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ISSUE 275

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COVER ARTIST Sebastien Hue SOFTWARE Gravity Sketch VR, Cinema 4D, Octane Render, Photoshop

WELCOME This month we have a stand-out cover artist, who teaches you his process for developing character art using 3D and 2D combined to create stunning concepts.

Continuing the character theme I give you a run-through on Epic’s wonderful new Metahuman Creator, a fantastic and intuitive tool designed to help you add photorealistic human characters to your scenes.

In other training we show you the importance of good topology, how to set up a procedural fire in Blender and how your art and story work together.

If you are looking for more inspiration than practical advice we have you covered with our behind-the-scenes look at Lovecraft Country, and in the first part of our new series we explore the wonderful work of Blue Zoo. Follow us as we get to know the team and the art.

Rob Redman, Editor rob.redman@futurenet.com

3D WORLD 5

CONTENTS 3D WORLD ISSUE 275

ARTIST SHOWCASE

8 The Gallery

Discover the best digital art from the CG community

40 Tech Focus: VR, 3D and 2D Max Schiller talks us through his amazing work produced in Blender and Gravity Sketch

50 Tech Focus: Detailing

Discover this beautiful scene by Kacper Bartnik

82 Tech Focus: Grooming

We find out how Erica Liu created her adorable ‘Tiger Friends’ render

FEATURES

22 Blue Zoo – Part 1: Studio and short films

THE PIPELINE

42 Create a science-fiction concept illustration

Sebastien Hue, the artist behind our amazing cover this issue, shows us how to build an awesome sci-fi scene

52 Make a procedural fire in Blender

3D generalist at the Blender Studio, Simon Thommes, demonstrates how to create a procedural volumetric fire shader

58 Build photorealistic humans with Epic’s latest tool

How to use MetaHuman Creator for generating CG humans

62 Render a story-driven 3D art piece

We discover how Santhosh The first instalment in our new Koneru and Tiana Maros worked series exploring the awardtogether to create a striking, winning animation company Blue emotion-led project Zoo; this month, we take a look back at its history 68 Create a detailed

32 Lovecraft Country

The team behind the incredible visuals of this horror drama series give us the lowdown

22

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stone sculpture with realistic decay

Reza Sedghi breaks down the creation process for this sculpture inspired by vanitas paintings

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72 Design a beautiful modern villa

Learn some top archviz tips and tricks with this tutorial from Shayan Shamlou

ARTIST Q&A

76 Your CG problems solved Pro artists tackle your queries

THE HUB

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84 Building Information Modelling (BIM)

How BIM processes can help achieve architectural greatness

88 Meet the Artist

We interview the creative lead at Riot Games, Devon Fay, about his career journey and working on exciting projects

92 Day in the life

This month, we take a look at the day-to-day life of Luis Cardoso, art director at Saddington Baynes

62

REVIEWS

94 T-Pro 2 Series gaming chair

Need a comfortable new chair for those long work days? We review this option from AndaSeat

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96 Back issues

IN GRAVITY SKETCH, YOU CAN PROJECT YOURSELF INTO THE VEHICLE YOU ARE ACTUALLY DESIGNING

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3D WORLD 7

The best digital art fr the CG community

08

SIMOUN

CG art to inspire

ARTIST Bernardo Oliveira SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Mari, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, Arnold, Photoshop

Based on an illustration by Ekaterina Burmak for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, character artist Bernardo Oliveira started working on his 3D recreation of the character in 2019, returning to finish it in early 2021.

Oliveira created the character’s garments in Marvelous Designer. “It’s important to do some research to get better results,” he says, “so at this stage I like to get some real references of similar garments.”

After blocking out the character and creating the garments, Oliveira used Maya to retopologise each mesh and work on UVs before jumping back into ZBrush for detailing and posing. “I like to go back to Marvelous to simulate the garment again and get better folds with the base mesh in the correct pose,” he adds.

Oliveira projected a multichannel texture manually for the albedo and displacement maps, “after that I made extra layers in Mari to change the skin tone and put tattoos on her skin.

I imported it all back into ZBrush for final adjustments and to add detail like extra wrinkles.”

I SIMULATE AGAIN TO GET BETTER FOLDS IN THE CORRECT POSE

There were no shortcuts when it came to making the character’s hair in XGen. Oliveira made all the guides manually and carried out tests to perfect the look and flow.

“I’m 100% visual, so seeing other artists’ works inspires me a lot,” adds Oliveira, “I try to challenge myself to do something at least similar to what those guys are doing.” beboas.artstation.com 3D WORLD 09

DEACONS OF THE DEEP

CG art to inspire

ARTIST Robert Roeder SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine

3D environment artist Robert Roeder spent roughly seven months creating this atmospheric ode to Dark Souls III. “When I started this project in October 2020 I was still in the process of interviewing for a new position and kept working on it after I joined, trying to chip away at it in small steps every day after work and finished it at the beginning of May 2021,” he tells 3D World.

“From the start of this project I knew that it would involve a very large amount of work for one person,” he adds, “not just by the size of the environment itself but also the number of bespoke props.” This led him to use and reuse tileable textures and kit pieces such as carved stone panels, stone bases and prefab blueprints in Unreal Engine to assemble simple objects like candles, lights and flames into a single asset that could be placed in the world without the need to create bespoke versions.

“I’m a huge fan of architecture which subconsciously made me gravitate towards this environment,” he continues. Roeder particularly enjoyed scouring the internet and his local surroundings for inspiration, adding that it gave him a better understanding of how such places were built. “Another aspect I enjoyed was finding ways to illuminate the scene in interesting ways to lead the eye to focal points, using mostly candles as a light source as well as the huge overhead light that fills the central chamber.” rroeder91.artstation.com

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CG art to inspire

ARTIST Marina Llorente SOFTWARE ZBrush, Substance Painter, Maya, Arnold, XGen, Photoshop It took 3D modeller Marina Llorente one month to take this Far Cry Primal fan art from a simple sphere in ZBrush to a finished render in Maya. “I always try to find a balance between the time I spend creating the parts that compose the final project and their quality, always prioritising the quality of more significant features, but not forgetting about the secondary ones,” Llorente tells 3D World. She adds that it would be a pity for a single bad component to ruin the entire character.

This was Llorente’s first time using displacement maps, which allowed her to keep a low and clean topology whilst achieving a highly detailed end result. “I spent a lot more time working on the fine skin details to achieve a realistic result,” Llorente explains. “Some people have told me that realism is boring because it represents what already exists, but I don't see it that way. What stops you from letting your imagination fly in a realistic style?”

Llorente enjoyed the challenges this character presented from the very beginning of the process. “I didn't know if I was going to achieve the quality I was looking for in the overall aesthetic,” she adds, “but as I kept going I began to feel proud of how things were turning out.

The beautiful aesthetic was one of the things that motivated me the most.” marinallorente.artstation.com 12 3D WORLD

CG art to inspire

FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE HOUSE ARTIST Vincent Boichut SOFTWARE Maya, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Unreal Engine

Freelance 3D artist Vincent Boichut based this piece on an original concept by artist Jenny Mati. He primarily used Maya to model the environment’s assets and vegetation, Substance Painter and Photoshop for texturing and Unreal Engine to render in real time.

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Boichut utilised Runtime Virtual Texturing inside UE, allowing his assets to blend into the surrounding landscape.

“I also used the Niagara particles system in Unreal for the falling leaves and chimney smoke effect,” he adds.

Boichut’s approach to lighting the scene was simple yet effective. “It’s basically one yellow-tinted directional light, to give that warm and cosy atmosphere you can feel at the end of the summer here in France,” he explains.

“I switched the Shadow Filter Sharpen

to 1 for my directional light; it gives the shadow a more cartoony look, it's a small detail but it’s always nice to have.”

The entire creative process proved to be enjoyable for Boichut. “Having a concept to rely on helped me a lot to know which direction I should go,” he says, “creating that global sense of cosiness while keeping the scene coherent was a big challenge, but I loved it from start to finish.” instagram.com/vincentboichut_3dstuff

CG art to inspire

CREATING THAT GLOBAL SENSE OF COSINESS WHILE KEEPING THE SCENE COHERENT WAS A BIG CHALLENGE, BUT I LOVED IT FROM START TO FINISH 3D WORLD 15

CLOUD LAMP

CG art to inspire

ARTIST Karl Larsson SOFTWARE Cinema 4D, Octane Render, Photoshop

Karl Larsson works across advertising photography and 3D visuals, and this dreamy interior took him just two days to create.

“I used a lighting technique that I had to figure out myself,” he tells 3D World. “The tricky part was making the cloud lamp glow. For this, I used IES lights with a focused spotlight.

I didn’t want the cloud light to disturb the lighting in the room so I turned off cast shadows.

With this setting I was able to light the cloud from behind through the back wall.”

When starting a 3D project, Larsson often begins by building an empty room. “I usually don’t have any idea of what the final image will look like at this point,” he adds.

He continues to test different light scenarios and play with materials and textures created with Octane Render before modelling in Cinema 4D. “This part of the process is like therapy for me so I put my headphones on and start creating,” adds Larsson. “Ideas for the final image come along the way. Sometimes I try four or five different ideas in the same set. Many times I just end up with a boring room and I have to start over.”

The most enjoyable part of the process for Larsson was giving the cloud its dreamy glow and working on the chair.

Discussing what inspires him as an artist, he adds: “A lot of my images are inspired by interior photography from different magazines and websites.” instagram.com/ninesidedshape 16 3D WORLD

CG art to inspire

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CG art to inspire

IT WAS CHALLENGING TO ACHIEVE GOOD-LOOKING FUR, BUT I OVERCAME THAT BY ADMIRING SOME REAL-LIFE REFERENCES LIKE CATS AND RABBITS

PIKACHU IN ASH’S CAP ARTIST Aneesh Chandra SOFTWARE ZBrush, Substance Painter, Blender, After Effects

Freelance 3D artist Aneesh Chandra chose to forgo using any procedural techniques in the creation of this Pokémon fan art. He used ZBrush to sculpt and Blender’s Particle System to create the photorealistic fur. “The most enjoyable element for me was simply the chance to recreate the iconic Pikachu from Pokémon in a realistic form,” he explains. “The idea was to have Pikachu wearing his trainer Ash's cap and holding

a Poké Ball, as he doesn’t like to stay inside the ball.”

Chandra started by sculpting the basic shape of Pikachu in ZBrush and took time to refine the sculpt. “In this process, I had seen a lot of references of classic Pikachu and from the movie Detective Pikachu,” he adds. After he was satisfied with the sculpt, Chandra imported the model into Blender for retopology and UVs before bringing it into Substance Painter for texturing. “Back in Blender, I created his fur using the Hair Particle System; it was very challenging for me to achieve good-looking fur, but I overcame that by admiring some real-life references like cats and rabbits. After all the adjustments

and groomings, I rigged the model, posed him and gave him the cap and a Poké Ball which I modelled separately in Blender.”

Next, he worked on the lighting, materials and rendered the image in Cycles before bringing the image into After Effects for the final colour correction and touch-ups.

“I admire the work of professional artists on various social platforms who are working for big companies across the world,” adds Chandra. “I spend hours reviewing and analysing their work, and try to achieve that perfection in my own artwork.” instagram.com/aneesh.official 3D WORLD 19

The Rookies

The Rookies is a platform to help digital artists get discovered without having to compete with professionals for attention. You’ll get to the front page of those sites one day, but for now, we’ve got your back and want to help turn your passion for creative media into a successful career.

WWW.THEROOKIES.CO

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CLAUDE FROLLO ARTIST Loïc Ciaux LOCATION Montpellier, France I am CGI/VFX student at ArtFX, in my fourth year. I’m currently working on my graduate short film coming out in 2021.

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

YEAR CREATED 2019 SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter, Mari, Yeti, Nuke

I’m a big fan of the character Claude Frollo in the movie The Hunchback Of Notre Dame.

With this project I wanted to challenge myself by doing a realistic 3D portrait of a 2D Disney character. This project was an opportunity to improve my workflow and achieve a realistic skin texture using the XYZ maps. www.artstation.com/loic_ciaux

3D WORLD 21

In this new series of features, 3D World explores the world of animation company Blue Zoo, beginning with a look at the studio’s journey so far ow in its 21st year, Blue Zoo has become one of the UK’s leading animation studios.

It’s built its name producing joyfully compelling animations, packed with story and character, brought to life with unique and innovative visuals. The studio boasts a colourful portfolio of work spanning long-form children’s TV like the BAFTA-winning Numberblocks, boundary-pushing short-form animation, original IPs, and existing IPs like The Adventures Of Paddington, and has also worked on adverts for

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companies such as Disney and Playmobil. Blue Zoo has garnered a host of animation awards for its work and won the BAFTA for Independent Production Company of The Year twice.

Throughout its rise and rise, Blue Zoo has remained committed to building a positive work environment, populated by talented, enthusiastic artists that are proud of what they create. It has also worked tirelessly to improve the UK animation industry, establishing and working closely with various initiatives to ensure a thriving, inclusive future for the whole industry.

This in-depth series on Blue Zoo will explore each aspect of the multifaceted, diverse and forwardthinking animation studio. We’ll look at how the studio develops animated shows and unique visuals, how it animates stories on a budget, the lighting and compositing workflows and, finally, explore realtime technology and the future of animation. But first, 3D World sat down with Blue Zoo’s co-founder Tom Box to find out how the studio got started, how it has worked tirelessly to uphold its values whilst pushing the animation industry forward, and discuss its renowned short film programme.

Blue Zoo: Studio and short films

Above: Members of the Blue Zoo team hard at work on a project pre-pandemic in the London studio Below: A still from Blue Zoo’s short film, Sinking Feeling, made using mixed media approaches in Blender

#1 STUDIO AND SHORT FILMS

Blue Zoo: Studio and short films

WE BUILT A ZOO

Blue Zoo was founded in 2000 by classmates Oli Hyatt, Adam Shaw, Tom Box and Nic Sims whilst they studied at Bournemouth University on the south coast of England. “We were studying 3D animation,” Box tells 3D World. Inspired to create their own animation company, Box’s fellow co-founders sent an email out to gauge the interest of their fellow students. “They picked people they thought had the best mix of skills rather than best mates, and that proved to be very savvy because it created a really balanced dynamic.”

Hyatt, Shaw and Box have remained at the helm of Blue Zoo since these early days. According to Box, the trio set out with “no real ambition other than to make a studio where it’s really enjoyable to work, to make content that we’re proud of and that audiences enjoy watching.” These ambitions have culminated in a focus on child and family-friendly content that’s comedic and educational, primarily across long-form television shows and short-form animations. “We’re moving into bigger projects,” adds Box, “there’s a big demand for 2D and it’s something that we’ve never had the skills to do ourselves, so we hired those skills and started our own 2D animation studio as well.”

The studio has grown over the last two decades from a trio

Above: A still from Blue Zoo’s 2018 short film Christmas With The Moonies Right: Storyboards for Ada, directed by Blue Zoo animator Dane Winn and rendered in Unreal

of ambitious animation students to approximately 450 talented individuals, making it one of the UK’s largest dedicated animation studios. Box admits that it’s easier said than done to uphold Blue Zoo’s small studio vibe as it continues to grow, with a workforce spread out across the globe. “It’s one of the things we try the hardest to do,” he adds. “It’s crazy to be at a size now where we literally haven’t met half the team because we’ve doubled 24 3D WORLD

over the last year whilst we have been remote.”

Like many animation studios, Blue Zoo had the early ambition of creating its own IP. “It’s how you make your studio a little bit more self-reliant,” Box explains.

“It’s probably one of the hardest things to do because you’re just generating content out of thin air, but we’ve been doing that almost since our first year and now we’ve got to the point where

about half of the shows we make are our own IP.” Blue Zoo has remained ahead of the curve in a world where animation’s routes to market are constantly evolving.

“We’re gearing ourselves more towards being able to run with IPs on different platforms,” says Box, “whether it’s doing the marketing, the licensing, or YouTube channels. The world’s moved so far forward in the last 20 years, it’s not just about making an IP and selling it, there’s so much more to be done these days. Especially with digitalfirst IPs where you can actually get a show on YouTube first and then sell it to whoever after.”

MAKING AN IMPACT

“Our ethos is very much as it has been from the beginning,”

Blue Zoo opened its 2D studio after witnessing a comeback in traditional animation particularly among older children By opening a dedicated 70-seat 2D animation studio Blue Zoo created more than 60 jobs in the UK animation industry Blue Zoo’s 2D studio uses a Toon Boom Harmony pipeline – a powerful endto-end 2D animation software

ANOTHER DIMENSION

CO-FOUNDER TOM BOX GIVES 3D WORLD A GUIDE TO BLUE ZOO’S FULLY-FLEDGED 2D STUDIO In March of 2019, Blue Zoo opened a second London studio dedicated to episodic 2D animation. “It’s been an ambition of ours for a while to get a 2D studio going,” explains Blue Zoo co-founder Tom Box, “it’s really exciting to see it now not just existing but growing with our own IP as well.” Having achieved colossal success with its first show, It’s Pony for Nickelodeon, which became the network’s highest-rated animation launch with kids 2-11 since 2018, the studio is now hard at work on Millie & Lou, an original IP from Blue Zoo for YouTube Kids.

The 2D studio is based around a Toon Boom Harmony pipeline.

Although 2D animation may seem like a far cry from Blue Zoo’s 3D roots, Box explains that the two disciplines coexist nicely. “Our studio uses rigged 2D animation which means there is more of a similarity in the pipelines. Our 2D and 3D pipeline teams work in alignment to make sure our pipelines have the same design, terminology and workflow. It’s fascinating to see, from an artist’s perspective, how similar the workflows are. The pre-production stages are very similar, whether it’s character design, scripts, environment design, or animatics. Building the character is very similar to how you’d rig a character in 3D and then animating is keyframes rather than frame by frame. There are a huge amount of similarities.”

Budget considerations are similar between Blue Zoo’s 2D and 3D studios, with both art forms proving time-consuming to animate to a high standard. Although many of the skills needed to work in 2D and 3D differ vastly, animators have proved to be flexible. “We’ve had animators move between 2D and 3D because the principles of animation are the same in both,” says Box, “the same with compositing or pipeline TD, they’re all transferable skills, just used in slightly different ways.”

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Blue Zoo: Studio and short films

explains Box, “which is to make animated content that we enjoy making, that our client enjoys making with us, and then our audiences enjoy as much as we have. Therefore, we can be proud of what we’ve made on every single level.” Keeping this ethos, and a commitment to inclusion and bettering the UK’s animation industry, central to everything Blue Zoo does is a constant work in progress.

“One of the ways we try to do that is by making sure that we build trust and transparency, making sure that we have people in our studio that have the same values as we do. Our people and talent team genuinely care about the staff they’re bringing in and try to get a very wide mixture of people from all different backgrounds that share the same values. We’re all in it together and we want to make sure that is at every level in the studio.”

However, Box admits that upholding Blue Zoo’s core ethos isn’t always easy in the face of budgets and other stark realities.

“If you want to make a dream studio you’ve got to balance idealism and realism,” he adds, but this hasn’t stopped Blue Zoo 26 3D WORLD

from striving to make a positive difference. “As me, Adam and Oli, the original co-founders, have had families and got a bit older we’ve really wanted to make sure that we are giving back and having a positive impact in society.”

Blue Zoo is in the midst of a B Corp certification process, which will ensure that the studio upholds its values and provides a positive influence on the industry. “Words are cheap,” Box continues, “it’s very easy to come up with five or ten values, stick them on your website and on a poster in your meeting room. You’ve got to make sure those values are threaded through everything you do. We’ve spent a lot of the time in the last couple of years working to make sure that as we grow, those values don’t get left behind.”

This ethos feeds into the work that Blue Zoo creates through a scoring matrix, designed to assess whether or not a potential project aligns with the studio’s core values.

“When someone brings a show to us we have various different questions, whether it meets our values, our skills, whether it pushes our studio forward, what the track record of the people involved is.

That gets weighted and averaged

“WE’RE MAKING SURE THAT AS WE GROW, OUR VALUES DON’T GET LEFT BEHIND”

Blue Zoo: Studio and short films

out to a score that tells us if we should be doing the project or not.”

Inclusive opportunity is also key to Blue Zoo’s ethos. The studio has several initiatives, including an innovative shorts programme and idea sessions, that allow anyone at the studio to pitch their ideas and use their creative voice. “We’re celebrating difference and the creativity that brings,” adds Box.

A SHORT HISTORY

Above: A still from Mamoon, a short told entirely using projected animation onto polystyrene film sets Blue Zoo was the winner of the 2019 Best Places to Work in TV survey by Broadcast and Best Companies Group

Blue Zoo’s celebrated short film programme is just one of the ways that the studio lives its values.

“The shorts are really a playground to push our studio forward and to help give opportunity,” explains Box. The shorts programme offers Blue Zoo staff an equal opportunity to create in new and innovative ways. Box and the team recognise that a great idea can come from anyone at the studio, be it an animator, recruitment coordinator, storyboard artist, or anyone else. The pitching process is open to the whole studio and once all the ideas have been pitched, the studio vote on the best idea to go into production.

“It’s very democratic,” Box continues, “we give a brief and we make sure that brief ticks the company’s business goals. So for example, a brief might say we want to try out new technology, whether it’s a new hair system that will push our projects forward or whether it’s real-time which will help with pipeline efficiencies.

Usually a brief only has two caveats to it in that sense.”

Once the brief has gone out to the studio, anyone is welcome to put forward a treatment. “It’s usually a small deck, maybe a mood board and storyboard, not much more than that,” adds Box. “They get shown to the studio and then everyone votes on a few criteria to make them think about it so that it’s not just picking their mate or which project makes them laugh.

We have a few different questions to make sure they’ve answered the brief correctly.”

Once the most popular pitch has gone into production Blue Zoo provides the funds and pays staff overtime to work on the short.

From the 3D chaos of Christmas 3D WORLD 27

Blue Zoo: Studio and short films

With The Moonies to the projected animation of the BAFTAnominated Mamoon, Blue Zoo’s shorts programme has produced a huge variety of stories and visual styles. “We’re doing stuff that isn’t necessarily commercial but allows us to experiment without the risk of letting down a client if it doesn’t work,” says Box. “It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work. We’ve been very fortunate that all the shorts have worked to date and that’s all down to the talent, enthusiasm and effort that the teams put into them.”

The shorts have been a part of Blue Zoo’s DNA for the past decade. “I think, hand on heart, I can say that if we hadn’t done the shorts we wouldn’t have the same reputation we do,” adds Box. They help to stave off the factory feeling that can arise when animation studios begin churning out hours and hours of commercial content.

“If you’re working on a project for a year you might not be able to show it for two years, and the shorts keep that creativity going and show experiments in the meantime. They’re multifaceted and they in turn show how our studio is multifaceted.”

“WE’RE JUST FINISHING SINKING FEELING AT THE MOMENT. IT’S LOOKING FANTASTIC BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, IT COULD HELP SAVE SOME LIVES” Tom Box, co-founder, Blue Zoo

A HELPING HAND

The past year has been unlike any other and that has led Blue Zoo to approach their latest short, entitled Sinking Feeling, a bit differently.

“Traditionally we would’ve done a short around Christmas,” explains Box, “but with the mood of the world at the time we thought it probably wouldn’t be right just to make a farcical Christmas animation. We thought, let’s try and make an animation that helps

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Blue Zoo saw more pitches submitted than ever before for the short film brief that would eventually become Sinking Feeling

someone else.” Determined to use their craft and platform in order to help raise awareness to an important topic, Blue Zoo searched for a charity to work with, eventually deciding on PAPYRUS, a UK charity for the prevention of young suicide.

“Suicide is the biggest killer of young people in the UK, a lot more people should know that than do,” says Box. PAPYRUS helped Blue Zoo to put together a brief in the form of a video that was shared with the studio. “We wanted to make a 60-second short to bring awareness,” Box continues, “and from a technical side we said we want to try out using Blender and mixed media. We did a 2D/3D hybrid approach using stylised shading and tried out remote tools as well, we’re using a new cloud pipeline to do that.”

Few 3D software has come as far in recent years as Blender; the free and open-source program now supports the entire pipeline in a variety of ways, from modelling and rigging to animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking. There are even tools for video editing and 2D animation. “I think it’s really exciting that open-source software can compete with commercial software,” comments Box. “We’d be silly not to see where it’s at in terms of production use in our pipeline and how it compares to Maya. The shorts are the best way of battle testing.”

Blue Zoo has already used Blender in production on commercial projects and is assessing how it best fits into various different parts of the pipeline. “With this short, we

MAKING AN IMPACT

TOM BOX BREAKS DOWN JUST SOME OF THE WAYS BLUE ZOO WORKS TO PUSH THE UK ANIMATION INDUSTRY FORWARD ANIMATION UK

Established by Blue Zoo in 2008, Animation UK went on to successfully campaign for the introduction of animation tax reliefs, for which Blue Zoo co-founder Oli Hyatt received an MBE. “They have helped the UK animation industry get to what it is,” explains Tom Box. “We saw a lot of work going to Canada because we couldn’t compete with their tax reliefs.

We could either just get grumpy about that or actually do something, and Oli did something and got the tax reliefs introduced, which have created thousands of jobs in the animation sector and are responsible for our growth.” animationuk.org

ACCESS:VFX

really wanted to see how the 2D side of Blender works,” explains Box. “One of the really intriguing parts of Blender is tools like Grease Pencil that allow you to do handdrawn animation as well as you can do 3D animation.”

The accessibility of commercial software like Blender, which is becoming widely used in production across the animation industry, is just one of the ways that the industry is evolving.

“When you have so many young people becoming experts in Blender by the time they’re 18, because they’ve been using it since they were ten, then you’ve got some absolutely amazing talent being developed,” adds Box. “Saying that, it is about the fundamental skills. It’s a lot easier to pick up software than it is to pick up a new skill, whether it’s

animation, lighting or modelling and sculpting. There’s definitely a balance between how important the tool is versus the underlying skills, but if there’s an abundance of talent killing it in Blender then that’s going to have a big impact on the industry.”

In the meantime, Blue Zoo remains committed to pushing itself and the UK animation industry forward, providing inclusive opportunity, fostering a positive environment and completing work on Sinking Feeling. “We’re just finishing that at the moment. It’s looking fantastic but more importantly, it could help save some lives.

We really hope we achieve our ambitions of using our skills and platform to help others.” more info on Blue Zoo visit FYI For www.blue-zoo.co.uk

A global, industry-led, non-profit comprised of 50 leading companies, industry bodies and educational establishments in the VFX, animation and games industries, ACCESS:VFX actively pursues and encourages inclusion, diversity, awareness and opportunity under four pillars of Inspiration, Education, Mentoring and Recruitment. Tom Box is one of the founding members and tells 3D World that pushing diversity and inclusion forward has never been more important. “That’s just people volunteering their own time,” he adds, so it does take a lot of work.” The group of more than 100 passionate people has run more than 50 events and reached thousands of potential future employees primary school age and above across the UK, US and Canada. accessvfx.org

ANIMATION SKILLS COUNCIL

Tom Box chairs ScreenSkills’ Animation Skills Council which comprises senior animation industry figures, from all areas, who lead and advise ScreenSkills in their work to develop animation skills and talent. Box explains that they work at a grassroots level to nurture skills across all age groups. “The Animation Skills Council set up the back-to-school initiative to encourage artists, especially younger artists, to go back to their schools and say, I was here a few years ago and now I’m working on this film or this TV series and you can too. It’s trying to do initiatives that have a real-world effect and are not just virtue signalling to where we’d like to see the world, it’s actively trying to change it.” screenskills.com

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MIXED DIMENSIONS Master the art of using Cinema 4D for 2D character concept paintings Page 42

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Navigating Through Hatred

Trevor Hogg makes some bone-chilling discoveries while travelling through Lovecraft Country…

Images courtesy of HBO

NAVIGATING THROUGH 32 3D WORLD

H

Navigating Through Hatred

HATRED Concept art for the Korean War battlefield sequence

by Rodeo FX that resembles something out of The War Of The Worlds by H.G. Wells

3D WORLD 33

Navigating Through Hatred

nspired by the horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft, author Matt Ruff penned Lovecraft Country, which revolves around a 22-year-old African American US Army veteran Atticus Turner searching for his father during the racial turmoil of the 1950s, and encountering a variety of monsters. The novel was adapted into a ten-episode series for HBO by executive producer Misha Green (Underground) who collaborated with visual effects supervisor Kevin Blank (Lost) to achieve the epic scope of the storytelling. 3,500 visual effects were completed remotely by Rodeo FX, Framestore, Important Looking Pirates, Crafty Apes, Blackpool Studios, BOT VFX, RISE FX, and Spin VFX. “Usually, 3,500 shots are hard on their own and midst a pandemic it is a little harder!” chuckles Blank. “One show that prepared me the most was the NBC series Constantine because everything in every episode was completely different. Every single episode of Lovecraft Country feels like its own unique piece of entertainment, whether it be an adventure or horror show.

There are different creatures and environments, and it’s not something repeated frequently.

I was constantly shifting from preproduction, production, and checking in on post to see how things were going.”

“All of our scripts were written before we started shooting,”

“USUALLY, 3,500 SHOTS ARE HARD ON THEIR OWN AND MIDST A PANDEMIC IT IS A LITTLE HARDER!”

Kevin Blank, visual effects supervisor, Lovecraft Country

remarks Blank. “That’s not to say there weren’t any rewrites taking place. Either there were location considerations and in some instances scale concerns where we had to pull back a little bit. We had tremendous editors on the show and they worked a long time to perfect cuts. The editors were cutting while we were shooting and creating assemblies.

It wasn’t until Misha was back in Los Angeles that those assembles got refined into final edits that got turned over to us. Some things would be turned over to us early and we would be blocking things 34 3D WORLD

out for temp effects. We had a couple of artists on staff doing temp effects throughout the process. Some hero sequences were previz completely in advance and cut together exactly as planned.”

When reading the scripts, the chrysalis effect in Episodes 105 and 108 stood out to Blank. “Hillary Davenport [Jamie Neumann] shedding her skin and turning into Ruby Baptiste [Wunmi Mosaku] was the hardest thing we had to do.

We did a mix of makeup and digital effects so the actors had something to play against. You don’t want to be pantomiming skin being pulled

GENREBENDING EFFECTS

1,218 VISUAL EFFECTS SHOTS WERE PRODUCED BY RODEO FX FOR LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, INCLUDING THE EPIC OPENING BATTLE IN THE PILOT…

Above (left): Concept art for the tripod robots featured in the opening sequence for the series, which transitions from black and white to Technicolor Above: For the epic opening battle in the pilot, three practical trenches were built in a field and extended by bluescreen

off. The actors were cyber scanned to make a digital model of them which was matched moved. CG skin, blood and gore was applied to them and transitioned across. In some cases, it is simply a CG person in the frame.”

Nightmarish creatures are a trademark of H.P. Lovecraft. “We made mood boards that included popular and traditional imagery from each of Lovecraft’s novels,” explains Blank. “We would try to amalgamate a bunch of imagery and some of it was random, like a sculpture or torn clothing found online. We drilled it down until

we understood Misha’s aesthetic.”

The creatures had to believably interact with cast members and environments. “For the Shoggoths, we had two stunt people; one of them carried two foam sculptured arms to scale and the other had the head. It gave everyone a sense of where the Shoggoth was and what were the eyelines. For the illusion aliens [cute, cuddly green creatures] in Episode 107, we had some dwarfs perform against bluescreen who were then completely replaced in CG. For the Kumiho in Episode 106, it was mostly harnessing an actor in

“The good thing on this show is that we got involved early on with the production designer, and did some R&D and concept art,” states Rodeo FX visual effects supervisor François Dumoulin. “We were not just designing visual effects but also sets, creatures and entire sequences which meant when we got into post most of the ideas were already set in stone.”

The pipeline was modified to increase the speed of shot turnovers. “Typically, we build our assets in Maya, design fire and destruction in Houdini, and those things are combined in our renderer Arnold,” remarks Dumoulin. “But sometimes due to the amount of effects work in Lovecraft Country, we had to create new publishing methods that allowed us to go directly from Houdini into Nuke rather than going through the render phase. That was especially true for fire, which is in almost every episode and heavily art directed.”

Giant monsters, robots and UFOs appear in the opening sequence which lasts for 90 seconds, and changes from black and white to Technicolor.

“We narrowed down how many creatures were needed to tell the story,” notes Dumoulin.

“It’s all CG. There was a location in Georgia where we shot the trenches. Everything beyond that was in a deep valley and small in frame. We have thousands of soldiers which are the size of ants, so they were built in a crowd simulation. The ambition for every shot was to be a big feature film with every possible element that you can think of for every single genre.”

Concept art by Framestore of the Shoggoth which has numerous eyes and over 4,000 teeth

UNLEASHING THE SHOGGOTH STEMMING FROM THE IMAGINATION OF H.P. LOVECRAFT ARE THE MALEVOLENT SHAPE-SHIFTING BEINGS KNOWN AS SHOGGOTH, WHICH WERE CREATED BY FRAMESTORE… The model, design, and animation of the Shoggoth evolved at the same time, thereby influencing each other. “One of the big asks was for the gills on the side of the head to expel blood in quite a violent way,” explains Framestore VFX supervisor Grant Walker. “Consequently, we had to make the mouth feel capable of blitzing a head. We ended up with these pincers that would move fast like mandibles. The

mouth had another jaw inside of it. I looked at sharks as their jaws and gums do not necessarily connect to the cranium itself.

The jaw could extend down and have multiple layers. We went through several iterations for the bones and joins until there was enough mobility to roll the teeth out like an angelfish.”

The Shoggoth was an effects-heavy task resulting in simple and complex simulations

being created for when the drool did and didn’t interact with characters. “Depending on the shot we chose which drool setup to use,” says Framestore senior FX technical director Hernan Llano. “In regards to the blood, we used a pixel level solver that allowed the blood to stain and slide on the skin. This was the first time we used this technique; it allowed us to have sharp details along the edges of the blood.”

Navigating Through Hatred

“IN REGARDS TO THE BLOOD, WE USED A PIXEL LEVEL SOLVER THAT ALLOWED THE BLOOD TO STAIN AND SLIDE ON THE SKIN” Hernan Llano, senior FX technical director, Framestore the air and connecting two actors by the tentacle-like tail.”

The pilot was shot in Chicago with footage of the subsequent episodes captured in Atlanta.

“Production designer Kalina Ivanov [Grey Gardens] recreated a four-corner setup on our Atlanta backlot and we had a stage with a huge bluescreen wall and some bluescreen containers behind it,” reveals Blank. “We would stage scenes inside our set and in front of the storefront, but then the camera could drop back and look down any street and there would be a Chicago set extension brought to Atlanta. We went back to the real location in Chicago and did a LiDAR scan and a photo survey of the real location circa 2019, and then did a 1950s periodisation of that location. The show was filmed in 2019 and is supposed to take place in 1955 so we were constantly going through research, like double

yellow lines on streets or street signs or telephone poles. This did add to the shot count considerably.

We had 600 to 800 shots that were just environment markings.”

For Ardham Lodge where a male-only sect led by Samuel Braithwhite (Tony Goldwyn) tries to harness magic and immortality, Ivanov combined Henry VIII Tudor castle architecture with the palaces of American robber barons from the 1890s. “It started as a real location in Georgia [called Bisham Manor] then Kalina did a sketch for a set extension,” states Blank. “Deak Ferrand at Rodeo FX did a fleshed-out version of her black and white sketch and that got translated into a physical model. For the scenes shot as a high wide in the set that looked on an interior in post, the decision would be made to take that image, postage stamp it, and move the camera outside of a dome; those

Above: Important Looking Pirates was responsible for the chrysalis effect, which involved creating digital doubles to properly transform one actress into another

are designed effects after the fact because Misha wanted to create an additional scope in the scene.”

Episode 107, which features the planet of Nelus, was the rare occasion when the environments and settings were almost entirely CG. “There was a lot of jumping around in these one-off scenes where sometimes we only had sand footprints surrounded by bluescreen and that would be a world created later.”

When conjuring magic and portals a balance needed to be maintained between being supernatural and grounded in order to ensure believability. “The portal was one of our trickier effects,” notes Blank. “There is a prop called the Multiverse Machine. It is turned on and malfunctions. The idea is that the machine opens up a rip in time and space but it’s malfunctioning and cycling through numbers.

Our challenge was if we’re cycling through worlds what are you seeing and how well are you seeing it? We scoured for licence-free imagery and things that might get coloured a certain way. A bunch of images were chosen and on set there was a huge video wall that we pumped those images through, so the interactive light cast on the actors on set was matching what we were using to put together in post. It was a mix of stock footage and the worlds that we had created for our show. The images were on camera for three frames as they were cycling through.”

Key collaborators were special effects supervisor J.D. Schwalm (First Man) and stunt coordinator Stephen Pope (The

3D WORLD 37

“THERE WERE SPECIFIC AREAS WHERE WE GREW THE BODY AND THAT WAS ENOUGH TO SHOW THE EFFECT”

Pietro Ponti, VFX supervisor, Important Looking Pirates Hate U Give). “There was some tremendous hero special effects work in Episode 104 when Yahima Maraokoti’s [Monique Candelaria] ship gets flooded; that was basically special effects flooding the set,” remarks Blank. “We shot things in passes so we could have actors running away from a tidal wave. But that tidal wave was real and they’re on set. It made it scary and breathtaking. We were always interacting with stunts especially when they were acting as standins for creatures. Sometimes there would be a specific interaction where an actor is being hoisted or tossed around, and stunts would choreograph that for us.”

“Cinematographers Rob McLachlan [Game Of Thrones] and Michael Watson [Black Lightning] were tremendous and collaborative,” states Blank. “Rob and Michael used the Sony Venice camera, Zeiss Supreme Prime 38 3D WORLD

lenses and the Cooke lens data system. We had visual effects data wranglers on set surveying and documenting lenses and distances and heights so we could recreate cameras in post. But in many cases this lens system delivered a lot of the information to us in metadata.”

The biggest challenge was the sheer variety and volume of visual effects. “Misha wanted this to be a big genre adventure and to have first-class work. The effect that made me want to do the show the most was the chrysalis effect, having a Caucasian woman shred her skin and there is an African American woman underneath; that was difficult. There was an amazing group of people who worked on this show and gave a lot of blood, sweat and tears in every single department. Just putting it all together was a joy and a challenge. I’m proud of the way Lovecraft Country turned out.”

SHEDDING SKIN

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAKING THE CHRYSALIS EFFECT A CINEMATIC REALITY WAS GIVEN TO IMPORTANT LOOKING PIRATES… The Smart Vector in Nuke, which computes how pixels travel across the screen, was crucial in producing the chrysalis effect. “The Smart Vector provides distortion maps that you can apply back onto an image and allows you to track the different patches of the image,” states Important Looking Pirates VFX supervisor Pietro Ponti. “It was useful for tracking the features of a body and saved us a lot of time when tackling the minor bruises and veiny details on the skin of the actresses.”

Digital doubles allowed for the morphing between the two actresses. “Hillary and Ruby were built with the same polycount so all of the blend shapes would work,” remarks Ponti, “but was a fully procedural job on the animation side of things. In effects, we would take the skin that came through and extrapolate the thickness and all of the other details that were needed in the simulations on top of the animation. We had an additional rig of simplified patches of skin that was used sometimes to drive the simulation.”

Every shot had its own bespoke simulation except for the 81-second oner in Episode 108. “Even there we had three sections of the shot where we stopped the simulation and started with the next one,” explains Ponti. “We had the body popping and changing into the different shape. Sometimes we would cut from a shot where the transition was only 20 per cent complete to one that was 60 per cent.

There were specific areas where we grew the body and that was enough to show the effect.”

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VR, 3D and 2D

TO CLAIM HIS PLACE Software Blender,Gravity Sketch, Photoshop Year made 2021 40 3D WORLD

VR, 3D and 2D

Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork

Max Schiller artstation.com/maxschiller Max Schiller is a freelance concept artist using VR, 3D and 2D tools. He works in the movie and game industries.

VR, 3D AND 2D I tried to come up with a cool story, searched for good references, and sketched out my ideas. After that, I blocked out the scene in 3D, attached materials, and refined all the objects. I jump between Blender and VR programs such as Gravity Sketch or Medium by Adobe. VR allows me to create more organic, natural-looking 3D objects.

Texturing and lighting give the scene life, so I spent a lot of time refining those elements. I rendered the shots in Cycles and brought them over to Photoshop. Here I refined the renders, adjusted values, colours, and composition until I was happy with it.

3D WORLD 41

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills

GRAVITY SKETCH VR | CINEMA 4D | OCTANE RENDER | PHOTOSHOP

CREATE AN AMAZING SCIENCE-FICTION CONCEPT ILLUSTRATION Sebastien Hue details step by step how to build a sci-fi 3D scene as a guide for a 2D concept illustration

42 3D WORLD

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept

T

his tutorial will cover the pipeline used to create this sciencefiction concept illustration from scratch, for an early stage project or pre-production research for a film or game. It starts from a 3D vehicle rough sketch done in VR, through to a final key art concept illustration in Photoshop.

The purpose is to show how 3D can help speed up the process of creation, and adds flexibility to your workflow in terms of framing, composition and lighting of the scene, without delving too far into heavy, detailed sculpts and models.

Since the final goal is to provide a still 2D work as a proof of concept or concept illustration, and the time frame is often short, it is not possible to spend too many hours or days modelling assets that would be treated separately at a later stage by a concept artist, prop designer and a proper 3D modeller. It is important to consider the scene as a whole for a general idea of the frame and not to pay too much attention to the composition of each element, even though there should be a certain artistic direction to follow with a given brief.

AUTHOR Sebastien Hue Sebastien is a concept illustrator based in Paris, France. Self-taught, he became professional in 2013 and found his way among many international clients in the entertainment industry, and has provided several live masterclasses for Adobe and View Conference. www.shue-digital.com 3D WORLD 43

Create an amazing sci-fi concept illustration

01START IN GRAVITY SKETCH

Most of the time, as a concept artist, you would start sketching and drawing some vehicle ideas on paper or a 2D program. The strength of VR and Gravity Sketch is to experiment directly in a 3D space like I did with this vehicle. Working with symmetry, you have great flexibility in changing your brush strokes to flesh out your ideas, and you can view your work from every perspective.

03 SURFACE THE SKETCH

02 CONSIDER HUMAN SCALE

Gravity Sketch is a very intuitive program you can learn quickly throughout the multiple tutorials you can find on their official YouTube channel. Sketching in VR for conceptual needs is very powerful, as you can directly define what you draw on a human scale, helping to ensure the correct proportions. You can project yourself into the vehicle you are actually designing in 3D, so it really makes your life easier when it comes to figuring out the interior or the cockpit of a vehicle in terms of human scale.

Once the backbone line sketches of your vehicle are completed, the surface tool will help you add surfaces between the lines you drew with multiple control points, but above all nice curves which are difficult to model in a more traditional 3D program. Your sketch is here to guide your surfacing process with multiple possibilities, including control points you can snap between lines, low-poly surfaces and a subdivision tool. By doing so, your sketch should be replaced by a mesh now.

THE 05 POSE MANNEQUIN

The mannequin included is very convenient and a huge help concept-wise, as it is fully rigged so you can pose him or her exactly the way you want, even the fingers. It definitely helps you create a scale guide as well as an anatomical guide for your concept, to reflect your idea more accurately, and you can submit a rough 3D scene to a director or client and change whatever they want at will.

Instead of a flying pilot, why not have him having a quick smoke on top of a building?

44 3D WORLD

04 ADD ROUGH DETAILS

You can add more details to your basic geometry in order to emphasise the science-fiction character of the vehicle. With mirror mode activated, some basic fins have been added to the vehicle to give it more of a flying characteristic. There is also a radial tool to easily model some detailed top turbines. Complex designs can be very quickly blocked out, moved or erased.

Create an amazing sci-fi concept illustration

06 BUILD THE PLATFORM Moving forward into the scene development, the bike spaceship needed a platform or roof top to be on, once landed. Again the revolve tool is of great help; once you have set your axis, perpendicular to your vehicle here, you draw content alongside your axis and generate the platform as a circle or hexagonal outer shape.

It basically works like extruding a shape alongside a spline but depending on your hand moves, it creates different sizes and curves just like using a lathe modifier in a 3D program.

07 ORGANISE YOUR MESH

Once you are done in Gravity Sketch, you can quickly export the mesh as an object to use it in another 3D program. The problem is that all mirrored geometries are separated once imported, nothing is grouped. So, you need to re-organise your model and join objects to have a better control over your mesh. It can take a little while but it is definitely worth it, as it will save you time with less geometries, good indexation of the objects composing your mesh. Imagine a mecha you need to pose!

09 ADD THE CHARACTER

After setting a camera into the scene, the whole model with the platform, ship and character has been added too. Those main elements have to now find their place in the whole cityscape scene, so the notion of human scale comes around once again. We need to consider, what is the scale of the buildings compared to the character?

08 QUICK CITY GEOMETRY

Based on primitives, some city buildings were modelled in Cinema 4D for our sci-fi background. With basic modelling skills, only some bevels and Boolean modifiers were used to create those geometries. The goal is to quickly generate some cityscape shapes to play with for our scene. The texturing will be rough too, no need to unwrap and UV the meshes.

10 DEFINE MOOD WITH OCTANE

We also need to define the mood of the scene, and consider the time of day: blue sky, Golden Hour? Octane Render can help define this rapidly thanks to the Octane Daylight Material. You can play with the sky colour, time of day, and the turbidity of the atmosphere to strengthen the mood. Since Octane is a real-time renderer, you can fine-tune your light and shadow positions and much more. Be careful though, a good graphics card is recommended for the engine to calculate fast and avoid crashes.

3D WORLD 45

Create an amazing sci-fi concept illustration

11TEXTURING

As Octane Render is the render engine for this project, let’s apply some good Octane materials to texture our models. It is possible to make your own, but you can directly download some free ones, buy some, and even better get full presets of a variety of different types of materials, from metal to plastic, from transparent glass to emitter material lights. Very handy. After installing those presets in C4D, just browse your packs and select. For instance, an anisotropic metal has been applied to the main parts of the ship.

12 PLAY WITH THE CAMERA

Let’s use an Octane camera to frame a good composition and viewpoint for our concept illustration.

The character and vehicle are definitely the focal point of our image. Thumbnailing with multiple camera placements is handy and quick to do, and will be helpful in the decision-making process for you and the supervisor/client.

13 PASSES AND RENDERING Without getting too much into the details, a few passes have to be set up in Octane Render to help you out with post-processing the illustration in Photoshop later on. Here you can see some that are often used, like the Shadow pass or the Ambient Occlusion pass. You can get them in one single PSD file or separately.

Another important element to consider is how the lighting will be calculated and rendered; for this, the kernel setting needs to be enabled. There are four different modes to explore, but Path Tracing is a clear favourite.

14 CLOWN OR MATERIAL ID PASS

Among the different passes available to render, one in particular is very handy in speeding up your workflow for post-processing your still image in Photoshop more efficiently. This is the MatID pass, also called the Clown pass.

It helps you quickly select elements in your image with the magic wand tool in Photoshop. The different materials applied are replaced by a flat colour, this way we can extract our character quickly and put him on another layer in our Photoshop file.

46 3D WORLD

15 COMPOSITE IN PHOTOSHOP

After rendering all the passes, there are different ways to composite them in your PSD file. Some will be used as tools like MatID to quickly select an element in our flat 2D scene, and others will help better define the lights, shadows and depth depending on which mode you are selecting for the layer (for instance, Multiply for shadows, Overlay for AO, or Screen for Light pass).

Create an amazing sci-fi concept illustration

16 CREATE DEPTH WITH FOG

17 PHOTOBASHING

18 LIGHT THE BACKGROUND

19 CHARACTER LIGHTING

By creating separated layers (foreground, mid and background) it is easier to add foggy layers in-between grounds to accentuate the depth of field, which will help to bring our character forward. By using Curves, you can play with the contrasts between the dark and light values but also apply a certain mood to the illustration with some colour tweaks in the RGB channels.

Let’s add more life to the background with some lit-up windows. These are set to Color Dodge mode to keep the windows’ information from the photo. As the structure is massive, the light from those tiny windows help give a sense of scale, as well as extra life to the city.

The larger blue line in contrast with the smaller yellow ones keeps our eyes not far from our character’s head.

20 MORE CHARACTERISATION

Our initial 3D model was more of a sketch, so to get a better sense of photorealism, some photo texturing needs to be applied to add this effect to the concept illustration. We’ll do the same for most of the image, and especially the character who right now is just an expressionless mannequin.

Bits and pieces of photos will give the level of information we want. Imagine those are the bricks to build the house, and the paintover work is the cement to make everything work together.

Time to put the character under the spotlight, this is our focal point after all. With layers set to Screen mode, different light types are painted onto the character to make him look more 3D. First a direct, orangy top light hitting the right side of his body from the cheek, shoulder to the bottom of his coat.

Another one, a colder hue this time, acts more as a rim light coming from the cyan front light of the vehicle behind on his left. A whiter LED light behind him hits the right side of his arm.

To emphasise the badass look of our character, you can add some elements that characterise him even further, such as a cool tattoo, punky green hair and some feathers. All these completed the cyberpunk look we went with for this character. Adding references to the vehicle or the block behind help add more context to the world and environment he is in. There’s a sense of an established life system, adding greater believability to the world we are building.

21KILL THE 3D FEEL

3D images can often look a little too perfect. So to break that effect, we need to make things more natural and kill the seamless render that does not exist in real life. Simply paint some scratches and dust onto the ship to imply a backstory to it. All objects have a history, tell it through the textures and smoothen their edges with the blur tool to blend them better into the scene.

3D WORLD 47

Create an amazing sci-fi concept illustration

The sky is key

The sky is almost everything in an environment design.

That is probably one of the most important elements to define when starting an environment illustration, because it will dictate your colour palette and values.

22 ADD MORE SCI-FI ELEMENTS

Let’s add to our sci-fi cityscape with some flying spaceships and antennas. Here, some simple, small shapes are painted with a plain colour sampled from the sky. With just a Motion Blur filter applied it does the job perfectly. The rooftop of the building behind the character looked too empty, so we added some antennas with their red lights to fill the space.

24 HIGHLIGHTS AND SMOKE

The cigarette actually needs a smoke effect. To do so, just get a nice smoke picture with a black background and go to your Blending Options in Photoshop to get rid of the black to reveal the smoke by transparency. To have a smoother control on the blending jitters, separate the controller by using Alt+Left Click in the middle of it. Then you can fine-tune the blending more easily. Some smoke/atmo layers have been added on the left corner the same way to give even more life to the industrial techie background.

26 SPECIAL TREATMENT

This additional treatment is probably the cherry on the cake, but it really contributes to making your final artwork visually polished, detailed and cinematic. Chromatic aberration is a photography effect coming from a failure of the lens to focus all colours to the same point.

The effect is just a small shift between the three Red/Green/ Blue channel layers to create this mismatch colour distortion. After that, a High pass is created to reveal the details better in Overlay mode, and some noise can be added too. •

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23 FOREGROUND AND ATMOSPHERE

The foreground is always something nice to play with when it comes to adding even more depth to our image. By adding just a blurred techie object somewhere on the edge of the frame, it will imply that there are many more, bigger elements beyond the frame, but also since it’s blurred, it does not detract from the main subject and an implicit visual depth is created.

25 FINAL ADJUSTMENTS

After a final round of digital painting it is time for final adjustments, using curves, contrast, and some subtle colour balance changes. Another thing to do is to add a LUT layer through the Color Lookup Adjustment that can add very different variations and can help achieve a more cinematic render to your image. Here the FoggyNight.3DL LUT has been used at a 25% opacity.

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3D WORLD 49

Detailing

Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork

Kacper Bartnik fisherowski.artstation.com Kacper Bartnik is a digital art student.

He has been creating 3D environments and level art for over five years.

DETAILING The whole scene is based on very beautiful and highly detailed concept art

by Christian Dimitrov. To recreate those details, I used Megascans assets and a wonderful Torii gate model created by Jasmine Cornell. Firstly, I checked the 'Enable Displacement' option in the Megascans plugin properties to make sure that Bridge will import all assets with extra displacement texture applied. Then, I had imported all mossy assets from the library and increased the 'Tessellation Multiplier' and 'Displacement Amount' values in their materials. Tweaking those options made moss looking detailed and realistic without using cards.

JAPANESE TORII Software Unreal Engine 4 Year made 2021 50 3D WORLD

3D WORLD 51

GATHER ROUND THE FIRE A render of a campfire scene using the procedural volumetric fire shader that is shown in this tutorial 52 3D WORLD

Make a procedural fire in Blender

BLENDER

MAKE A PROCEDURAL FIRE IN BLENDER Learn how to produce a procedural animated fire as a volumetric shader using nothing but a cube primitive and shader nodes

I

AUTHOR

n this tutorial you will learn how to create a procedural volumetric fire shader. This method has multiple benefits compared to the alternative of simulation, as no volumetric data has to be stored directly and the result can consistently be tweaked with the parameters that go into generating it.

In the following steps you will learn how to effectively work with volumetric shaders in Blender and how to set them up for both of Blender’s native render engines, Cycles and Eevee.

Simon Thommes Simon Thommes is a 3D generalist at the Blender Studio working mainly as a shading and lighting artist on open movie projects. Building on his technical education of a BSc in physics he developed a strong focus on the creation of procedural shaders using Blender. simon-thommes.com For the creation of the volumetric textures used by the fire we will cover various concepts and techniques of the procedural texture generation in Blender’s node-based shading system. Those concepts cover several aspects of procedural texturing in general, like creating and manipulating shapes in 3D space and using noise textures to combine different levels of detail.

A central point of these steps is the manipulation of coordinate space and combining different textures using mathematical

operations, but there is no advanced knowledge needed to follow along and pick up useful ideas and tricks.

Beyond that, you will see the flame come alive with some basic techniques of procedural animation applied to a volumetric shading context. Let’s begin!

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept

3D WORLD 53

Make a procedural fire in Blender

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01PREPARE THE FILE

Start from an empty scene with nothing but the initial default cube and a camera. Give the cube a material that you name ‘Fire’ and select a Principled Volume shader for the volume output of the material. To get a good contrast of the flame against the background, set the colour of the world shader to pitch black.

The flame is going to be using the emission of the volume, so turn the density of the Principled Volume shader to something very low like 0.001, and for now set the Emission Strength to 1.

Handle type in the Curve node

To create sharp corners in an RGB Curves node you can change the handle type of individual points to vector handles by clicking the down-arrow icon for Tools.

02 SET UP EEVEE PREVIEW This shading setup will work with both render engines in Blender, Eevee as well as Cycles.

If you want a fast preview while adjusting the shader make sure to optimise the volumetric rendering settings of Eevee by selecting it as the render engine and adjusting the parameters in the Volumetrics panel of the Render Properties tab.

There you can adjust the quality for an efficient workflow. Make sure to adjust the Start and End distance to your volume to make the most of the samples. To get a more

54 3D WORLD

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aesthetically pleasing result with Eevee later on, you can also turn on the Bloom option.

Curves node you can invert and shape this gradient, and connect the result to the Emission Strength of the Principled Volume shader.

Now it’s time to start with the actual shader itself. As the main input for the shader add a Texture Coordinate node. Use the Generated output to generate a central blob in the cube with a series of Vector Math nodes.

First subtract the vector (0.5, 0.5, 0.5), then scale the result by 2 and calculate the length. The result is a gradient going from the centre of the cube outwards. With an RGB

Next we need to give the volume a basic texture to introduce the variation in brightness of the emission. Add a Voronoi Texture node, invert the Distance output by subtracting it from 1, and subtract the result from the base shape that is used for the Emission Strength.

Make sure that the Voronoi noise is using the same Generated Coordinates as the input as the

03 MAKE THE BASE SHAPE 04 GIVE IT A BASIC TEXTURE

Make a procedural fire in Blender

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edge of the flame there is already a variation in colour, even when you only select a single orange tone as the Emission Color.

To push this even further we can use a Color Ramp node to map the values from the RGB Curves node to a colour gradient. Then, connect the result to the Emission Color of the volume.

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base shape. Set the Feature Output of the Voronoi Texture to Smooth F1 and turn the Smoothness to 0.1. You can change the spread of the resulting shape by offsetting the Value that the Voronoi noise is being subtracted from.

05 ADJUST BASE SHAPE

Next adjust the general shape from a sphere to something more conical. You can do this by manipulating the used texture coordinates. Add a Separate XYZ and a Combine XYZ node. Insert them in between the Texture Coordinate node and the base shape and Voronoi Texture.

Connect the X and Y component without any modification and modify the Z component with a math node set to power. Set the exponent value to 0.3. This will also make the flame speed up towards the top when it is animated later on.

06 ADD NOISE DISTORTION A good technique to give the flame a more interesting and

realistic pattern is to distort the coordinate space that the shape is using with a noise. You can do this quite easily by mixing the colour output of a Noise Texture node into the coordinate vector using the Linear Light operation of the MixRGB node.

Create two noise textures and use this method twice – one time directly after stretching the base coordinates with a Scale of 4 and one additional time right before the Voronoi base texture with a Scale of 2. The distortion strength can be controlled with the Fac inputs.

THE 07 DEFINE GLOW EFFECT

At this point you should go into defining the look of the flame in terms of colour and brightness. To do that, control the connection that drives the volume’s emission with an RGB Curves node and multiply the result by a factor that functions as your glow strength.

Due to the change in the Emission Strength towards the

Hide unused node sockets

You can hide unused sockets on a node by pressing Ctrl+A. This can help a lot to make a node tree more readable by visually removing irrelevant inputs and outputs.

Now that the volume is recognisable as a flame in a still frame, it’s time to put it into motion.

Add a Value input node and type ‘#frame’ into the value field. This sets up a driver for the value so that it always gives you the current frame number to use in the shader.

Plug the frame value into the Z component of a Combine XYZ node and subtract the resulting vector from the coordinate map of the base texture before the noise distortion. This will offset the coordinates along the Z-axis.

To control how fast this offset should be animated, divide the frame number by a speed factor (e.g. 20).

09 ANIMATE THE TEXTURES Apart from just animating the flame with an offset on the texture, there should also be an intrinsic variation to the noise textures over time.

To achieve this, set the dimension of both Noise Texture nodes to 4D and also drive the newly exposed ‘W’ parameters with a time parameter. Divide the frame number by another speed factor (e.g. 100) and connect the result with the ‘W’ parameter of both Noise Texture nodes. That gives the noise an additional variation

over time.

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Make a procedural fire in Blender

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VARIATION 10 INTRODUCE ALONG THE FLAME

At this point the complexity of the flame detail is uniform over the whole shape. To add more realism you can instead let it increase towards the top.

To achieve this, add two Map Range nodes that take as an input the Z component of the initial coordinates, which is already exposed with the Separate XYZ node. Use the output of one Map Range node to control the Roughness input of both Noise Texture nodes and the other for the Fac input of both Linear Light nodes for the noise distortion.

Adjust the values until you like the result (e.g. 0.0, 0.7, 0.1, 0.5 and 0.0, 0.6, 0.1, 0.4).

11ADD SMOKE TO THE FIRE

At present the fire simply consists of a flame, so let’s add smoke on top of it into the volume.

Simply duplicate the setup for the base shape and slightly offset it upwards by changing the vector of the subtract node to (0.5, 0.5, 0.75).

This additional base shape can now be used to control the density input of the volume shader.

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Procedural twigs using skin modifier

You can easily make simple twigs by adding a skin modifier on top of a skeleton of vertices and edges.

That way you can have forks in the shape without having to worry about topology.

You can adjust the thickness for each vertex by scaling it with Ctrl+A.

To make the smoke stronger, multiply the density by a factor (e.g.

10) and to make it more visible, create an external light source in the scene.

In order for the smoke to also reflect the general texture of the fire, subtract the base texture from the shape. But here the effect should be more subtle, so make sure to multiply the texture with 0.5 before that.

12 CREATE A WIND EFFECT

The last feature of the fire shader itself is going to be a wind effect. This can be achieved by once again manipulating the initial coordinate map.

Split the Generated Coordinates up with a Separate XYZ node and shape the Z component using an RGB Curves node. Use the result as the Scale input of a Vector Math node set to Scale and subtract the resulting vector from the coordinate map.

With the vector input of the Scale node you can control the direction and strength of the wind.

This will be replaced by a more convenient control technique in the next step.

UP A WIND 13 SETCONTROLLER

Add an ‘Empty’ object with the shape of a single arrow. By using drivers you can drive the direction and strength of the wind effect in the shader directly with the object transformation of this empty.

Create a Combine XYZ node, add a driver to the X component and open the window to edit it.

As the object, select the control empty, and as type, select X Rotation. Repeat this for the Y and the Z component of the rotation.

Use this rotation vector as the Rotation input of a Vector Rotate node set to Euler. As the Vector input, use the vector (0, 0, 1). Plug the result into a new Scale node and as the Scale value add a new driver referencing the Average Scale of the empty object.

Use the resulting vector as the input of the Scale node controlling the wind direction.

THE 14 ADJUST PARAMETERS

To give the fire the right amount of believability and complexity there are a set of parameters that can be adjusted to your setup.

Make a procedural fire in Blender

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You can change the fire’s overall sense of scale by adjusting the scale parameters of the Noise Texture and Voronoi Texture nodes.

The general complexity and noisiness is controlled by the remaining parameters of the noise textures and the strength of the noise distortion.

If the fire is clipping at the borders of the cube you can add a Mapping node after the initial Texture Coordinate node to transform the location, rotation and scale of the fire within the domain cube overall.

ENVIRONMENT 15 ADDELEMENTS

At this point the creation of the animated volumetric fire itself is complete. To complement the fire with some fitting scenery you can add environment elements like logs and twigs for the fireplace and pebbles and grass for the surrounding area.

These simple assets can easily be scattered on a ground plane or piled up on the fireplace using particle systems set to hair distribution and to duplicate the assets accordingly.

As an additional effect you can create some glowing embers that float up from the fire with a particle system. In combination with motion blur this adds a nice touch to the fire animation.

16 SET UP THE RENDERING 15

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To tie the focus of your composition together on the fireplace, give your camera a shallow depth of field.

There are also a couple of tweaks you should make in the Render Properties. In the Volumes panel you can adjust how Cycles renders volumes. Turning the Max Steps parameter way down drastically improves the render time and has little visual impact on the result in this example.

To give the render more crisp colours you can boost the Exposure while decreasing the Gamma in the Color Management panel.

In the compositor you should at least apply a denoise filter, but there you can also add screen effects like Glare, Lens Distortion and Sharpening. • 3D WORLD 57

METAHUMAN CREATOR | QUIXEL BRIDGE

BUILD PHOTOREAL HUMANS WITH EPIC’S LATEST TOOL Discover how to generate incredible CG human characters for your projects with MetaHuman Creator

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reating humans has long been the holy grail for CG artists. It’s a task that has always been seen as difficult and time-consuming, partly because the end result isn’t just about the geometry, or the materials and lighting, or the rigging and posing. It is all those things, but a believable human is definitely far more than just the sum of its CG parts.

Epic saw this problem and introduced the MetaHuman Creator software, an online tool for generating photorealistic human characters for use not just in its own Unreal Engine, but in other 3D apps too (currently only 58 3D WORLD

Maya is supported, but expect others later).

The tools are really quite simple to use, with a similar feature set to other character creation software, but the results are a step ahead of anything else you might have tried. The blending tools let you take pre-existing characters and morph between them. This isn’t restricted in any way so creating characters based on different statures, ethnicities and genders is both fun and rewarding.

Over these pages I’ll run you through getting started with some of the key tools on offer, so you can get up and running as

fast as possible, and you’ll have your own 3D characters rendering in no time.

One note, if you don’t use Maya and you want to access your characters in your chosen host app, you can export them to Unreal and then take them from there to your software as an FBX. It’s a workaround for now, but I’m sure that Epic will release new bridges soon.

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept

AUTHOR Rob Redman 3D World editor Rob is a 3D artist and animator with over 20 years’ experience, plays guitar, and is a serial beard grower. pariahstudios.co.uk

Build photoreal humans with Epic’s latest tool

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01TAKE IT TO THE BRIDGE

Although you can access the

MetaHuman Creator directly from

a browser, you can also use Quixel Bridge, which I would suggest, as it is also where you will download and export your finished character. On the browser panel, click the avatar icon, choose from presets or saved metahumans, then on the right click Launch MHC. One thing to note 03 – if you want to export a finished character to Unreal Engine from Assets and files here, then you'll need a level open Once you have in Unreal, otherwise you'll get an your metahuman error message. ready you'll find it automatically saved in Quixel Bridge Once in, you'll again be (assuming you have faced with the choice of any of your logged in). If you customised characters or presets. select your character, Don't worry too much about which a box will appear on you start with, as it really is just the right-hand side a kicking-off point and you can with a cog icon near customise as you go. That said, the bottom. Here you if there is one that looks close to can choose which what you want, you may as well start assets you want to there. You can merge in others in download, from LODs a minute. The library of presets is to textures you want really good, with a lot of variation on to use.

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LAUNCH CONTROL

display, but if nothing is quite right you can morph with others later on.

help define the basic structure of your character.

This is where the fun begins and the power of the MetaHuman Creator really shines. Move to the Face tab and you'll be presented with a dial, with three spots around your character. You'll need to stop the preview animation to activate this, but once you have you can click on any of the control points on the main render panel. When you drag these towards any of the three morphs, your character will update in real time. Do this for as many of the control points as you wish to

One of the more subtle but useful features lives in the Skin tab.

Yes, you can adapt the skin colour and roughness etc, but if you move across to the sub sections here you can add details like freckles or accents. These change the textures applied to local areas of the character, giving you an easy method to apply ruddy cheeks, grey eye bags, or add some colour to the forehead. Aspects like this really make it easy to refine the character in the way you want.

03 MERGE FACE BLENDS 04 TEXTURE MORPHS

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Build photoreal humans with Epic’s latest tool

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There are many options for really refining your character’s facial details

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I also appreciate that it doesn't let you go too far, keeping things within the realm of believability.

a few other options for previewing your metahuman.

I won’t go through all the face sections, but I will now point out that when you get to details like eyes it may be worth closing in on your character’s face. You can use your scroll wheel to do this, then use Alt plus the middle mouse button (MMB) to pan, and Shift plus MMB to orbit. On top of this you might want to increase the render quality.

To do this click on the third button at the top of the main view to select a render level. You can also define which lighting scene is used by clicking the Studio option, as well as

Addressing the hair works in a very similar way, and there are subsets of the grooming tools with similar controls. You'll also find a number of preset styles. Once you decide on a main style you can click the colour swatch, which opens a pop-up window where you can drag sliders, or click in the Colour panel to choose your settings.

Once done you can adjust the glossiness/roughness of the hair and dial in any grey. The styles on offer work really well here but there are currently no styling tools, only material ones.

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GROOM WITH A VIEW

Export into your projects

Having a library of custom humans is great, but what can you do with them?

For now you only have Maya and Unreal Engine to export to.

Get your level open in Unreal, then click Export. If you don't already have it you will be prompted to install the bridge plugin for your chosen app. Do this and then move to your app to find the model in the open scene, ready to go.

GOT TO MOVE IT, MOVE IT 07 YOU’VE

Near the bottom of the main view is the Move button. Select that and you'll see some control handles appear at key points on the face. Clicking and dragging them moves the associated geometry.

Again, this won’t go too extreme, which is a good thing, but it does let you refine the look of the character even more. For greater realism, you can deactivate the symmetry and choose the plane of execution. I think the key here is to keep it subtle and to work on the character's personality. If they are quizzicle, then a single, slightly raised eyebrow could be appropriate for example.

Build photoreal humans with Epic’s latest tool

08 SCULPT YOUR MUSE

Next to the Move tool is the Sculpt tool. This one is more refined and allows for more control over smaller features. Activate this (you'll have similar options for symmetry) and you'll see a set of control handles appear. Clicking and dragging these works how you have probably come to expect by now. They may affect smaller areas, but they can have a dramatic effect on the overall appearance of your character. When doing this you might find it useful to orbit round the model as you work, to ensure you are getting the desired results.

09 A BODY OF WORK

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In the Body section you can choose from a selection of body types, under short, medium and tall. These are your standard mesomorph or ectomorph types.

There are only a handful, but they get you where you need to be.

The Blend, Move and Sculpt tools don't work with the body, but you have enough options to work with.

It's also here that you choose from a palette of clothing, which have controls for primary and secondary colour. You may choose to use a different application to clothe your metahuman, but it's nice to have something to run previews with. •

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THE PRICE OF GUILT This piece is available as an NFT at tinyurl.com/yjre7hub

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept

Render a story-driven 3D art piece

MAYA | PHOTOSHOP | DAZ STUDIO | MARI

RENDER A STORYDRIVEN 3D ART PIECE Santhosh Koneru and Tiana Maros showcase how to visually convey an emotional story within a 3D render, as they walk us through the steps for their striking ‘The Price of Guilt’ project

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anthosh and I have been working together on multiple passion projects, including my most beloved piece The Awe Of Motherhood (see page 67). I was responsible for the storytelling, art directing and 3D building of the image, while Santhosh delivered technical help for moments when Maya crashed or I needed a quick Substance Painter course. I believe that we inspire each other artistically and technically, which makes working together effortless.

In this collaboration, ‘The Price of Guilt’, Santhosh wanted to create a significant piece for his first NFT, and since I happen to be his go-to muse (I was the only one whose face scan he had), I was the first to get updates on his progress, which I then influenced with feedback in return.

Santhosh had a precise idea of how the piece was supposed to look very early on. He nailed it down to the gesture, lighting and

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composition. He is an insanely skilled 3D artist and primarily concerned with visual mastery.

I am convinced that a piece of art needs to have a spirit, an emotion and a story.

When we brainstormed for a conceptual idea for this piece, I was pondering the guilt that I carried about the price of my own existence at the time.

Every decision that we make on a daily – be it eating, travelling or breathing – it all takes a toll on the planet, and this hamster wheel of life happens to be quite expensive too. I felt rather worthless to be this draining, until – after some soul searching – I reminded myself that I create valuable things which, through the power of the internet, might never be erased.

This realisation was the key I needed to justify the price of my life, and this piece visualises the striving for greatness despite its toll on our environment. We

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remind ourselves that for all the footprints we leave behind, it is in service of creating something so valuable, it will give solace to those around us.

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INITIAL CHARACTER DESIGN

Santhosh: I had a vague concept for a surreal piece in mind, so I collected reference images from Pinterest for inspiration and grouped them together in VizRef on my iPad. This way, the references don’t occupy the space on my workstation monitors.

So, the rough idea was to create a lady standing in a pool of milk, looking up, and a gold-like fluid dripping over her body.

To avoid having to model and rig a character from scratch, I’ve helped myself out with DAZ Studio.

This software is equipped with pre-rigged models that offer poses you can manipulate to your liking. I bought a customisable model and tweaked it as desired.

AUTHOR Tiana Maros Be it in 3D, digital 2D or traditional media, Tiana feels the strong pull to convey what needs to be said but is only told by a few.

Her works range from stylised to realistic concept pieces, digital matte paintings, 3D product visualisations and archviz, as well as fine art on largescale oil paintings. artstation.com/ tianamaros

AUTHOR Santhosh Koneru Santhosh Koneru is a 3D generalist with a little over five years of experience in the VFX industry, and around seven years’ experience in matte painting, UI design and branding. artstation.com/ koneru_santhosh 3D WORLD 63

Render a story-driven 3D art piece

02 FACE SCAN

Tiana: Three years ago I had my face scanned for another one of Santhosh’s projects. To get a correct overlap of the images, I painted crosses on my face with eyeliner. The result of one face scan is a ton of images that are taken from top to bottom in a spiral movement around my face; I repeated this process with multiple facial expressions.

Santhosh: I then generated a neutral 3D model of Tiana’s face by using RealityCapture. Once the scan is generated I export the mesh and the texture.

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MESH CLEAN-UP

Santhosh: I imported the head scan into ZBrush for cleanup. Then I wrapped a clean mesh around the clean scan using ZWrap.

I positioned the clean head mesh to the posed model and attached it to the body. You can use any 3D painting software to paint the displacement map on the model.

Since we were going for a 10K final render, we decided to paint the textures in 8K. So, Mari was the best choice in this scenario. I started with a projected displacement texture and did a bit of clean-up of the map.

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04 DISPLACEMENT MAPS

Santhosh: As you might have noticed in the previous step, the DISP maps used for the hands and face are different. So, I imported the maps from Mari individually into ZBrush to adjust the displacement value to keep the consistency in pore detail. Then I exported both displacement and normal maps.

I opened the model in Substance Painter and applied the normal map I had exported from ZBrush to it.

Then by using the procedural skin materials from Substance Source, I refined the skin details further on the body and hands.

AND 05 TEXTURING LOOKDEV

Santhosh: Once the initial body texture was finalised, I textured the props within Substance Painter. Using the textures and displacement maps I’d created, I started lighting and lookdev in Maya using V-Ray. 64 3D WORLD

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Render a story-driven 3D art piece

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06 CONCEPTUAL TWEAKS

Tiana: Santhosh had been sending me his progress regularly for feedback, and this was the point where I didn’t feel that the direction he was taking was a cohesive one.

The model seemed to wear a bathing suit (it’s actually a dress) paired with a statement necklace matched with a golden halo. This didn’t fit together and also lacked a story.

I proposed to have her naked because of the statement necklace – it is a primal accessory and doesn’t need any additional clothing. Santhosh didn’t want her nudity exposed, so I proposed to have her nipples covered up with thick oil rather than her bathing in milk. I requested an all-oil shader render from him and quickly drafted a rough overpaint by masking in the shader render over the render of her nude body.

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Render a story-driven 3D art piece

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SHADER TEXTURING

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Santhosh: For the oil surface, I used a Shutterstock image of an oil spill and Photoshopped it onto my circular geo’s UV by creating a flow that leaves from the centre, where the character stands. I exported two black and white variations of the map using Color Range in Photoshop and used all three maps to create an iridescent and oily texture in Substance Painter.

08 PAINTING IN HIGH-RES

Tiana: Santhosh sent me three Shader Variations upon request so I could start comping and overpainting to match the concept I’d sent him. I masked in the oil shader the same way I did in the concept and proceeded to overpaint that. Just masking the oil in doesn’t do much for the realism, so I had to paint in the oil dripping and iridescence super zoomed in by hand. This is an 8K resolution image, so every pixel matters.

Notice that I added some lighting/atmosphere to the scene.

I masked in some gold variations from other renders and detailed out the necklace as well. I’ve painted in some reflective oil traces on the surface that were not in the renders, and for the hair I’ve used photos that I bashed in and overpainted.

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09 CREATING THE LIKENESS

Tiana: Santhosh used an older face scan of myself which needed some work – jawline, neck, lips, nose, eyebrows… So I took a couple of selfies and used those for reference to paint my likeness back in.

Notice the change in the lips before and after – that’s all painting and clone tool stamping to preserve the pore textures. To paint in the eyebrows I’ve used a one to three pixels brush, and I took the liberty to add my beauty marks to the face. I can’t afford a real nose job, so I fixed my nose digitally in here! • 66 3D WORLD

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Render a story-driven 3D art piece

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THE AWE OF MOTHERHOOD created by Tiana Maros

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This piece, inspired by the Art Nouveau aesthetic, tells the story of the first AI surrogate mother. Once the overall concept was right I posed the main character in Daz, before exporting to ZBrush where I further refined it, using masks to split the anatomy into the different sections, allowing visibility to parts of the skeleton. The skeleton model itself was enhanced with elements of steampunk, rather than pipes, cables and electronics, keeping it technology free.

The baby was modelled from scratch based on lots of reference images, and once finished was sent to Maya for retopo, then on to diffuse texture painting in Mari. Mudbox was the tool of choice for exporting the displacement maps.

I chose to leave the lady’s textures simpler and more monochrome, to support the story, balancing her against the baby, which has more colour and depth. Something to note is the importance of blue in skin textures, which is often left out but really helps, especially for paler skin.

The scene was rendered in V-Ray, with some blue-stained glass to add to the ecclesiastical feel. Final comp was done in Photoshop.

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VANITAS: A PORTRAYAL OF HUMAN DEGENERATION Traditionally, still-life vanitas paintings feature arrangements of symbolic objects, often portraying messages of death and decay

Create a detailed stone sculpture with realistic decay

ZBRUSH | 3DS MAX | CORONA RENDERER | COBWEBS (3DS MAX SCRIPT) | PHOTOSHOP

CREATE A DETAILED STONE SCULPTURE WITH REALISTIC DECAY Reza Sedghi breaks down the creation process for his 3D sculpture inspired by symbolic vanitas paintings AUTHOR

I

Reza Sedghi I’m a 3D character artist from Iran. I’ve been working in the industry for over eight years; sometimes I change mediums to explore the different aspects of art. lowrez.artstation.com

created this 3D illustration titled ‘Vanitas: a Portrayal of Human Degeneration’ to express the idea of mankind at the peak of its civilization, with the knowledge it has acquired… yet mould, a symbol of corruption, destruction and extinction, has completely taken over our minds, causing it to fade into decay. Each of the assets in the image is used as a symbol to help the narration of the concept, in the style of ‘vanitas’ paintings. The candle on the right represents hope, but its light is fading, and the Apollo, which represents knowledge, prophecy and light, is buried and has lost its beauty.

I decided to create each part from a different stone – I’m actually working on the physical model at the moment, so the physical version is also made out of different marble stones.

I will take you through the creation process – focusing on sculpting, adding realistic mould, materials and composition.

01

01SCULPT APOLLO’S BASE To start, I sculpted the Apollo in T-pose using a sphere, and I sculpted the head and body separately. My aim was to capture the forms and feeling of the classic Apollo sculpture. Later I used ZRemesher to have full control over the posing. For the hair, I used a box and deformed it to match the head. ClayBuildup was utilised for deforming and creating the base of the hair. For sculpting the strands I set the Trails in the brush modifier to 13 for greater strength.

02 TWEAKTHE POSE

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept

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I masked the areas and created the pose; a proper topology helps you to have better control at this stage. Once you're done you can sculpt over the posed model to clean up your forms. After posing, I used a box and deformed to create the overall look of the cape, and then used DynaMesh to start sculpting. ZBrush Cloth brushes are useful for folds, but since I wanted to follow the actual Apollo’s statue I sculpted it with clay and Dam 3D WORLD 69

Create a detailed stone sculpture with realistic decay

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05 Cobwebs script

To add the feeling of webs to the head, I used the Cobwebs script in 3ds Max by John Martini. I created a few spheres on the places where I wanted to add webs, created a line, added the spheres as ‘Birth Objects’, and generated the webs.

I created two extra mould parts in ZBrush as support, and I used the same NanoMesh technique on smaller areas, one which has a volumetric material and the other which has a Hair and Fur modifier for the fuzzy parts of the mould.

70 3D WORLD

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Standard to bring out the primary forms, and the standard brush with gravity to create the folds.

03 CREATE THE MOULD

For the base of the noise I sculpted my primary forms with clay and then added the noisy effect with Noise and the Fracture brush.

Later on I merged both hair and head subtools and DynaMeshed them together. After that I smoothed and tweaked the forms with clay and the Move brush. For the moulds, once I was done with my base I masked the noisy area, extracted it and used a low-poly sphere as NanoMesh over the extracted area, and randomised the placements to create the mouldy feeling. Then I added noise, DynaMeshed the whole piece and tweaked my forms.

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FINALISE THE MODEL AND TEXTURING

For the final details I used XMD brushes for the damages and old cracks. After finishing the bust, I Polypainted the model; I didn't want a realistic colour palette, instead I went for a more abstract/ stylised approach. I tried to have a mixture of colours for the moulds so it would not be too colourful, yet not just a desaturated green-white colour. I duplicated my model, used ZRemesher for a quick retopology, and did the UVs in ZBrush for fast results. I imported both the high-res and low-res in Marmoset Toolbag for baking the maps.

ADDITIONAL OBJECTS 05 MODEL

For the other objects in the scene, I used 3ds Max for modelling and

ZBrush for adding any extra details.

For the fabrics on the ground and in the background I used Marvelous Designer, which provides a very fast and dynamic result. I utilised Polypaint in ZBrush for the texturing of fruits and flowers, and used ZBrush cloth brushes and Surface Noise for the feeling of decay. For the moulds on the fruits I used the same NanoMesh technique, but kept the model separated from the fruits to give it a volumetric material.

AND LOOKDEV 06 MATERIALS

Creating realistic and believable materials is challenging, but thanks to Corona Renderer, you can build up the look of the material very fast and start working on the lookdev to reach the result you need. To capture the marble's

Create a detailed stone sculpture with realistic decay

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translucency, I used the Corona Marble Material preset and set the scattering Distance to 6.0mm, added the Diffuse, Normal, Bump, Displacement and Roughness map, and adjusted the Reflection to make it rough rather than shiny to create the old look. For the webs I used a volumetric material, and for the flowers I utilised CoronaAO to create a gradient of colours for the dying flowers.

07 ADDLIGHTINGDRAMATIC

Light plays a major role in narrating your story, and I tried to create dramatic lighting for this scene.

I added four lights, setting their directionality to 0.75 to use them as spotlights. The key light on top is to light up the bust and the scene, the right cold light was used on the

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sculpture for creating a mysterious feeling. The left light has a very low power and only hits the moulds to lighten the areas a little more, while the candle, which also has low power, is added just to lighten up the fruits.

AND 08 COMPOSITION RENDERING

Composition is one of the most important elements in image creation; it’s extremely important to carefully consider the placement of each object in the scene, and how it guides the viewers’ eyes to the areas you wish to emphasise. I tried to cover the bust with the assets so that they would both support the bust and narrate the story. I used a low-angle camera to add further emphasis to the bust. For the rendering, Corona Renderer's

Hair and Fur

I applied the Hair and Fur modifier on some of the extra parts. I set the Root Thick to 1.54 to make it very thin and put the Hair count to 50,000 so it would not be too full. I applied hair material and reduced the roughness. For the volumetric parts on the head, I applied the fog material to my models and set the distance to 1.0. I applied the same material to the moulds on the fruits, but changed the volumetric distance to 2.0 to fade it more.

default settings work really well, and I only adjusted the denoiser. I didn't use HDRI as I was aiming to capture a dark atmosphere.

09 POST-PROCESSING

Once the rendering was finished, I saved all the elements to modify them separately. The postprocessing in Corona Renderer is really useful; LUTs can help to change the overall look and the colour tones in the render, and I used them as support images and as an Overlay & Luminosity layer on my main render in Photoshop.

This way you can have full control over your image to change the tones, contrast, and so on. I used the depth as an alpha in my alpha channel to create the lens blur. For the final touch, I added some grain and a little chromatic aberration. • 3D WORLD 71

REVIT | 3DS MAX | CORONA RENDERER | PHOENIX | FOREST PACK | SINI | PHOTOSHOP

DESIGN A BEAUTIFUL MODERN VILLA I

Discover how Shayan Shamlou built a stunning archviz render n this tutorial, I will take you step by step through the creation of this modern villa, located in Australia, featuring a beautiful swimming pool and a relaxing fountain. The water simulation for this fountain was an interesting challenge; here I utilised the Phoenix plugin, as I find this is the best way to build and simulate fluids. The material

of the villa is white and dark-grey cement, and wood material has been chosen for the garage doors and parts of the entrance.

The use of glass along with a few additional decorative plants in the facade of the building has given a beautiful aesthetic look to this villa.

To speed up the rendering, I used the Forest Pack plugin and

the proxy method for scattering, preventing slow render times due to the number of polygons. Let’s get started!

DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-concept

AUTHOR Shayan Shamlou I am working as a professional architectural visualiser, CG artist, and tutor in this field. My passion is working hard and learning more about the world of 3D. instagram.com/ shayanshamlou

Design a beautiful modern villa

01MODEL THE VILLA

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The modelling of this villa was undertaken in Autodesk Revit and then transferred to 3ds Max for rendering and simulation. I prepared the ground space for landscaping with the Shift tool and the Painting tool.

I placed buildings around the neighbourhood and in front of the space outside the camera to create natural reflections in the glass.

You always have to pay attention to the extra details in the simulation. For example, the use of ceiling lights in the entrance view, as well as the inclusion of lights next to the stairs and the curtains for the interior – these details may not be hugely noticeable, yet they still contribute to the beauty of the final piece.

02 CAMERA CONTROLS 02a

The composition of your scene is one of the most crucial elements when it comes to producing a quality final render; for my scene, I used the Image Comp Helper script to assist with this. I have used aspect 1.5 at the request of the client and a focal number of 37mm, which is almost the same as human vision.

The best technique for deepening the scene is to use a

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Design a beautiful modern villa small focal length camera, and the recommended aspect for this type of image is vertical.

SCENE 03 PREPARE FOR LIGHTING

I first used an HDRI for ambient light.

I combined the HDRI light with the Color Correct Map to increase the light colour saturation and upped the Exposure to brighten the scene.

In addition to ambient light, to increase the contrast of colours and the realism of the scene lighting, I also used sunlight – the settings can be seen in the screenshot.

As we have a pool, we can use the Caustic effect for extra realism; we must have direct sunlight, and we can activate this option in the water material and Performance tab.

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AND BLACK 04 WHITE CEMENT MATERIALS

The most important materials used in this project are the white and black cement, glass, wood, and water. In terms of adding realistic dirt to these materials, we do not need to use a dirt map in black because the villa is going to be newly built; dirt can be used for the white cement, because usually white paint gets dirty sooner.

Glass materials are very important because the edges of the glass are always darker than the entire glass space, for which we can use ‘Absorption color’.

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WITH THE 05 SCATTER FOREST PACK PLUGIN

I’ve always said that the most powerful scattering plugin out there is Forest Pack. This scene is made up of eight different Forest layers, which is one of the best features that it provides. Plus, you can easily find the number of items you have scattered, the type of scatter, its limitation to the camera you have in the scene, and even the type of proxy display.

In this scene, I have several layers of pine and tropical trees from vol 24 of Maxtree; I made sure to consider the geographical area, and also its library has been used to select and scatter the yard grass.

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AND MANAGE 06 PAINT WITH SINI

I got help from a series of SiNi plugins. The first plugin, called SiNi 74 3D WORLD

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Design a beautiful modern villa

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Disperse, was used for painting the leaves in the parking lot on the ground with a brush. For greater believability, we must paint more on the sides of the entrance and less on the part that is on the tyre path.

I also use the SiNi Forensic plugin to manage the scene before rendering. This plugin helps to clean the scene, removing all the extra, unwanted items. It can also clear all viruses in the scene to start the rendering flawlessly.

PHOENIX TO 07 USESIMULATE THE FOUNTAIN The most exciting part of this project was the making of the pool fountain, and I used the Phoenix plugin for this. In my opinion, it is the most powerful plugin in the field of fluid simulation. I used a cube for the water source and simulated the animation for about three seconds at 100 frames. For water, we always set the value of

viscosity to 0, which should increase for concentrated fluids.

The water outlet speed is about 35cm and finally, I converted it into a mesh so that I could easily use it in the scene and so that I could see this simulation well.

FOR 08 PREPARE RENDERING

Corona is fast at architectural visualisation. First, I used an Image Aspect of 0.85 and Full HD size.

Due to the use of direct sunlight, the noise is very reduced, so I used a Noise Level of 4 and set the Denoising Amount to 0.8 with the Corona High Quality mode. In the Postprocessing section, I set the EV number to -1.5 and the Highlight value to 4 to prevent burns.

Using LUTs is always attractive, and in the last part I set the GI to normal 16. Finally, the most important part is activating the Caustics option, which simulates the natural state of water.

RAW FOR 09ON1POST-PRODUCTION

I only used Photoshop and the ON1 RAW plugin for post-production.

This plugin provides many features, such as colour editing and layering for separate settings, and the ability to mask as well as tweaking image colour settings automatically and manually. It also provides 100 different presets for automatic colour settings; this plugin has many features that alone can meet all the needs of an artist. I was able to achieve the final render by simply altering the Tone & Color settings and making a few other tweaks. •

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Practical tips and tutorials fr pro artists to improve your CG skills Cirstyn Bech-Yagher Cirstyn has moved from Radeon’s ProRender to the RizomUV team, where she does product management as well as modelling, UV mapping and tutorial writing. cirstyn.com Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a 3D and visual effects artist with vast experience across the industry, as both a creator and a technical writer. www.creativebloke.com Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is a freelance 3D artist and YouTuber. An expert in the creation of props and environments, he shares many of his creations on his channel. www.pietrochiovaro.com Antony Ward Be it game development, rigging or recording in-depth courses for his YouTube channel, Antony boasts experience in most areas of 3D. www.antcgi.com

GET IN TOUCH

EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO rob.redman@futurenet.com 76 3D WORLD

SOFTWARE: SUBD MODELLERS

WHY DOES TOPOLOGY MATTER? Frequent question in the RizomUV Discord Cirstyn Bech-Yagher replies In our Discord, we get many questions about topology from beginners wanting to get into the industry. They ask what it is, why it matters or how to improve. It’s a vast topic, but let’s cover the basics: topology is the organisation or flow of edges on a model.

And a good, clean organisation of this matters. From a UV mapping standpoint, clean and quadified geometry makes for easier unwraps. But more importantly, clean topology matters because it’s a quality-of-life concern. Problem-free geometry makes life so much easier. This goes for everyone, but especially for animators or game artists.

Clean and regular quads make it simpler to work with your model. It also helps avoid shading or baking errors. Not to mention that a nice and even layout is

also much easier to animate, texture or triangulate, and that a model with even quads across all its elements can be much easier to deform.

So how do you get clean topology?

One of the basics is ‘housekeeping’ – make sure your model has no superfluous components or polys. So remove all superfluous (and out-of-view) faces and vertices. Think the cylinder caps no one will see, or the bottom quads of boxes that will never be in view. Check for and remove double faces and ensure your normals are consistent.

Then go over your model: make sure quads and edges follow the flow of the model and avoid tris and N-gons. N-gons are polygons with more than four faces.

N-gons can be useful when placed so multiple flows of edge loops can flow

Your CG problems solved

EXPERT TIP

PLACE EDGES WITH SEAMS Boost edges on curved surfaces, and also remember that you’ll make your and your fellow pipeliners’ lives easier when you divide your topology into materials and put edges where you have seams or different materials. It makes texturing and unwrapping so much easier.

STEP BY STEP TIPS FOR ENSURING GOOD, CLEAN TOPOLOGY

Even a few topology basics can help you go a long way

around them to keep a surface smooth, but they are notorious, and with reason.

They can generate rendering or shading artefacts, SubD problems, edge selection issues, as well as generating plain bad topology. Luckily, they are easy to fix.

Dividing them into tris, quads or a combo by connecting the edges between border verts usually fixes them.

Keep the big model picture in mind when splitting your N-gons, as tris – a face with three connected verts – can generate issues of their own, namely poles. A pole is a vertex with three or more edges connected to it. They are usually okay on flat areas, but the many edges connected to a single vertex can really mess with your subdivisions and edge flow, as well as generating artefacts at render time, especially on curves.

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EDGE? 01HARD SUPPORT EDGES!

On hard-edged models in particular, support edges ensure your model’s sharp edges stay sharp when you subdivide.

Otherwise, your model will look mushy or rounded. Any such edges need an extra edge (or two) to retain their sharpness.

And they are easy to make – once you’ve blocked in your shape, extrude the edges on the inside or outside. Keep them close and even, as moving a support edge can mess with your shapes.

MANUAL 02 LEARN RETOPOLOGY

With every application and its brother having retopology tools on board these days, it’s easy to let your software do the work for you. Learn how to do manual retopology before you use automated retopo tools. Otherwise you can end up with a mess of useless quads which may be easier to work with, but useless for animation and/or deforming. Learning this

will help you build experience and begin to trust your eyes, not your software.

03 EASY N-GON SPOTTING

One place where it's safe to let the software do the work is when it comes to N-gon spotting. In 3ds Max, go to the modelling ribbon while in Editable Poly> polygon mode. Select by Numeric and set the value to greater than 4 (>), or =5.

This will highlight all the N-gons on your model, and you can now break them up by splitting them into tris or quads.

YOUR 04 MIND FLOWS AND LOOPS

Consider your flows and loops – by that we mean the loops that constitute your figure and how they flow. Evenly aligned quads, also on different elements of your model, will make it much easier to triangulate and deform come engine time. If you used a CAD program or simulator, consider retopologising, as quadifying will never give you a good set of flows and loops.

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Your CG problems solved

SOFTWARE: CINEMA 4D

HOW DO I CREATE ANIMATED LIQUID IN CINEMA 4D WITHOUT USING PARTICLES? Christina Lane, Florida Mike Griggs replies Liquid simulations are still one of the more complex areas of CGI that always seem to require expense – whether that is the expense of buying a third-party plugin or the cost of time while the computer solves a particle simulation.

However, Cinema 4D artists can create a more than acceptable liquid solution using the in-built MoGraph and volume tools with a bit of ingenuity.

The technique I shall demonstrate is an excellent way of showing liquids filling a container from within. It doesn’t offer 78 3D WORLD

all the extras that go with a simulationbased approach, such as creative splashes and reactive physics, but for background objects or as a good way to grow ooze, this technique will have you covered.

The other great thing about using MoGraph and volumes for ‘pretend’ simulations is that it offers instant feedback when the parameters are changed, which is not something that particle and fluid simulations provide.

Simulations are typically required to be cached beforehand, which can be a

tedious process that impacts the artist’s desire to iterate.

The other important aspect that this technique demonstrates is critical to any successful 3D artist – responding to a brief. When a brief has a deadline and budget, that means the time spent for dedicated fluid solutions may not be cost-effective for the artist. Adapting a workflow to offer an answer within a specific budget will always be a better option than telling the client that you cannot create their work. This just means

Your CG problems solved

EXPERT TIP ANIMATE THE LIQUID FILLING Add a MoGraph Plain Effector to the original Cloner object, with only the Scale parameters active, which should be set to absolute zero. Add a Linear field to the Plain Effector and size it appropriately to the Cloner object, and then animate on the Y-axis to see the liquid rise (or fall).

STEP BY STEP ANIMATE A LIQUID SIM WITH MOGRAPH IN C4D

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01SET UP THE SCENE

03 VOLUME BUILDER

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Discover a cost-effective technique for animated liquid sims

the client will simply find another artist to do the job.

Another good strategy that having a ‘simple’ solution offers for client work is that it allows the 3D artist to provide a menu of solutions by price. This would be where the MoGraph and volume option is the cost-effective choice, but if the client wants more, offer a price for a simulationbased approach. Clients always respond well to this, as it shows both the amount of work required for creating 3D assets while still offering solutions at any price point.

This tutorial uses Cinema 4D R24, although the techniques apply to any version that has the volume modelling toolset. The initial scene has two cylinder objects: one has a larger radius which will be used as a source to create the liquid; the other cylinder with a smaller radius shall be used to ‘cut’ the first cylinder in order to make the resulting mesh ready to fit in a glass.

02 UTILISE MOGRAPH

Add a small sphere object and place that into a new Cloner object. Set the Cloner Mode to ‘Object’, select the Bigger Cylinder in the ‘Object’ dialog box and then set the Distribution dropdown to ‘Volume’. Set the count to around 3,000. Add a MoGraph random effector to the Cloner object and set the Position coordinates to about 1cm and the Scale to 1. In the Effector tab, to animate the effector, we need to set the Random Mode to ‘Noise’, Space to ‘UV’, Animation speed to around 30% and finally Scale to around 10%.

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Next, to create the volume, add a Volume Builder object and place the Cloner object as a child of the new Volume Object. Make sure the vowel size is set suitably low to see the Volume, in this case 0.25cm. In the Volume Builder ‘Object’ tab, drop the Cutter Cylinder into the ‘Objects’ dialog above the Cloner. Switch the mode to ‘Intersect’ and then add a SDF Smooth object to make a more rounded volume.

A MESH 04 PRODUCE FROM THE VOLUME

Add a Volume Mesher object and make the Volume Builder a child of it. This creates a geometry object of the liquid, which if the play button is pressed now animates due to the parameters entered into the Random MoGraph Effector. In the Volume Mesher ‘Object’ tab, add a small amount in the ‘Adaptive’ slider to make a more efficient mesh. If there are performance issues, this can be adjusted by decreasing the number of spheres in the Cloner object.

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SOFTWARE: SUBSTANCE DESIGNER

HOW CAN I CREATE TEXTURES FROM PHOTOS? Mary Smith, Bradford Pietro Chiovaro replies For the creation of this Japanese house, and in particular the creation of the wood texture, I started from a photo I had previously taken. A photo that will become a texture is not simple to take, and we have different factors to keep in mind, including symmetry, lighting and shadows.

First, it’s important that we take a photo from the correct position, so it’s important that we place the camera parallel to the object, in this way we will avoid any sort of distortion in the final texture. Secondly, it’s important to make sure we do not photograph the material during the sunrise or sunset, or at any other time when the light may change fast. The third and final element to keep in mind is to 80 3D WORLD

avoid having shadows in the surface of the object – it’s recommended to use the natural light (maybe a cloudy day) or some studio lights if possible.

Once we have taken the photo, we can pass it on to the editing process.

In this step, we are going to fix the colour of the photo and in particular the colour saturation, contrast, the colour temperature, the shaders, and the sharpness. All the values of these elements depend on the photo we have taken, but generally, the main rule is to not exaggerate. Once the photo editing is complete we can export the texture in the format we prefer (PNG or TIFF is suggested) and then we can import the texture in our project.

EXPERT TIP PROCEDURAL TEXTURES A procedural texture is a texture created using algorithms. The advantage of this approach is the production cost and the unlimited texture resolution, but it does require experience and a good knowledge of the relevant tools to achieve the best results.

Your CG problems solved

SOFTWARE: AUTODESK MAYA

WHY ARE MY SKIN WEIGHTS SO UNPREDICTABLE? Kaye Kea, Brighton Antony Ward replies Painting. Skin. Weights. Three words that can strike fear into the hearts of many digital artists.

Adjusting the influence a joint has on a model is often seen as a tedious task and one to be avoided, but you may be surprised to hear that there are plenty of people out there who enjoy it.

Depending on what you use, it can be a calming and relaxing process. The problem is, this is not often the case when using Maya’s native toolset and in particular, the smoothing option.

By default, as you paint or smooth your weight values, Maya will automatically adjust the surrounding weights, so they stay between a value of zero and one, which is normalisation. This is essential when working on most characters, even more so with game development, when

you have restrictions on the amount of influences each vertex can have.

The problem is, sometimes Maya gets confused about which weights it should spread the values onto, so you end up with some vertices popping as you work, meaning you often feel like you are chasing your tail. You edit one area and another changes, so you edit that and the original area is altered again, so you end up going back and forth.

Now don’t worry, there isn’t a complicated workaround needed, in fact, the solution is quite simple and it’s found in the Bind Skin options window.

By default, Weight Distribution is set to Distance, which means Maya will adjust the surrounding weights based on the distance the vertex is from its influences.

For a long time I kept this the same, mainly

because I wasn’t entirely sure what it did.

But if you change this to Neighbors, the area Maya will distribute the weights to will be smaller and closer to where you are working, which gives more predictable and stable results.

EXPERT TIP NGSKINTOOLS If you’re a seasoned technical artist you will already know all about ngSkinTools, but if not, you should take a look at it.

This external plugin is well regarded in the industry and can take a lot of the pain out of painting weights.

Painting weights in Maya can be frustrating sometimes, but there is a simple way to make it a more pain-free experience

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Grooming

TIGER FRIENDS (ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY GOP GAP) Software Maya, XGen, V-Ray, Substance Painter, Mari, ZBrush Year made 2019

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Grooming

Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork

Erica Liu ericaliuser.com Erica Liu is a look development artist.

She is currently working at Nickelodeon Animation Studios.

GROOMING While working on the tiger’s groom, I felt the best way to approach this would be utilising XGen’s groomable splines. With this method, splines were generated on the tiger’s mesh that I was then able to position using XGen’s brush-based tools. Brushing the fur gives the user greater control over the direction, especially in tighter areas and when direction changes quickly. The little boy’s hair was completed using guides. I felt this was more necessary because of how stylized it was and I needed more control over the defined clumps, length, and silhouette.

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News and views from around the international CG community

PROJECT INSIGHT

What’s the BIM idea?

3D World explores how IttenBrechbühl AG used BIM processes and Vectorworks’ design software to achieve architectural greatness

rchitectural office and general contractor IttenBrechbühl AG comprises of approximately 320 employees, all helping to take large and complex buildings from basic design to commission. With more than 300 hospitals under its belt, IttenBrechbühl has firmly established itself as a specialist for the health sector but has also lent its expertise to education, research, transport and industrial services. This work is done across 11 locations in Switzerland, Germany, and Luxembourg.

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In 2017 IttenBrechbühl began work on the headquarters of Scott Sports, a sporting goods manufacturer that has been based in Fribourg, Switzerland since 1978. After winning the Arc Award BIM in Gold for the construction of SwissFEL, a largescale research facility in Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute a year earlier, IttenBrechbühl opted to again employ an innovative Building Information Modelling (BIM) process on the Scott Headquarters.

The aim of the project was to achieve a forward-looking, precise design based on improved communication and coordination between those involved, all based on the use

of 3D models. IttenBrechbühl’s experience using BIM for SwissFEL informed the structuring of the BIM model at Scott Headquarters. For example, the standards for naming and structure of levels, classes, stories, the definition of the zero point, the handling of data, the wall and door styles, and any symbols used.

The objectives for Scott Headquarters, as with any BIM project, were initially set out in a project delivery plan. With a focus on quality assurance and interdisciplinary coordination, all the 2D documentation was created from the BIM models, along with model-based quantity takeoffs.

What’s the BIM idea?

Vectorworks’ software delivers a flexible design process to architecture, landscaping and entertainment professionals

This article includes portions of the Vectorworks Customer Showcase, collaboration with 3D BIM Models

A smooth data exchange was of the utmost importance throughout the process.

For this, IttenBrechbühl used IFC (SN EN ISO 16739), an open file format that translates data as well as 3D geometry. In an effort to avoid unexpected surprises, IttenBrechbühl’s project team exchanged test files in the IFC format between the different design software used by the consultants involved before the actual planning began.

Tima Kamberi, project manager for Scott Headquarters, defined the objectives of the BIM planning, supervised the process, coordinated the consultants involved and chaired coordination meetings, whilst IttenBrechbühl’s CAD systems administrator Sandro Ryf and associate project manager Susanne Keller handled BIM coordination. Ryf and Keller built the 3D architectural model that provided a reference for the other models for structural analysis, building services, and more.

“I HAVE THE POSSIBILITY TO DESIGN MY OWN ELEMENT FREELY IN 3D”

Sandro Ryf, CAD systems administrator, IttenBrechbühl Ryf sees BIM planning as an absolute advantage, explaining that it allows one to develop projects in a true materialrich 3D model, demanding that designers find spatial solutions for the more complex aspects of a project, something that has traditionally been overlooked in 2D sketching. Both Ryf and Keller utilise Vectorworks 3D design software throughout the BIM process. “I appreciate the freedom of choice that Vectorworks gives me,” says Ryf. “For the ‘special corners’ I have the possibility to use the general modelling tools of Vectorworks

instead of the given parts and to design my own element freely in 3D.” Keller uses Vectorworks alongside Solibri Model Checker and emphasises the benefits of using BIM for checking coordination. “In Solibri Model Checker, our reference model can be merged with the building services and structure models and checked,” she explains. “The automatic collision check provides information for quality improvement. More importantly, I can navigate freely in the project to view the critical areas, check recesses, check heights, and so on.”

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What’s the BIM idea?

With the help of a BIM process, architects at IttenBrechbühl are now re-establishing themselves as directors of a project

“INSTEAD OF PROBLEMS, EVERYONE GOES BACK TO THEIR OFFICES WITH SOLUTIONS. THIS IS A GREAT STEP FORWARD” Susanne Keller,associate project manager, IttenBrechbühl As the project entered the development phase, coordination meetings with engineers took place at regular intervals.

Models, such as the building services model created in the Plancal nova CAD solution and the architectural model created in Vectorworks, were exchanged in IFC format before the meetings so that they could be checked. If the architects detected collisions, inconsistencies, or rule violations between their reference model and the model of the engineers, they were logged using Solibri Model Checker in the BIM Collaboration Format (BCF).

These BCF log files record, among other things, rule violations alongside the affected components, the responsible project teams, 86 3D WORLD

a timeline, and suggestions for solving the issue. IttenBrechbühl’s team sends BCF files to the relevant consultant before the coordination meeting, where they can open the BCF file in their respective BIM software. If, for example, a ventilation shaft and door collide, a consultant can check possible resolutions before the meeting, saving valuable time and allowing the meeting to focus on solutions and decisions.

“Instead of problems, everyone goes back to their offices with solutions. This is a great step forward compared to the past, which makes the project more fluid overall,” explains Keller.

BIM processes are revolutionising the planning, design and construction

of buildings the world over and Scott Headquarters saw IttenBrechbühl win Gold once again at 2017’s Arc Award BIM. From expanding the creativity of designers to streamlining the problem-solving process, the benefits of software like Vectorworks are plentiful and obvious. “BIM has upgraded the work and competence of the draftsman as a whole. Those who model and inform know more about the project than if they drew a 2D plan,” adds Keller.

Christoph Arpagaus, partner and head of the Bern Office at IttenBrechbühl, adds: “We consistently apply the BIM method to all our new buildings because we are convinced that this model of cooperation will become widely accepted.”

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Fay’s home office setup, complete with art inspiration and a furry friend

MEET THE ARTIST

Devon Fay

Creative lead at Riot Games, Devon Fay, chats to us about his career journey and favourite projects – including the hugely popular competitive shooter VALORANT

graduate from the Gnomon School of VFX, Devon Fay started his career at Blizzard Entertainment, working in the film department on projects such as Starcraft II: Wings Of Liberty and World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and later as a matte painting lead for Diablo III. Seeking a new challenge, Fay transferred his focus to real-time environments, joining Neversoft Entertainment and later Infinity Ward as a senior environment artist, working on a variety of games in the renowned Call Of Duty franchise.

Currently he works as a creative lead at Riot Games, and has taken time out of his hectic schedule to answer a few questions about his day-to-day work life, career goals, and favourite projects.

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Do you have a background in 3D design or are you self taught?

I started 3D when I was pretty young, about 10. It was with a program called TrueSpace.

This was before the internet was totally widespread, so I had no information on how to use the program, or what it was even capable of. I basically just clicked every button and read every tooltip until I was able to figure out some really basic workflows, but I didn’t fully understand what I was doing.

From there I kept picking away at 3D, and eventually got the internet and was able to learn much more, including starting to learn Maya. Once I learned Maya I switched from TrueSpace and never looked back. For many years I picked away at personal projects, surfed the internet for information, watched every ‘making of’

special I could find, and even bought books full of tutorials and technical knowledge.

In 2007, I decided to ramp it up and get serious. I took what I learned and applied for the full-time certificate program at The Gnomon School of Visual Effects. That was obviously a HUGE step forward in my education. When you are purely self taught, sometimes you don’t even know the things you don’t know. I learned everything I needed to start working and met so many amazing artists, from the students, to the staff, to the teachers. I will always be grateful for what I learned from Gnomon.

How do you keep things fresh?

I am lucky that I am pretty inspired by sci-fi and fantastical things, like surrealism and fantasy. That’s obviously a pretty broad scope of things to be inspired by, which

leads to a broad scope of things I can try out and experiment with. Let’s take sci-fi as an example, there are so many ways I can approach it. I can approach an image with a ‘retro’ flair, or I can lean more into cyberpunk aesthetics. Those are just two examples of how I could approach a sci-fi image and even within those examples there is no set way to do ‘retro’ or ‘cyberpunk’, so it leaves so much room for experimenting and adding my own style.

Besides that, I have noticed that I tend to work on things that are a little different than what my day to day is at work. So for example, if I am working on some realistic stuff at work, I notice I will lean more towards the fantastical with my personal work and vice versa.

What’s your day-to-day life like?

I think my day to day is probably pretty standard… and pretty boring! In the morning, after my coffee and shower, I usually jump on the computer and start work. Morning standups, catching up on Slack messages and emails, that sort of thing. I usually work until lunch time, where I force myself to get off the PC for a

“I ALWAYS TRY TO MIX REAL-LIFE REFERENCES INTO EVERYTHING I DO… IT REALLY HELPS GROUND THE PIECE” bit and eat. I am lucky to have some space in my backyard that I can hang out in.

I usually spend the lunch break outside eating and watching my cats get into trouble in the backyard. After lunch, it’s back to work, which these days tends to be a lot of meetings and 1 on 1s with my team, as well as working on things like hiring, art direction notes and creative decisions around all things environment art and maps for VALORANT. I rarely get to jump in and do actual art in the maps these days, but I try my best to pick away at smaller aspects when I can.

After work , once again I force myself to get off the PC for a bit, do dinner and try and use the last bit of the light to check on my garden. I don’t have a green thumb, so that’s mostly watching my plants slowly die and trying to figure out why.

After relaxing a bit, I usually jump back on the computer to work on some personal work, which takes a few forms. Either working on some training or tutorials that I am creating, picking away on a new image, or learning some new software or technique. Most recently deep diving into all things Unreal Engine.

If I am not working on personal projects, I am playing video games to unwind.

Usually with some friends. Lately it’s been a lot of VALORANT, League Of Legends or Monster Hunter.

How long have you been creating in 3D and what software do you use?

As I mentioned, I started when I was about 10 years old with TrueSpace 2.0.

So technically I have been making 3D art for almost 25 years now, which is kind of 3D WORLD 89

Meet the artist

crazy. I moved to Maya a long time ago though, and consider it my bread and butter program. I also use a lot of Photoshop, ZBrush, Substance Painter and lately a LOT of Unreal Engine. I have been trying to finish my latest pieces in Unreal, instead of an offline renderer. It’s pretty amazing how much Unreal can do these days.

Walk us through a typical piece, from conception to final render.

Most pieces go through a similar process.

They all start with some inspiration, of course. After that I tend to do a lot of research into what I am making. If it’s a sci-fi piece for example, I start researching moves, shows, and real-life references. I always try to mix real-life references into everything I do, even if it’s science fiction and fantasy. I find it really helps ground the piece and makes it more interesting.

Next, I always try to do a blockout. The blockout is so key, but I tend to mess it up. If figured out at this stage, it makes the rest of the image go so much more smoothly.

“WORKING ON VALORANT HAS BEEN MY DREAM PROJECT… IT’S A GENRE I ABSOLUTELY ADORE”

Examples of Fay’s earliest art from 1999-2000!

90 3D WORLD

Next is asset creation. If the blockout and camera is set, then its head down and get into full-on asset production mode. Usually lots of props and materials. Not all the props are textured perfectly, I cheat where I can.

I use tileable textures a lot, and spend my texture time on the most important props for the scene. I have been using a lot more from Quixel Megascans these days, but I do my best to change it up and make it my own.

After that it’s really about putting it all together. I tend to do lots of small lighting tweaks, and I move things around little by little. Some days the only changes will be slightly moving props around to get just the right composition and amount of detail. The final step is always colour correction and usually edits in Photoshop.

Whether I am doing something large or something small, it’s really always this same process. I have documented the steps in the past for Gnomon, ArtStation, and I have made blog posts and created other articles detailing my process. You can find examples on my website or ArtStation (artstation. com/malibubob).

Can you tell us a bit about your current studio setup?

It’s pretty simple. I am lucky to have my own office space now, which is nice but I

am not sure I am taking full advantage of it. I have my standing desk, which has been a life saver during quarantine life. I have three monitors, with a 144Hz monitor as my main one. It’s not the best for colour, but I really wanted the high refresh rate for VALORANT and other competitive games I play. You have to have your priorities right?

When I am working, the other two monitors usually have reference and some sort of video or movie playing. I personally don’t like using Cintiq, I could never get used to them, so I use my trusty tablet for sculpting and painting. Other than that I have some art around, and of course all my artbooks and references close by.

Lastly I have my TV and consoles set up in my office also. I don’t tend to use them in the office too much however. When I am not working I prefer to be in another room or outside.

How often do you work on your personal portfolio?

It really ebbs and flows, but I try to do about two personal pieces a year these days. That said, the scope of work has gotten a bit smaller for me. I like to do smaller, more detailed pieces, and not so many large environments. I think that’s partly because at work, the scope of the projects is already

MY FAVOURITE PROJECTS

Fay’s fan art of artificial intelligence GLaDOS from Portal 2

pretty large. It’s also because in the past, some of my larger environments took well over six months of regular work to finish, and it really burnt me out. I also like to finish things, I don’t like to start something and not finish it , though I have done that a lot in the past. That’s another huge reason I have been doing smaller projects, you can wrap them up in a reasonable amount of time and actually finish them.

Going forward, is there a dream project you would like to work on?

Professionally? That’s really hard to say.

Honestly having the opportunity to work

on VALORANT has so far been my dream project. The game is really fun, and it’s a genre I absolutely adore: competitive multiplayer FPS. The team I get to work with is also really amazing as well. I personally got to build out the environment art team over the years, so we are a really tight-knit group.

Other than that, I really would love to start a game of my own one day, something small, with a small group of people. I don’t really know what that would be yet, but I think that would be my dream project – creating a game from scratch with a small talented team of friends.

I think my ‘Sci-Fi Alleyway’ [above] will always be my favourite personal project. I poured my heart into that piece, and worked on it for over nine months. I documented and recorded the whole process and turned it into a detailed tutorial for The Gnomon Workshop. It's literally my entire process, every trick I have, every step I take. After creating that, it was hard to get inspired again, because I felt I put so much effort and energy into it.

Professionally, it's easily VALORANT. I started on the team before there was any art at all. I was able to help build a team, and play an integral role in not only the creative decisions for the game, but technical ones as well. Similarly to my ‘Sci-Fi Alleyway’, I poured a lot of my love and energy into helping create VALORANT. I will always look fondly on the early years of R&D, working with a small, tight-knit and talented team with a really clear vision of what we were trying to create.

3D WORLD 91

Cardoso and the team at Saddington Baynes work on imagery for food and beverage products, like this piece for Buchanan’s Two Souls whisky

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN…

Art director

Luis Cardoso, art director at Saddington Baynes, talks 3D World through his daily routine NAME Luis Cardoso JOB TITLE Art director STUDIO Saddington Baynes LOCATION England, UK ABOUT Luis Cardoso bolsters Saddington Baynes’ respected creative team with specialist CGI skills in beauty, luxury goods, and product.

WEB saddingtonbaynes.com 92 3D WORLD

s art director at award-winning production studio Saddington Baynes, Luis Cardoso’s role is to oversee the many artistic aspects of a variety of different projects across a range of creative fields. Here he breaks down a typical work day at the studio, giving an interesting insight into his responsibilities as art director.

A

08:00am After experiencing a four-year stint at Burberry, where I worked on high-end CGI across a variety of luxury products, including cosmetics, fragrances, clothing and accessories, I dare say I have learnt a thing or two from my colleagues about how to maintain a healthy lifestyle routine.

Most notably, I have developed a great appreciation of the benefits of a good night’s sleep, of which the very last few minutes I am enjoying at this time of the day.

09:30am At half nine, it’s time to get to work. I usually start the day by putting some upbeat music on and catching up with incoming emails from the previous day – whilst having my essential morning double espresso, of course. Often, this is the time where I review any feedback on the content shared the night before. As an art director, it’s my job to work closely with clients to make sure the creative strategy conveys the message desired, whilst also respecting the project’s objectives, budget and relevant styles and techniques.

11:00am After gaining a full, clear understanding of the client’s latest review of the work, I will either have already briefed or be in the process of briefing the artists, including myself, on what needs to be addressed. At Saddington Baynes, I’m lucky enough to count on a team of creative wizards to get the job done.

13:00pm Our London office is based right in between Clerkenwell and Kings Cross St. Pancras.

In a pre-COVID world, lunch breaks often meant gastronomic adventures in one of the many restaurants the neighbourhood has to offer, followed by another essential mid-day double espresso.

Nowadays, it means a quick trip to my kitchen fridge, or to my local

A day in the life

THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Luis Cardoso discusses his journey from student to art director and shares his advice Can you tell us about your journey through the CG industry?

I started working with images at a young age when I joined the family business to help in the administration of a photography lab, which sadly wasn’t doing great due to the growing digital overtake. The experience led me to the Technical School of Image and Communication in Lisbon, where I graduated in TV/video directing. After operating as a cameraman for a while, I started working at an advertising agency as a videographer and CG artist. From there, I decided to work on portfolio images, mostly for practice purposes. Those images went down really well in various CGI community forums. That popularity eventually earned me an invitation to come to work in London.

shop, nonetheless followed by another essential mid-day double espresso.

15:00pm After lunch, I’ll either be busy in a meeting or getting as much work done as possible before our daily internal review at 5pm. The great thing about Saddington Baynes is that even though I am the art director – and therefore responsible for overseeing the artistic aspects of the CGI produced in-house – my role is also very hands-on, from modelling to UVing, texturing, shading and lighting. I also use this time of the day to share some of my knowledge with the artists and help them overcome any challenges they may be facing with a particular project.

17:00pm This is the time of the day for the final touches, where I make sure everything is ready or at least in a good position for our internal review.

Then, I check in with other department heads to discuss any additional client requirements to coordinate creative activities. It is crucial that the overall visual style of the project communicates the right message. Having an in-house testing tool such as Engagement Insights® helps me guarantee that

the creative direction is accurate by measuring the emotional impact of the imagery on consumers.

17:30pm After the internal review with our creative director, I make eventual last-minute changes to the projects and organise everything for packaging before sending it all off to the producers. As the job title suggests, they are responsible for managing the project across the different teams at Saddington Baynes, making sure it is delivered to the client according to plan.

A beautiful CG art piece designed to express the brand values of Estée Lauder’s Night Repair range

What advice would you give to those just starting a career in CG? Experimenting was very important to me when I was just starting in the industry. Trying out new techniques helped me to develop solutions that I later used in client projects. Of course, it depends on where you’re looking to be in the future, whether that’s in a specific role within a VFX pipeline or a generalist.

Personally, I’ve always found it to be incredibly rewarding to work on a personal project and be able to model, texture and light a CGI piece realistically.

What qualities, skills and abilities are essential to being an art director?

Naturally, you have to be highly creative, have a thorough understanding of visual techniques and a great eye for detail. A CGI art director is someone that looks after the lookdev, the artistic style and the quality of the visuals. In my opinion, lighting skills are very important for the role.

Because you will be relying on a team of artists, being able to work well as part of a group, with a range of people, is crucial. Also, make sure your computer skills are up to date with relevant art and design tools. Last but not least, be open to other people’s point of view and know how to cope with feedback – be it positive or negative.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I love what I do and the variety of challenging but beautiful imagery I get to work on, such as for luxury brands Bremont and Graff Diamonds, to cosmetics including Estée Lauder and Jo Malone London, and beverage brands like Buchanan’s Whisky. It all differs from project to project!

3D WORLD 93

Supportive, comfortable and hard wearing, the T-Pro 2 is a fantastic chair for all desk work

We explore the latest software and hardware tools to see if they are worth your time or money

AUTHOR PROFILE Rob Redman 3D World’s Rob Redman is a veteran 3D artist and creative director of a boutique studio, working across film, games, TV and print. He was a 3D artist on the Webbywinning Plot Device. pariahstudios.co.uk

FEATURES Excellent levels of adjustment Separate pads for neck and lumbar support Smooth breathable fabrics

BUILD YOUR DREAM SEAT The AndaSeat T-Pro 2 comes flat packed, but they do supply all the tools needed to put it together. The instructions are clear and it only takes a few minutes to go through the process. It’s an easy build, everything fits perfectly and there are no leftover parts that can so often make you question your abilities!

94 3D WORLD

T-Pro 2 Series gaming chair STUDIO EQUIPMENT REVIEW

T

PRICE £399.99 | COMPANY AndaSeat | WEBSITE andaseat.com

here are many things that gamers and 3D artists have in common, but the obvious one is that both activities dictate long stretches sitting in one place staring at screens, along with the associated aches and pains that ensue.

Office chairs of various kinds have been around forever, but in recent years it’s the hardcore PC gaming fraternity that have pushed the technology and design of these seats and many are looking at them for other purposes, from around the board table to indie studios.

What has previously been prohibitively expensive for some has now dropped in price to a point where a good

chair is affordable, and that is where AndaSeat come in.

The T-Pro 2 chair is designed for stability and comfort no matter the length of session. The metal frame makes it robust and strong enough for a 200kg weight capacity, which only drops to 150kg when in its rocker mode.

The broad shoulder supports come into their own here too.

Rocker mode is smooth and controllable, as is the fully reclined mode, which is less likely to be used while animating but nice to have if you like to take regular breaks.

The T-Pro 2 is versatile, with a range of arm adjustments for height, angle and distance.

Lumbar and neck support are good too. The pads for this are separate, so easy to adjust

for a natural fit. Stability is excellent with the five-point star base joining the chair at just the right position so you feel confident it won’t tip.

The range of colours available is small but they are all fairly neutral, so it is easy to find one that fits your space. The cloth is smooth, comfortable and hard wearing, as is the rest of the chair. The control handles under the seat all feel firm and positive with good levels of resistance, which add to the premium feel.

The AndaSeat T-Pro 2 is well made, adaptable and, most importantly, comfortable. All in all it’s a fantastic seat, and ideal if you spend extended periods at your desk/table.

VERDICT

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