3D

Veteran CG artist Seth Thompson shares his expert knowledge on how to create detailed environment scenes.Click image to enlargeThis article showcases my personal work entitled Unmystified, an art piece inspired by my love of the Uncharted video game series by Naughty Dog. I'm excited to share with you some of the tips and tricks I developed to create these images.We'll look at using many handy ZBrush features here, including Panel Loops, Insert Multi Mesh and just why ray tracing renderers love 'Decimation Master' meshes. I'll also share my texturing process and how unified UVW mapping, procedural material mixing and camera projection can speed up your workflow.01. Camera projectionThe moss Camera Projection mask for stoneI begin with moss and dirt layered on top of stone objects...

With the advances in landscape creation software, Mike Griggs says that the world is your oyster.Creating CG landscapes had until recently relied on a wide range of tricks, some borrowed from traditional analogue film and modelling, and others depending on complex cheats in 3D software that required a deep knowledge.Today, however, the wealth of landscape creation tools is overwhelming. Most 3D packages now come with a sky system, which can create the light of a sunset in seconds. Procedural processes now exist that can replicate millions of instances of plant models or blades of grass to populate landscapes in seconds.However, the trick to creating a natural landscape is not so much about the tools, it's about a true understanding of nature and how we perceive it, either through the lens ...

CG artist Gustavo Groppo mixes life-like anatomy with exaggerated form in his version of Street Fighter character Zangief.Gustavo Groppo is a 3D artist currently working for Vetor Zero, a CG studio in São Paulo, and while he's employed as a 3D generalist, his skills focus on texturing, lighting and rendering. As you can see from Groppo's take on Zangief - a character from Capcom's Street Fighter series - he's very accomplished."My workflow is pretty simple and traditional," says Groppo of his Zangief project, which took him 20 days to complete. "As I was doing a redesign of the character Zangief, the challenge was to keep him familiar, but exaggerate his body. I was trying to gain a balance between real anatomy and stylised shapes and volumes." Here, Groppo explains the process behind...

CG artist James Cutler explains how to render DoF faster using 3ds Max and V-Ray.Rendering depth of field via the V-Ray Physical Camera can be slow, due to the much-needed high number of samples needed to reduce noise levels. By using the V-Ray Shade Map you can greatly reduce the rendering time without affecting the quality of the depth of field.V-Ray can render stereoscopic images, where the left image is at a slightly different camera position than the right for generating 3D images or films. To render two images of the same frame would certainly double the render time as the GI has to be calculated twice.The Shade Map reduces this time by collating data from rendering the first image and applies it to the second, resulting in a much quicker render the second time round. Although you ar...