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3dworld.creativebloq.com The Blender Issue #268
37 CREATE THE
COVER Blender pro training Page 44
PAGES OF TRAINING
HOW TO MASTER YOUR PROJECT LIGHTING RIGIFY TO ENHANCE YOUR EXPRESSIONS STYLIZED CHARACTER WORKFLOW FOR FILM TEXTURE PAINT LIKE A PRO IN REAL TIME
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ISSUE 268
Sprites, Camera, Action!
Blender Studio open up about their latest 3D animation project and how it’s pushing the software in bold new directions 36 3D WORLD
Sprites, Camera, Action!
n 2005 the Blender Foundation began work, alongside the Netherlands Media Art Institute, on Elephants Dream, a surreal and visually ambitious short film that stretched the limits of Blender’s opensource 3D software. Ever since then Blender Studio has been producing iconic Open Movies that advance the
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software’s capabilities and are released for free alongside production files, assets, artwork, and never-seen-before content for the benefit of Blender’s devoted community. Blender Studio recently announced their 13th Open Movie, and perhaps their most ambitious yet, Sprite Fright. Directed by former Pixar story supervisor Matthew Luhn, Sprite
Fright is an 80s-inspired horrorcomedy, set in Britain. The story follows a group of rowdy teenagers on a trek into an isolated forest where they discover peaceful mushroom creatures that turn out to be an unexpected force of nature. 3D World caught up with Luhn and his co-director Hjalti Hjalmarsson to find out how they are bringing Sprite Fright to life. 3D WORLD 37
RenderMan meets photo-surrealism
Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills
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Perfect your shot lighting in Blender
BLENDER
PERFECT YOUR SHOT LIGHTING IN BLENDER Blender Studio art director Andy Goralczyk explains the lighting and rendering process for this issue’s cover artwork
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llie is the main character from our current film project Sprite Fright. We set out to depict her first encounter with a Sprite, the film’s cute forest creatures. This serves two purposes: 1) we create a ‘personality pose’ to inform the character design and 2) we help fine-tune the final look and feel of the film. The result is a true team effort among many artists at our studio. The initial idea came from director Matthew Luhn, who worked with storyboard artist Dirk van Dulmen on a couple of concepts for the overall layout. These were refined by co-director Hjalti Hjalmarsson. In the meantime production designer Ricky Nierva supervised sculpting wizard Julien Kaspar to create a unified look for the character sculpts. Pablo Fournier, character animator at our studio, posed Ellie and the Sprite according to the concept. Kaspar carried out pose refinements using Blender’s sculpting tools following paint-over suggestions from concept artist Vivien Lulkowski. Shading artist Simon Thommes created some impressive procedural materials for all objects, and finally it was my job to give the image a clear and appealing lighting scheme. Being at the end of such a production pipeline puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of the lighting artist. Good lighting helps make all the previous steps shine while maintaining clarity and storytelling. In this tutorial we learn how to work with lights in Blender’s Cycles render engine to illuminate a typical character-centric shot in one of our films.
01LIGHT PATH SETTINGS
Before we start any render, let’s first adjust the Cycles settings for an optimal, relatively speedy render. We don’t need a high degree of fidelity in the bounce light since we’re going to ‘cheat’ a lot. In the Light Paths tab under Max Bounces, set the total to 3 and Transparency to 32. In the Clamping subcategory, leave Direct Light at 0.00 and ensure that Indirect Light is at 10.00. Disable Refractive and Reflective Caustics and set Filter Glossy to 1.00.
AUTHOR Andy Goralczyk Andy is art director at Blender Animation Studio. His work in lighting and effects contributed greatly to the look and feel of most Blender Open Movies during the past 15 years. artificial3d. artstation.com
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AND DENOISING PARAMETERS 02 SAMPLING In the Sampling tab, set Render to 200 and cap Viewport at 100. Check Denoising for Render and Viewport and set them both to OpenImageDenoise. We are going to take advantage of Blender’s real-time denoising capabilities to get a clearer image while we’re adjusting the lighting. Set Start Sample to one (this parameter sets the minimum samples after which denoising kicks in). Lastly, make sure that the Filmic View Transform is enabled under the Colour Management tab.
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03 VIEWPORT PREPARATION
Split your main viewport vertically and turn the lower half into a Shader Editor. Then, split the top half in two again. Keep one side as Camera View and switch Overlays off. This way we can isolate parts of our image using Border Rendering without having to preview the entire image at once all the time. Removing Overlays helps clean up the clutter of non-renderable
03 DOWNLOAD YOUR RESOURCES For all the assets you need go to http://bit.ly/3Dworld-blender
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