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ISSUE 277
Turn to page 34 for our chat with Pixar on their stunning new film, Luca
WELCOME There can’t be a single 3D artist or animator out there who doesn’t love a good Pixar movie, which is why this issue we dive deep into the world of Luca, to find out how the team behind the magic put together this spectacular film. If you are more of a sci-fi fanatic who wants to create worlds of your own, then head to our Launcher tutorial on page 64, which will have you doing the city planning of the future in no time. Blender is continuing its surge of popularity too, so grab your copy then follow along as veteran artist Glen Southern shows you how to master the dark arts of the polygon, step by step, in his 3D recreation of a classic Disney character, over on page 56. In recent months a number of new graphics cards have hit the market, so I take a look at AMD’s flagship on page 92 to see if it fits the bill for a VFX workstation (spoiler alert – it does).
Rob Redman, Editor rob.redman@futurenet.com
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CONTENTS 3D WORLD ISSUE 277
ARTIST SHOWCASE
8 The Gallery
Discover the best digital art from the CG community
44 Tech Focus: Environment design
Cem Tezcan discusses the techniques behind his 3D collectibles render
54 Tech Focus: Real-time environments
Discover how Mustafa Hussein ensured his scene had a cohesive and grounded feel
62 Tech Focus: Scattering a forest
Amir Mohammad Nabavi takes us through how he brought two of his ideas together to create a harmonious image
76 Tech Focus: Hard-surface modelling
How Mats De Graaf created this Blade Runner prop with only minimal reference
FEATURES
22 Blue Zoo – Part 3: Animation and storytelling on a budget
34
This month, in part 3 of our series, we chat to two directors of children’s TV about the challenges that need to be overcome when telling engaging stories through animation
34 Luca
Pixar shares the secrets behind the amazing underwater visuals of its latest film, Luca
46 Intergalactic prison break Milk VFX takes us behind the scenes of sci-fi drama Intergalactic and its outerspace worlds
THE PIPELINE
56 Sculpt fan art in Blender Glen Southern teaches us top techniques for polygon modelling characters
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64 Design an urban city scene Build an impressive city render with Mohsen Hashemi’s guide
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70 Your CG problems solved Pro artists tackle your queries
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78 PURE4D: Game-changing facial animation
Discover this cutting-edge facial capture technology
82 Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn returns
We get the lowdown from THU’s founder on this year’s event
88 Aardman Academy
Head of department at Aardman Academy talks training students with a passion for stop motion
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92 AMD Radeon Pro W6800 We test and review this workstation graphics card
94 Adobe Substance Collection
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3D WORLD 7
The best digital art from the CG community
SMOKING PIRATE ARTIST Nikolay Kvartnikov SOFTWARE Daz Studio, Marvelous Designer, Blender, Quixel Megascans, Photoshop
Nikolay Kvartnikov works as an art director and CG artist at Fiero Animals, a creative retouching and CGI studio. To celebrate his second anniversary of giving up smoking, Kvartnikov decided to make this personal project for the studio’s portfolio. “Sculpting was the main challenge on this project,” Kvartnikov tells 3D World, “but drawing 08 3D WORLD
maps and creating materials is one of my favourite things to do.” At first, all of the clothing was sewn onto an ordinary character model, before an additional simulation was made on the skeleton to achieve the characteristic folds. “Everything went with varying success,” Kvartnikov continues, “some details were quick, but the boots and hat turned out with three or four passes. It was constantly necessary to look for new patterns.” Alongside this, Kvartnikov was learning to sculpt in Blender before beginning to work on the jewellery and bones.
Kvartnikov found it convenient to manually paint the model, drawing masks for the dirt and scuffs. “The big plus was Eevee because of all the scratches on the belts and metal,” he adds, “textures are displayed immediately and you don’t need to wait for the noise of the render to dissipate. Both the sculpting and the models could be immediately evaluated with materials and light.” Classical art has always been an inspiration to Kvartnikov and he presented this image in the form of a classic portrait of the 17th century, where characters in bright clothes will usually sit on a dark or contrasting background with one main light source. fieroanimals.com
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CG art to inspire
-RONINARTIST Maarten Verhoeven SOFTWARE ZBrush, KeyShot, Photoshop
Freelance ZBrush artist and digital concept sculptor Maarten Verhoeven spent two days sculpting this impressive character. Verhoeven derived a lot of pleasure from working on the overall theme of the piece. “I wanted to add extra character traits in how I sculpted him,” he tells 3D World. A background in art means that Verhoeven can handle different aspects of production, from concept and sculpting to compositing and colour grading. These days he works as a freelance ZBrush artist, contributing his talents worldwide to various companies, publications and projects. The most important technique in Verhoeven’s creative process on this particular piece was the use of ZBrush’s Sculptris Pro feature for sculpting the character’s expressive face and hair. This forced Verhoeven to keep his polycount low throughout the sculpting process. “I like to work rough and limit myself to simple sculpting tools,” he explains. “I always say, use Sculptris Pro and three brushes and you should be able to get 99% of all the sculpting jobs done. Start rough and just keep refining the basic shapes, it’s not about details but bigger forms.” When it comes to inspiration, Verhoeven says that he finds it in everything across foreign cultures, myths and history. instagram.com/maarten_mutte_verhoeven
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CG art to inspire
GALAD
ARTIST Vikas Kumar Prajapati SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Arnold, Photoshop
Vikas Kumar Prajapati is a senior game artist at Lakshya Digital. “I was watching The Lord Of The Rings and got the idea to create an elf character,” he explains. “There are a lot of images of elves on the internet. I used them to understand the basic features but tried to make my own unique design.” Galad was modelled and sculpted from scratch in ZBrush, Prajapati giving his full attention to the forms and features before breaking the details into layers. “I like this piece because it is a strong character with a simple design,” he adds. “I loved the forms of the head and antlers.” Prajapati created every detail from scratch in ZBrush: “I created VDM brushes for
horns, spikes and damaged skin to show mutant skin details. For the rest of the details, I used default ZBrush brushes and alphas.” He then decimated the model and brought it into Maya. To introduce the cavity and wax information that gives the character its statuesque aesthetic, Prajapati created a standard surface shader in Arnold with an aiCurvature node plugged into the diffuse and subsurface mask. “Finally, I added some drama with one main light and one rim light. Light plays the most important role in this piece.” vikas_prajapati.artstation.com 3D WORLD 11
CG art to inspire
HOWL PENDRAGON FROM HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE
ARTIST Layla Viscu SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, V-Ray, After Effects
3D look development artist Layla Viscu spent around three weeks of free time recreating this character from Studio Ghibli’s 2D animated classic Howl’s Moving Castle. “My favourite part of any project that involves the translation of a 2D artwork into 3D is finding the physical characteristics of the character,” Viscu explains. “This is when my knowledge of anatomy and understanding of underlying skeletal structure comes into play.” Hair creation proved to be a particularly challenging aspect of the project for Viscu. In order to create the hair in ZBrush she utilised Marthin Agusta Simny’s Hair Clump & Hair Detail brush, available for free on Gumroad. “This brush allows you to easily manipulate individual tubes of hair, so you can have full control of the silhouette and shapes of your character’s hairstyle.” Once she is satisfied with the character’s anatomy, pose, silhouette language etc, Viscu uses a ‘70% rule.’ “It means that instead of trying to get my artwork to look perfect I get it to the point where I am 70% satisfied with the look, and then I move on,” she continues. “When I personally got introduced to this idea for the first time the way I treated my art changed completely. Always remember, finished, not perfect.” Viscu’s inspiration largely comes from studying other artists and their work. “It so happened that I surrounded myself with a lot of creative people in life, so I’ve never really asked myself where my inspiration comes from, it is always in the air around me. Very neat, don’t you think?” laylaviscu.artstation.com 12 3D WORLD
CG art to inspire
UNDERGROUND KINGDOM ARTIST Hans Park SOFTWARE Unreal Engine, Photoshop
Senior concept artist at Sucker Punch Productions, Hans Park initially struggled to find the right mood and lighting direction for his underground kingdom. “I spent a couple of days setting up the base 3D blockouts with light and mood in Unreal Engine 4, and then spent a couple more days polishing it by digital painting,” he tells 3D World. Park was conscious of the number of ruin and forbidden temple concepts that are seen across the digital art community. “The most challenging and enjoyable thing was how I could figure out the distinguishing point from others to present a unique and enjoyable experience to the audience,” he adds. “I always try to stand on realism at the starting point of creating concepts, and then think about how I could bring up my own approach to make the scene unique.” Exploring localised volumetric fog in Unreal Engine was another highlight for Park. Although Unreal has a global atmospheric fog system of its own, Park wanted to add localised fog to certain areas of the scene. “I was using Exponential Height Fog for the overall effect of the scene, and for certain areas in which I want to add more fog shapes I created a texture card by creating a custom shader.” Stunning lighting is Park’s biggest artistic inspiration. “I like to see how the changing light colour affects the shadow colour, how the skylight affects ground colour and local colour. Artwork that catches my eye usually presents beautiful lighting and a realistic mood.” hanspark.artstation.com
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CG art to inspire
I ALWAYS TRY TO STAND ON REALISM AT THE STARTING POINT, AND THEN THINK ABOUT HOW I COULD BRING UP MY OWN APPROACH TO MAKE THE SCENE UNIQUE 3D WORLD 15
CG art to inspire
THE
FOREST HOUSE
ARTIST Julien Rollin SOFTWARE Maya, Substance Painter, V-Ray, Snapseed
CG student and artist Julien Rollin took time to find the mood of this fun environment, spending a week on the project. “I took a lot of time on lighting to avoid doing something too typical of the sunset very present in stylised renders,” he explains. The model and textures were created by 3D artist Nina Pal. Rollin took a unique approach to compositing his Forest House, opting to use Snapseed, a complete photo editing app developed by Google. “I wanted to try some new techniques. I didn't have my computer one day and I tried to composite with my phone to see what was possible. The decrease in image quality due to this application is normally a huge constraint, that's why nobody does it, but this project was basically intended for a phone wallpaper and Instagram publication. Honestly, I was quite surprised by the result, beyond doing classic colour grading, you can push detailed editing with very nice features.” Rollin adds that people even asked if he’d used Nuke to render the piece. The project provided Rollin with a way to test different lighting and he took the rare liberty of detaching himself from his reference imagery. “For me, the most difficult part is to keep my own creativity and add the technical side. When I want to push the technique, I focus more on the reproduction of the reference and forget about creating what I really want and expressing myself.” instagram.com/syntax3d 16 3D WORLD
CG art to inspire
18 3D WORLD
CG art to inspire
IN CREATING THIS IMAGE I WANTED TO CAUSE FEELINGS OF HOME COMFORT, NOSTALGIA AND DAYS GONE BY. THERE WAS BRIGHT LIFE, BUT IT IS IN THE PAST
RUSSIAN APARTMENT ARTIST Mikhail Beresten SOFTWARE Unreal Engine 4, Blender, Substance Painter, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer
Environment and level artist Mikhail Beresten spent four months experimenting with master materials, physically based rendering, lighting and other details for this photorealistic apartment. Currently studying at university in Khabarovsk, Russia, Beresten’s aim is to create his own game titled Relieve, and this environment is a small part of that. “In creating this image I wanted to cause feelings of home comfort, nostalgia and days gone by. There was bright life, but it is in the past,” he reveals. Beresten recounts his pipeline by dividing his assets into four groups: furniture, cloth, modules and small assets. For almost all of the furniture in
the apartment, he utilised trim sheets. “The essence of the method is that you can use the same texture multiple times for different objects,” he adds. “For interesting variations of wooden materials and dividing furniture into Soviet and modern styles, I implemented a material function that controls saturation, brightness, and contrast of albedo. Also, I made simple roughness and specular control.” Cloth meshes were simulated in Marvelous Designer and finalised in ZBrush. After sculpting some wrinkles, Beresten made low-poly versions of clothes and baked all wrinkles to normal map in Substance Painter. “To create walls, ceiling and floors I modelled structures in Blender and assembled them in Unreal Engine. All modules use tileable textures. I also added dirt blending through vertex painting to get more irregular surfaces.” daemoon.artstation.com 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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THE CHAMELEON ARTIST Lee Jia Min LOCATION Singapore I am a student from Think Tank Training Centre, and my dream is to become a texture artist for film and TV.
SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Mari, V-Ray, Nuke YEAR CREATED 2019
I wanted to push my modelling skills and I thought a reptilian creature would be a good way to challenge myself in ZBrush. I noticed that most reptiles people chose to create in CG were dinosaurs or dragons, so I wanted to try something a little unique and I thought the chameleon would be a great idea! www.artstation.com/leejiamin
Part three of our in-depth series on Blue Zoo focuses on animating for storytelling amidst the realities of production at an animation studio nimation is storytelling, from character rigging to a simple walk cycle and the most explosive of action, everything in animation helps to tell a story. Nowhere is this more true than at Blue Zoo. If you’ve been following 3D World’s in-depth series on the UK animation studio you’ll know that story is at the heart of everything they do. In this third instalment of our Blue Zoo series, we’ll be diving into the animation process, with a focus on the studio’s
A
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long-form children’s series. We sat down with directors to find out how popular shows like Pip And Posy, The Adventures Of Paddington, Go Jetters and Digby Dragon are animated, as well as how the team overcomes the numerous hurdles involved in production.
THE ANIMATION PROCESS
Matt Tea is the series director of Pip And Posy, Blue Zoo’s animated series for three to five-year-olds based on the popular series of picture books by Axel Scheffler and Camilla Reid. Having joined
Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
Above: The Adventures Of Paddington is co-produced by StudioCanal and Heyday Films Below: Numberblocks is a BAFTA-winning hit TV series that teaches children how numbers work
#3 ANIMATION AND STORYTELLING ON A BUDGET
Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
PLAN OF ANIMATION MATT TEA, DIRECTOR OF PIP AND POSY AND
EXPERIENCED BLUE ZOO ANIMATOR, SHARES HIS ADVICE FOR ANIMATED STORYTELLING When we tackle things in-house less is more. Don't overcomplicate things, don't try and do more than is necessary. It's very easy, especially in 3D when you can do crazy camera moves and duplicate rigs, but do you need to? Is this camera move adding anything? It’s very easy to get carried away and do stuff just because you can when it comes to animating. Do you need five poses? Can you do this in two poses? Can you do it in one really strong pose? The less you do the more polished you can make it, the more focused you can be and typically that's always going to make a better end result. You see a lot of animation reels where it's over complicated and in regards to storytelling and animation, if you've got the time to make it really complicated then fine, but my advice would be that less is more. Know what you're trying to achieve as well. It's very easy to just jump in and try to do something out of nothing. I think it’s incredibly challenging if you don't know what it is you're trying to get out of it. You need a road map. Without that, I don't think you're ever going to get to that endpoint where you feel happy that you've achieved what you want.
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Blue Zoo as an animator in 2007 and worked on shows like Digby Dragon and Go Jetters, Tea is perfectly placed to discuss animation, storytelling and the various challenges they present. “My main role is a problem solver,” he explains to 3D World. “Everyone is so capable. They bring their skills and talents to every department they work in. My main job is to steer the show.” Steering the show, of course, involves overseeing the animation process. “It all starts with an animatic,” says Tea. Whilst Blue Zoo’s 2D animation requires tighter storyboards with ironedout beats, 3D allows animators more room to iterate and put their own stamp on a project. “We want to make sure that it’s invoking the right emotions, it’s engaging, the timing, the pacing, everything we need needs to be there.” The
Above: Pip And Posy is a series for 3-5 year olds based on the popular picture books by Axel Scheffler and Camilla Reid Top right: The Adventures Of Paddington follows a young Paddington as he writes letters to his Aunt Lucy celebrating things he discovers Right: Blue Zoo was entrusted by Dick Bruna’s family estate to launch the animated series of his children’s classic Miffy
Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
“WE ALWAYS PUT CHARACTERS AND STORY AT THE FOREFRONT OF EVERYTHING WE DO” Matt Tea, series director, Blue Zoo storyboard is handed over to the animators who begin plotting out the performances and polishing the animatic. “If you’ve got a really tight automatic, you’re only going to make it better,” adds Tea. Blue Zoo use a visual storytelling pre-production tool called PanelForge to create their storyboards, a tool that Tea finds invaluable to the animation process. “It allows us to use 3D sets, we can draw as many as we’d like to do, kind of like 3D layouts with rough character models,” he adds. “We can move everything
characters and environments and creates the right shots and durations. Then they polish it and work it up.” “The animation process generally starts with briefing the animation director and animators who go through the animatic and break it down,” he continues, “typically we’ll have design locked down. But sometimes during the storyboarding process things will change and suddenly you have to think on your feet and change things around.” From here animation continues, with the animation director reviewing key poses to make sure that storytelling and performances are strong before the animators move onto a blocking stage where they add any extra information prior to another review. “The next stage is final animation,” Tea explains, “which is where I tend to step in and review it, just to make sure that everything we need is there. Most of the team do such solid work that my notes are more making sure the story beats have been executed really well. I don’t tend to find myself commenting on animation at all.” With the director’s reviews complete, Blue Zoo shares the project with the broadcaster or client to get their thoughts and feedback. After implementing any changes the animation team will pass the project down the line to effects, if necessary, and then on to compositing.
ANIMATING WITH STYLE
Each animated show Blue Zoo produces has its own unique
around as we go through and draw over it.” Despite PanelForge’s editing capabilities, the team will export the storyboard panels and give them to the editor who works in industry-standard video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro. “They also export out all the XML data from the edit and the PanelForge software,” says Tea, “and together that allows the layout artist basically to rebuild shots from PanelForge using the timing and editing from Premiere. They work together seamlessly so in Maya it brings in all the 3D WORLD 25
visual style that informs the story, the characters and the world they inhabit. These styles often stem from early conversations about the show and its design. “Pip And Posey and The Adventures Of Paddington, they’re both very tactile worlds that we wanted to create. They’ve got a unique aesthetic where you feel like you can feel it and touch it.” Chris Drew, director of The Adventures Of Paddington, recalls Blue Zoo’s initial pitch to work on the show, for which they made clear their desire to homage the past, particularly the 1976 series written by Michael Bond and 26 3D WORLD
directed an vor Wood. “Adam Shaw, one of the founders of Blue Zoo, was very attached to Paddington. It was an important part of his younger life,” Drew explains, “that’s the Paddington we grew up with outside of the books. So we definitely wanted to keep that in place.” Despite their charming aesthetics these original animations were somewhat limited and were produced very quickly. “We wanted to get that illustrative look to the backgrounds but have tactile 3D characters. Shows we’d been
Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
doing previously, Digby Dragon and Miffy, they were trying to get that stop-frame and tactile feel. So when Paddington came along, it was the perfect excuse to take everything we’d learnt,” adds Drew. All of Paddington’s sets are in fact 3D, with 2D shaders giving the illusion of illustration. This allows the team to move the camera freely, giving the show a dynamic, modern-day feel despite its traditional influences. To replicate the look of traditional stop-motion animation in 3D requires Blue Zoo’s animators to work in what they call stepped animation. “Stepped can mean we will have more freedom. It’s still trying to keep that stopmotion aesthetic but not having the rule of it has to be on twos,” Tea explains. When it comes to Pip And Posy, Tea and his team stick to animating on twos, meaning they animate every other frame, producing 12 frames per second instead of 24, perfectly replicating traditional stop-motion animation. Stepped animation, on the other hand, allows animators to replicate the stop-motion aesthetic whilst retaining the freedom to break down each shot and decide which frame rate works best. Stepped animation may sound like a simple solution to the artistic and technical challenge of digitally homaging stop-motion, but it comes with its own set of hurdles for the Blue Zoo team to overcome. “It’s definitely very complex when it comes to interacting with props, you’ve got to make sure that it
Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
doesn’t feel too clunky,” says Tea, “working in the stepped animation style can get a bit janky. Cheating things across motion helps us a lot because just seeing the physicality of contact is always a bit of a faff.” The challenges don’t start and end there, however. Moving the camera around a scene involving stepped animation causes strobing, bright flashes of light that distort the picture, a result of the camera moving as the characters remain stationary for a frame. “You need to problem-solve around that,” adds Tea, “which sometimes means just animating the character on twos, but globally moving them on ones so they move seamlessly with the camera. Sometimes it’s just animating the whole character on singles because you can’t get around it.” Things become especially challenging when effects are involved. “Effects do not like working with stepped animation styles,” Tea continues, “normally what an effects artist would do is spline the effects or do a simulation and convert it to be on twos as well. But for things like water, that doesn’t always work and can feel quite clunky. When it comes to effects we sometimes break the rules of staying in stepped animation, it means sometimes going on singles just to help the effects and animation work seamlessly together.”
ANIMATING ON A BUDGET
Even as one of the UK’s leading animation studios, Blue Zoo still needs to contend with the stark realities of production, including budget, deadlines and the marketplace. “I don’t think there’s any project ever that’s had money left over at the end,” Drew reflects, “it all gets spent somewhere. You want to make sure you use that resource as much as possible. When it comes to budget you just have to be aware, every step of the way, what you can achieve and how well you can achieve it.” He adds that the size of a budget is no barrier to making great art as long as you remember to keep that in mind. “Always reach for the stars, even if you only get to the moon, at least you’ve made it to the moon.” 28 3D WORLD
“EVERY SINGLE FRAME SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING, BE WORTH SOMETHING… IT’S GOT TO HAVE A POINT”
Chris Drew, series director, Blue Zoo
Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
Numberblocks helps children understand numbers by visually making sense of how they work When one of the Numberblocks jumps on top of another, they add up to make a new character and a new number A challenge on Numberblocks was character rigs that needed to transform into any block formation and allow room for animators to add performance
At the forefront of solutions to the issue of budget, and many other potential problems, is meticulous planning. “When we get that first script in we’re thinking about everything down the line,” explains Tea. “What could possibly go wrong? How’s this going to impact this department or that department? We involve all of our staff. For me it’s all about working collaboratively.” This forethought extends to the storyboarding process. “We always try and imagine how much work is involved,” says Drew, “how can we get this done well? I’d rather have a lovely headshot of Paddington than a rushed six shot of everybody. It’s about picking your battles.” Another solution is compromise. Despite its negative connotations, compromise can lead to moments of artistic inspiration. “There’s always compromise all the way along,” adds Drew, “it’s just knowing what you can or can’t achieve, where you can reuse props, where you can reuse character designs, where you if you can reuse animation. We have an episode coming out that requires Paddington to march in rhythm and there’s a lot of it. It’s not easy stuff to do. The good thing is we can reuse stuff. You cheat a cycle, you can dirty it up so it’s not exactly the same all the time, you can add a pause or a head turn, or move an arm, little tricks like that. All of a sudden you’ve got a lot of footage and a lot less work.” Tea is equally enthusiastic about the benefits of creative compromise when it comes to navigating the realities of production. “We always have to find creative solutions to tackling problems. That’s what I think the teams at Blue Zoo are amazing at because everyone’s passionate
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Blue Zoo: Animation and storytelling on a budget
about the jobs they do. When we do that it’s about going back to the story. Do we need to show all these crazy waterfalls to tell the story? Do we need to have it in every shot or shall we just focus on one big effect shot? Is throwing all this stuff into the story making it better? And working with the teams, the broadcasters and the clients, making sure they’re happy. I find that most people are happy to problem solve and discover solutions together.” Drew actually sees limitation, whether it be budget, deadline or something else altogether, as an important part of the creative process. “I like the fact we’ve been told no, you can’t do this and it’s like, well, actually we could,” he explains. “There’s an episode in season one of Paddington where he has to dig to Peru. In the script Paddington’s digging in a tunnel and there was no real way that we could do it. We went backwards and forwards, we re-boarded and then we had a lightbulb moment. We said, well, we can do it in 2D. We can cheat it but we’ll get the idea across.”
NEVERENDING STORY
Regardless of all the technical, artistic and production challenges involved, animation at Blue Zoo is ultimately guided by character and story. “Animators are basically shy actors,” says Tea, “I’m not the kind that could get on a stage and act but I think most animators in their heart are people that
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Below: Go Jetters is an action-packed geography show with characters that explore the world
enjoy performance. We always put the characters and story at the forefront of everything we do. The animation needs to be a continuation of that.” As a director, Tea likes to ensure animators are thinking about character whenever they work on a shot, considering how each character would likely react and behave in any situation. This character-focused approach to animation helps Blue Zoo to create more believable and powerful shows, thus forming a strong connection with their audience. “Our audiences are quite perceptive,” adds Tea, “they pick up on things. We’ve done things where something would be a little bit different and they’ll tell you that they didn’t understand that, ‘why did that character do this? They never do that!’ It’s quite impressive that a four or five-year-old has picked up on that. They invest very
heavily in these characters and the worlds we build so you need to make sure you stick true to that.” “It takes a lot of time, effort and money to get a single frame on the screen,” continues Drew, “so that framing should mean something, it should be worth something. If it’s just a headshot of someone turning and talking, it’s got to have a point. Although we have all our colours, our animation, everything else, at the end of the day, if you don’t understand why you’re having this shot, then it’s failed.” With a character as limited in facial expression as Paddington, Drew and his team are adept at telling a story with every minute detail. “When we have our animation meetings we will ask, what’s he doing? Why is he doing it? It’s all very well for a character to turn around and pick up a pencil. But if a character turns,
THE GOLDEN RULES THE ADVENTURES OF PADDINGTON DIRECTOR
1.
CHRIS DREW SHARES HIS TOP TIPS FOR CREATING YOUR OWN ANIMATIONS
MAKE US BELIEVE
One thing that I find we talk about a lot with animation at Blue Zoo is thought process. Make us believe that the pencil you're moving across the table is moving with a purpose. That's the secret, I think, to all animation. You can animate anything, but unless you believe it's alive then animation is just moving stuff, you have to bring life to something. So it's making sure that every time you move something it's got a reason, it's got a point, it's driving towards something. Even if it's just because a character is bored and they’re just reaching to the TV control unit, at least get across in the thought process that look before they move. You have to be able to hear the gears turning.
picks up a pencil and just starts using it, why are they picking the pencil up?” he asks. “I think one of the things that makes Paddington so successful is that we go for thought process. We always have him think before he does something. That’s where the storytelling comes from. Because you now know Paddington wants the pencil because he needs to write a letter really quickly.” The simple act of Paddington looking hurriedly for a pencil injects a small amount of story into the scene, reinforcing what happened previously and what comes after. “Every moment you’re in character,” adds Drew, “every single frame if possible. As much as we can within our budget, because by doing so, the better the show is overall.” more info on Blue Zoo visit FYI For www.blue-zoo.co.uk
Above: The Adventures Of Paddington’s animation style homages the work of Ivor Wood, who animated the 1976 series Actor Ben Whishaw reprises his role as Paddington Bear from the two Paddington films in The Adventures Of Paddington series
The Adventures Of Paddington was something of a passion project for Adam Shaw, one of Blue Zoo’s founders
2.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
3.
ASK FOR HELP
Limit your ideas. Sometimes, with budget and time, we've only got 120 frames for a shot and we have to get across the fact that someone's picking something up and giving it to somebody else. Within that, sometimes animators will put in loads of great ideas and tiny bits and pieces. Keeping it simple is really important. To be able to sit back from your work and objectively look at it and say, ‘there's too much going on here. I know I've got nine great ideas but I'm going to use the two that I need, understand why I need those two, give them context, and the other seven I’ll save for the next shot or the next film.’ You’ve got those ideas still, they've not gone away. But for now, understand the motivation. Understand why you’re doing this and pick the best thing to do it with because it's about storytelling. It's all about storytelling, so keep it nice and simple. If you are working on a project and you do need help, ask for it. Don’t just think, ‘oh my god I've got to get this right. I don't know what to do,’ and end up with a slew of notes. If you've been asked to do something that's too complicated, whether you’re a junior or not, let people know that you need some help with something. If you've been asked to do something that's just not possible with the rig or the time you've been given to do it in, or if you just don't understand exactly why you're doing a shot, just ask. There's nothing wrong with that. You'll never learn if you don't ask. Just make sure you ask your director, you ask your animation lead or animation director, your producer, someone else on your team, whoever you need. Never be afraid to ask to get some help, because at the end of the day the show's got to look good.
3D WORLD 31
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Luca concept art courtesy of Pixar
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Luca
“The colour of the Mediterranean water is so incredibly deep and gorgeous. When you dive under, it has these beautiful aqua tones that we had to capture,” notes production designer Daniela Strijleva 34 3D WORLD
CAT
3D World takes a journey above and below water as Pixar shares insights into the creation of its new feature film, Luca 3D WORLD 35
Luca
hen a fantasy movie strikes a chord it’s usually because it succeeds in weaving a thread of reality through the escapism and visual spectacle of it all. Luca takes a story of friendship and places it within the genre of a richly imagined fantasy tale and to begin the process of drawing these two worlds together, the team working on Luca embarked on a research process that included an exploration of Italian myths, legends and lore – from tales of dragons to the story of a bellringing octopus that saved a village from a band of pirates. “Some of these tales were actually made up by fishermen,” says the film’s director Enrico Casarosa. “They’d find a great fishing spot, and they didn’t want anyone to take it over, so they’d make up scary stories.” To create the look of the sea monsters, artists studied medieval depictions of such creatures that appeared in the Carta Marina – a Renaissance map dating back to 1539 – as well as sea monster sculptures throughout Italy, seen on fountains and benches, and even mosaicked on the ground. “I really wanted these designs to be unique, a departure from their medieval depictions,” says Deanna
Marsigliese, the film’s art director. “However, I also wanted to stay true to their decorative origins. You’ll notice beautiful, irregular scale patterns – as if carved by hand. You’ll see different kinds of facial fins, scalloped crests, sharp spines and webbing, and curlicues within the tails. And as our sea monsters age, these features only grow bigger and bolder. They’re beautiful creatures and combined with their iridescence and gorgeous colours, could pass for pieces of costume jewellery.” Colour and shading art director Chia-Han Jennifer Chang adds that, “On all of the sea creatures, we played with lots of patterns 36 3D WORLD
like scallops with their scales. They have a handmade quality. In terms of colour, they represent the Mediterranean sea – the blues and turquoises – with an iridescent quality.” Chang says the sea monster colour palette is as bold and saturated as that of the human world, “but on the opposite side of the spectrum.” According to character supervisor Sajan Skaria, the sea monsters’ hair paddles were complex. “It’s the sea monster version of hair, “ he says. “They’re individually modelled and they move around.” Since the animation team had no reference footage of real sea monsters to help establish
how Luca and his underwater family would move, they pulled reference footage of salt-water iguanas. “We looked at how their tails move when they swim,” says animation supervisor Michael Venturini. “Iguanas use their tails in a left-right pattern, not up and down like a dolphin, and their arms and legs drag behind while they swim.” The iguanas, however, didn’t wear clothing, so filmmakers had to figure out how to dress the sea monsters in a way that fit their environment. According to simulation supervisor Henry Garcia, his team worked closely with the character department
Above: The film conjures a sense of place that’s marked by the influence of both anime and Japanese woodblock design
to get it right. “The sea monsters make their clothing out of seaweed, so it’s like woven kelp, with almost fringe-like bits all over that move as they float and swim,” says Garcia. “We actually have to move it around, so there are a lot 3D WORLD 37
VISUALISING THE SEABED
Sets art director Paul Abadilla explains that, “The underwater world shape language is mostly round, curvy, and organic. For example, the way vegetation is dressed around the home is motivated by wavy water currents. We don’t see rectilinear shapes until we go to Portorosso.” Beyond Luca’s abode, says Abadilla, is the meadow, which plays an important role. “The underwater meadow is really the threshold for Luca,” he says. “It symbolises him living in two worlds. Anything beyond the meadow is unknown – forbidden. So it’s like his last safe space – the rocky walls that encircle the open field of seagrass provide him a place to hide.” Building on that idea, director of photography David Bianchi’s team used only two wide-angle lenses for all underwater shots. But they still needed to convey motion in the shots, so they dove into the project – literally, creating the actual motion of the camera by tracking themselves in the Pixar pool. “We rented gear, built trackers, filmed ourselves and put it into the computer,” he says. “Two lenses and a repetitive shot pattern give way to a completely different approach when Luca emerges from the water.”
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Above: The facial designs of the film’s three heroic friends are marked by distinct and particular shapes Top: To create the illusion of the sea monsters’ clothing having motion, a range of wind fields were designed to pull the ‘cloth’ to give a sense of tidal sway underwater
of wind fields and other methods to push and pull the ‘cloth’ to get that tidal sway you’d expect underwater. Nothing is ever static – everything is alive and moving, and it takes a lot of effort to make sure it feels right and isn’t distracting.” At the centre of this fantasy story is the friendship between three young characters and Deanna Marsigliese notes that each character embodies a unique short-hand, paired with a hero feature, one that represents how the character engages with the world around them. “Luca is a circle with large, searching eyes,” she says. “Alberto is a bean with an over-active mouth. Giulia is a fiery triangle, led by a sharp nose.
Strong, simple foundational shapes provide the perfect canvas for our fine details and rich textures.” Enriching the visual design of the film was the way in which the animators embraced Casarosa’s love of Japanese animation. “We were able to explore a different style that’s less physically based and more playful, caricatured movement,” says animation supervisor Michael Venturini. “For our characters on land, it’s big, graphic poses and faster timing. That’s a contrast to what we do in the water where you can’t ever hold still. There’s a little more poetry to the motion underwater, which is fun to watch.” Key to the entire movie are moments of transformation for the
Luca
characters. The filmmakers had to figure out how to showcase the incredible transformation from sea monster to human and back again in a fun and organic way. They were inspired by observing squids and octopuses and how they change the colour of their skin. Given concept art and parameters driven by story, the technical teams worked towards giving artists the flexibility to craft each transformation according to story needs – dictating details like the origin and speed of the transformation. The end result – developed through the collaboration of multiple teams, including art, tools and global technology, characters, effects, animation, simulation and lighting – is stylised, specific and seamless. “We had to develop very specialised technology on this film to make that happen,” says Venturini. “Those shots, on a technical level, are complex, so we had to be really mindful of when we’d show the transformation.” Coordinating models were created and rigged for both versions of the character – sea monster and
human – so each transformation could begin with one and end with the other. “In a way, it was building two main characters at the same time,” says Skaria, who adds that the tail posed some challenges since it only appears on one version of the character. According to character supervisor Beth Albright, the transformation had to be both physical and, at times, emotional. “Enrico wanted the transformation to be something that’s happening to the character, rather than a suit that slides on or off,” she says. “It had to be internal – something that the character would react to – but nothing that felt creepy. We opted for a transformation that would ripple through the body.” Adds Skaria, “Once we realised that it comes from the inside of the body – it’s not an external thing – everything came together. We started with the octopus reference and then built on that. We were able to do it so that animators could see it happening in real time as they’re animating.” Adds Venturini, “Animators had several controls. We could choose
Key to character expression was the hair for each character. Simulation supervisor Henry Garcia notes that, “For Luca, we chose one specific detail – what we called his croissant – his front curl that kind of bops around with a beautiful lyrical quality to it”
the direction of the transformation and the speed in which it happens. A character who’s air drying would have a slower transformation, for example, than one falling into the water. We also have characters shake the water off like a dog, or partially transform – their feet are the only things in the water. We used the storytelling moment of the film to dictate what the transformation would look like.” Henry Garcia’s team added special touches to amplify the event. “During transformation, the clothing has a little bit of
3D WORLD 39
Top (inset): The design of Portorosso is marked by an absence of right angles in the architecture, as evidenced in this paper model by Don Shank Above: For the design of Luca and his friend Alberto in their sea monster form, particular design focus was placed on simple foundational shapes that emphasised the expressive effect of their eyes 40 3D WORLD
magical wind inside it – it billows out to indicate to the audience that something big is happening. We do something similar with the hair and paddles – when the paddles come in or the hair grows out, we add a bit of a pop to it so there’s movement there.” While Luca’s underwater world called for a restrained approach, the look of the sea from the surface is stylised and inspired – in part by Japanese woodblock prints, stylised animation and graphic novels. The end result targets specific areas for detail. It’s not supposed to look photoreal because it’s meant to be Luca’s memory of the water versus actual water. Visual effects supervisor David Ryu says the effects and lighting
teams had to figure out how to coerce a water surface into the desired shapes. “We wanted to create a more illustrative picture,” he says. “That boiled down to building layers of stylised water looks. The effects and lighting teams developed a technique that would allow artists to control the detail in a reflection, allowing for a simpler, more stylised look. “We also wanted to incorporate the patterns we see in the ocean due to wind or underwater formations,” Ryu continues. “A patch of turbulent water here and a band of calm there – artists can use those elements as a compositional tool. Our team developed a few recipes – choppy water that pushes triangular
shapes, calm water with curved shapes. We could paint big swaths in the frame like brush strokes to compose an ocean pattern.” Much like the water, the colour of the sky was important to the filmmakers – both to convey the summertime setting and to help keep the movie colourful. “Even when we were exposing for the shadows we didn’t wash out the sky since it was part of the style to keep rich colour in it,” says Kim White, director of photography in charge of lighting. Adds set extension supervisor Matthew Webb, whose team added volumetric clouds, “We needed to bring our A-game because Luca’s never seen clouds before. When he first comes out of the water
Luca
HANDCRAFTED SPLASHES
Throughout Luca, the water above the surface was so stylised, filmmakers ultimately created a look that Pixar had never done before. “It was a really involved process,” says effects supervisor Jon Reisch. “We had to first find the look of the ocean, then decide how to push the stylisation of the water when it interacted with characters and with splashes.” Adds David Ryu, “We wanted to handcraft splashes that could be pasted on the simulated water surface.” The lighting team tackled the look of the reflections on the surface of the water as well. “We tried to capture the simplified and sinuous shapes of the reflections that we found in Japanese woodblock prints,” says director of photography Kim White.
ilm, set in Italy, tells the story of two young sea monsters who bravely venture out of the ocean
Luca
– after he panics – there is a nice moment with the wind going through the trees and the clouds slowly drifting.” Webb and his team had to find the look of clouds to best fit in the stylised world. “Typically, a cloud has a range of colours on both the sunlit side and the shadow side,” he says. “On the lit side, we grouped those colours together. There’s nuance and detail, but it’s more graphic.” As Luca’s world opens up and his excitement rises, so too does the approach to production. Director of photography David Bianchi purposely reserved more dynamic camera moves for the sequences in Portorosso. “We don’t have any crane movement or dollies until we get into town,” he explains.
The design of the town of Portorosso was based on the trapezoid shape. The RenderMan team developed tech that allowed the production to detect shadow edges and insert colour and texture into just those areas Below: The Art Of Luca book features beautiful concept art, sketches, storyboards and more from the film
Kim White was fascinated with the narrow streets and alleyways. “I brought home from Italy pictures of the way the light fell between the buildings and bounced off of them,” she says. As Ryu explains, “Enrico really wanted us to inject colour and texture into the edge of a shadow. It turned out to be pretty difficult because of the way we render now – shadows are just a byproduct of having something blocking the light. Our RenderMan team developed a technology that allowed us to detect those shadow edges and to be able to insert colour and texture in just those areas. It’s a pretty subtle effect, and it’s a good example of what we’ve peppered in to take the CG edge off.”
Graphics art director Josh Holtsclaw ensured that the signage that appears throughout the fictional Italian town of Portorosso fits in with director Enrico Casarosa’s stylised vision. “It’s trickle-down inspiration,” says Holtsclaw. “We look at the character design, the set design, and do graphic design that looks right in that world.” In 2011, Pixar released Casarosa’s short film La Luna (his directorial debut), which tells the story of an Italian family out at sea. With Luca, Casarosa and his team have taken the visual playfulness of the short and suffused the feature film with it. In doing so, it reminds us once more of animation’s capacity to offer a fresh look at reality.
r a x i P© s e g a m i l l A
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3D WORLD 43
E.T. (THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL) COLLECTIBLE FIGURES AND PACKAGES Software Modo, SolidWorks, Substance Painter, Substance Designer,Octane Render Year made 2021 44 3D WORLD
Environment design and package visualisation
Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork
Cem Tezcan cemtezcan.com Cem Tezcan is a freelance technical designer based in Ankara, Turkey. He loves retro design elements and is interested in technical design and CAD modelling.
ENVIRONMENT DESIGN AND PACKAGE VISUALISATION My purpose on this project was to create an environment that related to the movie and render the models and package designs by doctorcollector.com. I created the blister pack models with Substance Designer and sculpted exported tessellated displacement for the inner part of the package to match the figures inside, then re-textured everything with Substance Painter. The translucent material of the blister packs has a little absorption and subsurface scattering on translucency. I also added a ‘camera angle driven falloff’ to the translucency to give the edges of the blister a more solid look. Using Perlin noise as a bump map on package paper and translucent plastics makes the geometry and shading look more realistic.
3D WORLD 45
Intergalactic Prison Break
INTERGALACTIC Trevor Hogg learns how Milk VFX assisted a group of escaped convicts in the Sky series Intergalactic… Images courtesy of Milk VFX
46 3D WORLD
Intergalactic Prison Break
jailbreak takes place onboard a prisoner transport ship known as the Hemlock, which leads to a series of adventures ranging from a crash landing on a planet that gets ravaged by a massive dust storm, to visiting a submerged world populated with destroyed rollercoasters. Intergalactic consists of eight episodes overseen by showrunner Julie Gearey (Cuffs) that required 850 visual effects
A
shots provided by Milk VFX, which in turn received additional support from Egg VFX. There was not much of an opportunity for production VFX supervisor Jean-Claude Deguara (Good Omens) to reuse assets as environments were not revisited, except for scenes involving futuristic London. “This happens a 100 years into the future,” explains Deguara. “We have done a few projects in the past where we needed London so we managed to get a full 3D WORLD 47
Above: Famous landmarks were incorporated into the layout of Old London, such as the Tower Bridge Middle: A new layout tool was developed to make creating and rendering London more manageable 48 3D WORLD
layout of the city. Afterwards we spoke with director Kieron Hawkes [Fortitude] and discussed how many shots and how much we should do to make this an epic sequence; he went off with a storyboard artist, planned a whole sequence of shots and came back to us. We could constantly keep adding and building up the areas that needed it the most within the real-world space.” New London has been built on top of Old London, which has
been decimated by a flood. “We looked at massive caves to give us an idea of how light would behave on such a massive scale,” notes Matias Derkacz, head of 2D and onset VFX supervisor. “There is no actual reference of a covered city that we could say, ‘We need to match to this.’” A nine-mile radius was built around major landmarks. “A layout tool was built that we layered on a TBU [To Be Updated] cache basis,” explains Dimitris Lekanis,
FX lead at Milk VFX. “We didn’t have to worry about the instancing because it was coming from the layout tool.” Buildings were constructed and then destroyed. “We used Arnold operators on this job,” explains Sam Lucas, head of modelling at Milk VFX. “Previously, we had our own bespoke holder for look development, but the person who supported that had left the company. We therefore used a mix of alembic holders, GPU caches and
Intergalactic Prison Break
DROWNING IN SPACE
A TENSE MOMENT OCCURS WHEN WATER LEAKS INTO A HELMET DURING A SPACEWALK… An interactive platform was reused for different parts of the spacewalk involving the character of Verona, played by Imogen Daines. “It was the actress in her suit,” states Deguara. “We had to replace the visor because it became quite evident early on that it wasn’t quite working as far as reflections. The bit that we’re all proud of is when there is a malfunction in the suit that causes water to get into her helmet. Water in space will go wherever it will go. It will get in your eyes and mouth. There was a lovely performance that was done. We found this cool YouTube video of an astronaut wringing a flannel and how water actually stuck to his hand, and how it was moving and undulating.” It was important for the bubbles not to obscure the eyes of the actress. “The water travels up her neck and settles on her face; that’s what is causing the choking,” explains Deguara. “It didn’t interfere with the performance at all.” Understanding the intricacies of water was critical. “The first thing that we did is we went back to basics,” states Lekanis. “How is water sticking on the surface? What are its physical properties? Keeping these things in mind, we created the simulation within Houdini. It was challenging as every shot was a simulation and continuity had to be maintained. Early on we were happy knowing that our system could support the behaviour, weight, speed and oscillation, all of these nice things that we were seeing in the reference footage.”
“THERE IS NO ACTUAL COVERED CITY THAT WE COULD SAY, ‘WE NEED TO MATCH TO THIS’” Matias Derkacz, head of 2D & VFX supervisor, Milk VFX
stand-ins that made the scenes nice and light.” Another major environment build was the planet of Pau Rosa, where the Hemlock crash lands in the middle of a dense forest. “It was helpful having the partial set build of the Hemlock specifically when it comes to a stop,” remarks Derkacz. “It not only helped us to know where the Hemlock was stopping but how it was going to look when it stops. The set gave us a good reference of textures and
Above: It was important to make sure that the bubbles did not obscure the eyes so as to retain the original performance
was helpful in getting the Hemlock to work in the environment.” Hundreds of thousands of trees had to be produced, with those along the path of the Hemlock getting destroyed. “For the trees, we had some nice ones that were onset and created alien ones that were all concepted,” states Lucas. “We had a few different varieties of alien trees.” A layout was devised for the forest that consisted of static trees. “Animation took the layout because
we wanted the Hemlock to interact in a nice way with the trees on how it was crushing them,” explains Lekanis. “Then we took these big trees and broke them up. Effects had a lot of upwards dependencies; that’s why it was a big task.” Despite the prevailing orange colour grade on Pau Rosa, the original concept of the trees had quite vivid colours. “There were lots of pinks and blues,” states Deguara. Kieron wanted to push through lots of different colours 3D WORLD 49
in the smoky dust elements.” Special effects were utilised to get interaction with the actors for the close-up shots of the massive sandstorm. “The sandstorm was definitely something,” reveals Lekanis. “The main thing was to have control between what we see and what we don’t see, and how we hide or include the spaceship. Specifically for effects, how are we able to make something so it can be rendered and simulated? Do we simulate the whole world or are we able to make it in a more clever way? We had deep techniques and quite a lengthy R&D stage here so instead of simulating everything we instanced the volumetric 50 3D WORLD
simulation to create the build-up needed to show this land being destroyed. It was entirely CG.” One of the wonders of the universe is an asteroid field known as the Hestia Wreath, which was inspired by geysers freezing in mid-air. “Each asteroid is made of the main rock clump,” remarks Lucas. “You have these big obsidian type of crystals that reflect loads of light and have big flat surfaces on them. Then we had these quartz little spiky crystals. We made quite a few variations of the bits that we had. We had hero assets, but the asteroid that the Hemlock was on is close to camera, so it served as our test bed
Intergalactic Prison Break
ATTACK OF THE DREADLOCKS ADDING TO THE LETHAL NATURE OF GENEVIEVE (DIANY SAMBA-BANDZA) IS HER ABILITY TO USE HER DREADLOCKS AS WHIPS
“In the script the strands of hair weren’t clumped, but we needed to make them thicker in order to lift people,” says Deguara. “We worked out how to get three strands to clump for the two key strands that are doing all of the fighting for her. Something we wanted to avoid doing was having to create a full CG head of hair.” Being able to maintain the thickness regardless of the length was difficult. “The dreadlocks had to be like half a metre long or extend to five metres long,” says Roche. “The tricky bit was that the groom was procedurally generated for every shot. There was a sweet spot for the width of the groom. It couldn’t look like it was stretching. When the actress is being grabbed by the dreadlocks, we had to cover up the wires as well.” The hair was generated within Houdini. “The hair rig didn’t have guides because we wanted to have precise control,” explains Lekanis. “We would play with an area and make it fuzzier depending on whether it was curving or not. It was quite challenging. We’re quite happy with how it looks.”
to get that all sorted. After that we could make loads of different variations with all of the elements that we had. For texturing, we went through a few iterations. We looked at images of striped rocks and bright colours; that was toned down. We had to be careful with the crystals because they couldn’t look too aggressive. The spiky ones started to look a little like teeth.” “Kieron kept the shots big and wide for the moments when the pod is travelling to and from the Hemlock and the Phoenix,” says Deguara. “The more intimate moments in the dialogue were
all done from looking outside the observation deck.” A layout was done for the master shot. “Once we had laid out that shot, we put that layout into other shots,” explains Neil Roche, head of 3D at Milk VFX. “The layout of each asteroid and asset was tweaked to make each shot as visually interesting as possible.” The lighting was cheated to create sundog lens flares. “At the end of the day, besides the layout, it was important to keep a balance to the composition and not have all of the rocks exactly the same size,” notes Derkacz. “It’s about trying
“EACH ASTEROID AND ASSET WAS TWEAKED TO MAKE EACH SHOT VISUALLY INTERESTING” Neil Roche, head of 3D, Milk VFX
Above left: Maintaining the proper thickness to the dreadlocks required art direction on a pershot basis Left: A massive simulation was the dust storm that engulfs Pau Rosa Right: A partial set was built of the Hemlock for the crash-landing sequence 3D WORLD 51
to keep depth and we achieved that by having a sun on camera.” Next to the sunlight was a massive moon. “We used that to light it the way you would do on a film set,” explains Deguara. “It gave us a bit of side lighting and an extra bounce light.” Submerged under ten feet of water is the planet of Kelp. “We used a lot of the same techniques that were developed for London,” notes Roche. “They didn’t want a huge submersion.” The effects process was streamlined. “In general, we like to experiment technically as much as we can in order to save more time somewhere else. In this case we decided to try to export from Houdini,” says Lekanis. “We decided to bake the ocean into a multitude of textures because most of our planet was already developed and laid out with Arnold in mind. We had to create a configured system based on what the camera is actually seeing and how far it is from the camera; based on that we had to figure out how much detail to bake in.” Along with the Hotel Kelp there are various rollercoasters. “We made a big kit of parts for all of the rollercoasters,” states Lucas. “Some were complete while other ones were broken down. We had loads of jetties in different states of decay that enabled the layout to be rearranged on a per-shot basis.” 52 3D WORLD
ACHIEVING LIGHT SPEED
GUIDED BY THE EXPERTISE OF SCIENTIFIC ADVISOR DR. MAGGIE ADERIN-POCOCK, AN ALCUBIERRE DRIVE WAS CONSTRUCTED FOR THE HEMLOCK… Being able to achieve light speed is a staple of science fiction, and a particular scientific theory allowed for a unique spin on the subject matter. “By the time we got onboard, the Hemlock had already been designed,” explains Deguara. “The technology part of it was quite interesting. We added the Alcubierre drive, which is how the Hemlock jumps to light speed. I had a two-hour meeting with Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock. The Alcubierre drive is like a giant bubble that encompasses the whole ship. However, sticking a bubble around the Hemlock was not going to look that impressive. We came up with the idea, ‘What if this bubble was a massive undulating ocean?’ She was like, ‘That works.’” In order to sell the scale of the spaceship, the camera moves had to look realistic. “When you’re trying to do something like interstellar travel, the temptation is to move the camera quickly and you lose all sense of magnitude,” notes Roche. A visual point of reference was the classic dolly zoom shot in Jaws. “There is a specific shot where the bubble is used to fight and protect the Hemlock from two Jupiter Cruisers,” says Deguara. “The bubble is creating this negative space in the universe and pushing one spaceship on top of the other.”
Above: The submerged planet of Kelp features rollercoasters in various states of disrepair Left: Milk VFX produced 850 visual effects shots across eight episodes with additional support provided by Egg VFX
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Grounded feel in real-time environments
SHANASHEEL OF BAGHDAD Software Unreal Engine 4, 3ds Max, Substance Painter,Substance Designer, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Photoshop Year made 2021
54 3D WORLD
Grounded feel in real-time environments
Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork
Mustafa Hussein artstation.com/nugreon Mustafa Hussein is a self-taught 3D environment artist, currently working for Al-Joud Studio as well as freelance on a variety of projects.
GROUNDED FEEL IN REAL-TIME ENVIRONMENTS Achieving the grounded feel and the cohesiveness of this environment was really challenging. I used many techniques, starting with simple debris geometry I put in the corners between the ground and walls, which have a dithering material to blend the edges. I also used the vertex paint to paint plaster and dirt in the corners to make contact areas more logical, and adding decals in the edges was enough to make them feel really cohesive. For the ground I also added debris and rubble to achieve that feeling. 3D WORLD 55
Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills
Sculpt fan art in Blender
BLENDER
SCULPT FAN ART IN BLENDER
Follow these steps and learn techniques for sculpting characters in Blender with polygon modelling
T
here are many ways to model and sculpt in 3D, and often an artist will just start sculpting and have no regard for the underlying topology. At the end of the session it is fairly routine now to retopologise those models and then move onto UV and texturing. You can approach this in a different way, and that is to use polygon modelling tools at the start but use the sculpting tools inside Blender alongside them. You can use basic sculpting tools like Grab, Move, Flatten, Smooth and Inflate while you are working on a very detailed, fairly low-polygon model. This can be quite useful when you’re doing character work and you know the character you are going to make.
Switching back and forth between modelling and sculpting is very simple and after a while you don’t notice that you’re doing it – it all becomes part of one seamless creation process and Blender has got this down to a fine art. Add to that the amazing realtime render engine Eevee and speciality sculpting tools like the Pose tool, and you have a very powerful set of features that make Blender a must-have creation program. Let’s take a look at making some fan art.
AUTHOR Glen Southern Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He has been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 15 years. www.southerngfx.co.uk
DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to https://bit.ly/3D-world-luca
WITH A CUBE 01START AND MIRROR IT The plan for this project is to block out an entire character with basic polygon modelling, and then continue on with the full range of sculpting tools available in Blender. To start, switch to Edit mode (top left) and make sure you are in the Edge mode. Look for the Loop Cut tool down the left-hand side and split the default cube in half down the centre. Now select all the faces on the left-hand side of the cube and use X to delete them. Go to the Modify panel on the right and select Mirror, which gives you a symmetrical model and enables you to just work on one side, saving time.
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Sculpt fan art in Blender
02 EXTRUDE AND TWEAK
To start shaping up the body select the Extrude tool, and extrude the legs down. Do it a couple of times to give yourself some geometry to play with and then switch to Point mode so that you can use the Tweak feature and adjust the shape using just single points. Shape up a rounded body with a thinner neck area. Give the belly a bit more volume than the chest area.
03 JUMP BACK AND FORTH TO SCULPTING
A great thing about Blender is that you can jump from polygon modelling to sculpting at the click of a button. From the top right of the menu go from Object mode to Sculpting mode and you will see all of the sculpting tools appear, allowing you to manipulate your model as if it was a sculpted asset. We will be doing this a lot back and forth. Now you can just hold down Shift and anywhere you click on the model will be smoothed. You don’t even need to call a tool.
04 BLOCK OUT A BODY
Okay, it’s time to head back to Edit mode and also back to extruding. We can now block out an entire body. Select faces at the bottom of the body and extrude down several times to create the basic leg shapes as shown. Do the same at the shoulders and create a basic set of arms. Now in Tweak mode you can adjust the shape point-by-point while it is still very low polygon. You won't be able to do this later and all of the moving will be done with the sculpting tools.
05 CREATE EARS
From the side of the head select a couple of polygons and extrude them out three times. Tweak this basic shape into the rough outline of an ear. Now in Point mode tweak the shape at the back and front to make sure it is thick enough and can hold its shape as we continue modelling. Remember this is only an armature for us to sculpt on: we aren’t looking for perfection at this stage.
Model and sculpt Using a technique where you are making good geometry as you go means that you don’t need to retopologise at the end of a project.
06 SUBDIVISION TIME
At the moment we are looking at the shape as a low-polygon form. The final is obviously going to be sculpted and rounded so we can take a look at the model in a more organic way by adding a subdivision modifier. Add a Subdivision Surface modifier from the Modifiers panel. Set this to 1 so it will round the model but not be too intensive on the system just yet.
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07 ADD FACE DETAILS
Now with a combination of Extrude and Loop Cut you can add details like the mouth and eye sockets. We just need to put an indication of where the mouth and the eyes are going to go and ensure that there is geometry in the correct arrangement. We are always looking to create loops around areas like the mouth and eyes which helps if the model is ever to be animated.
Sculpt fan art in Blender
08 BACK TO SCULPTING
09 HAND AND FINGERS
10 START TO ADD MORE DETAIL
11ADD DEEPER LINES
Switch back to Sculpting mode and try to shape the head a little closer to your design. Make sure the head looks right from the front, back and sides and that the mouth is the right kind of width. You can achieve most of this using just the Grab tool from the sculpting toolbar. Grab allows you just to move large or small areas of geometry depending on the radius of the brush (right-click). Add some detail around the nose, which in this case is quite a simple shape.
We can keep adjusting the underlying topology, but it's time to try a bit more sculpting. Do a pass over the whole body using Smooth and Grab and also a few of the other tools such as Clay and Flatten. Build up areas of muscle and smooth down areas that are becoming too rounded or blobby. Feel free to change the colour in the material panel at the bottom right if that helps you while you are sculpting. Be careful with the Smooth tool; as you can see here the fingers went too thin and I had to inflate them back up again.
Use the same process as we did at the start by selecting faces and then extruding the hands and fingers out. Create joints as you would see on a real hand and try to keep some volume in the fingers as they can flatten out quite easily. Add a thumb and then use the sculpting tools to smooth and grab parts of the hand. Take your time with the fingers as they are intricate parts to model.
For this step, you could add extra loops and then push those loops inside, which is a great way to add more definition to an area like the nose and around the eye. The Crease tool in Sculpting mode can also achieve the same sort of effect, and it's great to do a combination of both. For the sculpting you may need to go higher on your Subdivision, so perhaps turn it up to 4.
Use Pose tool when sculpting
12 CUT GEOMETRY
Where the geometry isn't going in the right direction you can use the knife tool. If you don't want to run a full split around the model you can simply use the knife tool to click between the points and add the geometry to suit the area that you're working on. Overall we want to maintain quads and if needed we can leave one or two triangles.
13 DETAILING
Blender has an amazing Pose tool that stops you needing to rig everything when you simply want to try out different positions. Try it from the Sculpt tool menu.
Keep switching to Sculpting mode and refining the shape until you are happy with the overall volumes from all angles. Start to think about detailed areas like around the eye and under the nostril, and start to tweak the points or smooth an area until every area on the body is covered. By now the model should be looking quite accurate when you subdivide it. 3D WORLD 59
Sculpt fan art in Blender
14 REFINE WITH SCULPT TOOLS
15 ADD TEETH
16 ALIGN THE TEETH
17 CHECK THE WIREFRAME
There are actually lots of tools in the sculpting section of Blender, but you don't really need too many of them at this point. You should be using three or four of the brushes I've described earlier and going round each part of the model looking for areas to either grab, build up or smooth down. If you find an area isn't looking right go back and tweak it in the geometry first rather than trying to sculpt your way out of the problem. See under the nose in this image.
If you don't want to do it manually you can just do half of the teeth set and mirror it across, exactly as you did with the body. Breaking the symmetry and keeping the teeth asymmetrical actually helps to make the character come alive, even in this early stage. Make the teeth a little bit crooked and put some unevenness in the height as you set them into the jaw. Make sure that you check it from all angles as it could look fine from the front but not be working well from the side.
For the teeth let’s add in another default cube using Shift+A. Use the Loop Cut to add about four or five loops. Switch over to sculpting and using Smooth and Grab, pull the shape into a pointed tooth. Now simply duplicate several times and line them up across the top jaw. Repeat for the bottom jaw; you can group these together if needed.
At the top right of the menu there is an option to turn wireframe on. Now is a good time to make sure the wireframe looks how you imagined, as once we finish this section we will move to UV mapping and we can't really change the geometry after that point. The model should still be relatively low polygon but with the subsurface modifier we still have that ability to sculpt details in.
Change matcaps
Matcaps are one way that Blender allows you to view the surface of your sculpt. Get used to changing them regularly as it can show if you have any issues with the way you are sculpting.
18 RENDERED MODE
Feel free to add a new shader and switch to Layout or Rendered mode (Z on the keyboard). We won’t be able to spend much time on rendering in this tutorial, but it does help to look at your model with a shader and the colour set to closer to the final look. Working this way means you are cutting out the retopology part of the process and spending more time on character creation.
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19 INFLATE AND ADD VOLUME
Back in Sculpting mode, work your way around the model inflating areas like the cheeks and the forearms where you feel there may not be enough volume. Rotate the model around and find any areas that look flat or deformed and take your time using Smooth, Flatten, Inflate and Grab until you are close to your desired look. Inflating areas like the top of the ear can really help.
Sculpt fan art in Blender
20 UV UNWRAPPING
Turn the Subdivision Surface down to 0. Enter UV mode from the top menu. Start selecting edges you want to use as seams on the texture map: around the shoulder area for example. Mark these edges as seams (right-click>Mark Seam). Once you have a full set of seams marked you can use the Unwrap function to flatten out the UVs for you.
21PAINT OR TEXTURE
There are a few ways to texture a model in Blender. You can use vertex painting, texture painting or just simply export it and paint it in a dedicated program. Here I used ZBrush and I simply did a very basic colour pass across the whole UV model that I had exported from Blender. I then reimported it and it came back in with the vertex colours as seen in the image. I had also grabbed a texture map to use with Substance Painter at a later stage. To do it in Blender switch to texture painting and create your masterpiece.
Real time with Eevee
22 BASIC RENDER IN EEVEE
With Blender Eevee it is so easy to make a realtime scene to show your work in progress. To make sure you are using Eevee rather than Cycles (Blender’s main render engine), under Render Properties (bottom right) look for the dropdown that allows you to switch between Cycles and Eevee. You can add a plane for the floor and, selecting a back edge, extrude it up to make a ramp.
24 POSE
23 BRING SCENE TO LIFE
Being able to model, sculpt and switch to a real-time rendering solution like Eevee is quite amazing. You can really see your models come to life in front of your eyes.
I decided to add some little ducks which are made out of a very simple cube shape in the same way I made the main character. Using a combination of the modelling and sculpting tools I quickly created a cute little duck model. I only vertex painted this one as that would be enough for the scene I wanted to create. I duplicated them and scattered them around the main character.
Blender has an amazing posing tool in the sculpting menu. Switch over to Sculpting mode and look down the toolbar until you see the Pose tool icon. Now, by working around the model you will be able to pull and twist the jointed areas of the mesh and create the pose that you want. This is a great way to experiment with poses without having to spend time learning how to rig a model, and it gives you a great way to just see if your model is working well when it is deformed.
25 GET A LITTLE CRAZY
Have some fun with the Pose tool and try all kinds of different poses for your character. For this project I tried a walking pose, a sitting pose and also some poses where the hands were in very complex arrangements. If you feel like you need to go even further with posing, then it would be a great time to look into how to rig inside of Blender. • 3D WORLD 61
HARMONY OF BEAUTIES Software 3ds Max,Forest Pack, Corona Renderer Year made 2021
Scattering a forest
Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork
Amir Mohammad Nabavi amir_nb.artstation.com I was born in 1996 in Qom, Iran. I graduated in electrical engineering – very strange, I know! But I've always loved art.
SCATTERING A FOREST This scene features an amazing Porsche car modelled by Szymon Kubicki. After building the road and adding extra elements using assets from Evermotion’s Archmodels, I then started on the forest area. I used Maxtree's wonderful models for all the plants in my scene, and I did all the scattering of plants with the Forest Pack plugin. I set a limit for the scattering of trees in the Camera section, to make sure they only spread in my active camera view; however, in some places, due to lighting and shading, it may be necessary to have a tree behind the camera. Next, in the Transform section, I could change the size, location, and rotation of my trees randomly. I finished covering up the forest scene by adding flowers and smaller plants. 3D WORLD 63
Design an urban city scene
THE LAUNCHER
These two images depict a rocket launch, with the above shot eliciting a ‘calm before the storm’ feeling
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Design an urban city scene
3DS MAX | V-RAY | PHOTOSHOP | FOREST PACK | RAILCLONE
DESIGN AN URBAN CITY SCENE Mohsen Hashemi details the step-by-step creation process for his rocket launch concepts
I
n this tutorial, I will demonstrate step by step how I created my recent rocket launch artwork, and hopefully it may answer some of your own questions regarding how to go about building a large urban city scene in 3D. Creating a large-scale cityscape can seem like a daunting challenge and knowing where to start and what workflow to use can present the largest hurdle. Once you have decided on a direction, based on your inspirations and any reference material you have collected, the task becomes much easier. Creating the actual buildings is less of a problem and in this stepby-step tutorial I will show you my typical workflow process for this kind of project.
Because of the distance of the camera from the individual assets you will find you don’t need to worry about the smallest details, as it is much more about scene management than anything else and once the models are done you can focus on the layout, lighting and cameras to get the perfect render. After you have read this article, if you still have questions about the workflow, feel free to contact me through social media and I will try to help as much as I can. DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to https://bit.ly/3D-world-luca
AUTHOR Mohsen Hashemi Designer and illustrator Mohsen Hashemi is the founder of Render Expert, a creative studio providing photorealistic architectural images and animation. www.behance.net/ mohsen-hashemi
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Design an urban city scene
01a
01b
02
01MODEL THE CITY SPACE
To start I used a very simple Google Maps 3D landscape for some initial inspiration for how the city landscape might look. Then, using some very simple lines and extrudes, I added more elements to the environment and tried to find the best possible angle for the camera to add more urban details.
02 URBAN STORY
The premise behind this artwork comes from two different stories depicting a rocket launch, so in the first shot I wanted to show the calm before the storm, for which the lights and colours helped me a lot. I didn’t want to have a
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Detailing
For this kind of work you should be careful not to add more details than you need. Heavy files are always a big problem and it may be more difficult to spot any errors. Try to use your assets carefully and aim for an uncomplicated approach as much as possible, avoiding any unnecessary details.
big change in the scene when the stories changed, so I spent a lot of time finding the best composition to tell the story.
03 ADD THE DETAILS
When I was happy with the composition, I started to think about the type of urban city that would work well with this story. As you can see, I tried some different buildings to show variation of the city space, but the big question about this workflow is, how much is enough detail? I added as many buildings as I felt might be enough. A tip for avoiding repetition is to use lights and shadow on some of the buildings.
04 SCENE MANAGEMENT
Using Forest Pack and RailClone helped a lot with proxy scattering and made the whole process easier, but I have to confess, using a layer-based image and identifying each layer and forest makes your scene even more manageable and easier to search and find. I used a Brick Visual layer base Max file, and as you can see in the image I made a specific name for each forest, and all were easy to control. I also made different forests for the foreground, midground and background to show the diversity of urban space.
Design an urban city scene
05 LIGHTING AND MOOD
I used Pulze Scene Manager for the lighting settings (more on this in the next step). As you can see, I didn't use very complex lighting for this project, as I always try to keep things simple and understandable. Following references, for the mood I tried to have a foggy environment as the main subject to reach my desired final result.
03
05
WITH THE 06 WORK SCENE MANAGER
04
All settings for the mood of the first scene Adding the new camera Adding the new render resolution Adding the new render output Adding the specific sun for this angle Adding the specific forests for this angle
All settings for the mood of the second scene
It's very easy to work with the Scene Manager. If you start fresh with a scene, you can make your first ‘mood’ in terms of the lighting, camera composition and so on, and then add to the Scene Manager with the + key in the top right. Then, based on your project’s needs, you can choose from the left menu which setup is going to be added to your scene. For other moods, lights and settings you would only need to create a new setup and add new menus, and any time you need to swap from one mood to another to add more details or change the settings, you can do so with only one click in the main list.
Adding the new setup Change the settings based on your camera
Adding the specific atmosphere Hide / un-hide layers Adding the specific sky or HDRI
Adding the specific settings
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Design an urban city scene
07 SET THE ATMOSPHERE
This is an easy process, but also a very time-consuming step. For me, this step is vital for creating that desired mood. The amount of fog in the scene and in the background adds greater depth to the image, and as you see in the initial ‘Calm’ render, can also be used to create god rays. I used Aerial Perspective for the background fog and Environment Fog for the overall fog in the scene. I also added some colour to add more variation between the light and in order to bounce the colours in the fog.
08 POST-PRODUCTION
Mostly I try to reach 60 to 80 per cent of the result in the frame buffer and do some very subtle edits in post-production. For this project there weren’t any huge edits in Photoshop; I focused more on colour corrections and painting the parts related to the launch stand with smoke from the launch. In the beginning, I added the details with some real photos, and then I added hue/saturation to control the lights in the scene. In this case, playing with the hot and cold colour had a big effect on the mood of the image. Finally, just add a Camera Raw filter to boost the contrast and sharpness. •
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Keep the file clean
Bear in mind that the most professional artworks always come out of a clean file. Many edits and changes made during the workflow are much easier to control in a clean file. My advice is if you are working on a project over a few weeks, every couple of days open your file and delete additional details, or if there’s anything you replaced don’t keep them – unhide in the layers and delete them (but remember to save the file in a new version, just in case).
07
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Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Glen Southern Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He has been using and training ZBrush in the UK for over 15 years. www.southerngfx.co.uk Mike Griggs Mike is a digital content creator with over two decades of experience creating Mograph, VFX and CGI for a wide range of clients. 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 70 3D WORLD
SOFTWARE: NOMAD SCULPT ON IOS
HOW CAN I ADD DECALS AND TATTOOS WITH NOMAD SCULPT? Dan Torres, Manchester Glen Southern replies iPad sculpting has become very popular lately with apps like Forger and Nomad Sculpt. There seems to be two main groups of users, and they are often people just starting out exploring 3D sculpting, or existing 3D artists that just want to sculpt on the go. Nomad Sculpt is a very capable sculpting program and it has a lot of painting tools and features. Once you’ve sculpted your character or creature you can use the paint tools and a range of alphas to bring the surface to life, just as you would in a program like ZBrush or Blender. There are several options to get decals and tattoos onto the surface, so let’s start with a simple one. You can simply take the paintbrush and apply it to the surface as if
you were working in Photoshop, or more accurately Substance Painter. There are lots of options that you can change when it comes to both the colour and shape of your brush, but you wouldn’t want to spend time creating an entire tattoo with a simple brush. The second method is to create the tattoo artwork in another program, for example if you want to stay on the iPad just use Procreate, which is a very good mobile painting and drawing app. You need to draw a white tattoo on a black background and then export that as a JPEG. You can then import that into the alpha section of Nomad and switch to your paint tool again. Simply drag the tattoo on with the correct colour and the correct orientation as shown in the
Your CG problems solved
EXPERT TIP USE LAYERS Layers allow you to add the tattoos or decals onto different layers that can be dialled up or down. It means you can try different looks as you are adding the paint. The layers are found in the Layer panel (usually in the top right).
STEP BY STEP ADD TATTOOS TO YOUR CHARACTERS IN NOMAD
Placing tattoos on layers means you can try a wide range of designs and styles and just dial them in and out as you develop the look of your character
walkthrough section. There is an option to reverse the paint tool and at that point you are actually removing the ink, which can give you some really cool effects. I find it a great way to create very specific shapes and it’s especially useful because the model can be exported with the vertex colours and then converted to a texture map in another program like ZBrush or Blender. It gives you a very simple and convenient way to make complex artwork right there on your iPad. Nomad is available on Android devices too, which gives you even more flexibility. You can also apply paint to different layers and dial them in as you need them, so your tattoo designs can get really complex really quickly.
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04
01BASE PAINT
03 STROKE TYPE
02 DESIGN THE TATTOO
04 APPLY IT
Whatever character you are making you will need to paint the base coat or skin before you apply any decals or tattoos. In Nomad you can use the paintbrush and the standard alphas to create a nice skin effect, with lots of underlying reds and blues to make it look realistic. Ensure you are using lighter tones if you are going to add tattoos. In your chosen 2D app such as Procreate or Photoshop, create your design. Make sure you have a black background and a white tattoo or it won’t work. Export that as a JPG and save it on your iPad in Nomad>Alphas. If you save it here the alphas will appear in your library at startup rather than you having to import them each time.
Now make sure you are using the paintbrush from the Brush panel. Head over to Stroke and change the graph as shown here. That will make the edges of your tattoo hard and crisp. Then switch the Stroke Type from ‘Dot’ to the ‘Grab - Dynamic Radius’ option, which will now allow you to drag your design onto your model. Next, change the colour to a light, blueish green. Select your alpha from the Alpha panel down the side. You can now drag a tattoo out wherever you like on your model. Be careful when you are going around corners or really curved surfaces. Make sure your draw intensity is set to Maximum so that the tattoo is fully opaque rather than faded. 3D WORLD 71
Your CG problems solved
SOFTWARE: CINEMA 4D | REDSHIFT | PHOTOSHOP
HOW DO I MAKE SURE I AM USING THE CORRECT COLOUR IN A RENDER WHEN WORKING WITH CLIENTS? Ryley Martin, London Mike Griggs replies Despite the inherent complexity of all the tools and skills a 3D artist has to master, ironically one that would appear simple – working with clients – is probably the hardest to get right. Client work is defined by an artist seeking to understand and meet the client’s needs – which, in many cases, is clear and concise communication that is on-brand. In many cases a client, especially when working in stills, will ask 72 3D WORLD
for a Photoshop file with the correct brand colours in place. This can be a chore for both the 3D artist and the client if a typical multi-layered file that a 3D artist would use is given to the client’s print department. These difficulties arise because print designers use a different skill set to that of a 3D artist. If the file is handed across in a ‘neutral’ format, such as a well-organised Photoshop file, this can go a long way to removing friction with a client, which is
a great way to build a long-lasting and profitable relationship. So, what are the important considerations when defining a neutral ‘Master’ file to give to a client? In this example we will concentrate on a still, as this is the most common environment where a Master file will be asked for. A key step is to convert from 32-bit, the typical 3D output format, to most likely an 8-bit format, which tends to be what most print work is created in. The other
Your CG problems solved
EXPERT TIP CLIENT WORK IS NOT ALWAYS PHYSICALLY ACCURATE This tutorial has only dealt with the mechanics of setting up the Photoshop files. It has deliberately not offered options on opacity modes for the render passes. When working with brand-specific images, clients may want to 'break' the render rules, and systems like this make that easy to manage.
STEP BY STEP ENSURE CLIENT BRAND CONSISTENCY IN IMAGES
Maintain a positive relationship with your clients by ensuring that their specific brand requirements are met
potentially important element is to render either in black and white/greyscale so that true colours can be applied in Photoshop. Most 3D artists use RGB-based colour references, and print designers tend to use CMYK, making it easy for the print designer to input their own colour choice. Additionally, making sure that all layers are clearly named to their purpose can go a long way in making sure that you build your reputation for being a great team member, as well as a great artist.
01
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03
04
01SET UP THE 3D
The output of this render will be a colour-specific still file. In Cinema 4D, the hero objects, the cars, have all been set up with the same neutral black paint with a touch of diffuse weight, with a white colour to give a bit of a lift. The render has been set to output reflections, specular, mattes and ambient occlusion passes.
SETUP IN 02 FILEPHOTOSHOP
Once the render is complete, the individual passes that have been outputted are gathered into Photoshop using File>Load Files into Stack, which compiles the passes into a singlelayered Photoshop file. While multi-layer renders are available from most 3D engines, they can be problematic when saved, and if corrupted, all the render passes will be lost.
PHOTOSHOP CHANNELS 03 MAKE WITH MATTE LAYERS To create mattes for each car, ensure that the Channels palette is visible and press Create New Channel at the bottom. Select all of the pixels in a matte layer and copy and paste it into the new Channel in the palette. With the new Channel highlighted, press Load Channel as Selection at the bottom.
04 USETO MASKTHE SELECTION A GROUP
Press Create a New Group at the bottom of the Layers palette. Then, click Add Layer Mask to add the matte selection as a group mask. Drop in the Diffuse layer and then add a Solid Color from the Create New Fill button at the bottom of the Layers palette to add the brand colour. Repeat this process for every element that needs a specific colour. 3D WORLD 73
FOLLOW THE VIDEO
https://bit.ly/3D-world-luca
SOFTWARE: BLENDER
HOW DO I CREATE A STYLISED STONE MATERIAL IN BLENDER? Anne Grills, Ireland
Being a half-procedural material, you can apply this to any kind of mesh to create a satisfying result
Pietro Chiovaro replies There are many ways to create a stylised stone material, the most common of which is the use of textures and in this article, I will show you how to create a stylised stone material using just two and a half textures and some default nodes. For this material I started off with a really simple model, basically a distorted sphere, and to begin, I created and assigned a new material. First of all, we have to open the Node Editor panel and add: the Texture Coordinate input, two Image Textures, the default Voronoi Texture, two Subsurface Scattering BSDF shaders, two Mapping nodes, the Hue Saturation Value, the Mix Shader, and of course the Material Output. The first thing we have to connect is the Texture Coordinate. It doesn’t need a UV map, so we can connect it with the Generated input. Starting from this point we have to select the two 74 3D WORLD
essential textures: a sort of mossy/grass texture and a yellowish texture that will simulate the rock of the material. As we are aiming to create a stylised material here, the textures do not need to be largely detailed. Consequentially, both image textures can be linked to the Hue Saturation Value and the Subsurface Scattering BSDF shaders. Now we have to combine these two nodes and create the mossy effect at the top of the stone. To do this we can use the Mix Shader and connect the two Subsurface Scattering shaders while linking the Voronoi Texture to the Fac input, which will help us to define the moss starting point (percentage of moss at the top of the stone). Last but not least we have to connect the Mix Shader to the Material Output. All the values for this material depend on the texture we use. Generally for the Hue Saturation Value we can set
EXPERT TIP LEVELS If you want to achieve a more solid effect you can replace the Subsurface Scattering shaders with a Diffuse shader, which will decrease the light interaction with the volume of the stone. parameters similar to the defaults, while for the Mapping node we need to consider the level of detail we wish to include in the final material. In this case, I kept a low value (low texture resolution) to create this sort of ‘blur’ effect. Finally, in the Voronoi Texture, I suggest you activate the Smooth F1 method, increase the Smoothness to 1.000 and reduce the scale to 1.700.
Your CG problems solved
SOFTWARE: AUTODESK MAYA
CAN I USE PYTHON 2 IN MAYA 2022? Reece Taylor, London Antony Ward replies With the release of Maya 2022, Autodesk finally gave us something we have been wanting for a while now, and that is access to Python 3. It seems like we have been working with Python 2 for such a long time now, so finally getting access to the newer version is certainly a bonus to those of us who have upgraded. However, while a lot of us are seamlessly transitioning to Python 3, many technical artists just aren’t ready to take the leap just yet, and I don’t blame them. Over the years we have amassed a library of numerous scripts and tools, all written in Python 2, so the idea of having to go through them all to update them is quite daunting – but does this mean that those of us who are clinging to Python 2 are destined to never move onto newer versions of Maya? Well Autodesk has considered this and given us a few options which will let us launch Maya 2022 with Python 2 instead
of 3 (although these are only currently available to Windows and Linux users). The first is a new -pythonver flag. You can use this to launch Maya from a command line, simply adding -pythonver 2 after the executable. You can also use this flag in the Windows shortcut too for a much simpler solution. Next to the Target field where you have the link to the Maya executable file, add the flag to the end after the quotation mark, like this:
“C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2022\bin\maya.exe” -pythonver 2
EXPERT TIP CONVERTING SCRIPTS TO PYTHON 3 The idea of converting all your scripts for use in Python 3 can feel overwhelming, but Python does come with a handy script to help. The 2to3.py script will automatically convert your scripts for you, but I would make sure you back up first before attempting it. You can find the documentation here: https://docs. python.org/3/library/2to3.html
The second way is to set the MAYA_ PYTHON_VERSION environment variable. You can do this from the command window, while also launching Maya with this code, which could also be used as a So those are a couple of options for batch file: you which will enable you to continue working with Python 2, however I would recommend that you consider moving set MAYA_PYTHON_VERSION=2 “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2022\bin\maya.exe” over to Python 3 eventually.
If you have been avoiding upgrading to Maya 2022 because you aren’t ready for Python 3, don’t worry, Autodesk has you covered 3D WORLD 75
Hard-surface modelling
Incredible 3D artists take us behind their artwork
Mats De Graaf artstation.com/matsdegraaf Mats De Graaf is a 3D game artist currently in his third year as a student at SintLucas, Eindhoven. HARD-SURFACE MODELLING Since this prop was only shown in a YouTube video it was quite hard to find any good references. The way I fixed that was by looking at real-life objects in my own home and saw if they would match up to the model. I found my old phone and saw a lot of details, like tiny scratches or some metal chipping around the edges, and even smudges on the back and some colour noise variations like green and yellow. This was really helpful and definitely got me the great end result.
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Hard-surface modelling
SONY POLAROID DEVICE PROP FROM BLADE RUNNER 2049 Software ZBrush, Maya, Substance Painter,Marmoset Year made 2021 3D WORLD 77
News and views from around the international CG community
With expression data captured from the DI4D PRO system, facial performance data captured from the HMC will result in unprecedented levels of realism
PROJECT INSIGHT
PURE4D: Game-changing facial animation
PURE4D delivers world-leading facial animation by combining DI4D’s proprietary 4D facial capture technology with cutting-edge machine learning and Glasgow-based DI4D provides the highest fidelity facial performance capture for leading visual effects and pre-rendered animation projects. Facial performance capture is the process of filming the facial movement of actors, analysing that data and using it to drive the facial animation of digital characters in video games and movie visual effects. By driving the facial animation of a digital character with an actor’s performance, especially when the character is a digital double of the actor, it is possible to obtain a very high level of realism while remaining faithful to the actor’s performance. Since its formation in 2003, DI4D has contributed extensively to the innovation of facial performance capture
LA
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technology by pioneering the use of stereo-photogrammetry and ‘4D capture’. Stereo-photogrammetry is a technique that allows a ‘3D scan’ to be derived simply from two digital images taken from different positions, similar to the way that humans’ stereo vision allows us to sense depth. One of the advantages of stereophotogrammetry is that it can be used with synchronised video cameras to capture ‘3D scans’ at video frame rates. DI4D has also developed a method to track a dense 3D base mesh through such per-frame ‘3D scan’ data, resulting in ‘4D capture’, with time being the fourth dimension. Tracking a mesh with thousands of vertices in 3D allows 4D capture to produce much higher fidelity facial animation than is possible with traditional marker-based or sparse
facial feature-based approaches to facial performance capture. DI4D has developed and introduced two different types of system that utilise stereo-photogrammetry for 4D facial performance capture. The first is the DI4D PRO system, which uses multiple stereo pairs of high-resolution video cameras to capture extremely high-fidelity data of a seated performer. The second is the DI4D HMC, which is a wireless, lightweight, head-mounted stereo camera system that is designed to allow facial capture from several actors simultaneously while they move and act naturally together.
INTRODUCING PURE4D
DI4D’s new PURE4D solution now allows it to extend its services to much larger projects, such as in-game facial animation,
PURE4D
“THE LEVEL OF REALISM SEEN IN RECENT PRE-RENDERED CINEMATICS IS NOW BECOMING THE BENCHMARK FOR IN-GAME ANIMATION” Colin Urquhart, CEO of DI4D
while maintaining the highest possible level of realism. PURE4D delivers animation that is completely faithful to the actors’ original facial performances by capturing them using DI4D HMCs and processing them with DI4D’s proprietary 4D capture solution. It further enhances the detail and fidelity of the 4D performance data by combining it with even higher fidelity 4D expression data captured using a DI4D PRO system. Finally, PURE4D utilises advanced machine learning technology to increase dramatically the efficiency with which large volumes of data can be processed. By combining DI4D HMC performance capture, DI4D PRO expression capture, and highly efficient machine learning, PURE4D takes facial performance capture to a new level. As a result, DI4D can provide high-fidelity facial performance capture
NEXT-GEN TECH and post-processing services to all sizes of projects. PURE4D is particularly effective for digital doubles, allowing the facial performance of the actor to be replicated with absolute precision, and ensuring that every subtlety and nuance of the actor’s performance is represented in the subsequent animation.
HOW IT WORKS
The PURE4D pipeline begins with the DI4D PRO system. Comprising nine synchronised 12-megapixel machine vision cameras, the DI4D PRO system captures sequences of the high-fidelity, colour 4D facial performance data, using standard video lighting without markers, make-up or structured light projection. PURE4D uses the DI4D PRO system to acquire highfidelity 4D facial expression data from
Colin Urquhart, DI4D’s co-founder, shares his thoughts on why PURE4D is a huge advancement in 4D facial tracking technology
We believe that PURE4D is a real game changer for facial animation in video games. The next generation of game consoles and game engines can support more realistic in-game facial animation. The level of realism seen in recent pre-rendered cinematics is now becoming the benchmark for in-game animation. With PURE4D, game developers can reproduce the exact facial performance of any actor to create lifelike digital double performances – without the need to create a complex FACS rig or for significant animator polish. 3D WORLD 79
PURE4D
Above: A live video feed of the facial performance can be recorded and viewed alongside the character mesh for an accurate reference
“WE BELIEVE THAT PURE4D IS A REAL GAME CHANGER FOR FACIAL ANIMATION IN VIDEO GAMES”
Colin Urquhart, CEO of DI4D each actor. This often includes the actor performing phonetic pangrams, which are special phrases designed to cover all spoken sounds and the full range of mouth shapes. All of this expression data helps provide the building blocks for an accurate digital recreation, tracking and storing the full range of possible facial expressions and mouth movements. Next up is a session with the headmounted DI4D HMC system – a lightweight, easily adjustable head rig fitted with two small, synchronised highresolution digital video cameras, onboard LED lights, a compact video recording system and a battery pack. The HMCs are used to capture 4D facial performance data, often from multiple actors, simultaneously with body motion capture and sound recording. This is designed to ensure that body, face and voice performances are all synchronised, essential for ensuring active scenes achieve highly realistic performance results. This also allows directors and developers to capture emotional, facial 80 3D WORLD
nuance alongside the physical performance of the body, which will provide a greater level of authenticity. Leading-edge, machine learning algorithms efficiently combine both sets of data to significantly increase the scalability of the solution. By combining the data in this way, studios can acquire 4D data with the same high level of fidelity as the DI4D PRO system, all while the actors move freely within a motion-capture volume – something that no other portable headmounted system can achieve. The machine learning system refines and improves continuously as more performance data is added which, in turn, significantly increases scalability – there’s no project too big. The DI4D team provides a complete service from start to finish, including the capture and then subsequent processing of 4D data with its 4D reconstruction pipeline. The service is designed this way to fit into any major studio’s pipeline without any extensive training or infrastructure expansion required.
SAY GOODBYE TO COMPLEX ANIMATION RIGS
One of the game-changing new features now available with the launch of PURE4D is its unique approach to driving facial animation. It doesn’t require a traditional facial animation rig as part of the facial capture process – significantly reducing both complexity and cost from the delivery of any project. The pipeline is designed to faithfully capture an actor’s facial performance in its purest and exact form, without any artist corrections or enhancements required. For example, during the production of many movies and video games, studios will often capture an actor’s performance on set with the expectation that artist corrections (or ‘polish’) will be needed to reach the desired level of realism in the final animation. While entirely non-human, fictional characters usually still require this extra layer of animation, the vast majority of video games and movies that require digital human characters can remove
PURE4D DI4D’s new HMC has entirely unique eye and jaw tracking capabilities, successfully tracking detailed movement using its pair of stereophotogrammetry cameras
this step altogether. Instead, PURE4D is designed to make it far more efficient to use digital doubles, driving their animation directly with the facial performance of their real-life counterparts. This has the potential to dramatically change traditional production pipelines, shifting focus away from post and back towards the performance itself. It’s ideal for any studio opting to create exact digital doubles for any large-scale media production project, saving time while improving fidelity.
Every nuance and subtle expression from the actors’ facial performance is captured and transferred faithfully to the in-game animation of their digital double characters. It’s the perfect solution for narrative-driven experiences, attaining the same level of realism found in Hollywood movies.
SCALE-UP
DI4D’s PRO and HMC systems have already been used together for several recent projects, including 215 McCann and Ian Pons Jewell’s Xbox Series X advertisement, where MPC used both systems to create a digital double of acclaimed actor, Daniel Kaluuya. The new PURE4D service is designed to make this process simple and more effective.
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PURE4D is designed to meet the requirements of large-scale next-gen game projects that require thousands of seconds of the highest-quality facial animation. The machine learning algorithm serves to facilitate scaling beyond the capabilities of IN-GAME ANIMATION? NO PROBLEM previous DI4D services and cater to higher production demands of triple-A projects. The PURE4D pipeline can be used for PURE4D is a huge step forward for both in-game animation and cinematics without any drop in the quality of the facial DI4D, combining almost 20 years of animation displayed. The advent of the next technological advancements and experience into an efficient, high-quality pipeline for generation of gaming consoles has raised game developers and filmmakers to achieve the bar for in-game animation standards, photoreal digital doubles. with the same level of fidelity seen in cinematic sequences now expected for inout more about PURE4D at FYI Find game graphics. di4d.com/pure4d
DIGITAL DOUBLES
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Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn
INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Mark your calendars, Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn returns!
André Luís, founder of THU, talks this year’s event, featuring six action-packed days filled with exciting opportunities designed to inspire and foster your creativity
“WE ALL HAVE DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS, SO EACH OF US ADDS SOMETHING UNIQUE TO THIS COMMUNITY”
he world continues to be a somewhat strange place as we work through what this new normal looks like. But something that has remained constant, regardless of our circumstances, is our need for creativity, inspiration and connection. And that’s André Luís, founder, Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn what THU is here to deliver. For those of you who don’t know us, we’re Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn, or THU for short. And we live up to the cool name by empowering consideration many of the same questions environment that helps foster that. Here creatives through education, opportunities lifelong friendships are formed and selfwe considered back then, in addition to new and community, both at our Main Event ones, we’re proud and excited to be able to limiting inhibitions are shed. We see you. and throughout the year. This year we’re host a safe in-person event in Tróia. What And we’re here to help you discover your excited to host a safe, live Main Event in does that look like? Everyone attending inner magic. Tróia, Portugal on 20-25 September, and we the event (staff included) must fulfill the Looking for a job or a new career path? can’t wait to tell you all about it! The two first days of the event are dedicated requirements used to obtain an EU Digital First off, who is THU for? It’s for COVID Certificate. In addition, there will to recruitment, where the best companies creators from all areas of the digital in the industry seek out talent in a relaxed be another round of testing before checkentertainment and interactive industry. We atmosphere. Whether you’re looking for in at the Main Event and only participants all have different backgrounds, career goals freelance work, partners for a new project, who receive negative test results will be able and dreams, so each of us adds something a portfolio review or to build your network, to attend. And of course, we’ll be following unique to this community, our Tribe. we’ve got you covered. And once that’s done, government guidelines for social distancing What’s the Main Event all about? the talks and activities pick up. From and safety at the event itself. We’ve also The people. It’s about bringing made an exception to our normal policies, 9AM to 2AM, there’s always together creatives from something inspiring going enabling fully refundable tickets (except across the world, for six service fees) until 30 August, no questions on. But don’t take our action-packed days of asked. In these trying times, it’s our way of word for it, reach out talks, mentorships, on our social channels saying we understand your concerns. We activities and and see what others are here for you. connections. And Every year our Main Event has a have to say. We an art gallery as different theme, as each event tells a have an exciting well! No egos, different story. The theme for this year is list of speakers formalities or joining us this year, ‘A Quest for Roots’. Over the past few years a**holes allowed. we’ve been on a journey with our Tribe, with Amy Aniobi, Here, no matter writer, director and unlocking new views of the world and who you are or executive producer on riding this rollercoaster of a pandemic. In THU 2021 will be held in Tróia, following what stage of your HBO’s Emmy-nominated doing so, we’ve discovered the true meaning COVID safety guidelines career you’re at, you’re comedy Insecure, and Kris of being together. Stepping away and being encouraged to mingle with forced to pause helped us realise that Pearn, animation director and talk to anyone and everyone. home was never a place. And so, our quest and producer at Sony Pictures Industry leaders from VFX, video games, for roots has come to an end. Our home is Animation, already announced, and more animation, VR/AR, illustration and more our Tribe, the seed of all things, setting updates coming soon! are here to share their insights and likewise, roots wherever we go. So come join us, be Our Tribe is what’s most important to be inspired by yours. Whether you’re a shy us, and keeping them safe is paramount. embraced for all that you are and leave introvert, exuberant creative, or the wealth Cancelling the Main Event last year (the refreshed and inspired. in between, we want you to feel at home We look forward to welcoming you to first time in eight years that we’ve done so) with us. And we provide the safe supportive was what was needed. This year, taking into Portugal in September.
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Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn
THU Tribe perspective
Hear from some of the attendees who already got their ticket for this year’s event!
Brahim Bensehoul
Character designer based in Algeria artstation.com/ibralui
When you hang around with artists of all levels – whether they’re at the same level as you, beginners or your art heroes – and from different nationalities, races and beliefs, and have a regular faceto-face conversation with them, you realise how similar you all are. Through the stories you share you are filled with motivation and hope, and a special bond that only you and them can have.
Shelley Graf
VR/AR and game developer based in Germany shelley.de
THU has allowed me to really come out of myself. I’ve been able to interact with a lot of like-minded people in an otherwise pretty exclusive industry and forge both business relationships as well as friendships. The latter is what brings me back every year and what I hope to continue to grow, as the Tribe is filled with amazingly open and kind people from all around the world that I would otherwise never get to know. It's fantastic how everyone is so level at THU. For an industry event this size, I have enjoyed much more time hanging out with speakers and greats of the industry than I could ever have hoped to at any other event I could attend. 84 3D WORLD
Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn
Rodolfo Silva
Figurative fine artist and 3D artist based in Portugal artstation.com/rodolfosilva
One big existential crisis I’ve encountered, and see a lot of people struggling with, is the ability to merge two or more different interests together into coexisting work. After seeing what a lot of the Tribe members or THU speakers do, especially someone like, for example, Scott Eaton, Alex Oliver or Raphael Lacoste and watching them merge together their passion for both drawing, digital sculpture/painting and more technical digital production techniques, made me come to terms with what I really enjoy doing and the fact that I don’t need to sacrifice one of my passions in pursuit of the other. I guess that is another big message of THU, “to find your inner child” and, like any child, just do whatever you’re really passionate about and eventually you’ll find that cathartic feeling of being where you belong.
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Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn
Olga Andriyenko Character, concept & story artist based in Germany artstation.com/asurocks
I attended my first THU in 2013, the first edition ever. Immediately I could feel it having a massive impact on me, but I did not yet know that it would become an essential part of my life in the following years. What makes THU stand out from other industry events is the emphasis on human connection. Not only can you meet industry professionals with years of experience ready to share their vast knowledge, you also can get to know the person behind the profession. Every year I come back from THU inspired to go the next step on my artistic journey. It’s like being shaken awake from the inevitable creative rut once in a while.
Volkan Kucukemre Game artist based in Turkey artstation.com/volkank
For me, THU was an evolving experience. After my first year, Tróia was a familiar place and I was part of the Tribe, so it was easier to approach people and pick their brains. And I learned that asking the right questions is often better than presumably knowing the right answer. There are so many different ways to approach a problem and each can work, given the right context. It pays to be open to new ideas. THU and my interactions there have helped me see that firsthand. THU for me is a place to meet new people and be inspired by new ideas in a familiar environment. I think that's a great mix. 86 3D WORLD
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PASSIONATE FOCUS A passion for the craft enriches commitment “With the 12-week stop-motion courses it’s week-by-week of another craft, another skill being taught by directors and animators and going off and doing a task and responding,” says Hewis. “And [it’s about] being in a community of people. We’ve had an awful lot of people from the US, Colombia, rural India, Melbourne, Sydney, Qatar and all across Europe, and we become a group of geeks geeking-out about stop-motion. It’s ace!”
Stop-motion training in a digital world
INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Stop-motion training in a digital world
3D World speaks with Mark Simon Hewis, head of department at Aardman Academy, as he develops its training for people passionate about stop-motion here’s a real sense of satisfied surprise in Mark Simon Hewis’s voice when he recalls how, during the past two decades, the terrain and perception of stop-motion animation has radically evolved. “When Aardman was starting with Chicken Run they just couldn’t find enough animators,” he reveals. “They just couldn’t find people who did stop-motion. Stop-motion was incredibly unpopular if you weren’t Disney doing 2D, and it certainly wasn’t something that a lot of people dreamt about doing. And so Aardman realised that they almost had to train people up. So that’s what they did. They got people in who’d done a little bit or showed a lot of interest and they started doing a three-month course which trained people, and a lot of them walked straight onto Chicken Run; onto the highestgrossing stop-motion film in history. And, actually, some of the people who now teach on the Academy, who are directors and senior animators, they did that course.” With that lineage outlined, it’s clear that it echoes something essential about Aardman’s creative culture. In turn, about seven years ago the studio recognised the opportunity, as Hewis describes it, “to try and open the door a bit and to kind of help and support an industry that it really loves”. Of the profile that’s currently enjoyed by the Academy, Hewis says: “It has officially existed for about six or seven years, but it’s not had the same sort of public-facing front that I came in to help it have over the last year.” With this in mind, Hewis notes that some of those who enrol on an Academy course are doing so as a way towards developing their skills and sensibilities beyond the animation education that they may have had as undergraduate students at universities. Our conversation will later return to the relationship between prior knowledge and experience and what it might take to become an Academy student. Indeed, Hewis makes a useful and telling observation about the demographic of enrolling students, explaining: “We’re
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seeing far more people in their 30s than in their early 20s.” As such, for a significant proportion of Aardman students their impulse is to embark on a reskilling journey by enrolling on an Academy course. At the time of writing, we’re all emerging from the various waves of lockdown and the experience and value of teaching and training has, by necessity, been shown to work in various ways. One of those ways is the opportunity afforded by online delivery. To keep class sizes manageable and communal, each Academy course sets a cap of 40 students. Addressing Aardman’s creative and industry-orientated philosophy, and how that underpins the work of the Aardman Academy, Hewis explains: “I think that regardless of who you are and what department you’re in and what your skillset
is, Aardman is full of really good people and I think that [with the studio] becoming employee-owned it’s just made that more clear to all of us. The Academy has become a chance for us to really try and support an industry that we love and make it have an incredibly healthy future. And then, all along the route of the Academy what we’ve been trying to do is to work out how to be more than something that costs a lot of money for people to come and do; and that you can only do it if you are in a position where you’ve got lots of time and a fair bit of money on your hands. And so, actually, over the last three or four years we’ve been trying to work out how we deal with that. The purpose of the Academy now is to just genuinely support and grow people and help people and not be a closed door. And the whole price point was trying to make
“WE’RE SEEING FAR MORE STUDENTS IN THEIR 30S THAN IN THEIR EARLY 20S”
Mark Simon Hewis, head of department, Aardman Academy
The Aardman Academy delivers courses online, widening opportunity for students 3D WORLD 89
Aardman Academy
it at least half the price of university for the equivalent number of weeks. We know that we can’t offer loans, but what we do is we spread the cost so you can pay in instalments.” Doing anything well requires focus and persistence, of course, and in turn that can be buttressed by passion. “To be honest, you come to the Academy when you love animation,” says Hewis. “That’s what we find and with animation, no matter what role you want – whether it’s producer, editor, director, animator, model-maker, scriptwriter or storyboard artist – the truth is nobody chooses that unless they love it, because it’s hard work. Our job is to help people with their skills. They’ve already got the work ethic. It’s about getting people the skills and the support and a genuine industry network of experts to hold people’s hands through a process of getting better.” Part of the Academy’s teaching and learning resources combines digital and hands-on tools, as Hewis explains: “Everyone gets sent their own studio, so everybody gets the same. When they join the course we send them Dragonframe software, we send them out Dragonframe controller, we send them out an armature. In Week 1 we all build our armatures
Main: The Aardman Academy brings students together to explore the craft of stop-motion animation Above right: Each student is provided with a welcome pack of tools to work with Right: Character creation is key to the work of the Academy’s students 90 3D WORLD
together. You get sent plasticine. You get sent a rig and tools. And so everybody has that joy of: ‘We’re on the same course; we’ve all got the same kit.’” Hewis goes on to define how he sees the Academy developing: “Now, at the moment, the Academy is at about the point where we’re trying to build a pyramid of skills. At the bottom it’s people who want to learn more about animation from experts, from people who make animated feature films, who win awards. Then the next one up are two-week courses, that are really intensive, in story (character development and storyboarding) and then another two weeks purely in model-making: what modelmaking is. And then, above that, you’ve got three-month courses and that’s where you do things that take much longer.” Hewis’s recollection about the origins of the Academy prompts him to note that: “We started the plan four years ago and when the pandemic hit it looked like we were incredibly quick to respond to the pandemic. But we weren’t. We were almost there already (with online).” In turn, the Academy’s online delivery has opened up the opportunity for people to apply because they can undertake the entire course from their home with no need to travel and incur the varying
Stop-motion training in a digital world
EMBRACING COMMUNITY
Mark Simon Hewis celebrates the opportunity to bring people together and encourage longer-term commitment “Peter Lord [Aardman cofounder] has had a massive part to play in the development of the Academy. Peter will say to people who come in: ‘Look, this is a community. This is a genuine community, which means you need to talk to us and keep in touch and email us. And you need to ask our advice and you need to let us know when you’ve done something. And we’ll let you know when we’re doing something.’ We’re not trying to pick people up, wind the crank as they go through all the cogs, spitting them out at the other end. That’s not the intention. The intention is to develop, build and nurture a community.”
“THE ACADEMY’S COMMUNITY IS VITAL: STUDENTS POST THEIR WORK THERE, ASK QUESTIONS AND IDENTIFY INDUSTRY OPPORTUNITIES” Mark Simon Hewis, head of department, Aardman Academy
costs involved with that, whether nationally or internationally. With its range of different courses, Hewis sketches out the underlying teaching and learning provision and what tools are available for students to work with. “We try and make it as much contact time as possible, allowing things to be recorded in a way that adds to the delivery,” he says. “There are multi-cam shoots, with close ups of what animators are actually doing with their hands. There are screenrecordings of what’s actually happening in the software, with shots of them talking directly to camera. People can also shuttle through films frame-by-frame. We also have live Q and As, live lectures every week and, also, every single participant gets their own Aardman mentor. What we’ve done is created this really brilliant community that’s behind a paywall. It’s a bit like a Facebook group and it’s just for them. All the mentors are on there as well and we’ve
all got taggable names. The community is vital: students post their work there, ask questions, engage in general chat and identify industry opportunities. By the end of the course there are thousands of posts by 40 people. Then, at the end of each week, our students upload their work and you tag your mentor. So, while your mentor’s on-set shooting something, they’ll get a message saying that their student has just sent them a piece of work.” Hewis goes on to speak to a particularly pragmatic point: “I think that it’s not in our interest, as an industry, let alone as a department within Aardman, to flood an industry with too many people for the number of roles that are actually out there. And we really talk about that a lot in the department: getting that balance right between what’s needed and what people want. But what we hope is that what we’re doing is giving people a really good foundation as part of the Academy. The
second you come here and do something, you become part of the alumni for life. And loads of opportunities go on there; there’s loads of support. It’s so idiosyncratic of Aardman that if you’re going to do something it needs to be excellent.” As our conversation concludes, Hewis returns to the spirit of the Academy. He stresses that the Aardman Academy gives those who enrol the chance to “fall in love” with stop-motion. In turn, he cites a particular anecdote that might just speak to one of the ways that the medium of stop-motion dovetails so usefully with the medium of CGI. “We’ve had quite a few people come onto the course who are CGI animators,” he says. “One of our CG animators said that they came on a course because they were scared of gravity. They’re brilliant animators but you get something that can’t just be picked up with a mouse. The digital animators suddenly go: ‘Oh wow, I can move around it with my own eyes!’” 3D WORLD 91
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 Huge 32GB of on-board memory New RDNA 2 graphics architecture is much faster Hardware raytracing Only offers Mini DisplayPort sockets
SPECS Ray Accelerators: 60 Compute units: 60 Memory: 32GB EEC Architecture: RDNA 2 Outputs: 6x Mini DisplayPort
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AMD Radeon Pro W6800 HARDWARE REVIEW
PRICE $2,500 | COMPANY AMD | WEBSITE amd.com
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he AMD Radeon Pro W6800 meets the pace of development in GPUs, which is rapid to say the least, with a new generation coming hot on the heels of the previous one. This latest workstation graphics card has upped the ante in some significant ways, in a bid to dominate the arena. The AMD Radeon Pro W6800 is a very well-specced graphics card with some rather noteworthy attributes. To start with there is a whopping 32GB of memory, more than enough for the large datasets that visual effects artists and visualisers need for their work. This is EEC memory as well, adding a
layer of protection for these critical environments. Such a quantity of memory allays any fears users might have of culling texture sizes or worries about geometry density of scenes. Photorealism can often succeed on the details, so knowing the resources are there for dense foliage, sculpted surfaces and impeccable textures really delivers confidence. There’s also now hardware raytracing which, while not directly supported by all applications, certainly delivers where needed. Look at the rise and rise of Epic’s Unreal Engine. This software is supported, meaning that game designers, real-time artists and the ever-increasing
number of archviz artists who now use it can deliver their projects without the traditional bottlenecks. Epic’s benchmarking score for this card is 45.9, close to cards at almost twice the price and totally surpassing anything in its own range.
NEW ARCHITECTURE
AMD has equipped the AMD Radeon Pro W6800 with RDNA 2, the latest graphics architecture, which provides results almost twice as fast as the previous generation. On top of this is the fact that, being a workstation rather than consumer card, there is an abundance of certification, lending confidence in the card’s ability to play nicely with
AMD Radeon Pro W6800
The W6800 supports multiple displays, via Mini DisplayPort
your software, especially for users of Nuke and SolidWorks, among many others. Plus, the physical card itself adds further layers of thoughtful design. It’s a double height PCIe 4 card, although it does support PCIe 3 too and has been designed with multi GPU systems in mind. A clear example of this is the heat management, which is excellent. Hooking up the W6800 is a doddle too. The Radeon Pro has 6 Mini DisplayPort sockets, easily catering to those with multiple monitors or large display walls. These ports can support UHD and ultra wide monitors too, meaning no matter what your setup, you will be fully powered.
The final piece of this puzzle is software. AMD boosts the viewport on these cards, with variable localised resolutions, helping aid the required frame rates. However, it is really the enterprise-level software that is the winner. Having drivers and associated graphics software that is built for the business, not the gamer is a big deal and is an area AMD has long excelled in. All these elements, along with many others, make the AMD Radeon Pro W6800 a powerful and very capable graphics card that will be at home in many workstations. It has the grunt as well as the thoughtful design to successfully power it through many challenging situations.
Unlike some GPUs the power sockets reside on the end
“A POWERFUL AND VERY CAPABLE GRAPHICS CARD THAT WILL BE AT HOME IN MANY WORKSTATIONS” HEATMANAGEMENT
Cooling is a key requirement of a modern graphics card and the AMD Radeon Pro W6800 has that covered. Yes, there are plenty of fins inside but the air is sucked in through a large opening with a single fan, then the hot air is expelled directly out of the rear of the card, above the jacks. If you’re in the market for a new graphics card, the AMD Radeon Pro W6800 is hands
down one of the best out there. The latest generation of RDNA helps this excel. For demanding levels of data the 32GB EEC memory is on tap, and for applications that can take advantage of the hardware raytracing this is one of a very small group of leading GPUs, and as such should be very high on your shortlist.
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Adobe Substance Collection
Adobe Substance Collection SOFTWARE REVIEW
AUTHOR PROFILE Mike Griggs Mike is a 3D and visual effects artist with vast experience across the industry as both a creator and a technical writer. creativebloke.com
FEATURES The definitive Texture and Material creation suite AI and Machine Learning simplifies a wide range of complex tasks Substance 3D Designer gains procedural modelling Substance 3D Stager comes with GPU-powered Ray Trace Render engine Integrates well with other Adobe applications
A COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION While the Substance 3D Collection is paid for separately from the Adobe Creative Cloud collection of applications, the various Adobe applications play well together. This is especially true for the new 3D apps. For example, a procedural model created in Substance 3D Designer can be rendered in Substance 3D Stager, while having artist-selected attributes such as the number of copies available without the need to round trip. 94 3D WORLD
PRICE £200 Per Year subscription | COMPANY Adobe | WEBSITE substance3d.com
E
ver since Allegorithmic was purchased by Adobe in early 2019, the writing has been on the wall that the industrystandard texturing Substance suite for 3D artists would become part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Well, that time has come… kind of! The new Adobe Substance 3D Collection ‘Adobifies’ the existing core creation apps into Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Designer, while reinventing Alchemist as the new Substance 3D Sampler and adding the new Substance 3D Stager into the mix. There are new feature additions to Substance 3D Painter. The new Adobe Standard Material that allows creating more complex materials within a Texture Set adds some new Channels for Sheen and Coat, among others. Most of the changes in Painter are cosmetic and allow more significant interaction between other Substance apps and the broader Adobe creative ecosystem. Substance 3D Designer also gets these ease-oflife (if you’re an Adobe user) enhancements. More importantly, Designer receives a whole new graph type with the Substance Model graph, which allows the creation of procedural models directly within Substance 3D Designer. While it’s still an initial release, direct asset creation was the missing piece of the Substance offering, and it is great to see the capability to create bespoke geometry within the Substance 3D Collection.
While the addition of complex procedural models in Substance 3D Designer will make many experienced 3D artists happy, what about new artists combing from Adobe’s 2D core apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator? These artists are covered by the new Substance 3D Stager application, which allows the creation of complex 3D scenes using a simple drag and drop interface. Using either a model from the wide variety of assets, either within the Substance 3D Stager application or sourced from the Substance
could mobilise Substance 3D Stager to be the only 3D solution they need. Substance 3D Sampler allows the creation of tileable textures from photos. Like quite a few of the new features that have appeared recently in Adobe apps, Substance 3D Sampler makes the most of Adobe’s investment in AI and Machine Learning technology. But only (at the moment) when Substance 3D Sampler is being run on a PC. The tutorials that come with Substance 3D Sampler are easy enough for any artist, 2D or 3D, to make
“THE TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS CREATE INTRIGUING POSSIBILITIES FOR EXISTING SUBSTANCE ARTISTS AND NEW USERS” 3D Assets online collections (a crucial part of the Substance 3D experience), an artist unfamiliar with 3D can now easily create product shots. There’s support for a logo designed in illustrator that can be easily ‘plonked’ onto a model and resized and iterated until the right look is achieved. The render engine within Substance 3D stager supports ray-tracing, and it can work with custom backplates. Substance 3D Sampler can recreate camera angles and lighting from these images with a single mouse click. The render quality is excellent, with the ability to preview still renders quickly and easily. In fact, many 2D design agencies
a convincing tileable material that can be used as an asset in the rest of the Substance 3D Collection or a 3D content creation application. There is a lot to like in the Substance 3D Collection. The new tools and applications have created intriguing new possibilities for existing Substance artists and those coming from other Adobe applications. While the software developers have done wonders to integrate the Substance applications into the Adobe family, those at Adobe who are in charge of product marketing and pricing have let the side down. Any artist who thinks that when
Adobe Substance Collection
Above: With Substance 3D Stager artists can add assets created in other Adobe tools into a bespoke 3D scene Right: Substance 3D Sampler creates materials for Substance 3D Applications and any 3D digital content creation tool Below: Substance 3D Designer’s Substance Model Graph
they click on the ‘Creative Cloud All Apps’ plan to buy all that Adobe offers will be disappointed. The Substance 3D Collection is not included in this package. It has to be paid for separately via a notinconsequential monthly or annual subscription. By all means, the Creative Cloud suite could do with more pricing structures that allow users to focus on set disciplines. But have the ‘All Apps’ pricing option actually mean that. The sticker shock of buying ‘another’ Creative Cloud subscription could alienate 2D artists who could benefit from applications like the new Substance 3D Stager as a gateway into 3D content creation. This is a crying shame. The Substance 3D Collection integrates and develops existing Substance Applications into an exciting new bedrock for 3D content creation, leveraging Adobe’s AI smarts with Substance’s ease of use. The only thing letting these applications down is a confusing pricing structure for new and existing Adobe subscribers.
VERDICT 3D WORLD 95
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