3D

Create a realistic alien with ZBrush in 11 easy steps

Create a realistic alien with ZBrush in 11 easy steps

3D
It may be out of this world, but digital artist Caio César shows you how to make your alien anatomically believable. The first thing I do before creating a character is to look for references to inspire me. This is a mental process: the more you look at pictures, things in nature, movies and the work of others, the greater your mental reference will be. From there you should begin to gather ideas on how to start modelling your project. When making a character, it’s particularly important to collect anatomical references - both human and animal - so that you can make sure you’ve got the proportions correct. This is important even when designing an alien creature. 01. Start simply Start your sculpt with a basic shape like a cylinder I start with any polygon shape that is symmetri...
How to create a 3D spacesuit

How to create a 3D spacesuit

3D
From sketching patterns to adding fine details, CG artist Chris Chui shares his workflow for creating authentic digital clothing. Marvelous Designer simulates clothing based on physical properties rather than being an artist's approximation or observation. It allows you to tailor clothing like a fashion designer would, without some of the real-world pains. You design or trace existing patterns and pin them to an avatar. From there you can push or pull the fabric as if it were real, to get the look you want. The best thing is that it is all live and interactive. If I want to create a fabric hose to protect the oxygen tubes, I simply pull the hose over the tube as if putting socks on. The astronaut was inspired by some of the recent sci-fi films, such as Gravity and Elysium. The imag...
Create your own 3D Lego superhero

Create your own 3D Lego superhero

3D
Meet Creative Bloq's own Lego superhero! With the Lego Movie out today, Pat Imrie explains how to model your own Lego mini-figure. As we're sure you know by now, we're huge fans of Lego art here at Creative Bloq. So you can imagine our excitement at the release of the much anticipated Lego Movie in cinemas. To celebrate the film's release, we asked digital artist Pat Imrie to create this awesome CB superhero Lego mini-figure. And now you design one too with his brilliant step-by-step guide on how to create your own 3D Lego character. This guide was created using Maya, but any 3D software can be used including free software such as Blender (head here for some Blender tutorials to get you started). So let's dive straight in and start Lego modelling... 01. Collecting  and setting up...

How to create beautiful cinematic environments

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...

How to build convincing 3D landscapes

3D
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 ...

Avatar artist reveals how to create a 3D nature scene

3D, Maya
Alex Alvarez has worked on numerous hit movies, including Avatar and Super 8. Here, he goes back to nature to create a realistic-looking environment scene.Click image to enlargeCreating 3D art requires a lot of detail, especially natural-looking 3D environments, which for a long time was difficult to achieve due to software and hardware limitations. Today, however, thanks to engines that can render billions of polygons with physically accurate materials and lighting, the process has become manageable.The Onyx tree suite is a great collection of specialised apps for creating broad leaf, conifer and palm trees, with an excellent library. Xfrog also has a large library available online, some of which I have used in my work.Ivygen is a free standalone app tha...

How to create a Street Fighter-style CG character

3D
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...

How to render depth of field faster

3D
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...

Add photoreal cloth to your 3D scenes

3D, Maya
Oscar Juárez explains how use Marvelous Designer to produce photoreal cloth using solid modelling and texturing techniques.From the beginning, I've been a modelling kind of guy. I just like to model my stuff. I think in some way modelling your own stuff makes it more personal. A long time ago, I read about a cool new piece of software called Marvelous Designer; it's a 3D cloth creation tool. I tested it and was very impressed and excited by the results.There's no question that Marvelous Designer 2 has a lot of applications, but in this case I wanted to test it for architectural visualisation work, so I focused on making photorealistic cloth for an interior scene.In this tutorial I'll explain how to export models from Cinema 4D into Marvelous Designer 2, and then I'll show yo...

How to reimagine an existing character

3D, Maya
Character artist Danilo Athayde shares his working process to create this powerful character from King of Fighters.Everything about the process of producing a character fascinates me. This latest work is a fan art tribute to Leona Heidern, a character from SNK's King of Fighters series. I love everything about this character, from her physical attributes to her sense of personality. She's a beautiful, mysterious warrior woman and to show these characteristics in my piece was a great challenge.In this tutorial, I'll reveal the process of creating my image, share elements of my workflow, detail the challenges in finishing this scene and all the things I consider important for producing good work. I will begin with the concept, because this is an important starting point for creating a good p...