3D Artist No. 99

Technical diversity is key when it comes to modelling. It’s critical for you to develop a wide range of skills and techniques so you can perform at full capacity in the studio, and hone your own hard-surface creations at home. Whether your passions lie in mechs, vehicles, characters or anything in between, we’ve compiled a stellar roster of modellers from ILM, Ubisoft, Cloud Imperium Games and more to offer up key insight that they’ve absorbed over long and successful careers. They’re a super talented bunch and we’re really pleased to have them on board. The 3D fun doesn’t stop there, though. We’ve also been lucky enough to chat to VFX forefather Phil Tippett and his team at Tippett Studio about the facility’s tangible impact on the industry that stretches back to the…

JUAN HERNÁNDEZ artstation.com/artist/armoredwolf As soon as we saw Juan’s incredible Deep Eyes image, we knew it would make a great cover. Head over to our hard-surface modelling feature on p24 for his valuable insight. 3DArtist username n/a DANIEL SIAN www.danielsian.com Daniel makes amazing imagery for advertising from his base in New Zealand, so we asked him to come along and show off his efficient and artistic jellyfish workflow in Cinema 4D. It’s on p48. 3DArtist username danielsian TOM BRAMALL www.tomb-art.com Tom, like a lot of other artists at the moment, is a Substance Painter evangelist. He used Allegorithmic’s tool to texture his awesome sci-fi pilot character – find out how on p56. 3DArtist username Tomb_Art MIDGE SINNAEVE themantissa.net It’s amazing how little you think about the work that goes into creating dynamic 3D movie titles, despite seeing them all the…

“I wanted to represent a picturesque landscape featuring only a man-made machine – in this case, an old trawler. As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting and challenging part of 3D is to represent used, damaged and imperfect objects”Rémy Trappier, The Old Trawler, 2016 Rémy Trappier www.behance.net/RemyTrapp I’ve been doing 3D for about five years now. I love working on specific visual scenes Software 3ds Max, V-Ray, Photoshop Work in progress… “The image was created for the Trojan Horse was a Unicorn challenge on Artstation. In the scene there are two chemists trying to find the formula for the perfect society, and they finally found it. The ingredients are: empathy, individualism leading to pluralism, passion, respect for nature, tolerance, equality, creativity and liberty”Manuel Peter, The Experiment, 2016 Manuel Peter manuelpeter.com Manuel is a 3D artist from Germany, specialising…

Ahard-surface modeller is one of the most diverse and varied job titles in the industry; its definition varies from artist to artist. Some take hard surfaces to mean a model with a tight, clean mesh, few curves and hard edges. Others will take it to mean creating any man-made construct, so arch-vis would certainly come under this umbrella. But it could also mean a static rigid object that will not be animated – say, for example, a weapon. Not only is the definition so free, so is the level of inspiration for hard-surface designs. Markus Vogt suggests that the best references you can get are “of real-life hard surfaces and models.“ Hristian Ivanov agrees, and says that for truly believable models, you should look around. “Your model should look good, but…

01 Smooth group placement Setting Smoothing groups is essential for our Chamfer modifier to work its muscle. By doing so we define which bordering sections will get support edges. Those edges are key for the look of our high-poly model once we apply the TurboSmooth. Each colour indicates a separate Smoothing group. 02 Add the Chamfer modifier it's time to apply the Chamfer modifier, which has been part of 3ds Max since the 2015 iteration. Make sure to set your settings to Unsmoothed Edges, which will place the edge loops around the Smoothing groups. The Crease and Tension slider gives us full control over the hardness amount of our model. 03 Use TurboSmooth's subdivide the geometry by adding TurboSmooth on top of the Chamfer modifier, which results in our high-poly model. Thanks…

01 Define a plan What's most important before any kitbashing is to establish a plan, something to follow. Here, I want to create a mech, so what I do first is a very low-resolution maquette, known as a blocking model, where I roughly define my mech, its proportions and the style I'm going for. 02 Pick a method think about replacing this model with an outer shell, something which will define the shapes of each part more precisely. For that I usually make a flat pattern, which I turn into panels and then deform them to roughly follow my maquette. Creating cool flat patterns, extruding a thickness and then applying a series of Bend deformers or even Lattices allows me to quickly build a parts library of different panels. 03 Build a…