Best News and CG Artists; weekly review
CG Elite Artist - Thom Tenery (Oblivion Concept Artist)
Thom Tenery received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Texas, Arlington, and studied illustration and entertainment design at Art Center College of Design. After several years designing architecture, he made the transition to games, at studios including SCE and id Software, where he worked on Doom 4; and then to movie concept work and illustration.
Calling it "the most remarkable confrontation ever to take place inside a computer game," EVE Online developer CCP Games has released a new video recalling the battle at B-R5RB. Developer hyperbole aside, the January conflagration—which began with a missed bill payment—does shine a light on the story-generating possibilities of an MMO long known for its undeniable complexity.Microsoft Goes Bigger With Surface Pro 3
Tablet that's a little larger and a lot more robust than most tablets on the market, making it suitable to use as a laptop. The specs are great, said Laura DiDio, principal of ITIC. "They fit with what business users want - a lighter, more agile and more powerful mobile device. With a screen size of 12 inches diagonally, instead of the 10.6 inches of previous models. It is also thinner, at 0.36 inches, and weighs a mere two pounds.Autodesk ported FBX Review to Macs and iOS devices
Autodesk has ported FBX Review, its free tool for reviewing 3D assets, to Macs and iOS devices. The new versions preserve the features of the original Windows release, and add a few new ones for good measure. Fast, lightweight asset previews on the moveOriginally released last year, FBX Review imports data in standard 3D file formats, including FBX, 3DS, OBJ and Collada; and common mocap data formats.Play Windows games on a Mac with Steam
Steam's new streaming service lets users beam games from one device to another in the home. Steam has released its in-home streaming feature, allowing users to beam games running on one PC to other computers on the same network. The service, which was previously in beta, means that gamers can have a 3D game running on a high-end PC in a back bedroom, and stream it to a relatively low-powered laptop in the lounge, for example. Autodesk will release its own 3D printer
Autodesk will release its own 3D printer, as well as a software platform.Autodesk has unveiled its own 3D printer, as well as a software platform called Spark that it hopes will be the Android of 3D printing. Autodesk is well known for its 3D-design software, but is now expanding into printing. But rather than simply release it's own hardware, both the "Spark" software platform and the printer will be open designs for anyone to use.
Canoma3D modelling
Create photo-realistic 3D models from 2D photos and illustrations, with the minimal tool sets and minimum user input. Realistic 3D modelling is a difficult skill to master. Those who take it on board to learn the esoteric skills of trueSpace, 3D Studio Max, and LightWave without tutoring or lessons, often find the going more complex and more time consuming than they first expected. Even texturing a box or positioning a light, or just plotting a camera move can take hours of endless fine-tuning and attention to detail. 3ds Max Design 2009 Overview
It’s a complex art that produces beautiful work. Sometimes, especially in film, the goal is for your work to be understated; to appear to be so natural that the audience just runs with the distorted reality you create like it never happened. Thus, I have a great deal of respect for animators, and gleefully attended Autodesk’s unveiling of a few updated tools - most interestingly 3ds Max. There were other products there for CAD and engineering work, but 3ds Max is used for game and film production.
Unity Technologies has unveiled Unity 5, the next major update to its game engine and development toolset, adding physically based materials, real-time GI, 64-bit support and an extensive new audio-editing system. The upcoming release, described by the developer as a “massive update” was announced at GDC 2014. Physically based shading, real-time GI, and real-time lightmap previews. In his post on the company’s blog, Unity CEO David Helgason describes the biggest changes in Unity 5 as being those relating to lighting and shading.
Unity Technologies unveiled Unity 5
First off, Unity 5 introduces support for physically based materials – flavour of the month in games tool development, given their recent inclusion in Substance Designer 4, Allegorithmic’s texture-creation package. The update will also introduce full deferred shading and baked reflection probes, and thanks to the integration of Geomerics’ Enlighten middleware – previously used in games like Battlefield 4 – real-time global illumination.
Thanks to another technology partnership, this time with Imagination Technologies, Unity 5 also supports in-editor real-time lightmap previews based on Imagination’s PowerVR raytracing technology. Better physics, better performance, better… trees? In the world of real-time physics, PhysX has been updated to the latest release, version 3.3; while the 2D physics system added in Unity 4.3 has been extended to include new effectors. Performance has also been substantially improved, thanks to full 64-bit support, a multithreaded job scheduler and loading and NavMesh optimisations. The features list also mentions integration with IDV’s SpeedTree vegetation-generation system – although we can’t actually find any more details on either company’s website.
Non-graphics-related features
Outside the art department, the Unity Cloud interstitial ad-exchange network, announced alongside Unity 4.3, will also make its official debut, and there is an extensive new set of audio tools.
Unity’s new WebGL add-on, developed in partnership with Mozilla, and available in early access in Unity 5. Unity 5 will also provide “early access” to the new new WebGL add-on, created in partnership with Mozilla, and enabling developers to publish games directly to modern web browsers without the need for third-party plugins.
Pricing and availability
Unity 5 is currently available to pre-order, although no release date has yet been announced. Unity Pro costs $1,500, and the Android and iOS publishing add-ons a further $1,500 each. There is also a free edition of the software with a limited feature set.
Thanks to another technology partnership, this time with Imagination Technologies, Unity 5 also supports in-editor real-time lightmap previews based on Imagination’s PowerVR raytracing technology. Better physics, better performance, better… trees? In the world of real-time physics, PhysX has been updated to the latest release, version 3.3; while the 2D physics system added in Unity 4.3 has been extended to include new effectors. Performance has also been substantially improved, thanks to full 64-bit support, a multithreaded job scheduler and loading and NavMesh optimisations. The features list also mentions integration with IDV’s SpeedTree vegetation-generation system – although we can’t actually find any more details on either company’s website.
Non-graphics-related features
Outside the art department, the Unity Cloud interstitial ad-exchange network, announced alongside Unity 4.3, will also make its official debut, and there is an extensive new set of audio tools.
Pricing and availability
Unity 5 is currently available to pre-order, although no release date has yet been announced. Unity Pro costs $1,500, and the Android and iOS publishing add-ons a further $1,500 each. There is also a free edition of the software with a limited feature set.
3ds Max Design 2009 Overview
When you’re building a game, you need to plot out how your characters’ movements are going to be displayed. You start off with a basic skeleton which you map control points to. Then you can assign movements like walk cycles and the many, many nuisances of your character. Your character still needs a skin, so you export an ‘unwrapped’ 2D wireframe that you can work on in Photoshop. There are various techniques for adding some sort of texture to this image, like taking photographs of a person’s face from all angles and laying it out flat on top of your wireframe. Import this back into your modelling program and you’ve got yourself a character.
Once you’ve exported the lot, you plug them into your game engine and watch as the player moves around the game world. The engine seamlessly blends the multiple movement actions together in real time to create your masterpiece.
3ds Max Design 2009 has a new lighting analysis feature, which we saw being used to model the lights on a film set so that CGI shots would mimic the shadows and characteristics of the footage it was being composited with. There’s a new rendering system called Reveal that accelerates iterative workflows by providing control over what exactly is rendered in a scene, as well as a bigger materials library for texturing. And on the interoperability side of things, 3ds Max can now import geometry, materials, lights and cameras from Revit.
There’s even a few cool new navigation widgets that let you survey your scene that are being standardised across a large chunk of Autodesk’s software. They look like big buttons based on glorified jog dials that have been sectioned off into commonly used navigation tools, and are hugely intuitive for newbies -- one of them will even follow your mouse. And if it’s easy for newbies, it should also make it easier for CAD people to look around your models, and you to look around the CAD visualisations.
Of course, you should flip that last bit around if you’re a CAD-using designer looking at a model in 3ds Max.
Canoma3D modelling
Create photo-realistic 3D models from 2D photos and illustrations, with the minimal tool sets and minimum user input.
And the modelling side of 3D art and realisation is the most difficult, the most exacting of all the skills you have to master. To deal with this horrible brick wall facing those users that want to create and work with 3D, MetaCreations have come up with Canoma. It sets out to create photo-realistic 3D models from 2D photos and illustrations, with the barest of tool sets and minimum user input.
Focusing heavily on buildings, architecture, interiors, and still life, Canoma uses a system called perspective projection. By super-imposing various wireframe shapes on the flat image, and pinning their vertices to the corners visible on the image, you gradually build up a full 3D realisation of your scene. In addition, by stealing parts of the image to use as textures, and duplicating where necessary, the end results look almost indistinguishable from the original - bar the fact that you can rotate it, zoom in, or export the whole thing in Web-ready VRML.
You start with a basic 2D image, centred in the main window. Seventeen basic 3D shapes or primitives are lined up along the bottom. On the simple side: cube, rectangle, pyramid and trapezium. On the more complex: staircase, curtain, archway and table. After a quick survey of your scene, you simply click on a shape to bring it into the workspace. You use the mouse to drag it out to scale, and then pull the corners of your object into alignment with its 2D equivalent for pinning. Once complete, you can choose to view the results as a 3D model, flat shaded or textured. Textures are built from instant snapshots of the image underneath each 3D shape. The results with Quick rendering are undetailed but functional. For a performance toll, the Quality setting adjust the output to compensate for brightness differences, as well as anti-aliasing and effectively minimising the seams on objects.
Multiple anglesOne picture may suffice for a very simple scene, but ideally you'll have multiple shots of your subject, taken from various angles, probably with a digital camera. This not only allows you to correctly texture map the rear of objects and deal with half-concealed shapes, but also makes the scene more realistic and accurate as Canoma uses the extra information to adjust its maths and establish the correct perspective.
When you bring in an extra picture of the scene, you're asked to roughly realign the current 3D models to its perspective. This not only helps you visualise the new angle, but means less work is necessary to configure the models. Canoma also uses this extra information to make corrections to the earlier structure.
Sometimes, however, especially on close-up shots, details are out of the frame and cannot be accurately pinned down. This is where beads' come in. They're not based on corners, but on vertices, which appear along a line and can be used to nudge out-of-shot objects into shape.
Multiple anglesOne picture may suffice for a very simple scene, but ideally you'll have multiple shots of your subject, taken from various angles, probably with a digital camera. This not only allows you to correctly texture map the rear of objects and deal with half-concealed shapes, but also makes the scene more realistic and accurate as Canoma uses the extra information to adjust its maths and establish the correct perspective.
When you bring in an extra picture of the scene, you're asked to roughly realign the current 3D models to its perspective. This not only helps you visualise the new angle, but means less work is necessary to configure the models. Canoma also uses this extra information to make corrections to the earlier structure.
Sometimes, however, especially on close-up shots, details are out of the frame and cannot be accurately pinned down. This is where beads' come in. They're not based on corners, but on vertices, which appear along a line and can be used to nudge out-of-shot objects into shape.
Multiple shots can also be used to increase the quality of the textures. You can shoot from a variety of general distant views and then zoom in and take close-up shots of details. These can then be merged into the Canoma scene to increase the resolution of the textures, and to allow zooming into your image without too much degradation. For further detail, individual textures can be loaded into a 2D package such as Photoshop and tweaked even more. Saved changes are instantly updated back in Canoma.
The interface is typical MetaCreations, all graphic-designed and welcoming pastel colours. A suite of trackballs and directional arrows control the camera views. You can pan left and right, track in and out, and control the depth of field. A floating palette acts as a library of all your current images, while a toolbar holds a basic but uncluttered array of workflow tools.
Solo mode is on hand to single out models in complex scenes. The Glue tool makes for very precise alignment of objects. Stacking allows you to pile object on top of object. The Duplicate command is useful for saving time rendering similar landscapes, while the Mirror Textures effect cleverly duplicates material on to out-of-shot sides of objects to save you having to. Each item has in Information dialog with shortcut commands (rotate 90 degree around axis, and so on) for geometrically-precise manoeuvring.
When you aren't creating, you can animate. In a basic motion studio you can plan and direct flybys of your scene. You shift the camera (rotate, bank, zoom, or dolly) and create keyframes. Canoma fills in the motion in between.
While animations can be rendered out as QuickTime files, Canoma has a spread of export options for the 3D models it creates. VRML2 and MetaStream - MetaCreations own answer to VRML - are high up on the list, given the Web potential of this product, but users of Poser, Bryce 3D, and LightWave are catered for by the OJB format. Importing finished models into Poser, however, proves complicated (much copying of individual files into specific directories is required). The trueSpace SCN format is very well catered for - Canoma scenes are perfectly preserved in the Caligari 3D package. MetaCreations' mandate is to make every piece of its software as approachable, intuitive and as easy to use as possible. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes its enthusiasm for features clutters the interface. With Canoma however it has succeeded.
Quick and easyCanoma, as you suspect from its wafer-thin manual, is monumentally easy to use. In fact, its simplicity, pared down design and quick-fire results actually make it enjoyable to use. There's something intensely creative about wringing a 3D model from a 2D image. Breaking an image into primitives and trying to isolate the best combination of shapes to sum up a structure is taxing but very satisfying, exercising every last neuron of spatial reasoning in your brain.
It's also quick. Arranging a townscape or standard interior shot into 3D can take minutes. However, using Canoma is a real skill. You develop your own techniques and, after time, you find yourself quickly reducing images into primitives and negative space, and you find your pinning and beading skills rapidly improving. At the same time, Canoma learns more and more about your scene. You have to use less and less pins as the program leaps ahead and guesses accurately where your shape will lie.
However, there are things it can't do. The absence of anything close to a curve or a sphere is irritating and left unexplained. Anything organic or naturalistic is practically out of the question. There are objects in the primitives selection with editable polyline contours - essentially allowing you to add points to their surface to create objects like cars, or signs or even people - but the detail you can achieve is disappointing. If you think back to 3D action games about three years ago, you should have a good idea of the quality.
Also, for a 3D package, the animation features are very basic. Disappointingly, you can't add acceleration or deceleration, or any kind of dynamic features to your motion. Neither are there provisions for scaling keyframes. Having said that, there's some scope for unique visual effects, such as changing the field or view and warping a still image with bizarre fish-eye lens distortion.
The interface is typical MetaCreations, all graphic-designed and welcoming pastel colours. A suite of trackballs and directional arrows control the camera views. You can pan left and right, track in and out, and control the depth of field. A floating palette acts as a library of all your current images, while a toolbar holds a basic but uncluttered array of workflow tools.
Solo mode is on hand to single out models in complex scenes. The Glue tool makes for very precise alignment of objects. Stacking allows you to pile object on top of object. The Duplicate command is useful for saving time rendering similar landscapes, while the Mirror Textures effect cleverly duplicates material on to out-of-shot sides of objects to save you having to. Each item has in Information dialog with shortcut commands (rotate 90 degree around axis, and so on) for geometrically-precise manoeuvring.
When you aren't creating, you can animate. In a basic motion studio you can plan and direct flybys of your scene. You shift the camera (rotate, bank, zoom, or dolly) and create keyframes. Canoma fills in the motion in between.
While animations can be rendered out as QuickTime files, Canoma has a spread of export options for the 3D models it creates. VRML2 and MetaStream - MetaCreations own answer to VRML - are high up on the list, given the Web potential of this product, but users of Poser, Bryce 3D, and LightWave are catered for by the OJB format. Importing finished models into Poser, however, proves complicated (much copying of individual files into specific directories is required). The trueSpace SCN format is very well catered for - Canoma scenes are perfectly preserved in the Caligari 3D package. MetaCreations' mandate is to make every piece of its software as approachable, intuitive and as easy to use as possible. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes its enthusiasm for features clutters the interface. With Canoma however it has succeeded.
Quick and easyCanoma, as you suspect from its wafer-thin manual, is monumentally easy to use. In fact, its simplicity, pared down design and quick-fire results actually make it enjoyable to use. There's something intensely creative about wringing a 3D model from a 2D image. Breaking an image into primitives and trying to isolate the best combination of shapes to sum up a structure is taxing but very satisfying, exercising every last neuron of spatial reasoning in your brain.
It's also quick. Arranging a townscape or standard interior shot into 3D can take minutes. However, using Canoma is a real skill. You develop your own techniques and, after time, you find yourself quickly reducing images into primitives and negative space, and you find your pinning and beading skills rapidly improving. At the same time, Canoma learns more and more about your scene. You have to use less and less pins as the program leaps ahead and guesses accurately where your shape will lie.
However, there are things it can't do. The absence of anything close to a curve or a sphere is irritating and left unexplained. Anything organic or naturalistic is practically out of the question. There are objects in the primitives selection with editable polyline contours - essentially allowing you to add points to their surface to create objects like cars, or signs or even people - but the detail you can achieve is disappointing. If you think back to 3D action games about three years ago, you should have a good idea of the quality.
Also, for a 3D package, the animation features are very basic. Disappointingly, you can't add acceleration or deceleration, or any kind of dynamic features to your motion. Neither are there provisions for scaling keyframes. Having said that, there's some scope for unique visual effects, such as changing the field or view and warping a still image with bizarre fish-eye lens distortion.
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