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48 Articles

This issue is somewhat bittersweet, as it will be our last. We’ve spent over two decades helping artists hone their craft, discover inspirational projects and more. But that won’t end, as you can still find plenty of content to drive your passions with features, training and reviews at creativebloq.com. If you’re a subscriber, our team will be in touch to arrange any refunds. I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for being part of this journey. Thanks also to our wonderful contributors who have made 3D World the industry’s favourite magazine for 3D artists all over the planet. Working with such talented writers, artists and studios has been a real pleasure and I wish there was space to thank everybody properly. Enjoy the issue. rob.redman@futurenet.com…

GRIFFIN SLAYING

The Gallery The best digital art from the CG community BASED ON A CONCEPT BY T.B. CHOI (artstation.com/artwork/3XgeE) ARTIST Ivan Gubarev SOFTWARE ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag, Photoshop "I recently came across the amazing work of Blizzard concept artist T.B. Choi and decided to recreate one of her fantastic sketches in 3D. I was hooked by the awesome dynamics and intrigued by the fact that she'd only used two colours. I used ZBrush to create the piece and then rendered in Marmoset. In general, the work wasn't technically too hard, for example the gloves are mostly made up of primitives, as much as the silhouette, the direction of the lines, and the overall flow I was trying to convey, which are often much more important than the detail. Working on these types of…

GRIFFIN SLAYING

THE GLASS CANNON

"I THINK MY WORK IS PROOF THAT PRESENTATION IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF ART" ARTIST Dmitrii Solomka SOFTWARE Plasticity, Blender, ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag, Photoshop Camera Raw "When I created this project, I planned to make a fully game-ready weapon with dynamic animations for presentations. Instead, I made a kind of workin-progress presentation because the project had already taken me seven months. I was inspired by Egor Kapashylov and his MP5 to post my design before it was complete. During the work I relied on xNURBS, which was recently added to Plasticity. I went all-in on the renders, which after a lot of iterations and reworks were developed to a state that I was satisfied with. In the artist community there used to be a lot of debate…

THE GLASS CANNON

ARTIST Kateryna Hrytsyshyna SOFTWARE ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag "This was a personal project created in ZBrush and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag, with my focus on capturing the fine details of the face and clothing in the sculpt. The piece was designed specifically for 3D printing, so I carefully considered the structure and geometry to ensure it would print cleanly and maintain all the details. The main task was to make sure features like the headdress, ornaments and facial wrinkles would all translate well into a physical model, avoiding any thin areas or overhangs that could cause me issues during printing. The character was inspired by shamanic traditions and ancient myths, which I wanted to reflect through the design's blending of realism and fantasy. My goal was to create a piece that…

MOTHER REIMAGINED CASTLE GATE GUARDS

The Gallery "I began by limiting my reference pool, using a very simple sprite taken from the MOTHER video games as the main reference for the entire design process. My inspiration was taken from traditional ceremonial French armour from the 16th century, along with not-so-traditional armour such as those from Elden Ring. While sculpting, I kept my subdivision levels and baked the Normal maps preemptively. That way I could maintain high-quality details along with a low-poly mesh that could easily be modified. After the texturing, I brought the model into Character Creator, where I used the magic of AccuRIG to get a basic rig for the model. I then finalised my project by making a few keyframes and used Blender's EEVEE Next to get a fast render before switching over…

MOTHER REIMAGINED CASTLE GATE GUARDS

The Gallery ARTIST Kevin C. Sepúlveda Márquez SOFTWARE ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag, Photoshop "While I wanted to sculpt an alien with ZBrush, I felt that I could create something more than just another static character. That's why I decided to pose it and create a composition. Using simple SubTools I built a blockout for the pose, as well as the column. At first I applied the golden spiral vertically, but realised the column was too long and diminished the xenomorph's importance. I then duplicated and arranged the spirals horizontally, which worked perfectly. After that, I gradually sculpted the creature, brought it into Marmoset Toolbag for lighting, and finally used Photoshop to enhance the renders and give them more personality. Marmoset is an incredibly powerful tool for showcasing your characters, even if…

KEEPERS OF THE TRASH

BASED ON A CONCEPT BY OLEKSANDR KAYDA (artstation.com/artwork/VyY668) "For creating this scene, I used PureRef to collect references, ZBrush for sculpting and colourising, and Blender to make a cool, juicy render through the lighting. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process, but my favourite part was the painting. It was a whole lot of fun, as I used the Vertex Color technique in ZBrush for the characters. This method helped me to make characters look stylised, but still kept them believable and real." artstation.com/ken1s ARTIST Denis Kildyushev SOFTWARE ZBrush, Blender, PureRef…

KEEPERS OF THE TRASH

NEEDLE KNIGHT LEDA

The Gallery CG art to inspire "It was a pleasure to work on Leda, a project proposed by the Bulkamancer 3D art team that initially seemed daunting due to its complexity. Nevertheless, I decided to take on the challenge and learned a lot in the process. This was a tough project for the entire team, from sculpting to cutting, and supporting it was likely the hardest part for everyone involved, but they did an amazing job! I’m incredibly grateful to Bulkamancer for the opportunity to work on this character and for their efforts in making it printable. I used Marvelous Designer for the fabric simulation and ZBrush for sculpting and detailing. The most difficult aspect was applying the pattern to the cloak and dress. Replicating the concept’s pattern required UV…

NEEDLE KNIGHT LEDA

The Gallery CG art to inspire ARTIST Gannon Faust Jaspering SOFTWARE Unreal Engine, Quixel Megascans, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Blender, 3ds Max "I based this piece on the ancient Roman statue known as Sleeping Hermaphroditus, who is the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, and where the term hermaphrodite originally derives from. The original statue is thought to have been carved in the second century AD, and many copies have been rediscovered over hundreds of years. I wanted to create a fantastical portrayal of a pilgrim who has just found a copy of the statue abandoned deep in a forest. The piece is meant to evoke a sense of loneliness that many queer people feel. The foliage assets are from Quixel Megascans but I created the statue, pots, pilgrim and moss…

TORUK THE GREAT LEONOPTERYX

ARTIST Elisa Drique LOCATION France Texture artist Elisa studied 3D animation at ESMA Toulouse and worked on Swing to the Moon as her graduation movie. www.therookies.co/u/ElisaDrique James Cameron’s Avatar is one of my favourite movies. I love the universe and the creatures, particularly Toruk the Great Leonopteryx, its colours, and how terrifying it looks. That’s why I wanted to challenge myself to recreate a Toruk as a personal project! The lighting of this shot was done by Vincent Levrero. Discover your potential with The Rookies, the launchpad for emerging digital artists. At The Rookies, your work doesn’t just get seen, it gets noticed and featured, just like this! Join a community where your journey from hobbyist to professional is supported every step of the way. WWW.THEROOKIES.CO…

TORUK THE GREAT LEONOPTERYX

IMPRESSIONISTIC REALISM

Feature The Wild Robot Undoubtedly it’s easier for animation studios to have an in-house style, but this isn’t the path DreamWorks Animation decided to take when adapting the illustrated children’s novel The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, where a ROZZUM unit 7134 robot gets stranded on an isolated island teeming with wildlife. “The magic is in how every aspect of this movie, we altered the animation process to fit the style and story that we’re trying to tell,” states Chris Sanders, the film’s writer and director. “Our animators worked closely with the rigging department. It’s something we’ve become much better at in letting the animators take the lead as far as what they need for these characters and what expressions are required.” Being open-minded is a vital part of being a…

IMPRESSIONISTIC REALISM

Shaping Roz's robotic concept

Feature The Wild Robot “We started with a retrofuture look to Roz and she was more complicated,” reveals Zibach. “However, early on a modeller said, ‘I have an idea.’ And he tried this thing with more circular designs that were based off something that character designer Nico Marlet did, but different because he was talking about how her body could be like a Rubik’s Cube. That idea affected how we looked at her design, because until then we were looking at her as a humanoid, but that little bit of exploration showed a lot of potential to how she’ll change. What she can do with her body pays a lot of dividends throughout the film. We took that initial concept of design, worked on top of that and that became…

Shaping Roz's robotic concept

The wall of butterflies

“We went back and forth between how funny this needed to be, how scary for her, or how hard it would be,” explains Zibach. “Then we started throwing in these moments of beauty to break it up, and the wonder that the robot would have. Roz was designed for a world that’s almost prefab and perfect, and here she is in a location that isn’t that, but is beautiful and wondrous. There are all of these natural things going on around her and the butterfly moment captured that. When that was storyboarded we saw the potential for it; it’s poetic too. This robot is being dazzled by a natural event that’s so beautiful. We knew we had something special in that and it helped us to unlock what that sequence…

The wall of butterflies

Thinking practically with the camera

Feature The Wild Robot “We looked at stuff like Saving Private Ryan; the storming of the beach footage,” states head of layout Chris Stover. “There was also The Revenant, where there’s a lot of action happening in front of the camera and the camera’s reacting to it. We have a lot of tools on the backend of production for bringing that to fruition. We have Cartoni heads that can do pan and tilt type of stuff against the live performance once animation is finished. We also have camera shoulder rig systems that can capture the shoulder rig sensibility against live performance. We took an integrated approach between keyframe animation and at the same time leaning into practical rigs we could use to do the final camera to ground that camera…

Thinking practically with the camera

“For the fire, we wanted it to be something that would be so foreign to these animals,” explains Budsberg. “It’s an homage to Bambi in that it feels different and threatening, and we wanted to lean into something different than the stereotypically burnt orangered style of fire. We wanted something that felt unnatural. You get this visceral reaction from the audience when you see that pink-red fire because you’re going, ‘Oh god, this isn’t good.’ It’s jarring. You want to almost feel it from the animals’ point of view that this is something they’ve never seen before. That’s where we leaned into this high contrast and saturation palette.”…

At first the idea of Robert Downey Jr. playing five different characters known as the Priest, Auteur, Congressman, Professor, and CIA spy Claude seems rather outrageous. However, given that Park Chan-wook is the co-showrunner, director and writer for The Sympathizer it becomes less so, as making bold, non-conventional choices has become his trademark, demonstrated by Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Decision to Leave. This latest dark satire takes place at the end of the Vietnam War and revolves around a police captain in Saigon becoming a refugee in America, secretly reporting back to his communist superiors. Park directed Episodes 101, 102 and 103 while Marc Munden and Fernando Meirelles handled the remaining four episodes. “On his own episodes there is a ton of planning,” says visual effects supervisor Chad Wanstreet,…

“Robert Downey Jr. would get into his one prosthetic and we’d scan him right before he showed up to set, because we were setting up for the lounge, which is when you’ve got four different escorts and Roberts, and Captain as well,” Wanstreet explains. “Two days before we went into the lounge with the body doubles and matched hair as much as we could. That was one of the big things we talked about with hair and makeup: getting hair and everything around the collars to match as much as possible as we wanted a minimal footprint. “The thing we didn’t anticipate and talk about in a concept or production meeting was that director Park would ask us to have one of the Roberts with a face replacement lick whipped…

REFLECTION OF TROUBLE

“The predominant thing in this show was reflections and wetdowns,” reveals Wanstreet. “We see it every time we shot at night. It’s always wet, they’re always playing low camera angles, and there’s always all of these reflections. Then we took that after we’d filmed and that became a dominant element when we got into the tarmac scene in Episode 101, because when we shot it, it was a dry tarmac. We couldn’t possibly wet down that entire thing, not without a lot of time that we didn’t have. Time wasn’t our friend. When we started back up in post that became the dominant element we wanted to work out: how do we add a wetdown that doesn’t exist to seven minutes of visual effects shots so that we could see…

REFLECTION OF TROUBLE

EXPLOSIVE AUTHENTICITY

“When we went to the premiere and watched Episode 101, Hoa Xuande was there with his mum,” states Wanstreet. “At the end she goes to him, ‘Honey, how are you safe with all of those explosions going off around you?’ He says, ‘Mum, that’s all visual effects, none of that happened. They’d never let me near that.’ “There were a lot of simulations we did setting stuff up, so we had a variety and were able to place and set dress with explosions. Normally we set dress with boxes and debris, but this scene’s dominant elements are explosions, dust and debris. You’re placing them all over the environment all the time. That was something we had to establish the look of. We wanted them to be as authentic to 1975…

TURN A 2D CONCEPT INTO AN INCREDIBLE 3D-PRINTED FIGURE

The Pipeline Turn a 2D concept into an incredible 3D-printed figure ZBRUSH | CHITUBOX | 3D PRINTER Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Working as a freelance creature and character concept artist, my main passion is bringing imaginative sci-fi and fantasy designs to life through 3D sculpting, sketching, and digital painting. I’m excited to share my hands-on learning experience, which blends all of these skills into an intriguing and interactive compilation. In this tutorial, we’ll explore the journey of turning a 2D concept illustration into a fully realised 3D figure. My starting point was a bust that I’d previously sculpted as a standalone piece before realising the potential to push it further, envisioning a more intricate and larger-scale artwork. This decision set the stage for…

TURN A 2D CONCEPT INTO AN INCREDIBLE 3D-PRINTED FIGURE

CREATE A CANYON ENVIRONMENT

The Pipeline Create a canyon environment GAEA | BLENDER | QUIXEL BRIDGE | ADOBE LIGHTROOM Becoming a successful 3D environment artist has been my goal for a long time now. After a few years of testing, technique research and learning by myself, I’ve been able to use several different workflows to get the results I’m looking for. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce one workflow that I use regularly to create my environment art, which I’ve titled Canyon Absorption. The workflow will facilitate your way to achieving a great aesthetic result. After that, you should be able to understand and master several aspects of creating environments in Blender including volumetrics, scattering and plenty more. We’ll mainly use Blender, plus Gaea and Adobe Lightroom. Although they’re not free, there are always alternative…

CREATE A CANYON ENVIRONMENT

Technique focus

DISRUPTIVE 2D LAYER EFFECTS I’m passionate about the 3D hand-painted technique in all of its many forms and styles. Currently, I'm exploring ways to merge those techniques with the disruptive 2D aesthetics and striking designs found in the artworks of Alberto Mielgo and Lisa Parfenova. I just love it when a 3D model gives the illusion of being a 2D concept. I'm also drawn to visual effects such as colour aberrations, bold colour combinations and hue shifts. I incorporate these through the use of floating planes with transparent alphas layered over hand-painted 3D models, a technique I picked up from art directors James Marcus and Matthew Zikry. JUAN THE DIMENSIONAL PIRATE Software ZBrush, 3 ds Max, Maya, Photo shop Year made 2024 “I’M DRAWN TO VISUAL EFFECTS LIKE COLOUR ABERRATIONS…

Technique focus

DESIGN STRIKING SCULPTS AT SPEED

The Pipeline Design striking sculpts at speed ZBRUSH | SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER | BLENDER Over the two years that I’ve been working in the video games industry, I’ve increasingly realised just how highly valued it is to work on projects efficiently. That’s why I’ve decided to take some time to perfect my working process. To enhance my skills, I chose to model the Fat Baby Boto design by artist Fred Rambaud. When I discovered his art, I knew it would be perfect for improving my process. Baby Boto is simple yet impactful in terms of shapes and design. The blend of hard-surface and organic elements also makes it ideal for practise. The workflow I’ve developed helps me to create projects so much faster while improving my finishing techniques, which is…

DESIGN STRIKING SCULPTS AT SPEED

BUILD AND ANIMATE A FUN-FILLED ROBOT

ZBRUSH | MAYA | SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER | BLENDER The Pipeline Build and animate a fun-filled robot Getting acquainted with a variety of software is vital for virtually every digital artist today, as all of them have their particular strengths to help you along in every part of the creative process. In this tutorial I’m going to explain my step-by-step workflow for creating this gorgeous robot character, including posing it and making a basic animation using Blender’s physics options to help capture more stunning renders. To get all this done, I’ll be using ZBrush, Maya, Substance 3D Painter and Blender. I should note that the entire process can be done using a single program if you wish, but this time I wanted to use an expanded toolset to get the result…

BUILD AND ANIMATE A FUN-FILLED ROBOT

DISCOVER RED GIANT GEO'S HANDY TOOLS

Discover Red Giant Geo’s handy tools AFTER EFFECTS | RED GIANT GEO The Pipeline April this year saw Maxon release a new Red Giant tool with Geo. It’s partly for artists who want to render 3D files in After Effects while skipping the step of rendering an object as a sequence of stills with alpha channels in rendering software, then adding these into their motion graphics software. But there’s another aspect to Geo too: it performs the playback and rendering of thousands of objects, at speed, and is well worth considering if you need to create a potentially dangerous and expensive scene like a rockfall or underwater setting. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating the Moon using Geo, with a little help from a UV map from NASA, and adding a…

DISCOVER RED GIANT GEO'S HANDY TOOLS

ARE ZSPHERES ON IPAD SIMILAR TO THE DESKTOP VERSION?

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills Glen Southern Glen runs SouthernGFX, a small Cheshire-based studio specialising in character and creature design. He is a Wacom ambassador, VR Artist, and accredited ZBrush instructor. youtube.com/c/SouthernGFX/videos Mike Griggs Mike Griggs is a digital content creator with over two decades of experience creating VFX and CGI for a wide range of clients. www.creativebloke.com Paul Hatton After graduating with a first-class computer science degree, Paul Hatton has spent nearly two decades working within the 3D visualisation industry. bit.ly/3vuv0AT Pietro Chiovaro Pietro is a freelance 3D artist and YouTuber. An expert in the creation of game assets and environments, he shares many of his creations on his channel. www.pietrochiovaro.com GET IN TOUCH EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO rob.redman@futurenet.com Glen Southern replies…

ARE ZSPHERES ON IPAD SIMILAR TO THE DESKTOP VERSION?

STEP BY STEP ZSPHERE BASICS ON IPAD

01 START WITH A ZSPHERE Open ZBrush on your iPad, start a new scene and then look for the Tool menu on the right of the screen. If you tap the little tool icon, at the top-left of the panel you’ll find a list of tools. At the bottom is a small red sphere – that’s the ZSphere icon. Tap on it and one will appear in your document window. You’ll also see a little menu at the bottom with +, M, R and S icons for Draw, Move, Rotate and Scale. You’ll be switching between these quite a lot. 02 DRAW OUT ZSPHERES Make sure Symmetry is on in the right-hand menu, as most creatures are made with this option on. Now use the + sign at the bottom and draw…

STEP BY STEP ZSPHERE BASICS ON IPAD

HOW DO I ASSIGN A TEXTURE TO AN ALEMBIC FILE IN CINEMA 4D?

Artist Q&A SOFTWARE: CINEMA 4D Mike Griggs replies When working as a 3D artist, trade-offs always have to be assessed while running through a project, and one of the most fundamental is learning how to optimise a scene for the available hardware resources. It’s common for a 3D scene to become sluggish when you’re just starting out. The obvious and easiest answer is to invest in the fastest workstation with the biggest graphics card. While this might make the scene feel a bit faster, it hasn’t dealt with the potential reason why it became bogged down in the first place: because the scene itself isn’t very efficient. So what is an efficient scene? As with many things in 3D creation, the film set analogy can work well. On a film set,…

HOW DO I ASSIGN A TEXTURE TO AN ALEMBIC FILE IN CINEMA 4D?

STEP BY STEP SET A TEXTURE FOR AN ALEMBIC FILE

01 LOAD UP AN EXAMPLE SCENE FOR PRACTICE The scene being used here is the ‘Artist Sculpting Marble.c4d’ file, which is available in the Asset browser of Cinema 4D 2024. The scene has an animated character with a table prop that’s textured with animated candles, with the file size just under 50MB. The table group will be what we convert into an Alembic. 02 SELECT ALL THE REQUIRED GEOMETRY To create the Alembic model of the table, we need to export every element of it. In the Cinema 4D Object Manager, under the Objects tab, select the ‘Table_ Master_CTL’ Null, then right-click and choose Select Children to select all of the elements within the group, as otherwise only the Null could be exported with none of the geometry inside of…

STEP BY STEP SET A TEXTURE FOR AN ALEMBIC FILE

HOW DO I PREVENT MY OBJECTS FROM OVERLAPPING IN KEYSHOT?

SOFTWARE: KEYSHOT Artist Q&A Your CG problems solved Paul Hatton replies The placement of objects in any 3D scene requires a certain amount of attention to detail to ensure models don’t overlap when they shouldn’t. This is especially the case for product or small-scale visuals, where it would be immediately obvious if there was an issue. In most 3D software packages you have to rely on your eye or, more helpfully, the built-in snapping tools to ensure accurate contact but nothing more. Snapping tools are an absolutely essential part of any modelling workflow, but they can be a bit cumbersome when you need to adjust the properties and make sure you’re snapping to the right parts. The KeyShot team has come up with an innovative way of ensuring objects are positioned…

HOW DO I PREVENT MY OBJECTS FROM OVERLAPPING IN KEYSHOT?

STEP BY STEP USE COLLISION IN KEYSHOT

01 ENABLE COLLISION The first part of the Collision functionality is a simple checkbox that stops objects being moved through other objects. This is similar to a snapping tool, but its operation is a little different. Rightclick on your object and select Move Part, then open up the Advanced rollout in the Move window and select the Collision checkbox. Now try moving your object and you’ll see that it stops dead when it encounters other objects. 02 COLLISION AND SCALING When in Collision mode, KeyShot removes the ability for you to scale objects through the Move Tool window. This can be overcome either by turning Collision off while you perform your scale operation, or by scaling the object using the Object Properties panel. This is a little annoying but a necessary downside…

STEP BY STEP USE COLLISION IN KEYSHOT

HOW DO I CREATE A REALISTIC PEPPERMINT CANDY MATERIAL IN BLENDER?

EXPERT TIP PEPPERMINT DETAILS To make your candies more realistic, add Blender’s default Noise Texture and connect it to a Bump node, which in turn links to the Normal input of the Principled BSDF. Use the Object UV coordinate for the Noise Texture’s Vector and set the Bump node’s Strength to about 0.020. Pietro Chiovaro replies Last issue I showed you how to make a realistic jelly material, and the sweet theme continues here with an introduction to creating procedural peppermint candy, with no external textures or photos required. First of all, let’s create the peppermint. You can use any shape you want as the material will work regardless, but in this case I just added a cylinder the size of the peppermint and applied a Subdivision Surface modifier to…

HOW DO I CREATE A REALISTIC PEPPERMINT CANDY MATERIAL IN BLENDER?

THE BEST GRAPHICS CARDS FOR 3D ARTISTS

Reviews GROUP TEST We explore the latest software and hardware tools to see if they are worth your time or money When building a PC for professional 3D work, you‘ll want to dedicate the majority of your budget to the graphics card, or GPU, rather than any other component. 3D software will render scenes in the quickest time when run on a GPU. They say time is money, so investing in the best GPU you can afford means you’ll finish projects sooner. Unfortunately, the best graphics cards now make a serious dent in your wallet. The top-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is currently the most powerful graphics card there is, but you won’t find one for under four figures. Even opting for something less powerful is quite an investment, and…

THE BEST GRAPHICS CARDS FOR 3D ARTISTS

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £240/$275 COMPANY Intel WEBSITE intel.com For decades, Intel GPUs were a dirty word, synonymous only with basic integrated graphics that are no good for 3D whatsoever. But now Intel is finally taking a more active role in discrete 3D graphics, and adopting an interesting pricing strategy to boot. The Intel Arc A750 costs just £250, making it the most affordable card we’re testing, and one of the few options for building a 3D-capable design workstation if you’re on a severely limited budget. These specifications are also good for the low asking price. Based on Intel’s Xe architecture, made up of 448 XMX matrix engines, 224 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 112 ROPs (render output units), the A750 has a decent enough…

MSI RTX 4060 Ti GAMING X TRIO 8G

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £420/$450 DEVELOPER MSI WEBSITE msi.com FEATURES 8GB GDDR6 memory 4,352 Nvidia Ada Lovelace cores Entry-level rendering performance VERDICT 7.0 OUT OF 10 When you’re building a 3D system on a tight budget, you’re no doubt considering any possible saving that won’t severely impact the ability of your system at getting real 3D work done. The RTX 4060 Ti meets that requirement, since it’s the most affordable Nvidia GPU we’re testing, and can deliver in all 3D applications. It doesn’t offer the ultra-fast rendering times of the most expensive cards, but it absolutely gets the job done, while saving you about £200 over the next tier up in the RTX 4070 Super. That saving, unfortunately, does mean giving up a lot of…

MSI RTX 4060 Ti GAMING X TRIO 8G

Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti Super OC

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £860/$850 DEVELOPER Asus WEBSITE asus.com Until Nvidia released the Super range of 40-series GPUs, the 4070 Ti was the best card for most people. It offered great performance and wasn’t insanely expensive, unlike the 4080 and 4090. But now the more powerful 4080 Super has had a price cut, things have changed and the 4070 Ti doesn’t stand out as much. But Nvidia has refreshed the 4070 Ti as well, and the Super version has had a lot of improvements, including 25 per cent more transistors, an increased core count of 8,448, a wider 256-bit memory bus, 16GB of GDDR6X ram and increased clock speeds, resulting in an approximate 10 per cent performance uplift to what was already a stunning graphics…

Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4070 Ti Super OC

Gigabyte 4070 Super Aero OC 12G

Reviews PRICE £680/$680 | DEVELOPER Gigabyte | WEBSITE gigabyte.com Nvidia’s Super versions of its graphics cards are secondgeneration hardware that can mean major increases in processing power and render times over the original variants. Considering the RTX 4070 was already a popular sweet spot in the original Ada Lovelace lineup, the RTX 4070 Super is now even more compelling as it sees the most hardware improvements of all the updated cards. It’s variety of enhancements include many more CUDA cores, without any increase to the MSRP. The 4070 Super offers 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM over a 192-bit memory bus, which results in 504 GB/s of bandwidth. Increased pixel and texture fill rates, a higher core clock, more L2 cache and added streaming multiprocessors mean the 4070 Super can deliver a…

Gigabyte 4070 Super Aero OC 12G

Sapphire PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16GB

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £550/$570 DEVELOPER Sapphire WEBSITE sapphiretech.com You may well be looking at GPU prices and quietly crying in a corner. The top-end cards are as much as a good laptop alone. But the cheapest Nvidia card we’ve included, the RTX 4060 Ti, is nothing special. It has a narrow 128-bit memory bus, a paltry 8GB of VRAM, and offers relatively middling performance, all told. AMD’s modus operandi in both graphics and CPUs is to challenge larger competitors with products that may not be more powerful, but offer significantly better bang for the customer’s buck. The RX 7900 GRE is trying to do just that, squeezing into that critical gap in the market for something relatively affordable that’s also darn good. “AMD HAS…

Sapphire PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16GB

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £1,000/$1,050 DEVELOPER Nvidia WEBSITE nvidia.com FEATURES 16GB GDDR6 graphics memory 10,240 Nvidia Ada Lovelace cores The best option for a high-end 3D workstation VERDICT 10 OUT OF 10 On the surface, the GeForce RTX 4080 Super is barely any different from the vanilla GeForce RTX 4080 that was launched in 2022. It has an almost identical specification, save a tiny boost to the clock speeds and some tweaks to the core count. With the launch of the Super version, Nvidia took the opportunity to drop the price quite a bit, going from £1,199 to £999, which was no doubt partly a reaction to the highly impressive performance of the cheaper AMD Radeon 7900 XTX graphics card. This changes the value proposition…

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition

Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Reviews The best graphics cards for 3D artists PRICE £900/$930 DEVELOPER Sapphire WEBSITE sapphiretech.com AMD’s modular “chiplet” design has proven itself in Ryzen desktop and Epyc workstation CPUs, and the 7900 series now brings this to graphics cards via the RDNA 3 architecture. The RX 7900 XTX is AMD’s full-fat, top-end GPU, taking aim at Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and 4080 Super, rather than the high-priced and highperforming 4090. At this tier the 7900 XTX proves itself with hardware and performance advantages that, in some circumstances, may be better for 3D than Nvidia’s offering. Its 57.7 billion transistor 5nm die features 6,144 cores, 384 TMUs and 96 compute units with a 384-bit memory bus, which is the same as the RTX 4090. In terms of pricing, physical size and power consumption,…

Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G

Reviews PRICE £1,870/$1,830 DEVELOPER MSI WEBSITE msi.com FEATURES 24GB GDDR6X graphics memory 16,384 Nvidia Ada Lovelace cores Powerful, but expensive VERDICT 10 OUT OF 10 The GeForce RTX 4090 is the current all-conquering top dog in the world of graphics cards now that Nvidia has seemingly moved away from it’s Titan branding of this elite upper echelon of GPU performance. The 4090 is a massive jump over the 4080 Super, featuring 16,384 CUDA cores compared to 10,240 in the 4080 Super. The AD102 chip has 76.3 billion transistors, a wider 384-bit memory bus, 512 TMUs, 176 ROPs and a hefty 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM. This translates to faster rendering times than any other card on test, almost across the board. It also costs a lot more. The Founders Edition RTX…

MSI GeForce RTX 4090 SUPRIM LIQUID X 24G

Everyone has their own personal Goldilocks zone of just the right amount of performance they need in order to match their budget. The RTX 4090 is a no-brainer for anyone who makes a living from 3D design. If long rendering times are what holds projects back from completion, then the 4090 can pay for itself in time. For everyone else, it’s a bit more tricky to decide. At the budget end – for people who may just be getting started in 3D, students, or those simply unable to afford the top-end cards – beware of false economies. Spending as little as possible can mean frustratingly slow renders, which is why we feel the approximate performance level of the 4060 Ti is the lowest we’d choose for comfortable 3D design work,…

ZBrush for iPad

AUTHOR PROFILE FEATURES Digital sculpting and painting on a mobile device Industry-standard sculpting tool, rewritten just for the iPad Customisable UI + PROS Huge amount of brushes Same sculpting experience Improved UX and interface - CONS No real-time rendering No ZModeler or UV option yet PRICE Limited free version / full access £10/$10 monthly / £90/$90 annual COMPANY Maxon WEBSITE bit.ly/4gw9xKv Z Brush for iPad has finally stopped being a rumour, a leak and a tease and is now a real app. This new release feels like it could be breaking with the software’s history to be something quite new and unique, for new and old 3D artists alike. Maxon is offering up a free version with some of the higher-end tools missing, while the full version is going into…

ZBrush for iPad

AUTHOR PROFILE FEATURES Includes 74 primitive shapes such as rocks, spheres, diamonds, nuts and gems 28 preloaded Cinema 4D shapes including a spur gear, male/female figures and a palm tree 12 preloaded materials including chrome, glass, gold, gummy, plastic and porcelain Supports C4D, OBJ, FBX, GLB, 3DS, DAE and GLTF files + PROS Powerful Cloner tool Create After Effects layers for Bump and Emission maps - CONS Reset reverts all parameters PRICE Red Giant plan £85/$85 monthly / £635/$640 annual COMPANY Maxon WEBSITE maxon.net/red-giant Red Giant Geo is a new plugin that enables 3D objects to be rendered in Adobe’s After Effects. The feature stands out mostly for its Cloner tool, which can create thousands of copycat versions that Geo handles smoothly and easily. A part of the Red Giant…

GXT 612 Cetic speakers

PRICE £45/$60 COMPANY Trust WEBSITE trust.com AUTHOR PROFILE + PROS Lightweight, but well built Good, balanced sound RGB lighting Can be used wirelessly or via 3.5mm cable - CONS Can distort at higher volumes Lights aren’t fully controllable POWER OUTPUT CONFUSION Speakers are often rated in watts with a second figure in RMS, but what does this mean? Well, the stated watts is a measure of the maximum output a speaker can produce. A more realistic measure is the RMS figure: the level that a clean tone can be delivered indefinitely. Peak watts can distort if reached for too long. Audio is so often overlooked by visual artists, but it’s a key element of a successful project, so don’t skimp or simply use your earbuds for audio in your next…

GXT 612 Cetic speakers

Nosing around on Fallout

News and views from around the international CG community Long-time FutureWorks collaborator and VFX supervisor Jay Worth turned to the studio’s visual effects team to create one of the most iconic composites of the 16-times Emmy nominated Amazon Prime hit Fallout. In addition to the ideation and delivery on the look of The Ghoul, the FutureWorks team delivered over 700 shots for the series, including set extensions and clean-ups. VFX supervisor Gouri Shankar worked closely with Worth and over 150 FutureWorks artists to bring the character to life. “Jay has been a long-time partner of FutureWorks,” he explains. “We were fortunate to work with him on projects like Westworld, The Peripheral, and more recently the Apple TV+ limited series The Lady in the Lake. Naturally we jumped at the opportunity…

Nosing around on Fallout

MCU VFX moments

The best CG in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is hard to pin down, as there’s just so much of it at such a high quality. When it comes to sheer quantity of visual effects shots, one could argue Marvel Studios has created an offshoot industry, as thousands of shots have been created by an army of visual effects studios that span the globe, and literally works 24/7 when factoring in the time-zone differences. In order to manage the huge demand for digital content, several visual effects coordinators are assigned a particular set of VFX companies to support the production visual effects supervisor and producer. The process alone is as epic as its end products, which are perennial nominees for the Oscars’ Best Visual Effects crown. There’s a lot of material…

MCU VFX moments

MODELS AND TEXTURES EVERY MONTH Download these models and textures to use in your own projects FREE ASSET DOWNLOADS Download a really rocking set of models and build your own asset library with these stones from CGAXIS in our monthly model and texture giveaway. BUILD AND ANIMATE A FUN-FILLED ROBOT Expand your horizons with Julio Benavides’ tips for creating a charming hard-surface character. CREATE A CANYON ENVIRONMENT Make a stunning desert setting in Blender with a walkthrough from Romain Eboli. 3D WORLD MAGAZINE 2000-2024 Thank you!…

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