3D World

PRO HOUDINI TRAINING Learn to master your own procedural motion graphics with our cover tutorial on page 50 Hello and welcome to a special issue. This month we celebrate our 300th edition, meaning we've been around for almost as long as visual effects and 3D themselves. Since the dawn of this exciting development in film and games, we've covered everything from the smallest indie projects, right through to the epic milestones made by companies like ILM and Pixar, as well as keeping you abreast of the latest tools and, more importantly, how to use them. 3D World has a reputation as a fantastic source of practical inspiration and we hope you've enjoyed it so far. Here's to the next 300 issues! Enjoy! rob.redman@futurenet.com…

THIS IS AN OLD MODEL THAT WAS SAVED ON MY HARD DRIVE FOR ALMOST 10 YEARS ARTIST Jose Lazaro SOFTWARE Maya, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter “My process was chaotic from the start because I didn’t have anything in mind when creating this character. This is an old model that was saved on my hard drive for almost 10 years! I probably made all of the mistakes when designing it, but I usually really enjoy this part of the process, and I spent a decade slowly cooking the character, testing tools, and repeating over and over again until I was completely happy. I know, I’m my own worst enemy. I started with an anatomy exploration, added some body elements, and then wanted to test some fur tech. Later on I added…

“My initial idea for Bell House was just a sketch of the large, central figure draped with bells, and a feeling that I wanted to push my 3DCoat detailing and texturing workflow. Working in 3D has become such a fast, flexible method that instead of sketching out multiple comps of a scene before moving forward, I usually just start building it out and find my way to a version I like. For this piece, I made a rough blockout in Blender and then sketched notes on top of it for all the parts I wanted to model out in 3DCoat.” • artstation.com/auentinstipp ARTIST Quentin Stipp SOFTWARE 3DCoat, Blender, Photoshop I WANTED TO PUSH MY 3DCOAT DETAILING AND TEXTURING WORKFLOW…

ARTIST Xinxin Gong SOFTWARE ZBrush, Maya, Substance 3D Painter, Photoshop “I struggled for a long time before deciding on a concept, because it can be difficult to re-create the impact of an existing design. Nevertheless, I was motivated to study hard and improve on the final appearance. Overall, I’m happy with the result. I’d also like to thank the concept artist, Puba 24, for the original design; I love their work! For the modelling I chose to use ZBrush, as I could build the model quicker and better refine the overall composition. Working on this project taught me about stylisation, and better control of shapes. I decided on Arnold for rendering, as it can render at high quality, is relatively controllable, and is an application I’m familiar with. In total,…

ARTIST Daniel Hinckley SOFTWARE Unreal Engine 4, ZBrush, Substance 3D Designer, Substance 3D Painter, SpeedTree, 3ds Max “Midgard is a video game environment created using Unreal Engine 4.26, with dynamic lighting and no RTX, and was heavily inspired by God of War. I tailored this project towards improving my sculpting, specifically rock asset creation, with the intention of using this as a launchpad to further specialise in this area of environment art. I also used this project as an opportunity to focus on improving my scene composition, storytelling, sculpted prop asset creation, and ground cover foliage. That ground cover utilises a combination of small ground rocks and various branch cards, leaf cards and other meshes to create a terrain that felt layered and seamless, with the intention of blurring the…

ARTIST Michael Brandstetter (AKA mbrand) SOFTWARE Blender, ZBrush “I visited Sweden in 2021 and fell in love with the forest environment, where everything seemed to be covered in moss. The lovely smell of the forest, mossy and earthy, captured my senses. As a tribute to the forest, I created a moss monster in ZBrush and Blender, with heavy use of the Graswald plugin for the vegetation. I used ZBrush for the base and retopology, as I like the way I can control the auto-retopology with groups. The fine-tuning, if necessary, I always do in Blender. Coming from Softimage and Maya, I started using Blender about four years ago. Now my whole pipeline is based in Blender as I love the software, and its intuitive workflow and flexibility. It’s good to…