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Practical inspiration for the

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Penguins Of Madagascar Go behind the scenes of DreamWorks' spectacular 3D animated hit

EXPERT RIGGING Design intricate spine rigs for quadrupeds

Advanced fluid simulation in Houdini In-depth guide to generating and automating liquids

ISSUE

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For this image I wanted to try a few things that I hadn’t done before – adding a more human facial structure instead of my usual visor style Richie Jon Mason reveals how he made his stunning cover image Page 40

Richie Jon Mason Personal portfolio site www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Richenks Country UK Software ZBrush, KeyShot, Cinema 4D, Photoshop

Head over to p32 for an in-depth tutorial on how to create superb robot designs in ZBrush, with some extended insight into how Richie Jon Mason created his amazing cover image on p Hopefully these guides will help you to develop your own sci-fi style!

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Every issue you can count on…

to the magazine and pages of amazing 3D Welcome to 3D Artist magazine! Do you want to design the machines of the future? Using ZBrush you can bring your futuristic designs to life, and a good place to begin is with our tutorials starting on p Elsewhere in the magazine, we go behind the scenes of DreamWorks’ Penguins Of Madagascar (p22), industry experts explain how to succeed as a freelancer (p74) and Maya master Aldo Vicente walks you through accurately texturing a superbike (p42). Enjoy the issue!

Dan Hutchinson Editor in Chief

1 Exclusively commissioned art 2 Behind-the-scenes guides to images and fantastic artwork 3 Digital downloads full of handy assets 4 Interviews with inspirational artists 5 Tips for studying 3D or getting work in the industry 6 The chance to see your art in the mag!

Orestis Bastounis, Bruno Câmara, Rainer Duda, Gavriil Klimov, Tom Magill, Richie Jon Mason, Chris McMahon, Luis San Juan Pallarés, Aldo Vicente, David Molina Zabaleta

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This issue’s team of expert artists… Orestis Bastounis This month our tech expert gets his hands on the AMD FirePro W GPU and puts it through its paces. Head over to p84 for his expert analysis and exclusive verdict.

Gavriil Klimov Concept designer Gavriil discusses the major things to bear in mind when designing sci-fi characters in 3D. Take a look at his excellent tutorial on p

Luis San Juan Pallarés Have you ever wondered how to drastically improve your rigging? Luis is on hand to help, taking you on a guided tour of an intricate spine rig for a quadruped on p

Bruno Câmara

Rainer Duda

Utilising Mudbox, 3ds Max and ZBrush, Bruno looked to fantasy inspiration to create a fearsome werewolf on p For essential advice on sculpting, look no further.

Tom Magill

Houdini FX wizard Rainer walks you through a step-by-step guide to advanced fluid simulations, setting up a turbulence generator along the way. Check it out on p

Richie Jon Mason

3D expert Tom Magill takes Autodesk Smoke for a test drive this month, but how does it compare to last year’s iteration? Find out in his review on p

Aldo Vicente

Over on p40, Richie explains how he developed an incredible cyborg using ZBrush and KeyShot. We loved the end product so much we put it on the cover! Amazing stuff.

David Molina Zabaleta

A veritable genius when it comes to Maya, Aldo Vicente talks you through how to create and embellish an amazing superbike on p42, across 20 in-depth steps.

Also known as Caleb Nefzen, David walks you through re-creating his technical and unique cyborg project in ZBrush. Head to p32 to check out his awesome tutorial.

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INSIDE ISSU E SE V EN T

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What’s in the magazine and where

News reviews & features 8 The Gallery A hand-picked selection of incredible artwork to inspire you

16 Community news Keep up to date with the latest news and happenings in the world of 3D

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20 Readers’ gallery The www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar’s community art showcase

22 Feature: The Making of Penguins Of Madagascar We talk to the team at DreamWorks about turning the classic penguin group from sidekicks into stars

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74 Feature: Earn more for your 3D Discover how to multiply your earnings with this ultimate guide from the professionals

Earnmore foryour3D

If you want people to take notice, you have to show them something unique Andrew Kramer talks about building a successful portfolio Page 74

84 Review: AMD

Create an alien cyborg

Take a look at AMD’s second-fastest graphics card as we put it to the test

87 Review: Smoke Is Autodesk’s aim for a Smoke-only post-production pipeline worth it?

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The studio

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92 Professional 3D advice,

techniques and tutorials 30 Technique focus: Prawn Critter Tyler Smith explains researching anatomy for realistic renders

Build a spine rig for a quadruped

32 Step by step: Create an alien cyborg Discover how to model a sci-fi creature with Caleb Nefzen

Glassworks

We’re doing this for the first time and we have no idea what we’re doing, but let’s do it Simon J Smith on DreamWorks’ pioneering spirit Page 32

40 Technique focus: Enkeron – Zion Cover artist Richie Jon Mason walks you through his creation

42 Step by step: Texture a superbike and racer Simulate terrific textures with Aldo Vicente’s handy tutorial

50 Technique focus: BMW z4 gt3 Learn to love the light with Ulianov Denis’ incredible image

52 Step by step: Sculpt a fantasy creature Transform your sculpting process with Bruno Câmara

72 Technique focus: Lizardman Omar Jason describes how to create incredible detail

22

The workshop Expert tuition to improve your skills

62 Back to basics: Create a spine rig for a quadruped Discover and master the art of rigging a quadruped with character TD Luis San Juan Pallarés’ handy tutorial

66 Masterclass: Simulate turbulent water Houdini master Rainer Duda guides you through the process of creating turbulent waterflows using a Turbulence Generator

Discover incredible environment design with Artur Adamczyk

Visit the 3D Artist online shop at Industry news, career

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90 Industry news Get up to speed with industry events 92 Studio Access: Glassworks Discover how this intimate team keeps creating stunning projects 94 Industry Insider:

Mark Van Haitsma

Learn how artists like Mark brought Destiny to life

70 Questions & Answers

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Tutorials for artists with experience that are looking to hone their skills 3ds Max: Improve your sci-fi themed creations

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Mike Hill Mike uses 3D workflows to create believable technology for the entertainment industry Personal portfolio www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country Germany Software 3ds Max

Work in progress…

I worked iteratively to create the modules of the ship one by one, trying to emulate an engineering workflow. The mesh components are especially important as they are to become the backbone for designing other ships within the ‘Fractured Space’ series Mike Hill, Fractured Space Flagship,

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Inho Kim Username: icarus3d Personal portfolio www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country South Korea Software 3ds Max, ZBrush, V-Ray, HairFarm, Photoshop

Work in progress‌

I tried to create a beautiful woman dressed in classical clothes. I focused on creating the mood of the room with sunlight and the realistic material of each object Inho Kim, Sitting Woman, 10 O 3DArtist

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I wanted to create a unique book cover, one that you wouldn’t normally see in a bookstore. My main inspiration for this was the overall work from the Wachowskis. I like how they tell stories in a fresh way Tony Andreas Rudolph, 9am: Before the Fall,

Tony Andreas Rudolph Tony is a 2D and 3D digital matte painter and concept artist in the feature film industry Personal portfolio www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country Canada Software Maya, KeyShot, Photoshop

Work in progress…

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Cristiano Rinaldi Based in Rome, Cristiano creates work in the ďŹ elds of advertising, VFX and concept design Personal portfolio www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country Italy Software ZBrush, MODO, KeyShot, Photoshop

Work in progress‌

The image represents a personal vision of the development of a new species: that in the future, machines will control nature Cristiano Rinaldi, GALKENRES, 12 O 3DArtist

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www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Working on this selfportrait, I made sure to have a lot of photo references. I wanted to ďŹ nd a balance between photorealism and that of a classical painting. I found the hardest part of the piece was to make it look like myself Ian Spriggs, Self-Portrait,

Ian Spriggs Ian is a visual artist working primarily in 3D. He specialises in character modelling for VFX Personal portfolio www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country Canada Software Maya, Mudbox, Photoshop

Work in progress‌

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The latest news, tools and resources for the 3D artist As his model has been developed as a template, Jones reveals that as long as technology keeps progressing, he will treat his human project as one to keep tinkering with and improving ad infinitum

Masters of realism These artists have recently shocked the CG world with their work on modelling, texturing, rigging and animating hyper-real human beings

Chris Jones www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Software LightWave, Sculptris, Krita, Blender Bio Chris has been interested in drawing, animation and special effects ever since he was a child. In , he discovered 3D Studio 3 at university, where he was studying for his final year in industrial design. His final graduation project turned into his very first 3D project, and he has been working with it ever since. We Recommend Watching Chris’s animation, ‘The Passenger’ and then reading his making-of online at www. thepassengerfiwww.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Injected with a great sense of humour throughout, (the opening title reads ‘How to make a seven minute film in just eight years’), his story proves how complex the creative process can be and how amazing the results can be when you don’t give up. We loved your short, ‘The Passenger’, and were stunned by the work that went into it. Could you tell us more about it? ‘The Passenger’ was intended as a showreel piece when I started it in , and it ended up as a seven-minute short film that absorbed a total of six years of my life over an eight-year period. I took it upon myself to design it, create the story, models, animation, sound effects and music – everything except for some mastering at a pro sound studio and transfer to 35mm film. I released it in and it went on to tour the festivals for several years thereafter.

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I had no intention of doing another short after I had finished; in fact I stopped doing 3D and re-evaluated my career for a while. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve contemplated making something like another short, but I’d need to be sure it could be done in far less time than the last effort. Could you tell us more about your new project featuring a hyper-real human? Stylistically it seems like a major shift from ‘The Passenger’. It harks back to my interest in realism and visual effects. I like cartoons to a degree, but I like live-action effects films better, and I felt that I had misrepresented myself with ‘The Passenger’ to some extent. It attracted a lot of attention from animation companies, but not so much from VFX ones. The human project is partly an attempt to amend that, but its main purpose was to keep me productive while I deliberated over some new project ideas. It seemed safe to assume that they would need people in them, so I thought I’d make a generic template that could be modified into whatever humanoid character I needed. As long as I continue down this path, the goal would obviously be to make it indistinguishable from an actual human being. Could you tell us more about the workflow so far? I started by adding a body to a head model I made back when I was doing ‘The Passenger’ – if not earlier – and refined the

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TOP Contrasting to Jones’ previous project, ‘The Passenger’, this was an attempt to create a generic humanoid character that could be manipulated and tweaked for other future projects BOTTOM In order to successfully animate the movement of eyeballs and the reaction of the eyelids and surrounding skin, Jones recommends studying live footage in slow motion

www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Get in touch… www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar @3DArtist www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar As long as I continue down this path, the goal would obviously be to make it indistinguishable from an actual human Chris Jones topology. After that the process was quite convoluted with a lot of back and forth between programs since I was experimenting as I went. I created UV maps and loaded the base mesh of the model into Sculptris, where I added finer detail, and then loaded the sculpt and the base mesh into Blender to bake the new detail into a Displacement map. Next, I loaded the base mesh back into Sculptris to paint Bump and Texture maps, and then applied the base mesh, Texture, Bump and Displacement maps in LightWave. I rigged the body and began focusing on the hand, followed by the head. The face involved techniques such as dynamic wrinkles, which I achieved with the help of the DP Tension node, and I used some little scripts to link the face morphs to controls. I used chains of Effectors to simulate tendons, muscles and bone. What have you found most useful in terms of techniques throughout this creation? Along with LightWave and Sculptris, I’ve been using Krita for editing textures and painting the eyeball textures, and Blender for Displacement baking. As for useful techniques, the Wrinkle maps have allowed me to keep the mesh very lightweight and manageable since I can paint or sculpt those details instead of having to model them in. Effectors are the most effective solution I’ve found for reproducing skin slide, although they’re somewhat unwieldy when used in this way. I’ve also set up non-linear morphs for the eyelids, which allows the skin to unfold and warp organically as it travels over the eyeball.

TOP, BOTTOM “A good thing to do is to look at a lot of 3D scans to know how wrinkles look in a standard grey material,” advises Galal on creating realistic humans LEFT “Aside from the technical issues, I struggled to come up with a story and a title, and the project was plagued with creative blocks after the first couple of years,” explains Jones

If you could give any advice to others hoping to create as realistic a human as you have, what would you say? Study lots of videos and photos – and yourself, even down to the microscopic level. Slow-motion video is particularly useful for things like eyes. Continually examine your model and surfacing from different angles and in a variety of different lighting conditions while you’re working. Strive for physical accuracy and avoid shortcuts wherever possible, keep your textures sharp and high-res, and use the most physically accurate shaders, even if it dramatically extends render times.

Yasser El-Sherbiny Technical director Galal Mohey Senior character artist Website www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Software Maya, ZBrush Bios Yasser El-Sherbiny is a computer engineer with more than ten years of experience in the animation industry developing SW and HW systems for 3D artists. Galal Mohey is a 3D character artist with ten years of

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experience in character design in films and triple-A games. He’s currently senior character artist at Snappers. We Recommend Take a look at a video of Yasser and Galal’s incredible rig in action at the www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar YouTube channels. Could you tell us more about yourselves? Yasser We’re small team of artists and developers from Egypt who are passionate about 3D computer animation, especially everything to do with 3D characters. Like many artists in the field, what got us into this is being inspired by the visual effects in movies such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, as well as games cinematics from companies such as Blizzard and Blur. Being one the first companies to develop camera-based realtime markerless mo-cap was one of our biggest achievements.

First render of the raw scan data from ICT. The Digital Human League includes: Mathieu Aerni, Nick Gaul, Christopher Nichols, Mike Seymour, Paul Debevec, Steve Preeg, Graham Fyffe, Dan Roarty, Jay Busch, Vlado Koylazov, Rusko Ruskov, Lukáš Hajka, Angela Tinwell and Stephen Parker

Take us through the workflow for modelling a realistic face. Yasser The Wrinkle maps were done in ZBrush. After finishing all the Blend Shapes, we combined all the ones that contained wrinkles in a few new layers in ZBrush, such as a layer for the brows and smile details. We ended up with five or six layers that had all the wrinkles, then we add extra-fine details to these layers before we baked the Wrinkle maps. We tried to minimise the number of maps; with this rig we used three Wrinkle maps. We then wrote a custom DirectX11 shader to allow us to see the wrinkles (Normal maps) in Maya’s viewport as we moved the facial controllers. The Rig Manager is a tool we wrote to handle the rig, the selection of the facial controllers, setting and resetting the rig, saving/loading poses (Expressions) and so on. How did you achieve such realistic deformations and motion using Blend Shapes? Galal We believe that Blend Shapes are superior to Bones most of the time, as it gives the artist more control and flexibility to achieve a realistic expression, though you may have to add few corrective shapes and in-between Blend Shapes. What’s most important is to make sure that most of the Blend Shapes work well together to have the motion right. If you could give advice to other artists hoping to create realistic facial motion and rigs, what would you say? Galal A mirror is your primary weapon, but you need to look at other people doing the motion in front of you with different lighting setups. Go as far as painting lines on your face to see what is happening. One thing that makes a Blend Shape look realistic is skin sliding. You have no idea how much skin sliding is happening. For example, with the jaw-drop Blend Shape, all the skin except for the mouth area is almost still in its place and not going down with the jaw – all you see is bones and muscles moving beneath the skin.

A mirror is your primary weapon, but you need to look at other people doing the motion in front of you with different lighting setups

The Wiki Human Project A group of the industry’s best artists are looking into the science behind the uncanny valley – and publishing their digital-human results to download for free An incredible new project studying the science behind what makes a human look real is coming from some of the best VFX artists in the industry, who have playfully dubbed themselves the Digital Human League. The group first began with Christopher Nichols, creative director at Chaos Group, and includes Academy Award-winning Steve Preeg, Blur Studio’s lead artist Mathieu Aerni, Weta Digital’s senior modeller Nick Gaul, and Dan Roarty, whose work graced the front cover of 3D Artist issue After creating human characters and doubles at Digital Domain, Nichols initially started talking to chief visual officers at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies about the ways they could progress this research further. “ICT has incredible ways of capturing human forms and faces and getting a lot of detail from those scans,” he explains. “It has all this information that

Galal Mohey 18 O 3DArtist

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it gives to the studio, like very high-res models, including several detailed Texture maps, but there’s no real guide on how to use that texture information. It got me thinking, how great would it be if we had something like a guide on how to use your Texture maps, for example. That became the basis for us to analyse what is needed for re-creating a digital human, to try to remove all of the variables and approach the process in a more scientific way.” The Digital Human League was born, and the team is now exploring every aspect of what makes us distinguish a real human from a fake one, focusing on details such as how to animate a person who’s just standing still, and how we can notice even tiny differences in a person’s complexion that blood circulation will make. Best of all, the group intends to make its work open-source, so anyone can download the files to take a look.

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Lenses and accessories shown are not included

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User Upgradeable Sensor Blackmagic URSA features a modular camera turret that can be removed by unscrewing 4 simple bolts! The camera turret includes the sensor, lens mount and lens control connections and can be upgraded in the future when new types of sensors are developed. This means your next camera will be a fraction of the cost of buying a whole new camera! Choose professional PL mount, popular EF mount and more! Built In On Set Monitoring! l

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A Survey of Daraxos b » Eric Lloyd Brown 3DA username Digitalproselyte Eric says: “For this piece I imagined explorers visiting a habitable planet for purposes of colonisation. Although Earth-like, I wanted to add a level of otherworldly wonder to it as well.” We say: This image from Eric really impressed us, as it conjures such a tangible sense of atmosphere and mood. It’s bleak and mysterious, with the clouds that eclipse the Sun a particular highlight. There’s a real sense of being lost in another world.

c Mech Sentry Drone » Paul Massey 3DA username EclipseCGI Tom says: “Inspired by Vitaly Bulgarov, I wanted to experiment with the actual concept and final presentation, so I utilised kit-bashed parts to make the design process much more fluid. This mech was created with Cinema 4D and Octane.” We say: Paul’s mech demonstrates incredible attention to detail and looks extremely imposing. It was really popular with the team and with all of you who follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and deservedly so!

b Elephant » Andres Zorrilla 3DA username AndresZorrilla Andres says: “For this project I’ve gathered a lot of references for the model: skeleton, muscles, fat, skin and wrinkles. A majority of the wrinkles (head, trunk, tail, elbows and knees) were made by hand.” We say: This is a wonderful example of photorealism, and an intricate study in how to create realistic wrinkles. It’s not an easy thing to do, but Andres has succeeded brilliantly in re-creating nature, great stuff. We look forward to seeing more of his work!

d Deep Sea Creature » Martin Bässler 3DA username martinius Martin says: “All modelling was done in Blender, except for the red, gill-like element, which was generated with Structure Synth and remeshed with MeshLab. The render is done with Cycles, with some post-work done in Photoshop CS1.” We say: This leapt out at us immediately when we saw it on the site. It’s such a strange, abstract project, but the wild use of colours and different textures really works. Martin has a vivid imagination, and imagination breeds excellent art.

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www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Image of the month John Doe “le voyageur”

» Jerome Evrard 3DA username Bloom Jerome says: “This is a sci-fi character that was created in Belgium. The body shape, clothes and accessories were created deliberately to accentuate the comic and solitary side.” We say: This awesome project made us chuckle and brightened up the office when we found it.

Furniture Test Scene » Andrew Ryan Parker 3DA username Andrew_Ryan Andrew says: “Created in my spare time at work, it was initially just to test different pieces of furniture in. I was really happy with the results and decided to share it online. It has very basic post, using just a few elements, as I wanted to try to create as much natural contrast and light in 3D. Wall art by Charles Williams – www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar” We say: We love the crisp, clean nature of this piece. A lot of attention has been paid to the brickwork in the background of the piece, giving it a New York-loft feel.

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Water Globe » Mitch Forsburg 3DA username MForsburg Mitch says: “This 3D water globe was done in Blender, rendered with Cycles. It took roughly a day to model and set up the lighting. I was inspired to make this because of Blender’s wonderful fluid sim.” We say: Mitch has worked hard to create this image, and we love it. Mitch is, in fact, only 14 years old, and work like this demonstrates that he has a very promising future ahead of him in 3D.

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My Casio » Mohamad Reza Faal 3DA username keyvanfd Mohamad says: “I made the scene by looking at my own watch, which is very valuable for me. I used Maya and Composite, trying to focus on the details and to use anything that makes my work closer to reality.” We say: Some people take pride in modelling something special to them, and that’s exactly what Mohamad has done here with his Casio. Great job!

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You saw that pioneering spirit here of ‘we’re doing this for the first time and we have no idea what we’re doing, but let’s do it’ SIMON J SMITH

Contributors Simon J Smith Director

Philippe Gluckman VFX supervisor

Jonathan Harman Head of lighting

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All images © DreamWorks Animation

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THE MAKING OF

PENGUINS OF

MADAGASCAR We talk to the writer, director, VFX supervisor and head of lighting about how they transformed the classic penguin team from sidekicks into stars

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his year was a very memorable one for DreamWorks. Amidst several feature film releases, shocking rumours that the studio was in sales talks with Japan-based SoftBank Corp and the unveiling of the team’s groundbreaking new in-house animation software, Premo, came a special date: DreamWorks’s 20th anniversary. Looking back on these past 20 years, one of the studio’s most successful ventures – along with Shrek and How To Train Your Dragon – has been Madagascar, a series that has earned the company close to 2 billion dollars since its debut in The rewards show no sign of dwindling either. Madagascar 4 is scheduled for , and the much-loved penguin characters in the original film – Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private – have since gotten their own Nickelodeon series along with a licensed toy line and videogame for Nintendo DS. Now, they’re getting their own feature film too: Penguins Of Madagascar. Of course, the new spin-off neatly completes DreamWorks’s pledge to release three feature films each year until after the screenings of Mr Peabody And Sherman and How To Train Your Dragon 2. It also, however, allows audiences everywhere to see the moment when our favourite elite penguin team first met, and watch as the four heroes face an eccentric genius from their past known as Dr Octavius or, more forgettably, Dave. Along with a cast featuring the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch and John Malkovich, the team needed to build multiple locations, introduce a host of new characters including an owl, seal, bear and octopus, and deal with a schedule that was unexpectedly cut six months short when the studio switched the release dates for its next two films, pushing Home back and Penguins Of Madagascar forward. All this, while working across continents – sharing scenes from the DreamWorks PDI and Glendale facilities in the US to Bangalore in India.

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The team was using next-gen animation tool, Premo. “It wasn’t difficult to translate the characters to make them work with Premo, we just had to be careful not to break them,” says director Simon J Smith

A NEW SPOTLIGHT Funnily enough, the first script for Penguins Of Madagascar was written almost ten years ago – after the original Madagascar film. “I think it was meant to be a TV movie back then, but then they decided to hold off on it because Madagascar was such a huge hit,” begins director of Penguins Of Madagascar, Simon J Smith. It was around Thanksgiving four years ago that he first got the call from DreamWorks asking if he would be interested in directing not a TV movie, but a full feature film about the penguins instead. “They’re my favourite characters in Madagascar, so that was it,” he explains. “It took off.” The penguins were initially invented solely for the purpose of comic relief in Madagascar, though. Going from secondary characters to a spotlight where audiences had to truly care about them was another matter, and not just for the storyline. The models also had to be completely remade. Not only were they simply not complex enough to carry all the emotions needed for a feature film, but f every character ns, even Jeffrey of the company r, and Kowalski ht ‘well, this is mith continues. e had to look at their silhouettes and hone them in a bit more. Private had a super-

rounded-off head, for instance. We have no clothes to distinguish them and we have a whole bunch of other penguins, so you really needed them to stand out so you could really see who was who.” The team also needed to make sure that it always kept to its budget – which was lower than other DreamWorks films – while never compromising on quality. Assets, such as trees, set dressing and even some crowds from other movies, were reused from the studio’s digital backlog – as long as they didn’t conflict with the design of the film. Even more ingenious shortcuts were employed for the octopus antagonists, who almost didn’t make it into the film at all. “It’s interesting to learn that initially the studio was actually a bit scared that we would embark on this film with an octopus,” reveals VFX supervisor, Philippe Gluckman. “They thought that animating an eight-legged animal was going to be too hard and take too much time for the animators. Luckily the director felt quite strongly that it was a good idea, and we did compromise – we only gave them six legs!” “We also worked out a way of doing it where technically what you’ve got is tails reused from How To Train Your Dragon as the tentacles, with a head on top,” Smith continues. “That’s how the octopuses were made, and it proved that we weren’t going to kill animation.”

THE PIPELINE Throughout the four years of work on the film, the DreamWorks artists switched from using Naiad in Maya to using Houdini and Mantra to create and

render water for the film, which plays a huge role in sequences such as a chase scene in Venice. It also marked the last time they used proprietary software Light, developing it to the best it would be before being replaced by next-gen lighting package, Torch. The studio’s new attention to diagnostics was a crucial part of the lighting process throughout the film, where every asset would be meticulously checked in an environment called vdev. In vdev, every element and character that had gone through surfacing would be spun around in a control scene to focus on how specific material properties, such as the Reflection map, Diffuse property or Displacement would really look. “The idea behind the vdev environment rig is that it’s very simple,” explains Jonathan Harman, head of lighting on Penguins Of Madagascar. “So it has very basic back lighting and a key light and various versions of an environment HDR map for a day time, a night-time, and an evening. In lighting, we then basically go off of that, so our first default lighting rig is based on the vdev rig and then you start altering from there.” “Another interesting thing we did on the show is use a lot of deep compositing, meaning that we would render deep files,” he adds. “When we have lots of assets, we want to parallelise the rendering of those assets so we break them down into lots of smaller pieces. So, if you have groups of 2, characters you might want to render them down into groups of , and that will significantly reduce your length of the renderer.” “The problem comes when you want to assemble those back together. For example, what we have in the end of the movie is humans running around, and also zombie-mutant penguins running

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Penguins Of Madagascar also introduces a host of new characters, such as elite undercover organisation, The North Wind, led by a wolf named Agent Classified

throughout this group of characters, and there’s complete chaos,” Harman continues. “In the composites you can spend a bunch of time in NUKE figuring out what character is running in front of what character. The deep-file image allows for every pixel on that character to know its place on every frame, so it knows where it is in space. We just used the deep files to cut them out automatically, so you never had to figure out in what order they sat.” “DreamWorks is historically very reluctant to do too much in compositing. I personally believe that there’s a balance and I think we found the right balance here,” tells Gluckman. “We also used

compositing almost like a prototype tool. Basically, we would use NUKE to look at lighting and stuff like that, for example, say ‘what about this or this other thing’, [and] actually do it interactively with the compositor. We would actually start calling them Nukeovers! When that was okay, then the lighters could do it for real, so to speak.” Throughout the show, the team also worked with the studio to continue developing a new LOD – or level of detail – system. With it, assets far away from the camera would be automatically simplified in every shot, appearing as a lower-res model with a less complex shading and surfacing network

compared to any assets close-up. Rendering would become much faster and more efficient. “We worked together automating systems to decimate models, and a person would look at that model and say ‘yes, the automated system did a good job’. Nearly every asset went through that check and automated reduction,” explains Harman. “The way it worked was each particular asset has versions of itself, so we model a car as one version and then we make two other versions – a medium and a light – and those two versions are always sitting out there waiting for the particular scene to call the version that’s needed, which is kind of cool.”

DREAMWORKS’ MOST RECENT TITLES

How To Train Your Dragon 2

Mr Peabody and Sherman

Turbo

Lifetime gross (at the time of writing):

Lifetime gross: $,, A computer-animated adaptation of Jay Ward’s pioneering work, the film stars Mr Peabody, an advanced dog-genius, and his adopted human ‘pet’ son Sherman as they travel through history using Peabody’s ‘WABAC’ or ‘Wayback’ machine in order to fix a time rift that they accidentally created.

Lifetime gross: $83,, Based on an original concept by first-time director David Soren, Turbo tells the story of a garden snail, Theo, who dreams of winning the infamous American Indy race. It makes him an outcast within the slow and cautious snail community – until a freak accident turns him into Turbo, the fastest snail in the world.

$,, Aspiring to one of director Dean DeBlois’s favourite films, The Empire Strikes Back, How To Train Your Dragon 2 is set five years after the first instalment and introduces a host of new locations and dragon species as Hiccup faces up to adulthood and becoming chief.

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It’s interesting to learn that initially the studio was actually a bit scared that we would embark on this film with an octopus PHILIPPE GLUCKMAN

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www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Eric Darnel Writer

3 QUESTIONS

The octopus characters were almost not going to be in the film due to concerns at how difficult they would be to animate. Tricks such as recycling the How To Train Your Dragon 2 dragon tails as tentacles allowed the characters to be possible

After so much success with both writing and directing Madagascar, and Madagascar 4 coming to cinemas in , what is it that made you first become interested in starting to work on a spin-off feature? Where did the idea of including penguins in a film come from? The thing that will always hold a special place in my heart is when the Madagascar series was just getting started, Tom McGrath – my partner – had just come off of a penguin film that got canned for some reason, and I had just come off of a penguin film that got canned for another reason – they were not related to Madagascar at all. So Tom came in and was determined to get penguins into the movie that we were making, even though they weren’t in the script or part of the story or anything. He just came up with this funny action where they end up knocking the lead characters off that ship, and they became this great little secondary comedic platform that we turned to again and again for set pieces. Of course, the characters themselves are so much fun and almost classic. When it comes to Penguins Of Madagascar, what were the team’s main aims? What challenges did the team face? [The penguins] made it this far based on pure comic power, and the big challenge for us with this film was making sure that we kept all of that comedy and all that fun and all those things that people love about the penguins in the movie. We [had to] find a way to dig a little deeper and find out more, developing the characters to a degree that would warrant their own film. It was a big challenge, but it was a fun part of it too. How stressful was it to find out that your deadline for the film had been brought forward by six months? How did you manage it? You’re all settled into this way of working and this rhythm, and then suddenly you have to bring the movie out earlier. So everybody just needed to buckle down and do hour workdays sometimes and even stay overnight because we had to collaborate with our counterparts who would come in really early in the morning. There were a lot of animators who weren’t having dinner with their families because we were just so busy trying to get the movie made. At the end of the day though, I think that push really energised the project and really got us to charge through our story and make those final decisions that needed to be made about our climax. It’s just been finished in its final form, which was so exciting after so many years to have it truly in the can.

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Penguins Of Madagascar www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar FINAL DEADLINES “Everybody on this film did such an amazing job because we had such a tight schedule,” concludes Smith. “We lost six months at the end and it was a miracle that they pulled it off, because we could not believe that we had a year to go, and then suddenly we had just months to go.” For the artists at Bangalore doing most of the film, it’s been an extraordinary success, and even a new turning point. “They did an unbelievable job,” Simon continues. “It just took them to a new level of animation and raised the bar globally in the studio. Everybody at Glendale was going ‘oh my God, these guys are just kicking ass’!” “For me that’s the big story,” agrees Gluckman, who was a part of the Bangalore team. He explains that before this show, India’s studio had worked on several features, but not in the finishing stages, and had never been the ones establishing most of the animation before. “You know, I’ve been at PDI and

DreamWorks for so long – I was on Antz, and to me it was a kick back to that,” he reveals. “You saw that pioneering spirit here of ‘we’re doing this for the first time and we have no idea what we’re doing, but let’s do it’. It was amazing.” “Everybody sacrificed a lot of family time so the film wasn’t compromised at all; it was so good because everybody did such a brilliant job,” Smith points out. When he first started as director, his now five-year-old daughter was only one, and he couldn’t wait to finish the movie so that he could take her to see it. “I made this film for my daughter,” he explains, revealing that for him too, it’s been a huge sacrifice. “It’s been a tough year because she didn’t see me for a long time. Most of the time I would only get home at 11pm.” For the final approval of the last Penguins Of Madagascar reel, however, Smith took his daughter into the studio, and finally they got to see it together. “She loved it,” he reveals, “and it was a lovely way to end the movie, showing her. It was fantastic.”

PENGUINS BY THE NUMBERS The number of people, including writer Eric Darnel, that first invented the penguins as comic relief for Madagascar

4

years is the length of time the crew was working on Penguins Of Madagascar

UP TO

People worked on the project between DreamWorks PDI at Glendale and even in Bangalore

The number of months lost at the end of the schedule when Penguins Of Madagascar was pulled forward and Home pushed back for release in

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30 Animation films by DreamWorks, with Penguins Of Madagascar being the most recent

2 3 Of the movie was completed in India, including the majority of the animation, lighting, and surfacing work. “Basically for the third act, the schedule was shortened, so in order to accommodate that schedule change, we added US teams to help finish the film,” says Harman

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The number of episodes of The Penguins Of Madagascar series on Nickelodeon

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The number of tentacles an octopus has. To avoid overwhelming animators, the team reduced this to just six for Penguins Of Madagascar

The deep-file image allows for every pixel on that character to know its place on every frame, so it knows where it is in space

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JONATHAN HARMAN

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www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar behind their artwork ANATOMY & RESEARCH I wanted to practise the functionality and believability of anatomy. I recently bought several books on insects and sea life and tried my best to study the design of invertebrate limbs and exoskeleton materials. Then I made sure my primary shape volumes appeared consistent and clean before carving in and building up detail. Prawn Critter,

Incredible 3D artists take us

Website www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country USA Software used ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag, Photoshop

Username: tsmith3d

Tyler Smith

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The studio O Create an alien cyborg www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Easy-to-follow guides take you from concept to the final render

Create an alien cyborg

Chaoticcyborg David Molina Zabaleta aka Caleb Nefzen Personal portfolio site www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar CalebNefzen Location Colombia Software used ZBrush, Maya, UVLayout, KeyShot, Photoshop Expertise Character modelling, sculpting, texturing and rendering

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Combining hard-surface modelling with organic sculpting, create a realistic sci-fi creature from concept to final 3D still David Molina Zabaleta is a CG artist working in character creation, from conception to sculpting, texturing and rendering

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hen it comes to sculpting sci-fi creations, it’s important to understand the compatibility of both organic and hard-surface modelling. In this tutorial we’ll take a look at creating an alien cyborg, combining both these types of modelling. We’ll start by considering the concept of our character and how to come

up with a character that’s both totally unique, yet completely realistic and believable. Once we have an idea that we’re happy with, we’ll work on utilising both organic and hard-surface techniques to create our creature. This tutorial should serve as a great way to develop your ZBrush skills, whether you’re new to it, or just looking to experiment.

Work with silhouette concepts The first thing that you need to think about is what

era your character is from. Is it the past, the present or a distant future? If you have a clear idea about the kind of environment that your character inhabits, you can decide on the tone of your work – whether it’s dark and gritty, or bright and otherworldly. Once you’ve answered these questions, you can play with shapes and silhouettes using the QuickSketch feature in ZBrush. You could also use Alchemy to draw out your ideas. Using tools like Symmetry, you can produce a wide range a variable ideas, working with lines or shades set to different values.

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Create the head In my work, I already knew that I wanted some kind of alien cyborg.

By playing with shapes, I became more certain of my idea and decided to go straight ahead with the sculpting process. Starting work on the head, it’s possible to build up a more tangible impression of the alien. Make use of the Clay, Move and Clay Buildup sculpting brushes with large, confident strokes on the mesh. By playing with DynaMesh at a reasonable resolution, we can work on the appearance of the alien, even if we’re going to cover up its head later on.

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Set your mind free 03

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Begin with the helmet Now that we have a decent head, we can start to think more

about the character. In this case, I was thinking that it would be a big, bulky beast; a fallen warrior that’s been brought back to life with its own technology, or even someone else’s tech. In order to create the look and feel of this theme, we need to make a fairly chaotic rudimentary assemblage. Start off by duplicating the head, then go to Tools>Deformation sub-palette and set Inflate to Use another material that resembles metal so that you can start sculpting the helmet. Use your imagination to bring your character to life!

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Always let yourself work freely, using the Clay and Clay BuildUp brushes to create basic shapes. Be aware of every stroke that you place, and play with these, combining strong strokes with the Lazy Mouse function for straighter lines. When you feel ready, use the Pinch and Dam_ Standard brushes. When you do this, make sure that your mind is clear. You’ll be surprised at the creativity that comes through when you’re not really thinking about what you’re doing. Just make sure you work from big to small.

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LEARN MORE ABOUT ROBOT DESIGN FROM OUR COVER ARTIST ON PAGE 40

Learn how to Download Tutorial files: ě (+ 2!1##-2' fiwww.cronistalascolonias.com.ar

Define hard-surface sculpting Retopologise Create custom IMMs Texture Break down the sculpt Kitbash Take advantage of DynaMesh Create silhouette concepts

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Decide the final concept Once we’ve got the shape and feel of the helmet, we’ll need to begin work on the body. Going back to the shapes and silhouettes, pick one of the designs that fits in best with the head. If you need to, mix some of your ideas together to create a new body. Then, using DynaMesh, work on the basic forms of the body, guiding yourself with the concept drawing. It’s worth noting that the concepts that you create are only there to guide you through the creative process. Once you’re done, do a quick render and jump into Photoshop to finalise your concept.

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Prepare the mesh with DynaMesh Now that we have our final concept and we’re happy with it, go back to your workspace in ZBrush and prepare the model. Once again, take the body and name it however you like (I named mine ‘bodyDynamesh’), duplicate it and go back to the Deformations sub-palette and set Inflate to -1 again. Name this ‘bodyMech’ – it should give you total control over what you’ll be working on. Ensure that you keep your naming convention clean and tidy, as this will improve your workflow. Apply a metal material onto the body mech mesh so when it comes to working visually, you won’t have any confusing issues.

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Basic overview of the tools Using the right brushes will always lead to better results, and knowing which one you need to use in certain situations will massively improve your workflow. The Clay, Clay BuildUp, Inflate, Standard and Move brushes will really help you when it comes to sculpting organic things. On the flip side of this, the Trim Dynamic, Adaptive, Polish, Hpolish, Pinch and Dam_ Standard brushes will be absolutely perfect for hard-surface objects. It’s worth using hotkeys as well, as these are great time-saving tools. Check the different brush features and experiment with them. Lazy Mouse, SmoothDirectional and AccuCurve are all very important and hugely underrated features to use. 06

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Kitbash It’s now time to play with DynaMesh. Using the Clay BuildUp brush, make quick marks over it, as it’s a very versatile brush for both organic and hard-surface modelling. While you’re working, you may find it useful to press Alt sometimes, as this will enable you to add or subtract in a couple of strokes, providing you with a wealth of new sculpting opportunities. Don’t spend too much time on this stage – after all, the only thing that you’ll be doing is blocking out the forms. If you see forms that you’re unhappy with but that you don’t want to lose, use the Dam_Standard brush with the help of Lazy Mouse to tame them.

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Define the forms

When you feel that you’ve got something interesting and a character that you can really develop, it’s time to start shaping and sharpening your model. It’s probably easier to keep using the Dam_Standard brush along with Lazy Mouse for this stage. After the initial blocking out, fee free to use the Polish and Trim brushes. It might be useful to use the FocalShift and Z Intensity tools, as this will open up more possibilities in your sculpt by adding variation and depth to your work.

Don’t rely on Auto It’s always nice to have the tools do all the hard work for you, but I strongly advise against this, as there’s nothing better than you having total control over your work. Automatic tools, such as ZRemesher, are very helpful when it comes to the workflow, but remember to check and modify the results. Even though it’s a more time-consuming and labour-intensive process to do it all by yourself, the end result will be so much better and rewarding.

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Split it into several parts In

order to reach a higher level of detail in your sculpt, make use of PolyGroups and split the sculpt up into different parts. These PolyGroups should include the torso, shoulders, forearms, arms, hands and legs among others. Once all of these are set to separate SubTools, you’ll have to do the same for each section again, so the shoulder will have to be split into three different parts, as will the arms, the legs and so on. By doing this, you’ll provide DynaMesh with more resolution on your shapes without losing any details, which will result in a higher-quality sculpt.

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Retopologise and remesh Once the parts are

more defined, you can use the ZRemesher feature to generate the basic geometry. This can be modified, adding edge loops and subdivisions to give the model more sharpness. If the form requires more intricate details, use the ZSpheres Retopology tool. Select the SubTool that you want to retopologise, then in the Tool palette, click over it and select the ZSphere, then your SubTool will be replaced with a ZSphere. Go back to the Tool palette again, go to the Rigging sub-palette, press Select Mesh and pick the desired SubTool so that you can manually begin retopology. Sometimes it’s better to work manually rather than relying on automatic functions.

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Hi-res with DynaMesh Once you have the desired geometry, polish it with the necessary SubD. It’s then time to use DynaMesh again. This might seem like overkill, but it’s all for a good reason. Applying DynaMesh with a higher resolution will conserve the finer edges and forms that we got from retopologising. By DynaMeshing, you can keep adding more shapes and by using the DynaMesh Subtract tool, we will have endless possibilities for more interesting shapes.

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Create your own IMMs There are plenty of great sites where you can get amazing IMMs, but it’s better that you create your own library. Simply make a specific piece – anything related to your sculpt – and create a new tool in which there are SubTools for machinery, like nuts, bolts and other metallic parts. Once you have several SubTools, decimate them first, then make them all visible. Go to the Deformations sub-palette and press Unify, then press Repeat To Other. This will avoid any scaling issues. Next, in the Brush palette, press Create InsertMultiMesh.

Don’t stop creating

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It’s worth experimenting with your creations in order to build exciting new pieces. Create your own models, mix old designs together to create new ones and work with deformations, as these will lead to interesting results. When adding pieces to your sculpt, beware of oversaturating the model, as you don’t want to overwhelm the image.

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Kitbash with your IMMs As soon as

you press the Create InsertMultiMesh button, you will have created your IMM, so save it for future use. With these IMMs you can start adding the necessary details onto your model. Don’t DynaMesh it just yet though, as you need to be absolutely certain about your character. If you’re not sure, group the elements into the same PolyGroup and then use the SplitByPolygroups function to split these into a separate SubTool. As soon as you are sure, DynaMesh it.

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Concept The concept behind this image was to show the harmony between organic and hard-surface modelling and that both can be used alongside each other in a sculpt.

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Texture based on reality You may have an

exceptional sculpt, but the whole process can fall to pieces when it comes to texturing. Look at the world as what it is, and make sure that you keep your textures simplistic and realistic. Look at everything for spots, colour and angles. 3D is simply a simulation of this world, so you need consider the world around you as well as your characterâ€&#x;s. When it comes to painting your characterâ€&#x;s skin, begin on the darker parts, making use of different strokes, brushes and Alphas, moving on to the highlighted areas as you go on. Try to avoid the monochromatic feel as much as possible.

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Add a pose You always have to analyse your sculpt and make decisions based on what

you see as to how your character should be posed. If you decide to use a ZSpheres rig, some elements can end up being deformed by this, so itâ€&#x;s best to choose wisely. In my projects, I tend to use the ZSpheres rig to move the upper body and to twist the torso and shoulders accurately. Once youâ€&#x;re happy with how your model is posed, use the Transpose Master function to ďŹ nish the job. Next, put into place all of the other pieces that have been left behind.

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Light the scene The same goes for the lights on your scene. You can have a great textured sculpt, but if you miss how to position the lights, you can lose the chance to really show off your work to the best of its ability. Always look for highlights, shadows and strong shapes. As a rule, weâ€&#x;ll use a Rim light, a Main light and a Fill light for any scene. Depending on the complexity of a sculpt, it might be worth adding Spot lights to illuminate those tricky areas. We will be using Spot lights for our model, as itâ€&#x;s certainly quite complex.

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Final touches Last of all, render your character. Once the render is done, add a few passes and then work on the ďŹ nal 3D still in Photoshop. Personally I ďŹ nd that itâ€&#x;s best to get the ďŹ nal render as close to the ďŹ nal result as possible without having to render out loads of passes. This is particularly valid when youâ€&#x;re using real-time software, such as KeyShot. Most of the time I ďŹ nd myself with simply a Clown and Depth pass. Once youâ€&#x;ve opened your ďŹ nal image in Photoshop, add a Level adjustment layer and a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. You can add any other adjustments that you want to really accentuate the realism of your character.

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40 O 3DArtist

behind their artwork

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Add wires and muscles

Cut out your shapes

Texture in KeyShot

At this stage we need to choose the right KeyShot materials to use, as only half of this model was textured in ZBrush. KeyShot has great tools for texturing and can provide the metallic look we need.

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After weâ€&#x;ve blocked out the character, use the Slice Curve tool to cut out shapes. After this, we can use Split and Panel Loops to achieve a decent hard-armour look.

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Using the Curve Tube tool makes it fast and easy to create carbon wires and muscle structure. We can then conclude this step with hPolish and ClayPolish.

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Block out This is the blocking-out stage, before we go on to using the Slice Curve tool. The main tools for blocking out are Move, Clay and Trim Dynamic.

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from blocking out your character all the way to super-fine details. In particular, I used the Slice Curve tool and Panel Loops to create realistic sheets of armour. I finished the piece in KeyShot, utilising plenty of materials, with realistic lighting and environments. Enkeron â€ Zion,

DETAILING ZBrush has all the tools to generate robots and armoured suits,

Incredible 3D artists take us

Website www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar artist/Richenks Location UK Software used ZBrush, Cinema 4D, KeyShot, Photoshop Bio Richie works with hard-surface modelling and character design

Richie Jon Mason

HEAD/FACE

I decided to lower the saturation of the armour in order to emphasise the neon lights a little more. They stand out a lot more now

LIGHTS/COLOUR

I wanted to give the model more personality by including high-detail eyes, instead of my usual visor style

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I used these to embellish the arms, neck and torso to give the whole thing more of a robot feel, rather than looking like a human in a suit

NANO MUSCLE/TUBES

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3DArtist O41

www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Easy-to-follow guides take you from concept to the final render

Texture a superbike and racer Accelerator

A superbike racer accelerating down a stretch Aldo Vicente Personal portfolio site www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar Country USA Software used Maya, ZBrush, Photoshop Expertise Aldo is a 3D generalist that specialises in modelling, materials, lighting and texturing

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Aldo Vicente works as a 3D generalist creating imagery for marketing, advertising and 3D medical animations

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n this tutorial, we’ll go over some fast, effective and fun techniques for creating high-detail textures and decals. We’ll be creating an image of a superbike and racer in a full racing suit tearing around a corner. The rider’s suit has a complex design with a variety of fabric types, and is covered in logos. The superbike is also covered in decals and composed of different metals and polymers. We’ll be using a variety of cool techniques to create textures for everything from the fabric detail, to the logos and decals, to the dirt, rust and debris. We’ll start by looking into different theories and tools for quick and effective UV layout.

Plan out the bike’s UVs A clean, distortion-free

canvas for our textures will save us a lot of time and headaches in the long run. Laying out UVs can be a fun challenge when approached with the right kind of strategy. Let’s consider our spatial priorities. Each section of our superbike has a solid colour base of either black or green. Solid colour sections need very little map space, meaning that we can designate lots of map space to our decals and consolidate the remaining UVs into a tiny coloured corner of our map. Plus, we can save a lot of time by only refining the UVs on sections that actually feature decals.

We’ll be creating logos and decals then using layout maps to help assemble them into clean and accurate Texture maps. We’ll also be creating textures to define our fabrics and to improve our materials. Over the course of this tutorial, we’ll cover some fun painting techniques to help get consistently great-looking results quickly. Last of all, we’ll use layered textures and shaders to help stack our logos and decals onto our fabric and metal materials. Our goal here is to play around with various handy techniques, and of course, please feel free to experiment and expand to find what works best for you!

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Lay out the superbike’s UVs In Maya we can use Auto UV Mapping as a starting point. Next we’ll select the decal-heavy sections, such as the windshield, the tail and the exhaust panelling, using Planar Mapping to cut them into separate shells. Consider which axis each surface is facing. Let’s shrink the solid colour shells into a .1 x .1 corner, keeping the green and black shells separate. Refining our slightly curved decal shells is relatively easy with Unfold and Relax tools. Finally, we can organise our shells for maximum coverage in our space. Remember that a uniform scale and orientation will make our lives much easier later on!

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Create a template map Now that our superbike’s UVs have been set up, we can start sketching out a template for our decal designs and layouts. Personally I like to use ZBrush’s polypaint to sketch directly on the model. Let’s bring our superbike geometry into ZBrush, activate polypaint, and coat it in white. Now we can use a Pen brush set to black to doodle in ideas for decals. Once we’ve found some cool designs and patterns, clean up the sketch and save it out as a map. This map will act as our template, and it will be extraordinarily valuable a little later on.

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Thoughts on UV layout When it comes to laying out UVs, regardless of what type of project we’re working on, it’s important to consider things like spacing, orientation, coverage, seam placement, resolution and work time. However, the order of priority is dependent on the project. Here, we’re creating a pre-rendered still with lots of logos and decals. Therefore, factors like coverage, though important, become secondary as we’re free to up the texture resolution. Orientation becomes paramount as it will save us from painting counter-distortion into our textures.

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Learn how to Tips for laying out UVs Texture-painting techniques Use layered materials/ textures Use textures to improve materials

Concept

Download Tutorial files: ě (+ 2!1##-2' fiwww.cronistalascolonias.com.ar

By working on this project, I hoped to create an image that conveyed a sense of incredible speed, sound and gravitational force. This is hopefully shown with this racer accelerating out of a sharp turn.

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3DArtist O43

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Create the decals Here we’ll be taking our ideas and fleshing each one out into a polished-looking logo or decal design. A lot of these decals will be used on both the bike and the rider, so we should create and save each one out individually for assembling later on. Logo and decal design is an artform in itself, so remember to gather lots of reference images and inspiration. Let’s start by doubling our template’s resolution. This will help to ensure that all our logo files are substantially sized. Remember to keep each design on a transparent background.

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Assemble the decal texture Now that all our decals have been fleshed out, let’s bring them together to assemble our texture in Photoshop. Open up our standardresolution template and start importing decals. Once we’ve scaled and sorted them into place, remove the template and merge all the decal layers into a single Diffuse texture. Create a new Alpha channel, then select the positive space of our Diffuse texture and fill it white in the Alpha channel. Save the texture in an image format that supports Alpha channels, like bit TARGA.

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Add decal textures to our materials In Maya, create a decal material and a

layered texture shader, then drop them into the Hypershade workspace with our superbike’s body material. Next we’ll bring our decal texture in with a 2D File node and plug it into the Diffuse Color of our decal material. Now we can stack the two materials into the layered texture shader, with the decals on top (left). Next, connect the Alpha out from our decal texture to the layered texture shader’s Input01>Alpha. Last of all, we’ll create a surface shader and plug the layered texture into the Outcolor and apply that to our superbike.

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Plan the racer UVs Creating textures for the racer is going to be more challenging than the bike because in addition to a decals/logos texture, the racer needs textures for suit and fabric details. For this, we’ll need to create two UV sets for our racer geometry. The logos’ UV set will be similar to the one we created for the superbike. Maximise space for the areas with logos, and confine the empty sections to a small corner. The second UV set will be a more traditional UV layout, with a complete, even unwrapping. This will be our suit UV set. 08

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Create the suit UV set Let’s create a new UV set for our suit in the UV Set Editor window. We want the suit UV set to be a full, traditional unwrapping of our geometry. This UV set will be used to create textures for the suit details and fabric. We can break our model up into a torso and four separate limbs and then Unwrap and Relax each island like we would a cylinder. I like to keep a vertical orientation on everything, as this will make it easy to keep a consistent fabric pattern while creating our textures later on.

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Create the logo UV set The next step is to make a new UV set for our rider geometry in the UV Set Editor. Let’s select our suit geometry and run an Auto Unwrap. Now, let’s use Planar mapping to lay out the planes that will feature the majority of our logos. We’ll take the remaining UVs and shrink them into a small corner. Let’s make sure we have uniform scale and orientation on our logo UVs. Last of all, we’ll flatten out our logo canvas. Maya’s UV Texture Editor can get the job done, but remember to try out some of the other great UV tools outside of Maya.

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Normal maps, Displacement maps We’ll be

creating our Displacement maps, Normal maps and AO maps in ZBrush. These maps will be our guides for painting our suit textures. Let’s import our suit geometry, making sure the suit UV set is assigned. Now we can sculpt in our suit detail to project onto our Normal and Displacement textures. At this stage, we don’t want fabric texture. We only want to convey the way the suit is stitched and constructed, and how the fabric folds and bends around the stitching. Once our details are ready, generate Normal, Displacement and AO maps. 09 10

Manage your colours I used a linear workflow to ensure that all the incoming and outgoing colours – whether they’re from textures or colour swatches – are balanced into a uniform, linear colour space. Understanding colour management and how to establish a linear workflow is important for getting the most realistic and accurate results, so it’s absolutely worth researching. For a quick setup, let’s enable Color Management in the Render Settings window. Now we can use Gamma Correct nodes to balance our colour swatches. We can label our colour textures as sRGB, and we can label our Bump, Normal and Displacement as Linear sRGB.

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Sketch the logo template Similar to how we sketched on the bike earlier on, we want to sketch in a texture to use as a guide for our logo placement later on. In ZBrush, be sure to import a suit model with the logo UV set. Again, we’ll coat the mesh in white and draw with a Pen brush set to black. This time around, we need to consider the size and aspect ratios of our existing logos and find cool ways to distribute them across the surface of our suit. Note that unlike the superbike decals, these logos are asymmetrical, with each appearing on one side only.

Flat Color pass Let’s start making our suit texture in

Photoshop. We can use our AO maps as a template while painting in our textures. Start off with a flat Color pass. We are essentially filling in the base colours of our fabric panels. In this step we’re not concerning ourselves with details like wrinkle shading, fabric type, grunge, seams or stitches. We should make a selection out of our AO map and simply fill in with flat, solid colours. Be sure to keep each different colour on its own layer for further adjustment later on.

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3DArtist O45

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Fabric Bump pass Let’s create Bump textures that will convey what type of fabrics are

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Fabric Color pass I’ve found that we can make our Bump textures even more

in our suit. We’re keeping this Bump detail separate from the suit structure detail in the Normal map. To create our Bump maps, we can use photo textures of the actual fabrics that we’re trying to simulate. There are some great tools out there for creating Bump, Normal, or even Displacement maps from flat images, but I’ve also found it easy to create excellent Bump maps by simply desaturating photos and manipulating the levels. We should balance the levels for all our fabrics to fit within the same range.

convincing by integrating the same detail into our Diffuse texture. First off, make a copy of our fabric Bump pass and set them over our solid Color pass. We can set our fabric colour layer’s blending mode to Multiply to bring the fabric patterns into our colours. Next, we need to adjust the value levels of our fabric Color pass. When set to Multiply blending, adjusting the levels affects the Opacity. The more white, the more subtle our fabric colour texture will be.

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Create the logo texture With our suit textures ready to go, we can move on to creating our logo texture. This process, again, will be similar to creating the decal texture in Step 5. Let’s load our logo template texture into Photoshop and start importing our pre-made logos. Use the logo template that we made earlier in order to quickly pop the various logos into place. When all logos are positioned, we can hide our template, merge the layers and create a new Alpha channel using the positive space from our logos layer. Before moving onto the next step, we can save out our logo texture as a bit TARGA.

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Bump map tips There are some great tools out there for creating effective Bump maps from photo images, and it can be fun and helpful to go out and photograph new textures. Having control over framing, scaling and lighting can be very beneficial when you’re working on such a highly detailed image. We can manipulate our levels in Photoshop to create some really effective Bump maps. For our fabric Bump map, I collected photo textures for each of the fabric types in our suit, then balanced out their values, adjusted scaling for accurate comparative proportions, and then set a uniform orientation. This gives us an excellent starting point for creating our Bump maps.

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Prepare the suit material It’s now time to create the base material for our suit. I used mia_material_x. We’ll be adjusting the Shading attributes later on. Create a 2D Bump node and plug in our Normal map, setting the Bump type to Tangent Space Normals. Let’s apply this material to our suit geometry and then apply a Displacement node to the Shading group. Plug our Displacement map into the Displacement node. Remember to label Displacement and Normal maps as linear maps, and to designate them the suit UV set. Lastly, we can set up Subdivision Approximation on our geometry to refine the effects of our Displacement map.

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3DArtist O47

'#ĹŠ"(. O Texture a superbike and racer www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar 17

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Apply the suit textures Now that we have our base

suit material set, create a 2D File node and bring in our suitâ€&#x;s Diffuse texture. Weâ€&#x;ll be plugging our Diffuse texture into our suit material Diffuse attribute. Be sure that the Texture Input ProďŹ le is set to sRGB. Next, weâ€&#x;ll create another 2D File node and bring in our suit Bump texture. Our Bump texture should have a Linear Input ProďŹ le. Since this is very subtle detail, our Bump value should be set low. Finally, connect the 2D Bump node into the second Bump slot on our suit material.

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Create the logo material Make a material for the logos. Looking at reference, we can