3D Artist No. 104

Look close enough – and I mean really look – and you’ll see fingerprints all over The LEGO Batman Movie. Not figurative fingerprints, real ones, placed there by lead vendor Animal Logic to heighten the sense of realism and tangibility in the film. We aren’t watching animated digital characters, we’re watching animated digital versions of plastic characters. This is, of course, reflected in Animal Logic’s incredible attention to detail – fingerprints aside, individual bricks throughout the LEGO Batman world are scuffed, dented and damaged enough to look played with. This month we’ve been lucky enough to go behind the scenes at Animal Logic to learn all about the team’s artistic approach to filmmaking, the proprietary technology driving innovation and how crucial interesting and accomplished cinematography is in building an animated picture. Naturally, the…

ANIMAL LOGIC animallogic.com Dive headfirst into our incredible cover feature on p22, as the talented team at Animal Logic takes us behind the scenes of The LEGO Batman Movie, revealing some incredible stats in the process. 3DArtist username n/a AIDY BURROWS & GLEB ALEXANDROV creativeshrimp.com/spacevfx.html Two veritable Blender geniuses combine to walk you through creating astonishing planets and galaxies over on p32. Learn to model and texture planets, create close-ups and go procedural. 3DArtist username n/a PABLO MUÑOZ GÓMEZ zbrushguides.com/work Pablo returns to 3D Artist with another spectacular sculpt this month, this time featuring a stripped back ZBrush-to-Photoshop workflow that shows off his admirable hair and fur skills. 3DArtist username pablander CLINTON CRUMPLER clintoncrumpler.com Clinton creates some really fascinating Unreal Engine environments in his spare time (while he’s not working on games like Gears Of War 4). Jump to p58 to find out how…

“I wanted to do an arch-vis image that had a cinematic feel, so I decided to place a subtle silhouette of the main character (building) behind a foggy street. The road textures were painted non-procedurally to control car light reflections on the puddles. Water droplets on the window were made with a simple displacement map”Wai Kin Lam,Melancholy Sanctuary IV, 2016 Wai Kin Lam www.makonimation.com Wai Kin is an arch-vis artist who is now part of the Foster + Partners visualisation team Software 3ds Max, V-Ray, NUKE, Photoshop Work in progress… “I created this image while I was attending Gnomon. Early on I decided that I wanted a reel that catered towards hard-surface modelling. I came across Konstantin Maystrenko’s concept of a military robot on Artstation. The solid design convinced me that I had to model it…

When Animal Logic completed work on The LEGO Batman Movie, the latest instalment in its animated LEGO adventures, its artists worked out that the entire film would take 57,418,857 hours to render, albeit on a single CPU. Of course, the animation studio, which now has offices in both Sydney and Vancouver, relies on an advanced render farm to complete its 3D animated features and visual effects work. And for The LEGO Batman Movie, that work was incredibly complex. A crew nearing 500 people laboured over 451 CG characters in the film, along with multiple vehicles, buildings and environments, each effectively made up collections of individual LEGO-approved bricks. Gotham City, for example, consisted of 220,831,071 bricks (in real LEGO brick terms, the city would cover 379,095 square feet or 6.6 football fields…

Like they were in The LEGO Movie, minfigures (or minifigs) are the main characters in The LEGO Batman Movie. Batman, Batgirl, The Joker, Robin and scores of other characters fill the scenes, each modelled and animated by the team at Animal Logic. The studio took the opportunity to revisit its approach to the minifigs from the original film, starting with a reassessment of their dimensions. “On the first film we pretty much modelled the minifig using photographs and our eyeballs… but this time we actually went out and did a 3D scan of a real minifig to get those proportions accurate,“ says CG supervisor Damien Gray. From that, a few extra details were incorporated into the models of the minifigs, such as the way the torso slightly overhangs the hips when their…

Think about Star Wars, for a moment. What brings those unending space vistas to life the most are the bright and bold planets that inhabit them, expertly constructed by ILM and the like to create a layer of believability and a sense of scale to help you feel at home in a strange galaxy (far, far away). These environments were built digitally – in modern films, at least – and although a big glowing orb floating lazily against a starry backdrop doesn’t seem that tech at first glance, achieving a photoreal result can be tricky, and there’s something of a lack of tuition in the field. This proverbial black hole in space VFX education spurred talented videogame veteran Aidy Burrows and mad, caffeinated genius Gleb Alexandrov into action. Their video course,…