amount in post, and won’t need to re-render the whole scene. In this scene we have exported the most important elements that are needed: specular, GI, relection, ZDepth, ambient occlusion, alpha and environment.

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Bottles of Life, 2017 Maya, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop The idea came to my mind when I saw some oil painting masterpieces on Pinterest. They all had perfect lighting and illustrated an eye-catching image with brush touches.

Just Listen, 2012 Maya, Photoshop One of the most interesting parts in CG is creating imperfections. As you can see, this hands-free character has been made with curves drawn by hand.

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Enhance the inal image in Photoshop At this stage we will mostly enhance the image colour and mood. Don’t forget about the ambient occlusion element. You can use it in Multiply mode with about 30% opacity. Use the alpha channel to play around with a different tint colour for the background. As you can see, the Warrior Dog rendering is kind of a bright, shiny image that you may not be able to achieve just with package rendering. Here is the trick to add this mood to your image: after you have inished your composition and all the post-production, put the relection layer in screen mode with about 60% opacity. Boom.

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

Memories of a fighter, 2018 Maya, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop I love experience lighting. Here I tried to establish a kind of cosy lighting which gives you a morning sunshine feel.

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ENVIRONMENT LIGHTING FOG

Jiwon Park artstation.com/jiwonn

Incredible 3D artists take us

behind their artwork

ENVIRONMENT FOG I love to add fog when I work on environment scenes because it makes scenes more atmospheric. I used V-Ray environment fog and created five different fog render passes in Maya. I set each fog colour to blue and orange to create realistic sky and sun rays.

I also added god ray fog to highlight the main character.

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Jiwon Park is a BFA Animation & visual effects student at Academy of Art University Software Maya, V-Ray, ZBrush, Mari, Marvelous Designer, Nuke

Scooter Trouble, concept by Nikolai Lockertsen, 2018

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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

HoUDInI FX 15+

LUCAS STRINGHETTI lucasvfx.com

Beach simulations in Houdini FX

Bio Lucas is an art director and VFX artist with a strong working knowledge of Houdini, VEX, natural phenomena simulations and RBD/Flip/Pyro simulation.

He also loves stop-motion.

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DownloaDs from ilesilo.co.uk/3dartist • Tutorial screenshots • BEACH_BOX_V00.hip • Caches (bgeo.sc) • Textures • HDRI

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n this tutorial, you will learn how to create an animated beach diorama from start to inish using Houdini FX. You will understand the entire worklow of the process, going through modelling, emitter creation, simulations, water mesh creation, foam, bubbles and inalising it with shader, lighting and render.

I’ll introduce some of the advantages of working with Houdini, including some tips, shortcuts and important concepts. It is a very powerful piece of software and once you understand its logic, it becomes a completely intuitive and liberating tool where your creativity is the only limit.

Getting there requires a little patience, though, because the simulations are usually time-consuming and, as it involves a lot of refraction and volume information, the rendering will probably not be all that fast, either.

For your irst attempt, I recommend using the Houdini shelf, which can be found at Oceans>Beach Tank, since it will come with many links that will make your life easier.

Don’t be ashamed to use it – it’s an excellent study tool and a good problem solver in many cases.

This tutorial is based on using the shelf. The most important thing to understand while using Houdini FX is what shelf has created for you as well as why and what you are doing. So let’s get started!

01

To shelf… and beyond! On the upper right side

shelf, on the Ocean tab, click on Beach Tank. With the mouse cursor on the viewport, press Enter. It is possible to see that it has created a beach segment and seven SOP Geometries. Now create a new SOP Geometry and call it ‘bound_box’. Inside it, create a box and scale it to the size that you want your beach to be. This box will be a limiter and everything outside of it will be deleted, making our control much easier. You can use its Size and Center parameters to link to other SOPs later, but for now create a Null SOP by putting ‘OUT_BOUND’ after it.

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Beach model On beach_geo you will ind the

beach loor – feel free to make your own. The stone was made procedurally, using spheres in different positions, adding a Mountain SOP, converting VDB to join them and then converting them to polygons again. To do this, go to VDB from Polygons>Convert VDB. You can do this procedure as many times as you want to add more variations and details. In my case, I did it twice. Before OUT_beach, put a Merge SOP joining the ground plane with the stone you created. Finally, you need to create two Null SOPs, one for rock (OUT_rock) and another for the plane (OUT_ground). You will use this later.

sUBsCRIBE ToDaY! Turn to page 28 to learn more

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Procedural to simulation Next we need to set our animation time by pressing Opt/Alt+Shift+G, which opens the Global Animation Options. In my case, I decided to make my scene run 160 frames at 24fps.

Remember that the animation will start getting interesting after the irst 40 frames. Inside the beachtank_initial, link the Size and Center parameters of Ocean Source with the Size and Center values of box1 of the bound_box. Enter the beachtank_sim geometry and select the FLIP Object SOP. In Particle Separation, start off by setting it to 0.3, so you are able to have a better visualisation. In Closed Boundaries make sure to leave +X and +Y unchecked so that the liquid does not collide at either of these extremes.

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Tweak FLIP sim presets Sticking with the

beachtank_sim geometry, there is a POP Advect

by Volumes SOP (advect_by_ocean). It is responsible for applying the speed that was created by Ocean Source. You can play with this Velocity Scale – increasing it will give you a more violent sea. Make some tests by changing this value, simulating at least 120 frames and then make a Flipbook so that you can compare them. For this project, I left the Velocity Scale at 2. When you are satisied with the movement, go back to the FLIP Object SOP and change the Particle Separation to 0.08. Then in the Creation tab, disable Allow Caching and move on to the next step.

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Procedural ocean The magic begins with the Ocean Spectrum inside the beachtank_initial. Here you will deine the movement of the waves – amplitude, force, direction of the wind, speed and so forth. To visualise the movement, place the display lag on the Ocean Evaluate and hit play.

The Ocean Source (wave tank) is responsible for creating a tank of particles that will receive the speed of Ocean Spectrum.

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TECHNIQUES

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Sim cache and water surface In the

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beach_luid geometry is where you will cache the simulation and then generate the mesh of the water. Select the Delete SOP (delete_boundary_layer) and then, in the Bounding Volume tab, link its Size and Center with the Size and Center of the bound_box. Select File Cache SOP (compressed_cache) and click Save To Disk. Depending on your processor, this will probably take about two hours or so.

Once the cache is inished, enable Load From Disk. Select the Particle Fluid Surface SOP (particleluidsurface1). In the Surfacing tab, change the Voxel Scale to 0.4, the Inluence Scale to 2.8 and the Adaptivity to 0.001. In the Filtering tab, enable Dilate – Erode is enabled automatically as a result.

Finally, cache the generated mesh, which will take approximately three hours.

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Whitewater source Select the whitewater_ source geometry and select the Whitewater Source SOP to change some parameters. On the Emission tab, set Min Speed to 1 and Max Speed to 5. On the Curvature tab, set Min Curvature to 2 and Max Velocity Angle to 80. On the Acceleration tab, set Min Acceleration to 19. Basically, with these changes you will be increasing the emitter range to make more of it visible.

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Whitewater simulation The whitewater simulation happens in whitewater_sim geometry.

Select the Whitewater Solver SOP and in the Foam tab, change Depth to 0.01 and Max Lifespan to 10. As for the Spray tab, let’s disable it. On the Bubble tab, change Lifespan to 2.3. In the Solver tab, as usual, link the Volume Limits Size and the Volume Limits Center with the Size and Center of our bound_box. Now select the Whitewater Emitter SOP and on the Birth tab, change Const Birth Rate to 110. On the Shape tab, change Shape to Cone. And, inally, on the Attributes tab, change Radial Velocity to 0.30.

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Whitewater VBD, lighting and cam The whitewater is transformed into VDB to be rendered. Inside the whitewater_import geometry, select Volume Rasterize Particles SOP and change the Density Scale to 1.01 and the Particle Scale to 0.46. In VDB SOP, delete the Voxel Size link and type 0.01 to improve the resolution. The simulation is ready! Now let’s move on to the lighting. I used Sky Light and an HRDI in the Environment Light, which is found by going to Shelf>Lights And Cameras>Sky Light/Environment Light. To get HDRI, I would suggest going to hdrihaven.com as it has a great free library with excellent quality. Finally, you need to create a camera by going to Shelf>Lights And Cameras>Camera, and then positioning it where you want it.

where it is dry or wet Inside the rock_geo geometry, create a grid that’s connected to a Mountain SOP. Then create a white Color SOP for the grid and a black for the rock. With the Attribute Transfer SOP, you will transfer the colour of the grid to the rock. Use the Distance Threshold and Blend Width parameters to decrease the inluence where white will be the wet shader and black will be the dry shader. Turn off UV Quick Shade SOP and do the same for the sand.

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Final tips Make sure not to limit yourself – let your creativity motivate you! You can change the format of the beach and add objects, animals, characters and so forth. If you have any questions, I’m available to clarify them.

I’m also making the project available so that you can download it, modify it and clarify any doubts you may have during the steps.

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Unfold UVs Turn off the Display Flag of the

beach_geo geometry and create another two – ground_geo and rock_geo – just for organisation. On each, create an Object Merge SOP by pulling its respective OUT: OUT_ground or OUT_rock. In the ground_geo, after the Object Merge, create a Volume Extrude SOP, then a Boolean SOP (intersect) and check A Inside B to create a group.

Create another Object Merge with the OUT_BOUND of the bound_box to connect in Boolean input 2. Create a Delete SOP. In Group, choose A Inside B. Duplicate it and change the Operation to Delete Non-Selected in order to separate top from side. After the irst delete, connect a UV Unwrap SOP, and after the second, connect an UV Texture SOP. After each delete action, create a Material SOP and then merge with a Merge SOP. In rock_geo, create a UV Texture SOP, and in Texture Type, select Perspective From Camera and select your camera. To visualise its texture, use the UV Quick Shade SOP.

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Set mantra and shade whitewater In the top

menu, go to Render>Create Render Node>MantraPBR. In the Outputs, select the Mantra SOP and in the Rendering tab, reduce the Max Ray Samples to 7. On the Limits tab, reduce the Relect Limit and the Refract Limit to 4. In materials, Houdini automatically will create three materials, one for liquid, one for internal volume of liquid and another for whitewater. I only changed the whitewater (spray) – in Smoke Density put 4.15, and in Shadow Density Multiplier put 0.126. Now it’s possible to make a simple render and readjust the light.

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Rock and send shader I used four types of textures

– two for rock, one dry sand and one wet sand. I got the textures from Quixel Megascans, an excellent source but not free. Another great and free option is textures.com. In the materials you created two Principle Shaders, one dry and one wet, connect them (output layer) to a Layer Mix SOP and then create a Parameter SOP. In Name, type Cd and change Type to Color before connecting its output in the alpha of Layer Mix. This process is for sand as well as rock.

Finally, just apply the Layer Mix shader to each object.

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Final render Create another Mantra-PBR, go to

Outputs and select it. Choose the camera and resolution you prefer. In the Images>Extra Image Planes tab, check Direct Lighting, Surface Unlit Specular Color. Click + and in the VEX Variable ield, select Combined Lighting (Per-Light). Click + again and select Occlusion (Oc). This creates render layers. In the Rendering tab, check Allow Motion Blur, in Pixel Samples set 4x4, in the Limits tab set Relect and Refract Limit to 7 and Diffuse Limit to 1. Specify the frame range, use the $F4.exr ile extension and click Render to Disk.

All tutorial files can be downloaded from: filesilo.co.uk/3dartist 69

TECHNIQUES

MaYa, MaRVEloUs DEsIGnER, ZBRUsH, sUBsTanCE PaInTER

KURT KUPSER kurtkupser.com

Bio Kurt is an environment and look development artist currently working at The Coalition. He has worked on titles such as Gears Of War 4 and Star Wars Battlefront ll.

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70

Model and texture a backpack for VR T

his tutorial will cover the modelling and texturing of a backpack asset that I created for a VR project. The player will be able to grab the bag, and hold it, so I wanted to make sure both the textures and geometry held up at all angles. The software I am using to make the backpack is Marvelous Designer, ZBrush, Maya, MightyBake and Substance Painter.

I really enjoyed creating this asset, since I don’t often get to use Marvelous Designer in my environment art pipeline.

I found that the learning curve for Marvelous is steep, but is a powerful tool that gives great results, and I think it is worth knowing even if you don’t use it every day. We will look at how to block out 2D patterns in Marvelous Designer, then simulate the clothing layout in 3D. Next, we will look at how to export out of Marvelous and add additional details in ZBrush, and texture the asset in Substance Painter. We will cover some tricks to get results faster in Marvelous Designer and how to add details such as the zippers and straps in ZBrush. We will also look at texturing using Substance Painter, and rendering out beauty shots in Marmoset Toolbag 3. This tutorial assumes you have at least a beginner’s knowledge of Marvelous Designer and ZBrush.

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Get started in Marvelous Designer Before I started modelling the backpack, I went looking for a clothing tech pack/technical design, which is a 2D layout of the fabric patterns that get sewn together. I found a drawing, then assigned it as a texture to a square polygon in the 2D window (Fig. 1). I then changed the UVs of the texture so that it lined up within the polygon shape. You can ind the Edit Texture (2D) button in the 2D window (Fig. 2). I traced over the patterns in the 2D pattern window using the polygon tool, then I sewed the pieces together using the stitch tool.

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Simulate your mesh in 3D I arranged the

shapes in 3D so when I run the simulation the pieces are sewn together without colliding and clipping into itself. Within the Property Editor of the material, I changed the fabric’s physical properties to the denim preset. If you were to simulate with a silk material instead of denim, for example, you would get a much different result since silk is less stiff. I changed the back panel of the pack to leather in this case, since it’s more rigid and able to support the backpack without collapsing. Press the Space bar to start/ stop the simulation.

Export out of Marvelous Designer Once I was happy with the simulation, I was ready to export my mesh. Before exporting, I wanted to increase the polygon density, so in the Property editor under Simulation Properties I reduced the Particle Distance parameter to 5 (Fig. 1). By default, when you export a mesh out of Marvelous, the polygons are triangulated. To change that, select the patterns in the 2D window, and scroll down to the bottom of the Property Editor, under the Miscellaneous section and change the mesh to Quad (Fig. 2). After these changes, simulate once more for good luck, then export using File>Export>Obj (Fig. 3).

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After bringing the mesh into ZBrush, I broke everything out into separate polygroups based on UVs for easier masking and sculpting.

I adjusted some proportions using the Move brush as it was feeling too tall and skinny 01

Add sculpted detail After bringing the mesh

into ZBrush, I broke everything out into separate polygroups based on UVs for easier masking and sculpting.

I adjusted some proportions using the Move brush as it was feeling too tall and skinny. Based on my reference, I added large forms and wrinkles using the Standard, Inlate and Dam_Standard brushes with Lazy Mouse for a smoother brush stroke. My reference had a folded and puckered look where the panels met, so I spent extra time pushing that detail as well. For a closer look at how I added details around the zippers, refer to Fabric alphas on the next page.

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Double seams in Marvelous Designer When I am stitching panels together when working in Marvelous Designer, I tend to get a better result when I stitch each edge two times. I then create an internal line around each of the edges, then I will sew those inner edges together in addition to sewing the outer edges together.

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TECHNIQUES

05

Fabric alphas for ZBrush To add the stitch details that run on either side of the zippers, I used a vertical tiling alpha of the stitch and wrinkled detail that is common on the side of your jeans. You can enable Roll mode under Stroke>Modiiers, which enables you to tile your alpha when you sculpt with your brush.

Add mechanical details I modelled the zipper

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slider and pull in Maya using sub-d modelling. I used the insert multi-mesh (IMM) Zipper P brush that comes as standard inside ZBrush (Fig. 1) to add the zipper teeth. I enabled the dynamic draw size with the IMM brush (shift click the Dynamic text), so when I drew my curve, the zipper was the same size regardless of the camera position (Fig. 2). Using the Lazy Mouse helped smooth out the curve when I was drawing. Press the L key on the keyboard to toggle it, or in the menu at the top of the screen under Stroke>Lazy Mouse (Fig. 3).

Sculpt the straps For both the handle and shoulder straps, I started with a lat plane and I just used the Move brush to push the straps into shape. To add depth to the 2D shapes, I stored a morph target of my SubTool (Fig. 1), then under the deformation tab, I used the inlate slider (Fig. 2). Afterwards, hit the CreateDiff Mesh button (Fig. 3). This made a new tool that should have the preix MorphDiff_SubtoolName. You will see that the new mesh has thickness based on how much you inlated your model. If the normals are reversed, you may have to lip them using the Flip button found under display properties in the Tool tab.

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Retopologise I created my low-poly mesh using

Quad Draw in Maya (Fig. 1). I did this manually instead of decimating so I could put geometry exactly along seams where the fabric panels meet and hide my UV borders there. I retopologised over a medium poly version of my sculpted backpack for performance reasons so Maya wouldn’t stall. To use Quad Draw, you irst need to have a live surface, select the mesh you will be retopologising over, then click the magnet in the modelling status line (Fig. 2).

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UV the low-poly mesh I UV’d the bag in Maya

as well. To make sure all UV shells are the same size, I planar project in X, Y and Z, and on each planar projection, I manually override the projection width and height to be the same number (Fig. 1). After laying out my UVs, I soften all edges in Maya, then hardened the UV border edges for a cleaner normal map bake.

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Bake textures I baked a material ID, ambient

occlusion and normal map using MightyBake. You could use any baking software you prefer, however. For some areas, I needed a cage to avoid baking errors. I then baked the curvature, world position and world space normal in Substance Painter. I prefer to bake these maps in Painter, because they can be derived from the normal map I already baked, and Painter bakes a more contrast-y curvature map that works well with their smart materials compared to any other baker in my experience. I have posted images of my bake setup for both programs here as well.

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Texture in Painter The texturing for this asset was fairly simple, I started by grabbing a denim fabric material from Substance Source, which is a great texture resource for high quality fabrics.

My process is: 1. Base denim material.

2. Reducing contrast by darkening the brighter values of the denim.

3. Tiling noise and then handpainting overlaid on diffuse for breakup.

4. Using my curvature map to lighten the edges, I set the blend mode on a light blue solid ill to ‘saturate’.

5. To texture the patch, I created a mask in Photoshop to blend in the white, red and blue colours on the logo.

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Finishing touches in Photoshop Once I am done in Substance Painter, I like to keep a master PSD ile of my textures and baked maps so that I can make quick edits if I ind this to be necessary. In this case, I realised the asset looked a bit lat, and the values of my zipper tape and teeth were too similar. I grabbed my AO and multiplied it at a low opacity for depth and more value variation across my mesh.

Next, I multiplied a darker value on the zipper tape, and used the levels adjustment layer to brighten the zipper teeth against the tape. I have included a before and after for comparison (Fig. 1).

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Render in Marmoset Toolbag I rendered the asset in Marmoset Toolbag 3. I irst set up the camera angles I wanted to shoot from then placed a bright spotlight with a cool hue (key light). Next, I placed three spotlights with a warm hue on the right side of the bag (kicker lights) to help separate the asset from the background. Then I enabled the sky lighting, choosing a darker HDR (Fig. 1). I am using the HDR as a ill light to soften the shadows and brighten them a bit. The backdrop is just a solid, darker colour.

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Create the shoulder straps I could have completely unwrapped the shoulder straps. However, since the straps would move around as you picked up the bag, I wanted to make sure that the normal map was fairly neutral so that the geometry could bend without breaking the tangents. I chose to model the straps straight and bend them in Maya to a default T-pose. For the contact points of the straps, I hid the top ones within the seams of the fabric and the top handle. The bottom straps have the plastic clips to connect to, and are then connected to seams in the fabric.

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All tutorial files can be downloaded from: ilesilo.co.uk/3dartist 73

Techniques

Houdini

GREG ZDUNEK vertexlibrary.com

Bio Greg is a CG generalist with over a decade of experience in games and VFX. He is also the owner and founder of Vertex Library.

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from ilesilo.co.uk/3dartist • HyperGrass tutorial iles • Vertex Library sample pack • Tutorial screenshots

74

Create ields of grass with HyperGrass 3

D grass can be created in a variety of different ways and is an essential asset to any natural environment or arch vis rendering. One of the most common techniques is to scatter individual blades of grass across a surface or use a hair system to generate grass geometry. in this tutorial we will take a different approach.

This issue of 3D Artist includes a selection of assets from the hyperGrass collection by Vertex Library, which you can ind on Filesilo. in the following steps we will use the procedural power of houdini to instance and layer the hyperGrass assets across a terrain and use Redshift to render a realistic ield of grass. hyperGrass is a modular 3D grass library designed around the growth patterns of real grass. it is divided into a number of growth categories that can be layered and combined together for incredible detail and realism. The complete hyperGrass collections are available from vertexlibrary.com.

01

Set up the scene To get started we will irst use the File>import>OBJ menu to load in all the unique hyperGrass models. it’s important that each model is contained inside its own geometry node at the object level, with a unique name that represents the category and variation, such as short_V01. These geometry nodes can be grouped in a subnetwork to stay organised. We will also use Redshift materials with the hyperGrass PBR textures and assign them to all the grass objects. To create

the scatter surface we can use a Grid and Mountain node to generate a terrain, making sure to add normals to points with a normal node.

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Utilise layer instances To create the irst layer,

we will use an instance node with fast-point instancing enabled. inside the instancer, merge in the terrain with an Object Merge node. Then create a Point VOP to set up a density attribute. inside the VOP, create a uniiednoise and use simplex noise. connect its pos attribute to global P and the output noise to a FitRange node. Then connect a Bindexport node with the name set to density. Outside the VOP, add a scatter node and enable Density Attribute.

Lastly, increase Force Total count to control the amount of scatter points.

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Random instances We can now reference the unique names of each grass variation we imported earlier to specify the instance object. Add an Attributecreate inside the instancer, and set the name parameter to instance and the type to string. The irst layer will instance the sprout models. in the string value enter the full path to the irst sprout object. Replace the variation number with `padzero(2, loor(rand($PT)*X)+1)` including the backticks. Replace the X with the number of sprout variations you have. This expression will create a random integer for each instance point, which correctly refers to a speciic grass variation.

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Tweak the random Y rotation We will use a

Point VOP to randomise rotation around the scatter point normals. create a Random node inside and connect its pos input to global ptnum. Multiply the output by 360 with a Multiplyconstant, followed by a DegreesToRadians node. create a separate Align node. set the From vector to (0, 1, 0) and connect global n to the To input. connect the output matrix to a Rotate node. Also connect the previous DegreesToRadians output to the Rotate angle, and global n to the Rotate axis. Lastly, connect the Rotate output to a Matrix3toquaternion node, followed by a Bindexport with its name parameter set to orient.

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Create random scale To randomise scale we

will use another Point VOP. inside the VOP create a uniiednoise and use Perlin or simplex noise. connect the noise output to a FitRange node. We can remap the noise value with the destination Min and Max parameters. We also want to prevent negative or zero scale, so add a clamp node and set the Min parameter to at least 0.1. Finally, add a Bindexport node and set the name parameter to pscale.

Much like how we set up density, we can control the randomisation with the noise frequency and FitRange node.

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Layer the grass With our layer instancer complete, we can duplicate the setup and adjust the random instance expression for the short, medium and tall grass variations. At this point we can add a camera and lights to our scene. While we use Redshift in the tutorial iles, you can use any other renderer supported in houdini. Finally we can get creative and experiment with different types of noise and tweak the parameters of each layer. using different noise frequencies and ranges on the density and scale is an easy but powerful way to shape the look of each grass layer.

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All tutorial files can be downloaded from: ilesilo.co.uk/3dartist 75

techniques

ClaRIssE 3.6

RAINER DUDA rd-innovations.de

Bio Rainer is a VFX industry professional as well as university lecturer. He also owns a VFX company based in South Germany.

Completion time 2.5 hours

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76

Enhance backplates with Clarisse t

his tutorial covers the creation of a backplate enhancement scene in clarisse version 3.6 for short pre-visualisation in professional production environments. Digital artists will learn how to properly set up a modular project structure, which is based on decentralised production environments including a proper naming convention for easy-to-spot assets. the modular project structure will allow digital artists to make the best out of clarisse by using a dynamic ile referencing system for a non-destructive worklow. this means the project will be divided into a main scene next to a scene dedicated to hold assets with their own lighting setup for proper visualisation and adjustments before it lands in the main project. that will give artists freedom to test assets under various lighting conditions. the backplate will be enhanced with a large number of water-balls. this water-ball will be created entirely in clarisse by using a polysphere, and this will include a tailor-made building block material system. the shading of the water-ball will be realised with a material layering of essential surface descriptions to combine with a couple of procedural textures like procedural gradient nodes, which will be modiied and used as control masks to place colours on the polysphere. it is important to understand

how objects can be shaded by using and following a procedural texture worklow.

Artists will also learn how to distribute the water-ball via a point cloud and a scatterer over the virtual sea and additionally how to control the distribution in terms of scale, positioning and collision detection to create an interesting-looking scene. the sea will be created as well completely in clarisse by using a polygrid in combination with a displacement shader including water ripples that match the sea surface on the backplate.

Besides the material creation, the lighting scenery around the water-balls plays a major role for integrating water-balls onto the backplate. it’s important to understand what kind of light sources will be necessary to model proper lighting conditions to match the lighting from the backplate and have artistic freedom to enhance the look and feel of the image.

Another key area of this tutorial is the understanding of post-processing effects in clarisse. With simple tricks an image can be enhanced. this tutorials cover the creation of effects such as simple lens diffusion. the same procedure can then be used to create a bit of glow. Another procedure based on cellular noises will help to create in a procedural way a vignette effect on the image.

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Prepare the main scene the main scene will get

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a context, which will be named main_scene. that context will need three objects. An image object named iMG_FinalFrame, a perspective advanced camera named cAM_Main and a path tracer object named Pt_hD. it is important to add a 3D layer to the image called LYR_Base.

On this layer it is a must-have to assign the camera cAM_ Main and the path tracer Pt_hD. As a next step a new context must be created in main_scene with the name image_support including a texture map named teX_ Backplate_VP with a white arrow in its symbol to assign the image from the silo to it.

Integrate the backplates For our next step it is necessary to bring the backplates into place. First, go into the perspective viewport by jumping into the viewport options. in there is a line called background texture under the ield which is called background plate. that is the ield to assign the imported image frame. it’s now time to add the image frame as a background layer for the image view. to do that a ile layer must be created and moved below the 3D layer. Afterwards this will get the name LYR_ Background_Plate and in the attributes the image ile must be assigned to that ile.

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Re-create the sea surface Before geometry can be placed onto the backplate it is necessary for you to match the targeted surface and to also set up the camera.

First off, it is important that the image object matches the same resolution as the image ile itself – so that is 3840 x 2160 px. For speed and interactivity reasons the resolution multiplier can be set down to around 25%. A fresh context must be created in the main context called Geometry_ support including a geometry grid with the size 50 by 50 metres, along with a resolution of 150 by 150 spans. the viewport is now ready for you to align the camera view with the grid and backplate.

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Add in some ripples to the grid to add ripples

you must now create a new context called Displacement_support in Geometry_support. in there, you should also create a displacement object. the bounds for the displacement will be one metre for XYZ with a front value of two decimetres. the displacement object will be assigned to the grid by drag and drop. the grid will also now get a subdivision surface with two levels. now you must create a perlin noise node with a uV scale factor of 0.01 for uVW. the perlin noise node must be connected to the front value texture slot of the displacement object in order for it to work properly.

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techniques

05

Keep a proper project structure Projects can be complex in clarisse because of the huge functionality and interoperability of objects. it helps to add preixes to object names. Groups can then be used to collect assets based on intelligent rules. Dynamic ile referencing is also important to keep projects readable in terms of object trees.

Prepare the shadow catcher material under the Geometry_support context must be a new context created with the name shading_support with two fresh physical materials. A standard material (MAt_sc_ Grid_seasurface) and one shadow catcher (MAt_ shadowcatcher). the shadow catcher will be assigned to the grid via drag and drop and the standard material will be assigned in the shadow catcher as underlying material. the next step is to set the perspective view to progressive mode with sRGB display Lut and to create a new context on the main area named Lighting_support. now create a physical directional light (LGt_DirectLight) plus a locator as target constrain to match the scene lighting accordingly by hand.

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Reine the shadow catcher emission the basic shadow catcher functionality is working, so now enhance the visual quality in two steps. the irst step is the duplication of the image texture object, which is the background plate for the perspective view. the copy will get the name teX_Backplate_cAM. its projection mode must be set to camera and as camera for the projection the main render cam needs to be assigned. this texture will be the emission input at the shadow catcher node. now it’s time to create an environment light (LGt_env). the texture must be duplicated with the projection mode sphere. Afterwards this texture must be assigned as colour to the environment light and the shadow catcher needs to catch the illumination.

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Prepare the hero asset Within a new empty project you should now create a new context called Assets_support. Additionally, you will need to create in there a context called Preview_scene, which can be disabled later on in the main project. the water-ball is a polysphere with active subdivion surface. the material consists of a layered material with a base made from a diffuse material and the third layer a relection material. All three physical materials. the pattern of the ball is created with the use of three gradients and their projection modes will vary. uV Map u is used to create the horizontal pattern. the gradient mask for the white poles uses uV Map V. simple maths is used to create masks and colourise the water-ball.

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Merge the water-ball project Back in the main project you will need to reference the water-ball project by using the reference function via the ile menu. the water-ball reference is visible as reference by its own icon. it’s now time to deactivate the pre-vis lighting folder from the water-ball project with the right mouse button. the water-ball can be set to a proper pre-vis destination and scaled accordingly. All changes can be reversed, as they are stored as local overrides, which means that the source reference is untouched. if the scale is working ine it is time to spread the water-balls by making use of point clouds and a scatterer.

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Bring the living element in An easy way to distribute the water-ball is by applying a point cloud object onto the sea surface. the Geometry_support context needs a new context called Placement_support. create a point cloud object. in the attributes is a geometry ield, which must be connected with the sea surface. As point count an initial number of 400 will be ine including a distribution method like blue noise. A new scatterer must be created with the point cloud as geometry support. the irst additions are the values 25, 90 and 180 for the scatter rotation variance with values for the rotation step variance.

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Adjustments for a proper scaling now you

must add a texture support colour node to the scale variation in the scatterer object, as colour of the texture support colour must be a gradient plugged in with a gradient. uV Map V will be the projection mode of the gradient. the black and white gradient must be adjusted until visual balance is achieved with the backplate.

Afterwards the initial water-ball object can be hidden. in addition the number of points in the point cloud can be increased. to change how much the balls stick out of the water you can use a scatterer attribute called scatter position variance where the value was 1.25 dm for XYZ.

Make the image more interesting to make the image more believable it is necessary to activate a collision detection at the scatterer object. in the attributes is the ield scattering Decimation with a function called collision mode, which is by default off. this mode must be switched on if we are to use bounding box with world decimation space. now the water-balls have no intersection. the decimate texture of the point cloud can be modiied with a cellular noise to model the particle distribution with the goal to remove water-balls which loat on top of the tree.

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Post effects for image rendering the irst addition would be a lens diffusion effect. therefore you must add a reference layer in the layer editor of the LYR_Main. in the attribute there is a ilter section where you can add a Gaussian blur with a ilter size of 3 pixels. the reference layer density can be adjusted to a level of 0.25.

Additionally a vignette effect can be achieved by adding a colour layer with black colour but with an add ilter. the add ilter will be connected to a cellular noise without jittering, inverted colours and a border mode like linear where border size can be 30% and border amount 38%.

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Multiple 3D layers for pre vis A 3D layer in clarisse can contain one object, hundreds of objects and even complete shots. therefore it makes a lot of sense for fast previsualisation to keep important visual elements separated in their own 3D layers for adjustments based on the director’s feedback. each 3D layer can have its own renderer and camera assigned, followed by layer visibility options for corresponding lights, geometries, shadows, global illumination and raytracing elements. instead of plain light linking artists can use these capabilities to enhance the compositing in clarisse by deconstructing the elements for rendering.

All tutorial files can be downloaded from: ilesilo.co.uk/3dartist 79

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

ZBrush 2018 The latest release of ZBrush raises the bar again, making sculpting in 3D an enjoyable process

O

ver the past few years Pixologic has exceeded expectations, introducing new features that strengthen the place of ZBrush as an industry standard. This year’s iteration, called ZBrush 2018, is no different and comes packed with a set of impressive new tools that are both useful and fun to use.

Undoubtedly, in past iterations of ZBrush, there have been great new additions like ZRemesher, ZModeler, FiberMesh, NanoMesh, the Boolean system and VDMs, just to name a few. However, since DynaMesh was introduced, sculpting hasn’t been the focus, which makes Sculptris Pro one of this year’s strongest contenders for the title of ‘favourite feature’.

Sculptris Pro shifts the focus back to sculpting, giving you even more freedom to explore designs and manipulate the meshes with virtually no technical restraints. When you start sculpting (with Sculptris Pro enabled), ZBrush will tessellate the model, adding polygons where you need them to describe more details. The size of the polygons will adapt to the size of your brush, so to add iner details, you just need to reduce the size of your brush. What’s great about this worklow is that polygons will only be added in the areas affected by the brush strokes, leaving the geometry intact at the ‘untouched’ portions of the model (DynaMesh ‘weakness’).

Decimating the model is also possible while using the Smooth brush. The decimation amount is determined by the brush size but it can be further tweaked with UnDivide Ratio from the Stroke palette>Sculptris Pro. These attributes create an interesting worklow, where you can sculpt details with a small brush and ‘erase’ them with a large Smooth brush. Even better, ZBrush 2018 now remembers the size of each brush, so all you need to do is set the size of your brushes and simply… sculpt.

Freedom of sculpting is not the only trend.

The new PolyGroupIt plugin, for instance, is a

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feature that improves a variety of worklows, simplifying the creation of polygroups. Clicking on the PolyGroupIt button (Plugin palette> PolyGroupIt), will launch a separate window (GPU-based) with your selected SubTool.

Clicking on the model will create a ‘seed’ and clicking on the seed gives you access to a slider that enables you to control the reach of a coloured section based on the topology of the mesh. This is huge, especially for hard-surface modellers, as you can easily deine some planes with the hPolish brush or cut some lines with the Dam_Standard brush for instance, and send the SubTool to the PolyGroupIt plugin to create very clean polygroups in a few seconds.

As if all these new features weren’t enough, there are also new additions to the deformers (from the Gizmo 3D). A few deformers were introduced with ZBrush 4R8 and ZBrush 2018 ships with even more, for a total of 27 very handy deformers. All the new deformers are really useful, but the new ‘Project Primitive’ is surely the one that will be the topic of discussion.

The Project Primitive deformer is an extremely powerful tool. It enables you to modify your mesh by ‘projecting’ a simple object. In a way, this tool is similar to VDMs (vector displacement maps) but without the restriction of being limited to a predeined shape. The primitive objects from the Project Primitive deformer are driven by functions, so you can easily change their shape by pulling the ‘cones’ controls and get real-time feedback.

Some fantastic additional features include: the editing of Curve brushes, such as smoothing the curve with Shift and rotating it with Cmd/Ctrl, new SnakeHook brushes, Decimation presets, a custom QuickSave folder and more. ZBrush 2018 is an exciting software to explore and a rewarding experience once you get the hang of the way things work.

Pablo Muñoz Gomez

oUtStanDinG

Main A ZBrush 2018 robot that was created using most of the new features, including Sculptris Pro, Project Primitive and PolyGroupIt BottoM lEFt This stylised orangutan was mostly created with the new Sculptris Pro feature BottoM MiDDlE This is the result of two minutes’ work on a ‘mecha suit’ to create polygroups using the new PolyGroupIt plugin BottoM RiGHt This psychedelic tree is the result of exploring the Project Primitive deformer to affect FiberMesh, as well as the new curve ‘editing’ tools (Smooth, Rotate, Elastic and Liquid) BEloW This screenshot of the ZBrush 2018 robot shows the use of Sculptris Pro to create details and geometry only where needed (scratches, wear and tear)

Essential info $895 pixologic.com/features 64-bit editions of Windows Vista and up/ Mac OS X: 10.8 and up CPU Intel i5/i7/Xeon technology or AMD equivalent 8GB (16GB recommended) RAM HDD 100GB (SSD drive highly recommended) Video card Most cards manufactured 2008 or newer.

Must support OpenGL 3.3 or higher

Price Website OS

Summary Features Performance Design Value for money

Verdict ZBrush 2018 is an exciting software to explore, making sculpting and designing in 3D a lot of fun

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Pulldownit 4 for Maya 2018

Pulldownit 4 for Maya 2018 CG destruction plugin from Thinkinetic gains extra tools to smash polygons in new ways

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or the uninitiated, Pulldownit is a crossplatform plugin with a dynamics solver that’s designed for the production of fractures and massive rigid body simulations.

Chances are you’ve already seen it in action, as it has brought destruction to several mainstream feature ilms and videogames, including John Carter, Harry Potter, Epic Games’ Gears Of War and naughty dog’s Uncharted 4. after installation, you’ll want to either load or create a model to destroy. Before doing that, it’s important to remember to check your model for issues and clean up bad geometry to avoid any risk of instability and crashes. once done, you’ll be ready to let your inner Hulk loose. this review uses the Maya 2018 edition, which has some minor user interface layout changes and refreshed icons that won’t take experienced users long to adapt to. the new acquire Shatter Style facilitates easy transfer of shatter patterns from low-poly to high-poly models. optionally, if the simulation is baked, the animation keys can also be transferred between meshes. results tend to vary depending on the extent topologies differ, but transferring to a smoothed duplicate created an identical shatter pattern and baked keys as expected. for any leftover missed fragments, additional dynamics can then be calculated.

Breaking a mesh using any source geometry is now possible via the use Volume Shape option. this powerful feature has many potential uses, such as simulating a football smashing through a window or perhaps re-creating the old levi’s ‘odyssey’ advert for a fraction of the multimillion pound budget. it’s also extremely easy to set up: with the feature enabled, simply position the object that will collide so that it intersects the geometry you want to shatter, set it as source and then shatter. updates to the Jagginess deformer include the separation of jagginess being constrained to an object’s tessellation. By making it independent, the problem that used to occur in previous releases of artefacts appearing on borders is removed. the toolset also comes with a Soften Edges slider based on a minimum angle setting, which is used to tweak inner edges. Plus, there’s also a new option to apply jagginess to broken fragments only, but currently jagginess is a feature that works exclusively with Pdi fragments, so you cannot apply it to a general shape. the implementation of jagginess gives an extra level of realism to a simulation, and once

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applied it’s a breeze to modify and update the settings to hone in on exactly the look you’re after, regardless of the complexity of the mesh.

Good results can also be achieved with generally more challenging shell objects that are thin. for baking Pdi simulations, a new option to Bake Selected objects has been added. this enables baking keyframes for chosen fracture bodies that can then still interact with other fragments when they are set as kinematic bodies to provide additional control with simulations. alongside the new tools under the hood, optimisations to reduce production time have also been added. thinkinetic has benchmarked a 30 per cent speed increase with Pdi’s fractures solver when working in dynamics, and 50 per cent less memory is required for simulation caching in the viewport. while this is dificult to conirm as an end user, there is a noticeable gain over the previous release. other enhancements include full Maya Viewport 2.0 support and more responsive selection of fragments in advanced fractures.

Paul Champion

E SS E n t i a l

Main Version 4 is a free upgrade to those who have licensed the plugin 12 months ago and those who licensed between 12 and 24 months ago can get a 30% discount BottoM lEFt The Acquire Shatter Style requires both the source object and target object to have matching local pivot positions to calculate the transfer of a shatter pattern and animation keys BottoM MiDDlE If a mesh is constructed from different parts such as three spheres combined, enabling Detect Sub-meshes before shattering helps to prevent unwanted artefacts from appearing BottoM RiGHt Shell models tend to be more dificult to shatter and add jagginess to. Choosing an Amplitude value lower than 1.0 will help to prevent the creation of borders that appear overly sharp BEloW It’s now possible to direct a shape-based shatter with the Use Volume Shape setting. This tool is ideal for when you need to simulate a tank crashing through a wall or building

Essential info Price 395 Website pulldownit.com Microsoft Windows 64-bit all versions, Mac OS OS X 10.6 and up, Linux (contact website for Linux versions) HDD space 1GB CPU 64-bit Intel or AMD multicore 64-bit Maya 2015+ Software RAM 8GB (16GB+ recommended)

Summary Features Performance Design Value for money

Verdict A stride forwards in creating more realistic simulations in less time

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

086 Community News

092 Project Focus

Wishing Box

Beck – Colors

We spoke to the director behind the short ilm made by 150 artists

The Mill on their most colourful project yet

088 Industry News

094 Project Focus

Unity & AR

Morgan Lives In A Rocket House

Unity Technologies announces an annual Unity for Humanity grant

Peter Monga talks real-time animation

090 Opinion

096 Social

TheLaserGirls

Reader’s Gallery

The fantastic duo tells us why 3D printing has helped to level up cosplay

The latest images created by the 3dartistonline.com community

To advertise in The Hub please contact Chris Mitchell on 01225 687832 or chris.mitchell@futurenet.com

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Community news

The team took visual and storytelling inspiration from films like Brave, How To Train Your Dragon and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

Opening up the Wishing Box We caught up with the director of the short that won 11 international film awards

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student project has been making waves on the consistency across such a large team was another international ilm circuit. Wishing Box is a project obstacle to overcome. “we had many different from the Academy of Art university in san departments work together, such as character animation, Francisco. the short, which features an oaish pirate and texture lighting, VFX, music, editing… because our artists his lovable monkey companion discovering a magical are the best, the best artist is proud of their work. artefact, has won a trove of awards and accolades, and it therefore, it is more challenging to persuade them to was something of a passion project for its director, Lizzie make a choice between their personal style and the Zhang, who initially came up with the concept in 2011. “i overall style of the ilm. But the result is amazing! we are was a big fan of treasure hunting, and the monkey is cute all so happy with this.” and naughty, which is one of my favourite characters,” For character design, Zhang drew inspiration from Zhang says. “so i decided to create a story about it.” industry heavy-hitters. “For the pirate, i was inspired by the detail in Wishing Box is commendable, especially in the characters from How To Train Your Dragon and Brave,” its industry-standard environments and lighting. when she says. the DnA of King Fergus or stoick the Vast can asked about what software was used to achieve this, be clearly seen in Wishing Box’s lead buccaneer, however Zhang points to the likes of maya, Premiere Pro, he’s far from a carbon copy. “i tried to show the pirate’s Photoshop and uV Layout. silly and greedy personality through his messy beard and what’s most impressive about Wishing Box, however, is old dirty clothes,” Zhang explains. the effort and size of its crew, which was scattered across the buccaneer isn’t the breakout star from Wishing the high seas. “in total, 150 young artists worked on this Box, though. instead the ilm’s true treasure is its innocent ilm,” Zhang tells us. Zhang’s team was made up of fellow but mischievous monkey. to achieve the simian’s lively students as well as collaborators and exaggerated movement the team from across the globe who worked looked to a somewhat unconventional on the project remotely. “the solution. “we recorded many human most challenging part was the reference videos,” laughs Zhang, as irst-time work with such a big she points to a video of one of Wishing team,” Zhang says. she also Box’s team members acting out a Lizzie Zhang Director highlights that establishing a visual scene as a monkey for later reference.

i am very happy that our hard work has been recognised and loved

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The titular wishing box has the potential to contain anything the holder desires, which enabled the team to get creative

In addition to directing duties on Wishing Box, Zhang also wrote and produced the short ilm

“we used many video references online, and we were also inspired by the monkey from Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs,” Zhang adds. the hard work put into Wishing Box has gone on to speak for itself, with the short netting 11 international ilm awards and screenings at festivals, like tiFF Kids. early on in the project’s life, Zhang set a goal to showcase the ilm on the festival circuit, and the team’s output had to match that level of quality. it was a goal that paid off for Zhang and her team. “we took such a long time to complete this ilm,” she says. “many of the projects that we launched in the same period ran aground, but we ended up with the ilm and the recognition of the world.”

Following the project, Zhang tells us that Wishing Box’s alumni have moved into coveted positions in the industry, with her citing that some of her former teammates now work at the likes of Pixar, iLm and electronic Arts. Zhang and her team remain proud of their efforts. “i am very happy that our hard work has been recognised and loved,” smiles Zhang. “we believed that we could make something together, and we did.”

Get in touch…

www.3dartistonline.com

@3DArtist

Facebook.com/3DArtistMagazine 87

industry news

Aardman and BANDAI NAMCO announce collaboration The pair will join forces with DigixArt for an artistic, story-driven experience set during World War I

The grant is part of the Made with Unity programme

Unity partners with AR ilm project, Terminal 3 Interactive, augmented-reality documentary explores contemporary Muslim identities in the US unity technologies has announced an annual unity for Humanity grant, a $25,000 award for creators developing unity projects that feature themes of social awareness, healthcare, science, education, humanity and the environment. the grant is inspired by projects like Terminal 3, an interactive, augmented-reality documentary by Asad J Malik exploring contemporary Muslim identities in the us through the lens of an airport interrogation. unity partnered with the project earlier this year to support its premiere at the tribeca Film Festival.

Terminal 3 takes the viewer into an interrogation room to don a Microsoft HoloLens

Unity takeover Tribeca According to a post on the Unity Blog, 17 of the 27 projects in the Tribeca Immersive programme this year were made using Unity.

Among them were VR experiences Lambchild Superstar, in which users can collaborate on writing songs in virtual reality, and My Africa, which allows the user to become a keeper on an elephant sanctuary.

mixed-reality headset and determine the fate of a hologram passenger before them, with them taking on the role of a customs oficial while exploring perceived Muslim identity in the current political climate. “unity is not a game engine anymore, it’s a tool that will democratise the creation of new realms of reality and expression,” says Malik. “we’re moving towards a world where individuals can create worlds for others to experience. deining the reality of the future is a huge responsibility, but also an unprecedented opportunity for change. it’s important that tools like unity make a special effort to give the stage to underrepresented narratives, which is why it’s an honour that Terminal 3 is recognised with this thoughtful new grant. i’m very proud to be the irst recipient and am excited for all the indie creators who will receive these funds in the future to push their expression forward.” submissions for the 2019 unity for Humanity grant will open on 1 October 2018, with the recipient being announced in January 2019. submissions are to be judged by the Made with unity team based on their story, impact, art direction and creative use of technology. unity actively encourages creators from all backgrounds and skill levels to apply.

HAVE YOU HEARD? Autodesk 2D drawing application Sketchbook is now free for desktop 88

BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, Aardman Studios and DigixArt have announced their collaboration on 11-11: Memories Retold, a narrative-driven adventure that takes place during the irst World War. The project promises to be an experience unlike anything before, with a unique painted visual aesthetic.

David Sproxton, co-founder and executive chairman of Aardman says: “Engaging audiences with compelling stories through animation is at the heart of what we do at Aardman. With this project we want to produce an emotionally rich experience with a distinctive visual identity that relects the sentiment of this narrative. 11-11: Memories Retold is truly an exciting step for us as it marks the irst time that Aardman has collaborated on a game of this scale, and we’re delighted to see this come to life.”

“11-11: Memories Retold is a very special game on many levels. From the painted style to the emotional journey we create for the player to revive their heritage, we are pushing the boundaries of what a game can be and hope it will leave a mark on you,” adds Yoan Fanise, game director at DigixArt. 11-11 will be available to play on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The game experience promises to touch many and bring together some amazing talents from studios, music production and narration

James Razzall is named president, North America advertising at Framestore Previously the managing director of the company’s LA ofice, Razzall undertakes new role Framestore has announced the promotion of James razzall to president, north America advertising. razzall previously held the position of managing director at the company’s LA ofice, where he will continue to be based in this new role. He has been rising through the company’s ranks since 2000, proving an integral part of their expansion in the us. razzall says: “i am very proud of what we have achieved in the us over the last 15 years. Our amazing team bridges the gap between advertising,

Free pipeline tool Prism released Richard Frangenberg released a new pipeline management tool for animation and VFX Prism is a new tool for pipeline management, compatible with Houdini, Maya, 3DS Max, Blender and Nuke made by FX TD Richard Frangenberg. The tool was made to enhance creativity for artists while it takes care of the technical aspects in the background.

Additionally it can be used with media playback tools such as RV, DJV and VLC. Deadline and Pandora can be employed for submitting to the farm and Shotgun for project tracking. Users will be able to utilise the tool in managing scene iles and exchanging data with other scenes, even across different applications. A variety of other features are also included with the release. You can ind out more about the free tool and download it at prism-pipeline.com.

Software shorts Shogun 1.2 the latest update arrives with 11 new features and improvements.

Mocap teams can now add and record up to two Hd sdi video camera devices for easy overlays of 3d footage. Blackmagic cameras and capture cards are also now supported. users will also have the ability to create custom skeletons from meshes with improvements to shogun Post.

technology and entertainment perfectly and our three creative hubs are constantly being challenged to come up with innovative ways to tell stories and present beautiful imagery. the work speaks for itself and is testament to the people we have at Framestore, and i am truly honoured to be leading this next phase and inding out what the future holds. From what i’ve seen, the next few years are going to be very exciting.”

In Razzall’s time running the California venture, the team has seen huge growth in both headcount and remit

Wildbear Entertainment creates new immersive experience Australian factual content producers create three-year project for new WWI centre wildbear entertainment has completed more than 60 individual media pieces for the sir John Monash Centre in France. the centre tells the story of the western Front from the perspective of the Australians that served. At its heart is the immersive Gallery, a space containing almost 200 screens that form a 360-degree experience. wildbear’s extensive team was made up of ilm and documentary producers, writers, video game developers and more. Michael tear, CeO of wildbear, says: “we are so proud to have been involved with this important project that commemorates the sacriice of those who served, and we are delighted that the wide-ranging skills in our business, from painstaking research to high-end dramatic recreations, can be showcased in this way for years to come.”

The Centre features over two-and-a-half hours of content, telling the story of the First Australian Imperial Force’s time in France and Belgium during World War I

Bringing you the low-down on product updates and launches Rebelle 3 A set of new features includes ultra-realistic papers featuring hot press, cold press, rough, Japanese, canvases and more. to adapt to the new papers a rewritten watercolour simulation code has been incorporated, making it more realistic than ever. elsewhere, a new ‘dropengine’ enables more realistic paint drying and dripping. rebelle 3 is $89.99.

Trapcode Suite 14.1 red Giant has released a free update to its suite of 11 tools. Form now allows users to have multiple 3d objects in the same space and comes equipped with over 60 new presets to speed up worklows. Mir has new material and shading options that include image-based lighting/ relection mapping. the full version of trapcode suite is priced $990.

DID YOU KNOW? VFX studio Floating House has released an experimental CG project called Proteus on Vimeo 89

opinion

THELASERGIRLS 3D-printing artists, educators and evangelists based in New York City thelasergirlsstudio.com

How 3D modelling and printing have levelled up cosplay TheLaserGirls discuss how 3D modelling and printing can enhance the superpowers of cosplayers, and help spread the spirit of creating through collaboration and template sharing

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osplayers are inspired makers: wildly creative, eager to learn and always pushing the limits of materials; they are early adopters who are excited to get their hands on new processes of making. And with 3D printing getting more eficient, less expensive and overall more accessible by the year, our community of ecstatic cos-makers have a new set of doors to open and explore their craft on a whole new level.

Fundamentally, the pliability of 3D modelling and printing provides makers the ease to rapidly design accurate, durable and overall more consistent parts that can be easily iterated upon and custom-it to the wearer. But the deeper power of the process can be seen in how the technology pushes those who use it and the new avenues it provides to the community of sharing as a whole.

Because larger-picture aspects like working in symmetry, dimensioning parts and physical space are automated or consolidated in 3D software and printing, the maker gets the opportunity to prioritise more of their time and energy into higher level problem-solving and creative decisions that can be lost or dificult to juggle in other mediums.

Coming from a background of traditional sculpture, the way we would go about creating a 3D form in clay or wax by ‘hand’ would require a speciic space, extensive prep and clean-up time, and hours of agonised building around the overall form and anatomy. not only were these aspects of sculpture huge time consumers, but they caused much initial discouragement to even begin a new piece in the irst place! This shift in priority, when we moved to 3D, allowed us to easily dive into sculpting and focus on more intricate, nuanced aspects of the designs. We were even more empowered to be more ambitious with our costumes because of this, which was especially great for our Final Fantasy ventures!

Another signiicant inluence that 3D printing has had on cosplayers is expansion and accessibility of certain materials to use for their costumes. When desktop 3D printing was in its infancy, there were few material options. But this menu is growing in variety, providing cosplayers with the diversity of materials necessary for their craft. Simulated wood, (real) steel, nylon, carbon

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ibre, marble, copper, lexible plastics – all that is needed is a printable ile! And the printer options are wider than ever. From companies like Shapeways to the communities that fuel 3D Hubs, the power of the 3D model ile and the availability of printers has changed the access level to materials that used to be only available to engineers. All of this potential for incredible materials and the depth of design and making only grows in power when you consider the generous community behind the characters.

Cosplayers have always been awesome documentarians of their work and have created an ocean of content and dialogue around making and sharing their processes, patterns and parts way before 3D printing ever came into the picture. if anything, working in 3D has fuelled this exciting ecosystem even more and has allowed so many others to join in on the fun, including ourselves! The open-source cosplay community is one of the largest we have seen and the contributions of those to that pool is important and inclusive to others looking to start their own journey.

Commissions of printed props not only have a faster turnaround, but the exchange between designers is a productive and personal one; we love doing commissions because cosplayers have an incredible eye and appreciation for quality work and the process of making. Through 3D printing, we can work faster and iteratively alongside our clients, creating and receiving feedback, which we have found to be a far more poignant form of collaboration. We have also developed amazing relationships with people across the world through sharing our work and always asking questions. We have been inspired and taught by so many and we feel compelled to pay that forward.

3D modelling and printing has not, by any means, replaced other, more traditional or well-established, forms of prop-making for cosplay, but it has further enhanced and liberated a community of inspired makers who foster positivity and productivity around teaching, learning and making. The power of these processes lies in wait for those with the spirit to create and the desire to be creatively ambitious. We truly believe that our fellow cosplayers have the right stuff to level it up!

LIGHTING

James Elderton wonder-vision.com

Missing LIGHTING The lighting of a shot is one of the most important elements to making a CGI look photoreal. HDR Light Studio gives us the creative headshot freedom to accurately position lights that illuminate the desired parts of Incredible 3D artists take us

behind their artwork

the bike. We ‘solo’ each of the lights as they are placed to see the exact reflections of that source, building up lights that show the form beautifully.

James is the MD of Wonder Vision fusing art and tech to move people Software SolidWorks, 3ds Max, Maxwell Render, HDR Light Studio, Photoshop

Triumph Motorcycles Tiger 1200, 2017

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project focus

Beck – Colors The Mill discusses working on the Edgar Wright-directed video Company The Mill Location United States Website themill.com Project description Music video Biography The Mill is a visual effects and content creation studio collaborating on VFX, digital and design projects for the advertising, games and music industries. It frequently partners with groundbreaking directors, creative irms and brands.

With over 28 years’ experience, The Mill is a creative culture of talented artists from multinational backgrounds, nurturing innovation, lexibility and ideas, enabling them to offer creative solutions across studios in London, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Contributor • Daniel Thuresson, VFX supervisor • Lisha Tan, creative director

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ven for a studio as proliic and accomplished as the Mill, the opportunity to collaborate with a visionary ilm director, a Grammy-nominated musician, a Golden Globe-nominated actress and a legendary Hollywood cinematographer is a special one. ‘colors’ is a visual accompaniment to the title track from Beck’s 13th album, brought to the screen by director edgar Wright and cinematographer Bill pope, and it is clear to see why the project was so enticing for the studio. two weeks were allocated for the Mill to complete around 150 shots for the four-and-a-half-minute video. the tight turnaround did not present any issues for the teams involved, however, as VfX supervisor Daniel thuresson explains: “the irst task was an ingest process where we got a sense of everything we were going to deal with. We then divided it all up and developed a strategic, timemanaged approach. After being in this industry for some time, you build up a very good intuition on how long something will take and how to make it.” thuresson and his team were responsible for compositing, a process that was far from straightforward.

“Almost every shot had three or four different plates that needed to be switched from colour to black/white on a whim, meaning there was about 15 minutes’ worth of material combined together in the inal product.”

He adds that tight collaboration between Wright and the other ilmmakers helped the team work within their deadline, a view that is shared by creative director Lisha tan, who led the design and animation department. tan and her team found themselves undertaking many new challenges during the project. “one of the things we handled was tracking and roto on certain shots, which we don’t often do. Luckily, we had some pretty handy tricks in our bag. In one particularly tricky shot, one of our motion designers, Gap [Yossanun], ended up hand-tracking everything in 2D in After effects over the course of a few days and hand animating the effect Wright wanted to achieve. It was that type of commitment and group effort that made it work.”

Despite being among the busiest names in ilm, Wright remained very hands-on in helping the Mill realise his and Beck’s vision. “from shoot to post edgar always made himself available. He would make the trek across LA to be with us in the studio if we had any questions, and he kept the creative process going at all times,” adds thuresson.

Despite being unique in many ways, this project is far from the irst music video the Mill have worked on, and there’s a reason they continue to produce them: “Music videos are a great medium for young artists to learn and grow their skill set – it allows them to do things they may not normally do. It was a fun experience to watch our junior designers dive in and develop their craft quickly.” thuresson adds: “‘colors’ was a good reminder of why I’m still addicted to my job after all these years, and that I get the opportunity to work closely with the best people in the world, both inside and outside of the Mill. It never gets old.”

Music videos are a great medium for young artists to learn and grow their skill set

TIME MANAGEMENT Lisha Tan discusses animating ‘Colors’ within a two-week deadline “the magnitude of work on the design and animation side was actually quite manageable,” says tan when asked how her team managed their time inside such a small window. she continues: “Due to the nature of our portion of the job and our tight-knit team, we also had lexibility in the design worklow and tools to explore and change things as we went fairly nimbly.” tan has some very simple advice when it comes to animating a project with a tight turnaround. “the key was to get the animation roughed out quickly so we could focus the remaining time reining and supporting the 2D team toward the end. positivity and teamwork really make all the difference.”

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02 03

04 05

01 Alison Brie and Beck are the starring performers throughout the video 02 The animated components were initially incorporated as a way of adding punch to the negative space, but additions were made as the edit evolved 03 Colour grading was handled by Gregory Reese and his team 04 Beck’s music video for Colors is exclusive to Apple Music 05 The video is a mesmerising dance spectacular

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project focus

Morgan Lives In A Rocket House Location New Zealand Website bit.ly/morganrocket Project description An animated preschool show made by Peter Monga.

Biography After working on a number of animated series in New Zealand, Peter Monga wanted to make his own animated show, but didn’t think he’d be able to realise the quality he was after until discovering how Epic Games’ Unreal Engine could be at the centre of a pipeline for lighting and rendering.

Contributor • Peter Monga, animator

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One artist is using a game engine to make a 3D animated series

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t’s a goal sought after by many 3D artists: creating your own content that you can control yourself and perhaps turn into something bigger. Animator peter Monga wanted to do exactly that after working at oktobor Animation for a number of years, including as an animation director on children’s television series such as Penguins Of Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda: Legends Of Awesomeness and Robot And Monster.

When oktobor closed, Monga channelled his love of preschool stop-motion shows such as The Magic Roundabout and Pingu to devise his own cG-animated series called Morgan Lives In A Rocket House in that style.

But his irst challenge was inding a way to produce the necessary vibrant imagery of a children’s show without a studio pipeline.

“My original goal,” he says, “was to design the show so it could be produced by myself or a small team. I felt that in order to do that, the show would need to be ‘technically easy’ to make. the show would still be artistically demanding in terms of story, direction, cinematography, acting and animation physicality, but I wanted to remove some of the time-consuming elements of production by designing around them.”

Monga soon saw that epic’s unreal engine 4 could serve as his lighting and rendering solution. He would rely on the real-time game engine for those aspects while still animating traditionally, including starting with storyboards and using tools like Maya. With ue4, it meant everything could be produced on just one computer without the need for a renderfarm. Monga had not used unreal engine before, so he set to studying manuals and videos. so far, Monga has created a two-minute proof-ofconcept teaser, three ive-minute episodes, a two-minute mini-episode and a series of Vr and 360-degree videos of Morgan Lives In A Rocket House. “I’m also looking into the viability of converting the Vr episode into an Ar experience. I’ve never done mobile app development though, so need to learn more about that, but I think it could be a cool way to introduce kids to Morgan.” the challenge of ‘selling’ the series remains, although Monga has been in discussions with a New Zealand production company and is hopeful Morgan may be picked up. for now, he’s been sharing with others how useful a game engine can be in animated series production. “the engine is more capable than I was expecting it to be,” says Monga. “I thought ‘game engine’ meant assets would need to be highly optimised, but they don’t, really. I would have pushed the engine further at the start, and I’ve actually had to go in and up-res a lot of my assets. Having said that, the optimisation I had done originally paid off when making the Vr version.”

My original goal was to design the show so it could be produced by myself or a small team

SELF-IMPOSED CG LIMITATIONS To make his CG animated characters a reality, Peter Monga imposed a series of strategic self-limitations • No hands or feet: you don’t have to worry about planting the feet or animating a foot roll when walking, or have characters holding things.

• Use narration: this eliminates the need for lip-sync, and you require fewer actors.

• No superluous, dangly things like loose clothing or tails: these can be time-consuming to get them to look natural, and simulation can be expensive.

• Animate at 12fps: this mimics a stop-motion aesthetic and saves on frames to polish.

• 2D mouth shapes: helps ‘sell’ the stop-motion frame rate to the viewer.

• Just one location: limits assets builds, and employing simple textures helps here, too.

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02 03

04 05

01 A inal rendered scene.

Monga makes the show on a i7 6700K processor with a GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card a Wacom Intuos4 tablet 02 An Unreal Engine screenshot. Monga has been prelighting and baking scenes to take advantage of Unreal’s global illumination, and is keen to try out real-time global illumination 03 Modelling, rigging and animation is still done in Maya and is exported to Unreal Engine for lighting and rendering 04 Unreal Engine’s Sequence Editor is used to attach animation clips to the characters or props 05 Morgan’s look and feel was inspired by the stop-motion shows Monga watched as a child himself

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Images of the month Here are some of our favourite 3D projects submitted on 3DArtistOnline.com in the last month 01 Baby Bender

by João Junior 3DA username Junior João Junior says: “Based on the concept by Dave Atze.

Modelling was done in Cinema 4D and ZBrush. For the render I used KeyShot and Photoshop for all of the post production.”

We say: This is a fun concept that João has translated so well into 3D! His almost chibi-style proportions work so well with the matte metals to provide a slightly different take on Dave Atze’s illustration.

02 White

Haussmann

by Romuald Chaigneau 3DA username Romuald Romuald Chaigneau says: “In order to improve my interior rendering technique, I created a series of 27 images. My irst goal was to make a very bright decoration inspired by the Haussmann style. You can ind the series on my Behance page.”

We say: We’re big fans of Romuald’s Black Haussman images, so we were delighted to see that he’s brought a new spin onto the series. Everything from the lighting to the textures here are absolutely gorgeous.

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03 Cerebrum

by Tomasz Artur Bolek 3DA username TomaszArturBolek Tomasz Artur Bolek says: “This work is the result of my Blender 2.8 tests. The Eevee renderer already works pretty well in its current state. The idea itself was born in a dream I had some time ago and I decided to implement it in the form of this illustration. Generally, I was aiming at such a neon look using the simple geometry of the city.”

We say: With neon dystopias en vogue currently, we can’t imagine a more inspirational cityscape. We’d love to step inside this scene and be immersed in the bright lights.

04 Prototype

by Tarek Samaan 3DA username TSamaan Tarek Samaan says: “‘Prototype‘ was an exercise in speed in design and testing the Iray renderer in Substance Painter, I modelled in ZBrush and 3ds Max, textured in Substance Painter and used Photoshop for inal touches.”

We say: There are some interesting hard surface shapes in Prototype, and we’d love to see Tarek’s library of pieces to see what else he could make as part of a speed exercise!

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MODELLING LIGHTING

Alexander Beim Incredible 3D artists take us

behind their artwork

MODELLING It was important to me that my model is similar to the real Einstein. The biggest problem I had was the references. I could not find any photos in good quality, and even tried to find out the form of his face from videos. I applied the wrinkles by hand. Basically, I did not use any scans or photos; all the folds had to be exactly the same as the original, and, of course, to find textures that had the same wrinkle shape, I would have to scan the real Albert Einstein as well.

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lotusart.de Since completing his training as a multimedia producer in Frankfurt, Germany, Alexander started working as a 3D artist Software ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Arnold, Photoshop

Albert Einstein 3D Portrait, 2018

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