Table of contents for March 2022 in 3D World

A particular favourite of the VFX industry, SideFX’s Houdini presents 3D artists with a node-based procedural approach that offers unrivalled levels of flexibility and control over their creations. Houdini certainly isn’t for everyone and its workflow can be difficult to get used to, but for the right artists it can be an invaluable addition to their digital toolset. Freelance grooming artist and 3D generalist Alicja Cygan discovered Houdini when SideFX first introduced the grooming tool. “I aspired to be a grooming artist, and I was excited to learn it,” Cygan explains. “It turned out to be a great tool which is my favourite to this day. Houdini wasn't commonly used for illustrations back then, but I decided to shift my workflow to Houdini because of its nice-looking hair results, which was…

“I worked on this project as a fan of Mamoru Hosoda,” notes Kim, who has never worked on a Japanese production before. “I like the sincerity of his movies. When he asked me to do some designs, I had no idea what it was going to be like. Usually at Disney I get tons of images, such as the director or storyboard artists doing sketches as well as some reference photos that have been gathered by production. For this, I got only the script and some ideas from the director about Belle. I saw some drawings in the real world of Suzu Naito and [her childhood friend] Shinjiro Chikami. That was it. Director Hosoda let me do what I do.” “There is a famous Korean opera singer, Sumi Jo, and…

CATHEDRAL CITY Software Photoshop, 3ds Max, After Effects Year made 2021 LIGHTING AND DETAILING In this work, lighting and detailing were important to me. All the lighting was rendered in Photoshop. I wanted to convey the heavy atmosphere of the metropolis, where dense fog does not let in light and it is all flooded with advertising signs and information screens. To do this, I used many layers of different densities with an air haze and specially drew the necessary advertising screens. Vladimir Manyukhin lives in Moscow and has been working in the art industry for more than 20 years.…

AUTHOR Atila Salviano Born and raised in Brazil, Atila is a 3D artist with a focus on 3D modelling and texturing. Now he’s working on feature movies for a previs company. www.atilasalvianoart.com This was a very special personal project for me, and from gathering references until hitting ‘render’ it was a long journey with multiple challenges. However, it was the project that I learned the most while working on it. My goal was to achieve an appealing scene from space, something that can touch people’s hearts. I remember that when I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut, but now that I am a 3D artist, why not create one? Or even better, two! Nowadays, space exploration is a topic that a lot of people are talking about,…

ASTERIORNIS MAASTRICHTENSIS Software ZBrush, Substance Painter, Blender Year made 2021 FEATHER COVER CREATION IN BLENDER To create feather covering I used planes with feather alpha instanced by Blender’s hair particle systems. There are 21 different systems that allow for flexible grooming. Most are emitted from faces randomly to create even coverage and in some, I added interpolated children to boost their count, but wing feathers needed another approach. I reduced the number of particles to 0 and placed them by hand in particle edit mode. Instanced objects show in edit only when children are on. I added simple children and set their amount to 0, so I could preview feather alphas when grooming. Joanna Kobierska is a 3D generalist working for VFX company Dash Dot Creations. She also uses her…

ARTIST Jay H Patel SOFTWARE Unreal Engine 4, Quixel Mixer “The idea for this project came while I was playing Forza Horizon 4, I wanted to recreate the barn environment in Unreal Engine using the Path Tracer in Unreal Engine 4.27. I started by gathering reference images of the location. I modelled the barn structure and then exported meshes as FBX to Quixel Mixer for texturing. Once I was satisfied, I imported it into UE and started creating the environment which consisted of landscape sculpting, foliage painting, props placement and so on. I had set up materials for the Porsche model in a separate UE project, which was then added as a sub-level into my main scene. After experimenting with different light setups I eventually settled for a low sun position.” jay-h.com…

Unreal Engine has long been an open and advanced platform for 3D creation of all kinds, with imaginative creators making everything from art and games, architecture and automobiles, to film and immersive experiences inside the real-time engine. With the latest version, Unreal Engine 5, taking the platform to new heights and new features arriving regularly, the engine is becoming the real-time tool of choice for numerous studios and there’s never been a better time for artists to try their hand at it. Unreal Engine was the preferred engine at Breda University of Applied Sciences, where environment artist Isa Raaijmakers graduated from last summer. “Throughout my education I worked on multiple group projects making environment art for the games we created,” she tells 3D World. “When entering my final year at…

“CG has been used in many scenes of director Hosoda’s previous works, and they were environment or background-related,” states Horibe. “But what’s different this time with Belle is that all the characters [in U] were created with CG as well.” The production schedule was tight. “We didn’t have much prep time for animation, so we shaped our animation style as we created actual shots. For scenes where characters sing, our animators looked at movements of Kaho Nakamura who voiced Belle as well as a contemporary dancer and incorporated them into her motions.” Different animation techniques were combined. “Upon hearing the director’s vision, I came up with an idea of combining the Japanese animation style [limited animation with 2s and 3s] with full frame animation, like Pixar’s. We kept body movements…

3D ENVIRONMENT CREATION I’m a big fan of Breaking Bad and Ready Player One and wanted to create something between a van and a sci-fi style of building. I used Autodesk Maya for the modelling process with a simple primitive object like a box, cylinder, sphere or plane, and after that I use simple tools to play with their forms. I like this polygonal modelling method because it allows you to control every point on your object. Then I make the details in ZBrush if needed, to give it a realistic look. For texturing, I mainly use Substance Painter and a UDIM workflow to give each asset a high-quality texture. Bondok Max was born and raised in Egypt and has been a passionate 3D artist for many years. THE CRYSTAL…

In today’s generation of video games, the visual fidelity and graphics are advancing to almost complete levels of realism. As we are crossing over to current-generation consoles such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S, it’s more important now than ever to make sure that not only are the visuals as good as they can be, but that a game can be performant on both last-gen and current-generation platforms. To do this, it’s extremely important to optimise your art content to allow performant playability on both. In this tutorial, we are going to cover industry-proven methods of optimising the art content you create for video games, making sure we maintain visual quality while keeping the content as performant as possible. This includes methods such as LOD ‘level…

AUTHOR Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a veteran creator with a passion for explaining the process of digital content creation to new artists. www.creativebloke.com Adobe Substance 3D Painter has become the default texturing option for scores of 3D artists across the globe. With an intuitive toolset and interface, combined with a vast stock of materials, brushes and textures, Substance 3D Painter makes it easy to create complex textures using techniques familiar to artists who are new to texturing but used to using 2D applications such as Adobe Photoshop. While using the ‘Photoshop’ method will get you pretty far along with Substance Painter, there is a range of tools that can be used to enhance an artist’s workflow further. One of these areas is the wide range of advanced masking options…

Pietro Chiovaro replies I will show you one of the fastest ways to create buildings in Blender. Creating a realistic building in 3D is a long process that requires a lot of practice and experience, as you have to take care of every detail in the production and keep in mind the performance, especially if you are creating buildings for video games. But if you don’t need a lot of details and the purpose of the building is to use it in the background as a secondary element, the solution to speed up the process is to create buildings starting from a photograph. The building shown has been created using just one photograph, without any extra texture, and the only thing you need is a photograph with a high resolution…

NAME Mike Griggs JOB TITLE Digital content creator STUDIO Creative Bloke Ltd LOCATION UK ABOUT Veteran content creator and CGI generalist. WEB creativebloke.com Mike Griggs has been working in digital content creation since the late 1990s. After a varied career working in museum design, web and advertising, Mike went freelance a decade ago and now offers his skills to a broad portfolio of international clients. Here Mike answers our questions and shares his expert advice. Can you describe your role as a digital content creator? My role is to provide digital content assets for my clients, including CG 3D assets and animation, technical advice, editing, audio and VO recording, and 2D animation. I also offer professional consultancy and technical writing for a range of publications. I prefer it when my…

Autodesk’s Maya is a professional 3D animation, modelling, simulation and rendering toolset, designed to create knockout CG visuals. With its industrial strength capabilities, Maya is widely considered the very best 3D software on the market and is the tool of choice for some of the biggest names in VFX and animation. Does that make it the right software for you? We caught up with art director Amaru Zeas and creative director Tsubasa Nakai to help you find out. Zeas shares his tips for getting started with Maya and its vast features, whilst Nakai delivers a masterclass in character creation within Maya. "Maya has, in my opinion, become the standard 3D program in most schools because of its user-friendly interface, which makes learning easier than with other 3D applications. Autodesk Maya…

Key words given to Wong that described the virtual realm were omnidirectional cityscapes, skyscrapers and floating whales. Sketches were drawn in Wong’s notebook as he travelled to and from his full-time job as an architect. “A lot of my design process happened in the CAD program MicroStation and I tried to match the 3D model as close to my 2D sketch as possible.” Summer Wars depicted the internet as a totem structure, but that concept was replaced with a linear design inspired by a string on a harp because at the time ‘Love Song’ was the title of the movie. “I enjoyed developing the project with clean geometric shapes because it represents this virtual, pixel-like world and using that to form the rest of the architecture,” notes Wong. “The crescent…

How can you make the transition from budding artist to taking your first step into a career in the video games industry? James Brady, senior environment artist at Antimatter Games, provides some handy tips for becoming an industry-worthy artist. 01 FIND YOUR NICHE With graphics ever changing in the video games industry and hardware becoming more powerful, this means art production in the games industry is ever evolving too. With this, it’s extremely important to always specialise in a specific area of expertise in the art creation spectrum. Generalists aren’t too common in this industry and it’s not as beneficial to simply be a jack of all trades. Art disciplines in the video games industry include character art, concept art, asset art environment art, VFX and real-time rendering. It’s important…

Antony Ward replies The joy of Maya’s constraints knows no bounds. They can be useful, and sometimes essential elements of your work, but they can also cause so many problems. When constraining one node to another you are essentially sticking them together, with the constraint node being the glue. If the two objects you’re constraining are orientated differently, an offset can be added to the constraint to compensate for the difference. Problems can then occur when rotating past certain key values. So for example, the constraint will simply decide that a rotation of 360 should logically move on to-360 rather than 361, so you then end up with a flip. This can get worse if the axes aren’t aligned too and good old gimbal lock comes into play, but that’s…

FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE HOUSE [LIVING ROOM] Software Maya, Photoshop Year made 2021 3D AND 2D For this image, I had already made the exterior of the house. I usually start by determining the architecture plan and researching references for the mood and objects I would like. After that, I do the modelling inside Maya, arranging each element into the best composition possible. I tried to research the best focal and the best story for my image. Once I've done the lighting and rendering, I move on to the paintover to add textures, organic elements and improve the lighting and colours. I love painting small details and adding some life to my concept. I’m a concept artist at Umeshu Lovers also doing freelance work. I work for games, movies, board games and…

Follow the link to download your free files https://bit.ly/3D-world-gnome MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects MODELS + TEXTURES FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a set of fantastic textures from and build your own asset library with these incredible free ‘furniture’ models from in our monthly model and texture giveaway. HIGH-RES SCREEN GRABS ZBRUSH AND BLENDER Learn to optimise your workflows for creative projects with our step-by-step. HIGH-RES SCREEN GRABS SUBSTANCE PAINTER Follow along with Mike Griggs’ step-by-step to masking with Substance Painter. ISSUE 284 NEXT MONTH We take a look behind the visual effects scenes of Pixar’s Automaton ON SALE 22ND FEBRUARY Subscribe today: www.bit.ly/3dworld-subs…