Introduction:

Hello, my name is Daniel Vijoi and I have been working in the gaming industry for 7 years. My current job is Lead Texture Artist at AMC Studio, a Romanian game development company based in Bucharest. During this time I have worked on many projects, like Test Drive Unlimited (Atari), Mercenaries 2, Saboteur (Pandemic Studios/EA), Pure (Blackrock Studios/DISNEY), Rise of Nations & Rise of Legends (Big Huge Games/THQ), and other exciting titles yet to be announced.

I decided to write this tutorial as I noticed a certain lack of interest for game-related environmental texturing in the 3D community. This tutorial is targeted at medium level users and will present the process of texturing a photorealistic building that has already been modelled. I will focus on the texturing process in particular, even though the modelling and UVs are also important for the final look of the building.

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Creating a Next-Gen Video Game Hot Rod: the Complete Workflow

Ever wanted to know how the artists create those amazing cars for AAA video game titles? Well here’s your chance to find out. In this incredible CGTuts+ exclusive tutorial series, you will follow professional CG artist and teacher Laurens Corijn as he creates a high quality, next-gen, normal mapped Hot Rod for realtime use.

In this first part of the series, Laurens takes you through the first planning and design steps, such as gathering inspiration, collecting reference, and fleshing out the idea, and then demonstrates how to get started with the first rough blockout of the model.

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Making of Tree Room

Hi everyone! In this making of I’ll try to show you the process of making the “Tree Room” image. First of all I started to look for some references on Japanese rooms and trees because that was the style I wanted to reproduce. In this stage I also look for light and texture references.

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Making of Annie

Hi, my name is Florian Falcucci and I am CG Graphist in Paris since 1 year. For this character, the idea was to create a character in a cartoon style with a good charisma. A woman who does not let itself be. And I love the period of the aero postal, with Amelia Eckhart. The objective was creating an illustration with a single character, and discovering other methods for a best workflow. I suppose parts of my workflow are not very classical but it is my procedure.

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How to Animate the Inception Totem with Cinema 4D and Dynamics

In this tutorial, I show you how to animate, light and texture the totem top scene from Inception. I show you how to use the Lathe Nurbs, Dynamics and noise in your textures to build and texture the scene. Then I show you how to light the scene with the HDRI Light Kit Pro. Stay tuned for part 2 of this tutorial where we head into After Effects and do the texturing and compositing.

Part 1

Part 2

Making of Angel

Concept – I didn’t create this model with the purpose of making a real time character; I wanted to represent a modeling and concept exercise. That’s why, the low-poly phases of this model are missing from the working process.

The idea of this project was based on a portrait I’ve made in ZBrush, and this portrait inspired me to create a whole character. I didn’t have a specific idea of how this character will look like, I just wanted to attach him an interesting body and a pair of wings.

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An Introduction to Texturing, Lighting and Rendering Architectural Exteriors

In the field of Architectural Visualization, realism must always be the 1st goal that we strive to accomplish. In this 3 day tutorial series, you will gain a solid introduction to valuable lighting and texture mapping techniques that can be used to achieve realistic architectural renderings.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

How to use Volumetric Lighting in Cinema 4D

In this short tutorial, I show you how to use Volumetric Lighting in Cinema 4D. You can use Volumetric Lights for glows, Shine effects and also for dramatic backlighting.

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Making of a Formula 1

Introduction – I’ve made this car by the requests of an advertising agency here in Rio de Janeiro.  They need it completed in less than 3 days… It should be a generic formula1, ‘because our client doesn’t sponsor any… I asked for more time, but the agency was in a hurry (as always…)

So I decided to do it by myself…the color scheme of the car is a tribute to my soccer team Flamengo who is the winner of the Brazilian soccer championship of 2009. The car took me one week to be finished! And here is the small project overview…

I’ve looked in the Internet for the official documents of formula1 in order to have the right dimensions to model my own car.

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Procedural Modeling with MEL Scripts in Maya

This tutorial introduces the exciting possibilities for modeling using Maya’s MEL scripting language. In this first part, we will learn the basics of MEL commands, and create two procedural model scripts that could be useful in your own workflows.

Part 1

Part 2

Software Used :

ZBrush, Photoshop & Google SketchUp

Usually I start working by experimenting with the idea in different forms, lines and colors until I decide how the image should be. Obviously while working on the painting, the image is transforming and the final one might be very different from the original. In this case everything started from a photo of Sorrento which was sent to me by a friend

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In this video tutorial I will show you many various ways to use the zbrush projections Tools, I will show you how to optimize your mesh. I will show you how to transfer one mesh to another, I will show you how to transfer just parts of one mesh to another this is an easy and fast way to retopology your mesh.

Software Used :

Silo, ZBrush, 3ds Max & Photoshop

Introduction :

Here is my latest personal work “Who Is Spock”. I wanted to make a Mr Spock of our day, so he could something like a simple astronaut, or even the original Mr Spock himself, who has come to pay us a visit from the future.

So… who is Spock?

Research and Concept :

I started the work on Spock mostly for fun, after watching some of the great episodes of the original series of Star Trek. In the beginning I thought it would be just a great modeling practice subject

I searched all over the internet for references, but didn’t found as much images as I expected to, so I thought that I should try a different approach. The best one that came to my mind was to bring Spock more into the present time. It seemed better to bring him to present then to make some Sci-Fi image or some retro image, as it would look like I was just copying the Spock from the TV series.

So I got some astronaut pictures from Google, and with the references of Spock I’d already gathered, I started modeling, bearing in mind that I was building my concept on the run. I usually build my concept as I’m modeling. Sometimes this works better, sometimes not, but it gets me to the modeling part more quickly, which is the part I like the most.

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Software Used :

ZBrush, Maya, Photoshop & Mudbox

Concept :

I’ve always been interested in classic paintings and the old masters who are the fathers of the artistic movement in Europe and the US. This image is one from my Epic and Classical series. I didn’t want to just mimic the same old painters’ styles; with this image I wanted to bring in a new mix of modern techniques with the traditional way of reading a painting. Along the same lines, I decided to mix 3D and 2D to further that contrast in style.

The references were very important for this piece. The “Icar” or the Bird Man “Papageno” from the opera The Magic Flute by Mozart inspired me so much, along with a mix of Rococo style and a fantasy mood. The performance here was to bring a certain reality to the scene, but not photorealism. Like the way the old masters such as Rembrandt, Leonardo and Caravaggio did

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Introduction :

After seeing a forum topic where the artist showed some 3D prints of comic women, I decided to model my own comiquette. After a search, I chose the character Aayla, from an Adam Hughes sketch

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Introduction :

Jeff Feligon takes you step by step through the process of preparing your ZBrush sculpture for 3D printing.

Software Used:

ZBrush 3.5, 3ds Max, Photoshop

I have always been fascinated by Sci Fi and creatures. I wanted to create something from scratch, trying to learn the new ZBrush 3.5 features at the same time. For this character I was inspired by the artwork of Mass Effect. I love all the concept art you can find about the game – it has such deep characters and history – and I wanted to make something with the inspiration that it passed to me. I also looked at references of reptiles and mammals to create my creature’s look.

The history I imagined for this character is that he is from a race of great warriors; you could imagine him on a huge battlefield in the first line of fire. He can be a nice combat mate, but he’s brutal too. He has a deep sense of honour and respect for the enemy, but he can kick ass if he wants to.

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Introduction:

In this video ZBrush Educator Martin Knapp, shows how quickly you can create an alien helmet using ZSpheres, Polypaint, and Polygroups. This powerful ZBrush workflow will give you the tools for creating complex forms the quick and easy way.

This is a personal project that I’ve been planning for quite some time, and will be part of my demo-reel. Being aware of the amount of work ahead of me, the hours spent, and considering this will last for only a few seconds on the video, I decided to go ahead and model with all there is to it, starting on concepts, then on a simple but functional Basemesh, refining it on ZBrush, Multipass rendering and post-production in Photoshop.

It is all part of the pipeline on character development, and there are many other steps in Maya that weren’t necessary on this case, such as rigging for animating the model as a digital puppet, blend shapes that form the face expressions, and all the animation process with timeline, manipulation of animation curves, trax, etc. After going through all these steps, there’s still rendering, post production, sound editing, final edition, etc.

This is such a demanding, long lasting and complex process, that animation studios and producers have groups of professionals, specially trained for each part of the process, and a 30 second TV ad can easily take 12 hours – or more – a day of a hard working staff, for about a couple of months.

Heavy stuff, but extremely gratifying, and considering the investment on mastering all techniques involved, this kind of job is often well payed.

Let’s get to the point, Obama’s making of.

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Software Used:

3ds Max, ZBrush and Toolbag
Since childhood, I’ve been a big fan of comic books and have always tried to include some of this style in my work. I recently had the opportunity to participate in an annual contest hosted by renowned GameArtisans.org site, the Comicon Challenge 2009. The challenge consisted of creating a representation of a favorite action character from a comic book, no matter if it was hero, heroine or villain. As this is a competition specifically related to character creation for games, there were some restrictions like not being able to use more than 10k triangles in the final model and having to create 2048×2048 texture maps.

Idea:

One of the comic book and movie characters and that I have consistently followed is the Incredible Hulk. I’ve always wanted to make one that looked as real as the movies, but had the likeness of the comics. But because there are so many versions created by different artists already and an equal number of representations in 3D, I thought about doing an unusual one.

Thus was idea of making Red Hulk was born. He’s a character not well known in movies or games, or even in comic books. The character is an evil version of Hulk, created by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuiness (one of my favorite comic artists) and according to them, he is more aggressive and intelligent, besides having all the abilities of Hulk. The main difference with the original Hulk is that Red Hulk does not become stronger with anger, but rather radiates increasing levels of gamma radiation. In some editions, he is also called Rulk to distinguish him from the original Hulk character, but personally I prefer the original name.

Keeping all of this in mind, I began searching and collecting images that I could use as a references for creating my own version of this strong character. Then I began work on this new challenge.

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I love comics, cartoons, movies, video games, and can’t stop admiring all the great art spawned trough that mediums.

A dream from my childhood, to become professional CGI artist (after seeing Jurassic Park 1993) combined with my affection towards Dinosaurs that I started liking since I was a 10 years old, resulted in DinoMonsters concept. Idea behind DinoMonsters actually came to me when I was modeling one Dinosaur model.

I started thinking how cool would be to make humanized dinosaur, or a dinosaurized man. That’s how it all started, and before you knew it, I made up 6 characters. At first I thought I had original idea, but later I discovered several similar concepts involving Dino man characters. So, you could say, they aren’t original, but by the great feedback I received from the 3D community from different forums, I guess I did a good job.

The difficult part of DinoMonsters was to give them all distinctive look, and again, to keep the visuals together, as if they belong to the same team, and exist in the same universe. As an aspiring character artist, thinking about characters is more of a reflex to me.

So, making them apart was easy, but getting them out of the head and into viewport is more challenging. But even if it was hard at some point to create them, with today’s great software it is all achievable.

When you think about making something like this in 3d apps like Maya or Max few years ago, it would take three times longer period to get it done, and still wouldn’t look as nice as it looks today. We, who love and live CGI, are lucky to be living in renaissance era of CGI. It’s on us now to make it memorable by producing great and inspiring imagery for our future ancestors.

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Hello, this is a tutorial about making a rock arch and then prepare the model for game engine. It’s simple and fast and shows only the basics. This tutorial is not for beginners, you will need to have some knowledge about polygon modeling, make the uv’s of the model, import/export operations, have to be familliar with ZBrush a bit and with photoshop too.

Applications used are 3ds max, ZBrush 3.5R3, Photoshop and UDK /Unreal Engine 3/. So let’s begin.

First I’ve made the sample foundation of the arch in 3ds max and then imported the model to ZBrush as obj. file

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Software Used:

ZBrush & 3ds Max

Concept:

This alien baby was an old idea, which I first sculpted with clay five years ago. The clay sculpture was now a good reference for this 3D project – in fact, it was the only reference

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This is a sneak peak at part 2 of our ZBrush 3.5 training series and has 45 minutes of training that goes over new features in ZBrush 3.5 R3. The instructor goes over such featues as quicksketch, new brushes, subtools, groups, masks, and more.

Now that ZBrush 3.5R3 has been released, I would like to share with you a tutorial movie that demonstrates some of the new
features of R3. This movie was recorded during one of the beta cycles of R3. The newly released ZBrush 3.5R3 contains all the
features demonstrated in this movie, as well as features that have been added since then.

I hope that you’ll enjoy this movie and be inspired to create your own ‘polished’ models using the techniques demonstrated here.

Have a happy holiday season and joyful ZBrushing