Indice dei contenuti per December 2022 in 3D World

Feature Pinocchio IN the Robert Zemeckis movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Pinocchio makes a couple of appearances. Roll forward 34 years and the director has reunited with the wooden puppet for a reworking of the 1940 Disney cel-animated adaptation of Carlo Collodi's novel. Indeed, look closely early in this new version and you'll see Collodi's name as part of the production design effort led by Stefan Dechant and Doug Chiang. The fine line between what has been established and the potential to add something new is a creative challenge, and Ben Jones (visual effects supervisor at MPC) starts our conversation by noting how the studio's work on the new movie builds on their own animation legacy, whilst also providing the opportunity for them to work further with real-time, virtual production…

Glen Southern replies Scene hierarchy is very important in 3D, for lots of reasons. As the iPad gets more and more software, enabling us to accomplish the same tasks as with a powerful desktop machine, developers are having to race to keep up. Nomad Sculpt and Forger are the two leading programs, with Nomad pulling ahead in terms of features in 2022. However, Forger (now owned by Maxon) has just added low-polygon tools, which is an amazing addition to a stagnant app. Once you start creating low-polygon models with more intricate parts and less sculpting, scene hierarchy becomes really important. Nomad Sculpt is about to release just that, so let's take a look at what it is and how it works. Basically, if you create anything in Nomad Sculpt it…

01 SET UP YOUR SCENE Volumetric effects are best utilised in specific situations where you want to create an atmospheric mood. One classic example is creating sun/god rays with light coming through a window. Another situation is when you have low light in the scene and want to have localised lights such as lamps around a room. A final example is when you have a misty outdoor scene. If you want to make the most of volumetric effects, you need to set your scene up accordingly. 02 CREATE YOUR LIGHT(S) Set up all your lights in the scene and adjust their colour and density to suit your needs. Volumetric effects work best when there are only a few lights that are contributing to specific parts of the scene. If the scene is…

SOFTWARE: AUTODESK MAYA Antony Ward replies There's nothing more frustrating than finally finding a plugin, or even a script, that will drastically speed up your workflow, then spending your hard-earned money on it, only to find that it doesn't work. You follow the instructions to the letter. The script is in the right folder, you're using the correct command to run it as well as the right syntax, you have even restarted Maya numerous times, but you still get the following error: // Error: ImportError: file <maya console> Line 1: bad magic number in ‘antcgiQuickLimb’: b'B\r\r\n' There's obviously a problem with the script, right? But other people seem to be able to get it working without any issues. So what is the “magic number”, and why is it such a…

Reviews PLUGIN GROUP TEST Scattering tools We explore the latest software and hardware tools to see if they are worth your time or money On the early days, when scattering tools were very much few and far between, artists had to create a whole host of complicated workarounds to create even remotely believable results. Even when scattering tools like Forest Pack hit the market, we still had to follow processes like Peter Guthrie's famous grass creation tutorial to get the right objects to then scatter. I made use of Particle Flow in 3ds Max in those early days and I'm getting the sweats just thinking about it now. It was complex, laboured and unbelievably difficult to get good results. Early releases of scattering plugins provided the necessary tools to duplicate objects over…

Reviews Gaea 1.3 SOFTWARE REVIEW PRICE f£90 Indie/£180 Professional/£270 Enterprise COMPANY QuadSpinner WEBSITE quadspinner.com Gaea, terrain modeller extraordinaire, is now at version 1.3. Since its release we've seen a few iterative updates and a whole host of new features, bug fixes and general improvements. Considering Gaea's development team is relatively small and in recent years has been hit by a number of challenges outside of their control, it's amazing that they've managed to deliver not only a stable build but, by many accounts, their best build so far. For those new to the terrain modelling scene, Gaea adopts a node-based approach to create vast and realistic terrains. Other options include the likes of Vue, World Machine and World Creator. Gaea began its journey producing procedural clouds, models and materials but…

The Gallery CG art to inspire “DO NOT LET A FEAR OF LEARNING AND TRYING NEW TOOLS PREVENT YOU FROM DOING SO” ARTIST Quinten Blake SOFTWARE ZBrush, Unreal Engine 5, Photoshop “I created this piece for the annual Atomhawk art competition which had the theme ‘Forgotten Creation’. My initial idea was to have ‘epic scale’, and for that I decided to create a scene where explorers discover this giant ancient golem. To achieve such epic scale I had to change my workflow a bit, so I decided to try Unreal Engine 5. After watching some tutorials and seeing the power of Nanite, and how artists use very dense and heavy assets with ease and without software limitations, using Unreal Engine turned out to be such an awesome and fun experience.…

BLENDER | CHARACTER CREATOR | ICLONE | MARVELOUS DESIGNER | PHOTOSHOP Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills LAST WOMAN ON EARTH Take time to consider your composition, and how it serves the story you wish totett with your image Blender is an extremely fast-growing software, and it has become the main, go-to tool among many artists for commercial and personal work. The software, coupled with highly detailed character models from Character Creator 3 and clothes simulated in Marvelous Designer, help to push the visual quality of images even further. One of the reasons I'm so committed to working in Blender is the ability to create highly realistic images within a reasonable amount of time, and because I'm a concept artist I need to be…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3Dworld-292 Houdini has been gaining increasing popularity in the game industry for its powerful VFX and procedural modelling capabilities. Although learning the software is difficult, the reward is also tremendous. While it is important to learn the nodes and functionalities of this gigantic software, another very important aspect is often overlooked by beginners – data structure and algorithm. This computer science-related topic might seem alien, but the nature of Houdini is visual scripting; building procedural logic to generate assets is no different from developing a piece of software, and algorithms play a big role in the process. This article introduces a simple yet powerful data structure called disjoint data set. With its ‘find set’ and ‘union set’ operations, a working maze can be quickly generated. Another powerful…

01 MODELS BEFORE SORTING Any model that you bring in either as an import or as a default primitive (as here with the cylinders) is on its own layer in the hierarchy stack, and it has a pivot point. The pivot point is where the model will be rotated or scaled from, so logically you need it at the correct point before you start any of your creation process. 02 MOVE THE PIVOT To move the pivot you need to look in the sidebar and hit the Pivot button. This means that when you move the gizmo now, only the gizmo will move and not the model. From here you can move the pivot point to the correct place that your model will be rotating from. With this image I just…

Reviews Helium SOFTWARE REVIEW PRICE £56/$60 per year COMPANY Helium WEBSITE heliumx.tv Helium is an After Effects plugin that lets artists create 3D scenes and animations, working with models, text, splines, terrain and organic effects. In recent years After Effects has been improving its 3D capabilities, but it still lacks many of the tools that are available in the likes of Video CoPilot's plugins and Helium. Let's take a look at what Helium has to offer motion designers who are particularly concerned with working in 3D. All of the tools are well thought out, quick to browse through and easy to use. The initial setup is as simple as adding ‘Helium Effects’, found in the Effects menu. One of Helium's main selling points is its ability to work with 3D…

PRICE £25/$25 per month COMPANY PinkSoft LID WEBSITE fstormrender.com FStorm has developed at an incredible rate. Since its inception seven years ago, we've seen an intense level of focused effort to advance the capabilities of this Tenderer. FStorm is a GPU Tenderer that is focused on speed, quality and simplicity, its founder is Andrey Kozlov, who some might remember from the development team at Octane. FStorm is not the easiest renderer to pick up and start using. It has an online manual for most features but it lacks a lot of official resources that new users are likely to need to get a grip of it. The website's most recent news item was June 2020 and its YouTube channel, at time of writing, hasn't seen any new content for a…

• The Gallery CG art to inspire “I created this illustration as the training material for my team at the studio, to show how I am mixing 2D and 3D together when I create illustrations. I decided to make a fantasy theme and a creature (my favourite thing to do), and I started by gathering references from animal pictures, then sketched in Photoshop. After I got a rough design, I moved to ZBrush for sculpting, then Photoshop for post-processing.” • wasurah.artstation.com ARTIST Worasak Suwannarach SOFTWARE ZBrush, Blender, Photoshop…

Feature Stranger Things Season 4 Emphasising the growing epic scale of the storytelling by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer is Netflix dividing Season 4 of Stranger Things into two parts, with Episode 409 clocking in at a feature length runtime of two hours and 20 minutes. There were three visual effects supervisors with Michael Maher Jr. overseeing Episodes 401 to 406 while Episodes 407 to 409 were looked after by Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates. Among the 30 VFX vendors producing over 4,000 shots was Scanline VFX supervisor Justin Mitchell who created 220 shots, half of which were for the season finale. The major work was devoted to environmental enhancements and set extensions as well as effects simulations. “I didn't work on Stranger Things in previous seasons but it was…

Taehnique focus Posing for 3D prints THE GREAT OLDONES – CTHULHU Painted version photography by Philip Lin Software ZBrush, Blender Year made 2022 POSING FOR 3D PRINTS This is my reinterpretation of Cthuthu. It's sculpted in ZBrush and the final rendering was done with Blender. Immediately when starting to design this character I imagined that Cthulhu was actually part of a high-level alien race. I didn't want them to sit on a stone tablet like the traditional image of Cthulhu, so I designed a sci-fi base, like a planet or spaceship. The most difficult point of this design was getting the physical pose right. This work will be presented as a print mockup, so finding the right balance is crucial. We can't grasp proper weight distribution in 3D – what…

Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved SOFTWARE: BLENDER Paul Hatton replies Volumetric lighting, or god rays, are a fantastic way to instantly add cinematic beauty to your renders and videos. This effect of light beams shining in an environment has become popularised as a notable phenomena in film. I'm sure you've noticed it too; if you sit in a particularly dusty room with the only light source being the light shining in through a window, then you'll likely see a beam of light starting at the window and proceeding into the room at the same angle as the sun hits the window. My parents have a black and white photo taken at a railway station with volumetric light pouring onto the platform. It adds a beautiful sense of atmosphere into…

01 GET THE FILES INTO NUKE This tutorial uses NukeX, but the experience should be the same for Nuke Indie users. A new Nuke Comp has been created, placing a 32-bit colour ‘Beauty Pass’ of a motion graphic element and a Cryptomatte file from the same scene rendered from the Redshift Tenderer. Check the best render options for Cryptomattes for the specific render engine used if Redshift is unavailable. 02 ADD A CRYPTOMATTE NODE To add a Cryptomatte node, either press ‘Tab’ to bring up the Node shortcut menu and start typing ‘Crypto…’ or access the node from the eye dropper icon on the toolbar. Connect the Cryptomatte render pass node into the Cryptomatte node and then connect that output to the Viewer. The items in the scene should be visible as…

The Hub INDUSTRY INSIGHT News and views from around the international CG community The world of 3D visualisation has seen some pretty seismic shifts in the last few decades. First up were still images, quickly followed by videos and interactive experiences hot on their heels. For most of this evolution, 3D artists have been supported by a range of traditional 3D packages including 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema 4D as well as Tenderers such as Mental Ray, V-Ray and Octane. The latest shift has seen a move away from these applications and towards game engines. Unity, Unreal Engine (UE) and CryEngine have been around for a long while but have largely occupied the games market alone. Unreal Engine, for example, was birthed out of the first game that was developed with…

PRICE £420/$80 annually COMPANY Autodesk WEBSITE arnoldrenderer.com Arnold is a force to be reckoned with in the sea of renderers that artists have the pick of. Autodesk claims that this latest version, 7.1, is a “major feature release”, so let's take a look at what's new. One of the improvements made has been to its OptiX Denoising capabilities that were first introduced back in February 2021 with version 6.2. This is one of three available denoising options in postproduction. It benefits from being the fastest out of the three but is unfortunately unsuitable for animations, for which the Arnold denoiser is still the best option. Artists have the option of increasing diffuse or specular samples to decrease noise, but with substantial improvements in recent years to noise reduction and elimination…

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