3D World April 2023

There can be no denying that games engines play a bigger part in the CG industry and community than ever before, not just in games development, but in TV and movie visual effects, stills rendering, and even visualisation and live events work too. This issue, we bring you insight into some of the latest developments in Unity, alongside training for interior scene creation and next-gen asset design for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Elsewhere, we help you master your animal grooming, set up stunning interior renders, and tell you whether the latest version of ZBrush continues to wow, just like its previous iterations have. Enjoy the issue! rob.redman@futurenet.com…

The Gallery The best digital art from the CG community The Gallery CG art to inspire “First, I'd like to highlight that I created this piece four years ago. Looking back, my working methodology has evolved since then. To get an interesting composition, I used a geometric shape, a circle, as the focal point of the model, which was my intention from the beginning. I looked for a high-contrast value for this piece, given that we are in space, so the white colour of the ship would be highlighted against the dark background. I also used a Displacement map in Octane Render to achieve the high level of detail that can be seen here. I always add the final touches to my artwork in Photoshop. The model itself is a…

The Gallery CG art to inspire “I started this project with the goal of bringing Broxigar, an orc character from the Warcraft novels, to the iconic look the orcs have in Blizzard's cinematics. I sculpted everything with ZBrush, taking a lot of care in adding as many details as possible. In Mari, I projected the micropores and details from scans on top of the details I hand-sculpted in ZBrush, which gave me a good result. Once I finished texturing, I built up the materials in Hypershade and rendered with Arnold. The lighting was important to work on, as it's what gives the final render that cinematic feeling I was looking for. If I had to remember only one lesson of the many I learned in this project, it's that the…

The Gallery CG art to inspire (instagram.com/p/BC3fbx9x95D) “When I saw this concept from Jake Parker, I was compelled to translate it into 3D. One challenge was to make sure the mechanisms made sense in showing how the owl could control a mechanical body. Among my goals on this project was to introduce an environment to give context to the character. The background was fairly simple and a new process to me, but it has inspired me to push that aspect further in my future projects. artstation.com/gtiber ARTIST Guillaume Tiberghien SOFTWARE ZBrush, Blender, Marmoset Toolbag…

The Gallery CG art to inspire (yuumeiart.com/ashes-collection) ARTIST Evandro Miguel Rodrigues Junior SOFTWARE ZBrush, Substance Painter, Maya, Arnold, XGen “This model is inspired by the amazing artist Wenqing Yan, AKA Yuumei, who built an amazing idea in a 2D drawing that just had something I was looking for. I was planning to make a piece with a focus on crafting an image that gave me a good feeling, and my aim was to improve my skills to deliver something artistically strong in a short amount of time; just two days. My previous projects were focused on modelling for production, so to make a model without that constraint was amazing. I'll focus on this in the future.” artstation.com/evandrom…

The Gallery CG art to inspire ARTIST Thuan Duong (AKA RedShadesTD) SOFTWARE Blender, ZBrush, Photoshop “We have a lot of Mitsubishi Xpanders in Ho Chi Minh City and I like them a lot, so I made a giant mecha based on them. I used ZBrush to block out the concept art, then moved to Blender to do some base shape modelling, and back to ZBrush for final details. I have learned about a lot of modelling software, but Blender stuck with me so I used that from then on. Most of the details were made using ZBrush's Knife brush and alpha techniques, which are super fast for 3D prints, concept designs or game models. I really enjoy experimenting with various different paths for a design; seeing my own design evolve…