Computer Graphics News

2011-03-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

The Thea Render team has officially begun shipping its hybrid renderer, advertised as “the first commercial solution that contains both state-of-the-art biased and unbiased engines”.
Read more >>

Smoke 2012

2011-03-06T00:04:00.000-08:00

Most coverage of Autodesk from the past week may have centered on its upcoming releases of 3ds Max, Maya et al, but the developer also has other updates in the works, including its Mac-only finishing software, Smoke.
Read more >>

2011-03-05T23:58:00.000-08:00

This tutorial of the Florence Design Academy (www.florencedesignacademy.com), the leading Design School in Europe, explains how to create a glowing material by using architectural and standard materials. Additionally it will explain how to use the Glare shader to improve glow effects.

Glowing material

Zbrush 4 : The Making Of Alien

2011-02-08T20:57:00.001-08:00

Making of Alien by
Fabio Bautista, Colombia

ZBrush 4 is one of those software that always surprises with future and innovative . At the most recent release includes the new ZSketch feature. This one is based on the known ZSphere tool, which allows creating basic shapes from interconnected sphere structures. Through this new function, we can able to create structures even more complex by a more efficient way, getting better control and greater freedom to make them.
The process of zsketching consists in building up forms from strips of ZSpheres drawn freely in 3D space or applied to structures already created. This is similar to the technique of covering a wire armature with clay used in traditional sculpting.

Basic Structure

I started creating the basic armature, which I would use later to cover it with the strips of ZSpheres. The first thing I did was to select the Zsphere tool and drawn a sphere on the canvas. Then I went to the Edit mode and added more spheres building up the structure for each part of the body. Here, I also was using Move, Scale and Rotate modes to bring out form to the structure.

Here the wire armature would carry out two main functions: first, being a support surface for the strips of spheres applied, second, by working as a skeleton, so once the model is finished, I would be able to move, rotate or scale the parts more easily and get pose to the model.

ZSketching

With the ZSphere armature created, it was time to cover it. To start off I activated the ZSketch mode by clicking on the EditSketch button, located in the Tool:ZSketch menu. Then I was able to use the ZSketch brushes and was ready to start covering the ZSphere structure, starting by the head. ZBrush have several brushes, which produce different embed depth. First, I selected the SKetch 1 brush. This brush allows applying strips of spheres almost inside the underlining applied surface. Using a large stroke, so I started covering the structure with this ZSpheres

Once I got the right shape, I began to draw a series of strips with different stroke sizes to create the details. To make this task, I used mainly the Sketch 2 brush, which allows adding spheres, leaving half of its radius under the applied surface. In other areas, I used Sketch 3 which creates spheres almost out of the surface. Then I used Move to position them, followed of Bulge and Smooth to adjust them. The Bulge brush simply increases or decrease the radius of the spheres. This one was a very helpful tool to bring out form to each strip of spheres.

One important thing when using the Smooth brush, is to know how works the different smoothing levels and how is the behavior of each one of them. For example, Smooth 1 and Smooth2 soften in greater or lesser degree the ends of the strip, causing them to blend with the underneath contact surface. On the other side, Smooth 3 only smooth all the strip keeping intact the ends of the strip of ZSpheres.
I also used the Armature brush to build up the structure of the mouth, jaw and teeth. This brush, unlike Sketch brushes, allows creating free-form patterns. This means that the spheres does not need any contact surface, so it is the best way to create floating strips in the 3D space.

After creating each form, I was switching among Bulge, Float and Move to adjust the size and position of the spheres. Sometimes I also used CTRL + Shift + Click on the strips to hide the other underneath strips of ZSpheres, so I was able to work only on current strip.
A similar procedure was used to create each one of the Alien's body parts.

Of course, some areas like the torso and tail requires more detail and more work than others. Also some specific parts requiring most use of a brush over another. For example, in the chest and ribs, I only used Armature. While for the spine of the back and tail, I mainly used Sketch

Deformation and Pose

Another of the advantages of using a ZSphere skeleton is the fact of being able to apply global deformations to the model. This allows performing actions such as changing the pose of the ZSketch model. The skeleton structure can be connected easily to this model by using the Bind function. Doing so, the ZSketch becomes transparent and the internal ZSpheres skeleton becomes visible, allowing manipulating the structure comfortably.

To start with the changes, first I deactivated the ZSketch mode by clicking on the EditSketch button. Then I activated Bind button and started using the Move, Scale and Rotate modes on the ZSphere skeleton.

Each change I did to this one was applied to the ZSketch model. One by one I was adjusting the parts until I got the right pose for the model. This process was straightforward, though, every time I finished a pose, I had to accommodate manually some spheres that came out of the structure. At the end, I had to adjust a little more the ZSketch structure by using mainly Bulge and Smooth.

Render and Composition

To complete this process, there is just still to apply some custom Matcap materials to the model and get the final renders. In the final image I used materials with a glossy finish and activated Best Render Mode. This render mode generates softer and precise shadows. As usual, I also activated the anti-aliasing mode to avoid jagged edges.

Finally the images were opened in Photoshop to composite, add a background, put some effects and make some levels and color adjustments.

And the result is the final image.

The Making Of 'AH1Z Viper Helicopter'

2011-02-08T19:28:00.001-08:00

This tutorial by Martin Kostov and in this article I will have the honor of explaining the creation of my image “AH-1Z Viper Helicopter”. First of all, I want to start by telling you that I did not work alone on this project. The high poly modeling was done by my friend and colleague Ivo Jovchev. We wanted to create a good piece of art and at the same time wanted to keep the poly count as low as possible. The first step we took was to look for references. We were lucky and found a lot of high quality photos on the internet. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have good references (Fig.01 – 03).

Fig.01

Fig.02

Fig.03

Modeling :

The next important step was to find information about the helicopter. Such information can usually be found on Wikipedia and similar sites. You can always make the model without knowing anything about it, but this model was very complex with a lot of different elements and we wanted to get to know the different parts so that we could create them more easily.
After we gathered all of this data we sat down and decided that in order to keep the detail, but end up with a low poly count, we had to make a very high poly version of the model first, then create the final mesh and bake all of the small stuff (like bolts and small holes). Ivo was going to create the high poly version and I would do the rest. He sat down for two-three weeks and created a really detailed high poly model with around 9 million polygons (Fig.04 – 05).
After I received the model I started making the final mesh. I used the high poly version that he had created and started going through all of the pieces one by one, making the final meshes. I grouped and fixed elements that needed adjustment before the baking.

Fig.04

Fig.05

Baking :

After all of the modeling was done and I had a final mesh, I started baking the parts. I could have just drawn the bolts and holes in Photoshop, but after a few tests I decided that it didn’t look as good as if it had been baked from the high poly model.
Of course the baking didn’t go by without a few mistakes, but they were all fixed either in the baking stage or in Photoshop (Fig.06).

Fig.06

Texturing :

After the baking was done the next step was for me to create all the textures. This included creating diffuse, glossy and specular maps as well as a few opacity maps. I used the normal maps that I had already created and also exported UVW templates into 3ds Max.
I wanted to test my textures in real-time not only with the diffuse but with the normals as well, so I decided to use DirectX shaders just for the time being. You can only use those shaders if you run DirectX as your default driver in 3ds Max (Fig.07).

Fig.07
I used a Wacom Bamboo tablet for the drawing of the textures. I don’t think that good results can be achieved when drawing with a mouse. Even a small tablet like the bamboo works miracles for your end result. I wanted to add some dirt, scratches and also a little bit of rust around the helicopter. Military helicopters go through maintenance before every flight so they only have small scratches and rust spots on them. Anything to0 drastic would not look realistic (Fig.08).

Fig.03

Materials :

I wanted to render the final images with mental ray, so I had to create mental ray materials. I used Arch/Design materials and basically used some pretty standard settings: Reflectivity – 0.3, Glossiness – 0.5 and Highlights + FG checked (Fig.09).

Fig.09

Lighting :

I used “mr Sky Portal” lights, because they render really fast and at the same time provide a very clean and nice result. Also they give you a very soft light which was my goal from the beginning. I used a little trick for these lights. I used the “mib_cie_d” map, which is only available if you unhide it in the 3ds Max/mental ray folder. Just go to “3DMax2008\mentalray\shaders_standard\include” and open the “base.mi” file in Notepad or some other text editing software. Once you open it do a search for “mib_cie_d”. Once you find it you have to scroll down and place a # sign in front of the word hidden. This will eliminate this command and the map will be visible in 3ds Max. Just restart the program and you will find it there.
I used some middle values for this map since it is working with temperature. You have to note that higher values create a red color and lower values create a blue color. So if you type in something like 6-7000 you will get somewhere in the middle, which is white. I placed four lights around the model and one at the top with a lower value for the intensity (Fig.10 – 12).

Fig.10

Fig.11

Fig.12
Rendering :
The rendering setup wasn’t anything special. I rendered with mental ray and set the Aliasing values to 4 for minimum and 16 for the maximum. I also changed the Filter Type to “Lanczos”.
The last thing I did for the rendering was to render out an AO pass for the post-production in the end. I recommend using an AO pass since it can add a lot of depth to your end result. I wondered if I should render a Z-Depth as well, but decided that for this scene setup it was not necessary.

Post-Production :

For this final step I used Photoshop CS5. There wasn’t much to do for the post-production. All I really did was sharpen the image a bit and add a bit more depth with the AO pass, as well as making the reflections more visible.
Also I changed the background and added a border and my logo (Fig.13).
Thank you all for reading this and also thanks to the 3DTotal team for showing an interest in our work. I hope you enjoyed reading this article and that it helped you in some small way. Bye!

Fig.12

Nasa used 3d for presneting sun

2011-02-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

Nasa used 3D image for presenting the sun, they using its Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites.

The twin satellites, launched in 2006, were positioned on opposite sides of the sun to generate the images. Unlike the moon, which has a permanent far side, the sun rotates once about every 24.5 days. This means the whole surface is visible from earth over the course of a month, but if there is an event on the far side we would not become aware of this until at least another week later, if at all.

The STEREO satellites travelled 290 million miles to give scientists this unique view of the solar surface. From now on, solar structures and phenomena will be visible to scientists in three dimensions. This will aid their understanding of the star's physics, and improve their ability to predict space weather.

Maya; Tutorial Maya Cloth

2011-01-10T23:48:00.000-08:00

With Maya Cloth, you can create realistic animated cloth within the Maya environment. Maya Cloth gives you the ability to model garments for any animated 3D figure, apply dynamic effects, and simulate the cloth behavior. In this tutorial, we will create a simple scene on which we will play with cloth.
Read more...

Material Tutorial: Glowing Material with Mental Ray

2011-01-10T23:34:00.000-08:00

For this material you must use Mental Ray.

Glowing materials are very useful to create light effects. For example a neon-light effect.

This kind of material is a light-emitting material. It will create light and shadows like an Omni Light.

Let's check out the steps we are going to do:

1. Change in the material editor the Standard material to an Architectural -image 1-.

2. Choose the color of your glowing material in the diffuse color slot.

3. Now go to the setting "luminance cd/m2". This setting allows you to create a material which is able to emit light. This setting is very similar to the standard "self-illumination" slot. But in the architectural material you can add a value which is much more higher than 100. The higher the value the brighter the material's light emission.

Image Description: image 1

It is very important that you enable Final Gather (in max 9 the option "SAMPLES" is called “rays per FG point”) since the glow effect and the emission of light will be possible only with this setting. The higher the number in FG Samples/ FG point the better will be the quality. Put 1 for low quality (for test renderings -Image 2-) and 250-400 for good quality.

Image Description: Image 2

If you go to increase the value in MAX BOUNCES -image 3- (in Max 9 it is called DIFFUSE BOUNCES -image 4-) in the Final Gather panel, you will be able to give more energy to your light effect. It is possible to illuminate an entire room by using the MAX BOUNCES setting: the indirect light that comes from the light that bounces on the walls will add more realism to the scene. But it takes much more time to render the scene. You should have additional lights anyway to achieve a perfect illumination of your interior (this kind of technique and all light settings are explained during the lessons of the Florence Design Academy).

Try to make this small experiment: Create a box, and place a sphere on top of it. Assign to the sphere a glowing material and enable all settings explained previously (don't create any light). In the rendering you will see that the entire scene is illuminated and that the sphere is emitting light. But it is clearly visible that the illumination is not coming only from the sphere. If you don't create any lights, 3D Studio Max will create a default light. But what if you don't want this additional default light of 3D Studio Max because you need a very dark scene in which only the sphere is visible as a glowing object ? Let's go on with our small experiment: Just create a mr Omni light, and disable it from the modify panel (uncheck in the beginning of the panel the slot "ON")

Make a new rendering. Only now does the scene behave as it has to be in reality. The only light which is illuminating the scene is the sphere.

Here below you have a sample with a room.

Image A:

Rendering of a room with a default light.

Image B:

Rendering of the same room with Architectural material assigned to the box on the ceiling. It is clearly visible that the entire room has the same illumination like before, now we can see shadows under the teapot. Since we are using a default light, the entire scene looks wrong. The light should come only from the ceiling.

Image C: exactly the same scene as scene B, but now we have created an additional MR Omni and we have disabled it. Now finally we have a realistic result. It is clearly visible that the illumination is coming from the white on the ceiling.

Image D: same scene like image C, but now the MAX BOUNCE in the Final Gather panel has a value of 3.

From this sample you can see that it is possible to illuminate a room only through this material, however I suggest to use always additional lights.

A similar effect like the architectural material can be simulated with a simple self-illuminated material on which you apply an OUTPUT where you increase the output value. But the architectural material is faster to manage.

That's it.
I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.

Best Regards
Florence Design Academy
www.FlorenceDesignAcademy.com

Interview with Thiago Costa: Lagoa Technologies

2011-01-10T23:30:00.000-08:00

Thiago Costa
A native of Brazil, Thiago Costa created Lagoa Technologies (lagoa means small lake in Portuguese) to generalize physics formulas into one unified formulation. Thiago's physics framework Lagoa Multiphysics became widely popular with over one million views in less than one week. Prior to creating Lagoa he has worked extensively in the post-production industry in Brazil, the United States and Canada and have participated on films such as "Predators", "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" and "Assassins Creed Lineage" and found Softimage ICE the ideal platform for developing tools.

The Area:
THIAGO! Welcome to the AREA. This year so far, must have been undoubtedly a hell of a year for you. As the creator of Lagoa, the powerful multiphysics engine that is now integrated into Softimage 2011.5, how has the response been these past few months since the major announcement was made?

Thiago:
Thank you for receiving me at the AREA! Yes this year was special for me. The work was largely done before the announcement was made and with the help of the great Softimage staff the integration was very successful. Since then I’ve been busy writing a lot of code, giving support to new customers and following up with users.

Image Description: Image courtesy of Lagoa Technologies

The Area:

There are over 1.5 million views and counting, on your jaw-dropping Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 Teaser! But… before we get into Lagoa, let's talk a bit about your background. Growing up in Brazil, how did you get started in the CG industry?

Thiago:

My CG story started with 3D modeling and animation for advertising.... Then I got into TV, design, opening titles for tele-novelas, character animation, motiongraphics... I had the luck to work in a lot of different areas and with a variety of people. The fact that I had to apply my work in a various ways got me very confident that I could change and work on pretty much anything I had fun. Was always for the fun of it and usually a lot of Brazilians that work on the CG industry carry the same diverse background. The exception with me is that I went a lot to the tech side, which doesn’t happen often in Brazil.

Image Description: Image courtesy of Lagoa Technologies

The Area:

What was your first 3D app…share any fond memories <:-)?

Thiago:

3ds Max was the first real production tool I used. I still open it and hit Shift+q to render, and it still works :)
But before that (to be fair) I had touched Blender when I only had a Linux system, it was the only thing there was for 3D... I have lots of memories of using Gimp(2D) and Blender to do ugly stuff...:) Not because of Blender but because I pretty much sucked at that time in 3D.

Image Description: Image courtesy of Lagoa Technologies

The Area:

How long have you been using Softimage?

Thiago:
I’ve tried it when 3.0 was out, that was like 8 years ago? I remember it was complaining about my monitor resolution... Then when 4.0 was out I really got into it and never let go :). Readmore...

Ubisoft uses Autodesk games technology to create Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

2011-01-10T23:17:00.000-08:00

In 2007, Ubisoft Montreal created a third-person action-adventure game named Assassin’s Creed. The universal success of the top-selling, award-winning game set in both the distant past and the not-so-distant future lead to the creation of Assassin’s Creed II, which saw present-day protagonist Desmond Miles reliving the genetic memories of ancient assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze, all of which take place in Renaissance-era Florence, Italy. The second installment also proved a huge success.

Now, the Ubisoft team has raised the bar again for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, an ambitious new entry in the evolving story of the assassin that is the first to include a multiplayer mode.

Image Description: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Image courtesy of Ubisoft.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood picks up where the second installment concluded, with players being reintroduced to both Desmond and Ezio, who has now become a Master Assassin and moved to the much larger city of Rome. Ezio’s mission has also grown in scope and responsibility, as he attempts to build a brotherhood of assassins to vanquish the evil Templar Order and a new arch-nemesis, Cesare Borgia.

Ubisoft artists and engineers used the powerful combination of Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® MotionBuilder® software, together with Autodesk® HumanIK® animation middleware in the company’s proprietary game engine, to create the biggest Assassin’s Creed title so far. Read more >>

Luxology Modo 501 is released

2010-12-19T23:50:00.000-08:00

Modo 501 now released with some featured of Rendering, New Modeling Tools and Hair/Fur.

3D Motion and Position of Text Characters with After Effects

2010-12-19T06:48:00.001-08:00

Typography is one of the qualities upon which we base most of our design work, and the type animation engine in After Effects offers a gamut of ways to express typographic flair. One of my favorites is the ability to control the 3D motion and position of text characters. When combined with simple camera moves, depth of field, and some real-world studio tricks we use every day, the results can be—literally—powerful. Let’s get started.

1 CREATE PROJECT; ADD BACKGROUND, TYPE
Create a New Composition, named “Power of Words,” at HDTV 1280×720 resolution with a 6-second duration, and then double-click the Project panel to import an image to use as a background. For this example, I purchased a vector illustration of blurry lights (#4292586 from www.istockphoto.com). Drag the image into the Timeline at 0 seconds and use any effects to adjust color or contrast, as well as an Effect>Blur & Sharpen>Fast Blur to soften focus. Go to Layer>New>Text, and enter the main text. We’ve styled ours using Helvetica Neue (85 Heavy and 35 Thin), 30-px size, Optical kerning, Tracking 10, black, and centered.

2 ADD AND EDIT 3D CAMERA
Now, go to Layer>New>Camera, choose 15mm from the Preset drop-down menu in the dialog, and click OK (if you get a 2D warning dialog, just ignore it for now). Press P on your keyboard to reveal the camera’s Position properties, and adjust the Z position value to –600 for the time being. Now go to Layer>Transform>Auto-Orient, choose Off, and click OK.

3 ADJUST 3D POSITIONS
Click the 3D Layer switch next to both the text and background image layers in the Timeline, then select the background image layer, hit P, and set the Z position to 3000 in the far distance. Now, press Shift-S to show the Scale property also, and scale the background image until it touches the edges of the full composition.

4 DUPLICATE AND ADJUST TEXT
Twirl up the background image layer’s properties, select the text layer, and press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to duplicate it. Click the Solo box on the left of the Timeline for that layer and in the Character panel, change its color to white. (Note: Go to Composition>Background Color and change the color to black so you can see your white text.) Now, change the Font family to be the same throughout—in this case Helvetica Neue 45 Light, the Size to 24 px, and the Tracking to 100.

5 EDIT TEXT; RENAME LAYER
Now, double-click the T icon next to the layer’s name, then type in a series of words or sentences of your choice. The longer the line, the better the finished 3D strings of text will be, so feel free to type and copy-and-paste to extend the lines. You’ll notice that the layer’s name becomes rather awkward to work with, so when finished, click on the name of the layer, press Return (PC: Enter), and rename it to “Long line of type” or something short to that effect.

6 ADD FIRST TEXT ANIMATOR
Now for the animators! Twirl down the Long line of type layer, twirl down Text, then click the arrow to the right of the word “Animate” and choose Anchor Point to add your first Animator. Click on the name of the Animator, press Return (PC: Enter), and rename it “Animator 1 – Anchor Point” for easy recognition. Go back to Animate and choose Enable Per-Character 3D from the menu, then adjust the Anchor Point Animator’s Y value to sit in the vertical middle of the type—in our example, around –9. This enables rotators we add later to spin from the center of the letters, not their baseline.

7 ADD SECOND TEXT ANIMATOR
Twirl up and deselect Animator 1, then go back to the Animate menu and choose Position, which adds a second animator. Rename it “Animator 2 – Position Wiggle,” then next to the new name, click Add and choose Selector>Wiggly. This is where the fun and creativity really begin!

8 ADJUST POSITION AND WIGGLE VALUES
In the Position value within the animator, adjust the XYZ values to 400, 600, 400, respectively. As you can see, this blows the characters far apart easily. And if you scrub the Timeline, it looks crazy too—but this is easy to control. Twirl down Wiggly Selector 1, set the Wiggles/Second to 0.05 (it will show 0.1 when you press Return [PC: Enter]), and most importantly, set the Correlation to 96%. This causes the letters to remain more in line with each other, forming a gently rippling line of type.

9 ADD THIRD TEXT ANIMATOR
Deselect all, go back to the Animate menu, select Rotation, and next to the new animator, click Add and choose Selector>Wiggly. Rename this animator “Animator 3 – Rotation Wiggle,” then adjust the X, Y, and Z Rotation selectors to 1x, 2x, 1x, respectively. Now twirl down Wiggly Selector 1 and adjust the Wiggles/Second to 0.35 and the Correlation to 0%, and scrub the Timeline. This correlation value allows the random rotation to apply to the characters individually, which looks very cool.

10 ADD FINAL ANIMATOR
Deselect all, go back to the Animate menu, choose Character Offset, and then add a Wiggly Selector into that new animator. Rename this animator “Animator 4 – Character Offset,” then go to the newly added Character Offset value and set it to 10, and the Character Alignment to Center. Now adjust its Wiggles/Second to 2 and its Correlation to 0%, then view the results. Looking pretty cool!

11 ADD RANDOM LAYER ORIENTATION
Now to adjust the entire layer’s rotation in anticipation of the next step, twirl up the entire text layer, then hit R to reveal its Rotation property. Hold down Option (PC: Alt), click on the Stopwatch for X Rotation to add an expression field, and type in wiggle(0,180), then hit Enter to confirm. This will randomly rotate the layer up to 180° on the x-axis, but with no motion. Now repeat this process to add expressions to both the y- and z-axes, using wiggle(0,360) and wiggle(0,180), respectively.

12 DUPLICATE, DUPLICATE, DUPLICATE
Everything we’ve created so far is referencing Wiggle values, which are created randomly in After Effects on a layer-by-layer basis, so if we duplicate this layer, we’ll get wildly different results. Twirl up the text layer, select it, then press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to duplicate it. Not only do you see a new spread of text characters in completely different positions, but the layer name has added “2” to the end, which is why we renamed it. Now, duplicate as many times as you like to suit your design.

13 ADJUST AND ANIMATE CAMERA
Turn off the Solo icon for all of the type layers, then select the Camera 1 layer and change its Z Position value to –900. At 00:00 seconds, click the Position Stopwatch to add a keyframe, then scrub to 04:00 seconds and change the Z position value to –300. Select that second keyframe and go to Animation>Keyframe Assistant>Easy Ease In (PC: Shift-F9), or adjust the velocity to suit your own design.

14 ADD DEPTH OF FIELD; MOTION BLUR
Finally, press AA to reveal the Camera Options, then turn Depth of Field to On. Change the Focus Distance to 300 and the Aperture to 80 pixels—this gives us perfect focus on the final wording line at 04:00. Feel free to turn on the Motion Blur switch for all of the text layers, then render your final movie.
A really powerful, and even slightly disturbing, motion piece created easily and quickly thanks to some careful planning, animators, wigglers, and expressions, and of course some good “Energi.” Enjoy!

'Displacement Map Chainmail'

2010-12-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

by Tom Isaksen

Software Used :

3ds Max and mental ray

Step 1 : Modeling

In this tutorial I want to show a relatively easy technique for making a chainmail in 3ds Max using a displacement map and mental ray. In this example I’ll show how to make the displacement map and how to get a good quality render with as few artifacts as possible using a simple Arch & Design material. The idea is that you can use this setup to create a tileable chainmail texture like I used on this knight (Fig.02).

Fig.02

Once you have positioned the first few, duplicate out. How many you create is up to you, depending on the variation and size of your final texture. Merge all the rings together and give them an appropriate name. You can play around with some variations in the rings for more realism etc., just keep in mind that it makes a tileable version of the material more difficult to pull off (Fig.03).

Fig.03

Step 2 : Generating Displacement Map

First you must create a surface with UV coordinates as a target for your displacement map. You can do this by simply creating a plane and positioning it on top of your rings (Fig.04).

Fig.04

Position so it just barely touches the rings, and assign mapping coordinates. With the plane you created selected, open the Render To Texture dialog box (Rendering > Render To Texture (press 0)) (Fig.05):

Make sure you see the name of your plane here (shows name of selected object in Max).
Click the Pick… button and select your rings. In the options menu here you can play around with the Min and Max Height settings to get a greater range in your displacement map.
Choose Use Existing Channe” in the mapping coordinates menu, otherwise new ones will be auto generated.
Assign a file name and destination. Choose tiff file format and make sure you select 16 bit texture to get best result. Then choose Displacement Map in the Target Map Slot.
Set the Element Background color to black.
Set the image resolution to 2048×2048 or higher (you might want to do a test render at a lower resolution first). Then click render.

Fig.05

Note: The image you see rendering on screen is not the displacement map, but rather a default map 3ds Max puts up. You can disregard this map, or you can assign a nice metal shader to your rings and use this map for creating a diffuse map for you chainmail. To get the actual displacement map, find it at your File Name and Type location.
It can take some time to render depending on your resolution. When the render is complete, it should look something like this (Fig.06).

Fig.06

Step 3 : Creating Material

Now that we have our displacement map, we need to create an Alpha map. I won’t go into detail, but I simply modified the Brightness and Contrast settings in Photoshop to make the alpha from the displacement map. Alternatively you can generate one from the Render to Texture menu in Max.
And here’s the Alpha map (Fig.07).

Fig.07

Set up an Arch & Design shader and assign your maps (Fig.08).
Give the displacement map a Strength of 1.0 to begin with. We’ll go back and tweak textures and material settings once we get some test renders done.

Fig.08

Step 4 : Rendering

It’s time to set up a small scene to render our chainmail material. I created a simple setup using the plane we created to generate the displacement map with a camera, a couple of lights and a background. How you set it up is up to you.
Here’s a screenshot from my test scene (Fig.09).

Fig.09

The results of the first render (Fig.10).

Fig.10

Not exactly a pretty sight! The rings aren’t very well defined and the edges look all fuzzy. Fear not, we just need to tweak a few things. The most important is the displacement map. The generated map has very little range, so use Photoshop to manipulate the levels and contrast until it looks more like this (Fig.11).

Fig.11

Alternatively, you can play around with the Height map settings when you generate the Displacement map (Fig.12).

Fig.12

Render again and you should have a more defined result (Fig.13).

Fig.13

There are still a fair amount of artifacts, so we need to play around with some render settings to get a better result. Open the Render Setup menu, select the Renderer tab and scroll to the bottom (Press F10) Rendering > Render Setup > Renderer (Fig.14).

Fig.14

The settings here are very important to the quality of the displacement. The important numbers are the Edge Length and Max Displace. The Edge Length controls the number of polygons per pixel in your render, and the Max Displace controls the maximum amount of displacement you get. Since our render is relatively simple; we can set the Max Displace low and speed up our render a bit. To get rid of artifacts in our render, we need to lower the Edge Length value, Try to set it to 1 and do a new render. If you don’t like the result then lower it a bit more until you get the desired result. Setting the Edge Length value too low can cause you to run out of memory and mean the render can’t complete. It can also increase your render time, so keep that in mind.
Here is a comparison between Edge Length 0,2 and the default 2,0 from our first render (Fig.15).

Fig.15

It might also help here to adjust the strength of the displacement map in your material to get a better effect. When you’re happy with the shape of the rendered mesh, it’s time to add some metal shading to the result - here are some quick settings you can try (Fig.16).

Fig.16

That should give you a result similar to this, depending on your render scene and light setup (Fig.17).

Fig.17

That’s it from me, but keep playing around with the material settings: create a diffuse layer with rust and dirt and add a specular map. The scene setup will be important too since metal is reflective, so maybe you need to add an environment map. There are plenty of ways to improve the look.
Thanks for reading!

Making Of Horned Man

2009-05-03T04:10:00.000-07:00

The Making Of Horned Man by Paul Large, website www.opifex.co.uk , email : 0x_my_s0x@hotmail.com . The image started as a sketch inside ZBrush and grew from there into the final image almost by accident. Sketching characters in ZBrush is a great way to concept ideas, mess around with forms and come up with cool new things. After the sketch I retopologised the head section of the model and from there used the polypaint tools in ZBrush to create the textures. Rendering was handled with Mental Ray in 3ds Max. I find Mental Ray to be the most accessible of the available rendering systems for Max, and the fact that Max already comes with it makes it great. Also, having used XSI for many years, the creation of shaders in Mental Ray has become second nature to me

source : www.3dtotal.com

Making of Obidos

2009-05-03T03:58:00.000-07:00

The making of Obidos by Hugo Silva, web site : www.hugosilva.com . He inspired by a few personal photos from Obidos (another ancient village with a sweet little castle), from a street lost in the corners of this village, but especially this photo (Ref. Photo A) was taken with the purpose to recreate it in 3D.

source : www.cgarena.com

Taking the new Autodesk Mudbox 2009 for a spin and a sculpt

2009-04-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

Mudbox 2009, the second generation of Mudbox is an amazingly easy to use digital sculpting tool that takes away all the technical aspects of working in 3D and lets your imagination and creativity flow. This may sound corny, but it really is that easy to use, and impressively fast.
The latest version added several new sculpting brushes, along with an entirely new, and much anticipated painting system. Read more >>

source : www.cgsociety.org

X-Men: Extreme Makeover

2009-04-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

In this week's podcast we talk to Greg Strause, of Lola and Hydraulx and John Bruno visual effects supervisor of X-Men, about the amazing 25 year digital facelifts in X-Men: The Last Stand. We are also joined in our companion written story by Eric Saindon who headed up the Weta X-Men 3 team . Read more >>

M.I.A Bang by David OReilly

2009-04-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

Announcing ZBrush 4

2009-04-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

ZBrush 4 will be a free upgrade for all registered users of ZBrush on Windows and Mac systems.

Getting ready for the upgrade is easy, and linked to your Support Account

Making of From the hoop

2009-04-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

Making of From the hoop by iamyog

Story of From the hoop is inspired by Earl Manigault's life. Earl Manigault was one of the greatest basketball player of his generation. Mentored by Holcombe Rucker through his youth he became the star of his high school team. As an universitary champion, he seemed destined to shine in NBA. But before the transition, he fell into drugs and lead his life far away from the basket. After dark years made of jail, drugs and friend's death, he gave up this world to return in the right way to Harlem. He started the "Walk Away From Drugs" tournament for kids in Harlem. He died in 1998 from a heart failure. Read More ....

Source : www.3dm3.com

MakeHuman 1.0.0 alpha1

2009-04-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

This Alpha 1 release provides the 1st formal testing release for the functionality that has been implemented to date. This is not a full-function release and, most notably, does not provide functionality to allow the figure to be posed. It does include examples of all of the different tools and techniques that this software will provide to enable you to easily model the anatomy of a human figure, although some of these functions are not yet complete and are not necessarily in their final form. Read More ....

Source : www.makehuman.org

CG Channel announces animation reel contest!

2009-04-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

CG Channel announces our first animated short/animation reel contest!
Winners will receive a copy of John Lasseter's Bolt on blu-ray. In addition to the free 3 disc combo pack, winners will be interviewed by CG Channel and have their video featured on our homepage!
2 winners will be chosen one for best animation reel and one for best animated short. Read More ....

Physical Dynamic Rendering, the Future of 3D Computer Graphics?

2009-04-03T05:43:00.000-07:00

source : www.cgexplorer.com

Making of The Cursed Pirate

2009-03-30T03:22:00.000-07:00

Cursed Pirate is a part of a scene where two characters are present but for Making of, focusing mainly on the Sea Creature. Read More ....

source : www.cgarena.com

V-Ray courses

2009-03-27T03:54:00.000-07:00

If you want a career in visualisation then you’ll need to be completely proficient in using one of the most celebrated rendering tools on the market, V-Ray. Each course will be taught by acclaimed tutor Rusko Ruskov alongside the software creator, Peter Mitev. You will learn how to produce photo-realistic renders for your visualisation work taking each creation to the next level. Read more ....

source : www.escapestudios.com

Key Highlights of Autodesk 3ds Max 2010

2009-03-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Innovative Creative Tools

A new Graphite modeling and texturing system introduces at least 100 additional creative tools and helps artists explore and more rapidly iterate their ideas.
The addition of render-like effects in the viewport display - such as soft shadowing, exposure control and ambient occlusion - offers near photo-real quality for faster decision making.

Powerful New Referencing and Scene Management Capabilities

Artists can create robust referencing workflows to help organize complex scenes more easily by treating multiple objects and scenes as a single Container object.
A new Material Explorer helps to simplify the way artists interact with objects and materials, making iterations much easier even in highly complex scenes.
The new multithreaded xView mesh analyzer technology helps to significantly reduce errors by providing in-viewport reporting on several types of mesh.

Enhanced Software Interoperability and Pipeline Integration

3ds Max 2010 is the first animation package to integrate mental images' powerful mental mill technology. This allows users to develop, test and maintain hardware-agnostic shaders and complex shader graphs for hardware and software rendering with real-time visual feedback.
Enhanced OBJ support and ProOptimizer technology provide improved interoperability with Autodesk Mudbox software.
Additional support for C# and .NET gives developers the access they need to customize, extend and integrate 3ds Max into their existing pipelines. Read More ....

Source : usa.autodesk.com

Making of The Sky Fisherman

2009-03-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

Akin Bilgic shows us how he used 3dsmax and ZBrush to create his image ‘The Sky Fisherman’ in 3DTotal.com Project Overview. Read More ....

source : www.3dtotal.com

Photorealistic Anisotropy with mental ray for Maya

2009-03-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

In this video, from “Introduction to the Hypershade in Maya 2009” , learn how to properly use the anisotropic features of the mental ray architectural material. By taking full advantage of this powerful feature, you can create incredibly realistic metallic surfaces that can mimic rough, brushed metals commonly seen across many real world objects. Read more ....

source : i3dtutorials.com

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Movie Trailer

2009-03-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

Sony Pictures Animation has released the movie trailer for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Inspired by the beloved children’s book, the film tells the story of a scientist named Flint Lockwood, who while trying to solve world hunger who encounters a problem of global proportions, as food begins to fall from the sky like rain. Written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, executive producers of the television show How I Met Your Mother, and featuring a voice cast comprised of Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Andy Samberg, James Caan, Bruce Campbell, Tracy Morgan and Mr. T.

source : www.slashfilm.com

Photoshop Post Processing For 3D Visualizer

2009-03-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

This tutorial used Photoshop for 3d visualizer post processing. Viktor fretyan from Hungaria show how to used photoshop for 3d image. Read More ....

source : www.vizdepot.com

Houdini 10 Sneak Peek

2009-03-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

Houdini 10 is currently being beta tested and is proving to be one of the coolest releases yet. This version is packed with a wealth of new features and usability changes designed to make you more productive in your day-to-day work. As we approach number 10, I wanted to talk about our development process and the steps we take as we approach a new release. Read More ....

Source : www.sidefx.com

Hand Modeling

2009-02-24T00:45:00.000-08:00

This tutorial method used polygon and learn modeling from sketch. Read more ...

GridironFlow

2009-02-19T12:13:00.000-08:00

GridironFlow is new way to see and manage all your project files, with simple and elegant interface. Now available for Mac user to download. Link ...

Tutorials for Silo

2009-02-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

This videos are introduction for anyone new to 3D or looking to try out the Silo for the first time.

Source : www.nevercenter.com

Google Product Car

2009-02-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

This video showing how to transform a SketchUp car model into a basic product configurator.

Source : www.youtube.com

Making of Twisted Mind of Puyuh

2009-02-06T22:26:00.000-08:00

Making of Twisted Mind of Puyuh by Leong Wan Kok, Read more ...

Yankee Gal - trailer from supinfocom

2009-02-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

3DCreative Issue 42

2009-02-06T05:22:00.000-08:00

3DCreative Issue 42 is out now! includes interviews,tutorials series, much more ...

The Making of

2009-02-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

The making of "About the burden we humans have to carry ..."

source : www.itsartmag.com

Think outside the animation

2009-01-30T18:21:00.001-08:00

Character animator Tom Baker teach how to creating a traditional cel animation-style movie, from concept to post-production. Read more...

RealFlow RenderKit

2009-01-30T18:05:00.000-08:00

The RealFlow RenderKit is a set of tools that has been designed to facilitate the complex task of rendering RealFlow™ fluids. The RFRK enables you to generate procedural geometry at render time, and also render individual fluid particles. Read more...

Red Vertex Foliage Tutorial

2009-01-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

This tutorial used 3dsmax and vray, With very large scene and plants to make impression of a forest. Read more...

Source : www.evermotion.org

Making of the Standing Beauty

2009-01-29T07:47:00.000-08:00

This tutorial created by Asan Umerov, it's inspiration from photography and bring it to 3d. Read more...

source : www.cgarena.com

Tutorial UV, Autodesk Maya

2009-01-29T02:44:00.000-08:00

This tutorials shows the techniques and workflow you could use to successfully unwrap a model's UV's with Autodesk Maya. Read more...

source : Area.autodesk.com

Mudbox 2009: Quick Start Series

2009-01-29T01:38:00.000-08:00

want to learning Autodesk Mudbox 2009 ?..., this is the series containt quick start and techniques to sculpting 3d object. learn more ...

Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 1
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 2
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 3
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 4
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 5
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 6
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 7
Mudbox Quick Start Series - Part 8

Autodesk Mudbox 2009 freetrial

source : www.cgarena.com

Announcement: free CAT for Subscription customers!

2009-01-19T20:27:00.000-08:00

Autodesk announce release of plug-in CAT for subscription program. Subcribers will recieve great tool for character animation in the price of almost one thousand US dollar.

Autodesk® 3ds Max® CAT software is a complete character animation toolset for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2009 and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2009 software. With this latest addition of Character Animation Tools (CAT) to the 3ds Max 3ds Max Design software, Autodesk continues to demonstrate its industry leadership in character animation by providing artists with even more flexibility to create complex 3D characters and animations inside the award winning 3ds Max software. 3ds Max CAT offers artists in the film, post-production, design visualization, and games industries an environment to produce better animations faster. Read more ...