The productivity and graphics group has just announced the latest versions of Poser, describing a host of new professional level features that will be available with even the base version of the latest software.

The well known 3D software package allows an animator to begin posing and animating fully ready-to-use 3D Characters straight away from the software’s library, enabling professionals and beginners alike to create their own 3D content quickly without necessarily worrying about figure modelling, texturing, rigging, or long production times and costs. Illustrators and animators such as creator of Anomaly Brian Haberlin and director of animation at Rooster Teeth Productions Monty Oum utilize Poser for their projects.

Poser 10 and Poser Pro 2014 are set to introduce lots of really exciting new features such as the addition of Pixar’s OpenSubdiv library for a ‘Subdivision Surfaces’ feature. This will allow artists to define separate subdivision levels by prop, figure or individual body part, significantly improving bending fidelity whilst animating as well as improving mesh smoothness and software performance and render times by allowing the user to control the polycount in each scene.

A new Bullet Physics tool has been added which will simulate soft body dynamics and rigid body dynamics, allowing users to paint soft body constraint weights to characters for more realistic animation or even create dynamic strand – based hair. Two new human figures with weight mapped magnets and detailing optimised for the SubD feature as well as seven new 3D cartoon figures will also be added as part of the included content.

Morph brush improvements will make it easier to modify any mesh, whether it is a prop, figure, or conforming figure. Material compound nodes when texturing will also be introduced to allow users to layer materials as a compound node whilst still allowing for editing on each individual node when the compound node is expanded.

A new Live Simulation feature enables animators to preview their work in real-time, and the new Comic Book Preview Mode allows users to create both static and animated toon imagery. Artists can create comic art with improved line control and colour and clean black or white outlines, even when rotating or animating their point of view. In the newly designed Poser Pro Fitting Room users can interactively fit clothes and props to any poser figure, tightening, smoothing, and preserving soft and rigid features interactively.

Watch the teaser video for the new software here.

Poser 10 and Poser Pro 2014 are available to buy now and are available in both a physical and digital version.

Poser 10 is $239.99 for the full version, and Poser Pro 2014 is $399.99 for the full version until the 3rd of June when the introductory 20% off sale pricing ends.

Known for being a master in the Visual Effects industry and working on films such as ‘Mighty Joe Young’ (1949), which won the Academy Award for special effects, and ‘Clash of the Titans’ (1981), Ray Harryhausen was the legendary inventor of a form of stop motion model animation known as ‘Dynamation’, which enabled two areas of a film to be matted out for the first time, creating a split screen.  He is probably most well known for having animated seven skeletons that came to life in the film ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, which took him three months to film and perfect.

He began being interested in visual effects as a child. ‘My obsession with fantasy has been lifelong, growing during my formative years and being taken to new heights by novels, paintings, and of course films’. He was encouraged by his parents who took Harryhausen to see The Lost World (1925) when he was only five years old, where he was inspired by incredible scenes of dinosaurs coming to life once again for the world to watch. After viewing King Kong (1933) for the first time later in life, Harryhausen began to experiment in the production of animated shorts and stop motion.

Dynamation was an idea Harryhausen had thought through and developed over many years, an innovative technique that involved combining rear projection photography with mattes, essentially splitting live action and therefore allowing a model to be inserted directly into a film, appearing to interact with the actors.  His life’s work produced sequences that changed visual effects forever, giving audiences visual effects which were not only technically brilliant, but believable emotional characters as well, giving them personality and expression. His films became landmarks in cinema and visual effects history and visual effects artists are still continuously perfecting many of his techniques today. His work literally inspired the inspirational, George Lucas commenting that “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.’

Ray Harryhausen’s official website: link

Yes, this issue we’ve partnered with the Blender Foundation to bring your a bumper edition of 3D Artist filled with Blender content. To kick things off, check out this Blender tutorial on creating the awesome fighter jet featured on the cover. A big thanks to Ben Simonds of Gecko Animation for all his hard work!

If you’re interested about where Blender came from, where it is right now, and where it’s heading in the future, then you’ll want to check out this fantastic feature on the rise of the industry’s premier open source software.

Given that recent versions of Blender have been so focused on the visual effects side of the CG world, we got in touch with some of the biggest names on the Blender Network and asked them to offer 50 of their best tips for top VFX.

And as we gear up for the next generation of gaming, we talk to the artists on the front lines about what all the extra technological grunt really means for the developers.

There’s plenty of training content to keep you busy over the next few weeks too, with Andy Probst revealing his workflows for MODO 701‘s newly implemented particles…

…Craig Barr talks retopology in Mudbox 2014…

…and André Kutscherauer reveals his quick and simple stereographic pipeline in 3ds Max.

As ever, there’s plenty more content throughout the magazine to inform, entertain and inspire.

If you buy issue 55 today then you’ll find a disc bursting at the seams with the Blender 2.66a software and  7+ hours of top notch Blender training, delivered by the top minds at Blender Cookie and the Blender e-Shop. You’ll also find:

• An exclusive Sculptris Starter Pack featuring the software, models, materials and more
• Houdini 12.5 Apprentice
• Free trial of Red Giant‘s Trapcode Mir
• 4 high-quality arch-vis models by 3D Ocean
• 10 high-quality models by designconnected
• Plus magazine tutorial files to follow along with the magazine, including video guides, textures, OBJ files and more!

Get your copy of 3D Artist issue 55 today!

You can purchase your copy through the Imagine Shop or get it digitally through greatdigitalmags.com. Alternatively, why not make big savings and buy yourself a subscription?

There are less than two months left until the beginning of Siggraph, where some of the best minds and most innovative companies in the CG industry will be on display. This will be the 40^th International conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques and throughout the four-day event will feature everything from student work to blockbuster VFX.  The festival is recognised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival, and several works originally showcased at Siggraph have been nominated for or have received a Best Animated Short Academy Award.

The art gallery will explore CG work related to this year’s theme: XYZN:Scale; or rather projects which portray an innovative idea or story through scaling and transformation techniques. This year’s impressive preliminary lineup of production sessions will be open to the public and include the techniques behind the creation of the visual effects behind Life of Pi and Pacific Rim, as well as a presentation on the fusion of stop-motion and visual effects technologies used in blockbusters such as ParaNorman and Coraline.

Major software companies will also have booths at the festival. The Pixologic booth’s line up alone includes studio panel discussions by Blizzard Entertainment and Disney  (amongst others) focusing on how they use ZBrush, as well as individual artists such as Joseph Drust (from Ubisoft), Jared Krichevsky (from Aaron Sims Company) and Josh Herman (from Marvel Studios) giving live demonstrations of their work.

Check out the official website  for more information

Can you please tell us a little about Set Visions and the history of the studio?

Set Visions was established over 25 years as a commercial photographic studio, combining photographic and creative skills with emerging technology. Having transitioned from film to digital, and more recently (approximately five years ago) launching a unique photorealistic CGI brand named ‘PIX’, Set Visions has advanced, and can now successfully deliver dual discipline image solutions to a much wider audience.

Why did you decide to go from a photography-only studio to a photography and CGI studio? 

A key element of our success is timing, and a renewed awareness of CGI caught our studio’s attention at the right time! As the economic downturn began, particularly within the architectural area, we noticed a slight increase of CGI awareness within the home interiors market. This new prospect for CGI visuals in our market resulted in an acceleration of CGI technology, and so an opportunity arose. Supplying duel disciplines made us more competitive, utilising assets and adding value when budgets needed it most.

What tools/software do you mostly use at the studio for your CG work?

Software used are 3DS Max, Rhino, Vray & Photoshop.

You’ve mentioned that your team of CG Artists include photographers and stylists – in what way do they work together? How are the disciplines of photography and CGI combined?

Each image created is a collaboration of skills; CG artists mixed with professional photographers and stylists balance the aesthetics of every image. Our traditional creative studio process remains, uniting such skills as lighting, camera angles, decor and the use of CG technology to produce the final image.

What truly excites you about CGI today?

How it thrives through the ever-changing boundaries provided by developing technology. Passionate and obsessive, we enjoy the challenges this brings when creating photorealistic visuals. New tools open new avenues, enabling growth from 2D stills to movies, 360s, design visualisers and interactive web tools for use across multimedia.

What’s next for the studio?

The Set Visions team relishes the opportunity to constantly develop new skills and evolve. Through resource, talent and technology available, we aim to showcase our progression with each image created. Our CGI team is expanding, helping us to get more of our work recognised and viewed by a wider audience, beyond the UK and Europe…worldwide!

To learn more about Set Visions, please visit setvisionspix.co.uk

For the past 25 or so years I’ve been working in the videogame, TV and film industries, creating graphics and animations, directing commercials and leading art teams. While working at various studios I have hired many artists and seen various showreels drop through the letterbox – some very memorable, if only for all the wrong reasons. However, there were a few that have certainly made me sit up and want more.

This feature aims to guide you through creating and preparing your showreel to the standard needed to wow your potential clients or employers. Make them want to choose you for their next project. We will be looking at industry-standard Non-Linear Editing (NLE) tools and I will outline tips, tricks and the hard-and-fast rules that will help you get the best out of your work.

We’ll look at the importance of choosing the right music for your reel and how to create a soundbed using freely downloadable audio tools. We’ll explore how you can edit tracks using the timeline to accentuate your reel. I’ll also be giving my advice on how to promote your showreel; who you should be showing it to and which online websites you should use to get the maximum exposure for your self-promotion.

If all this is done well, your reel will become an extension of your talent, rather than just a list of clips edited together to a tedious techno track.

Start strong

The opening of your showreel has the biggest impact on the client, so it should be the most impressive part. Show the work you are most proud of and that represents your talents. Starting off strong will captivate your audience, draw them in and set the tone for the rest of what’s to come.

As an employer, when I press Play I expect to see a title, the name of the artist and what the showreel represents. Mine, for example, opens with ‘Chris Hill, Character Animation Showreel 2013’. Keep it short and use a simple, clear font with a backplate that won’t detract from the information you’re giving. Using a short, punchy title sequence can also give your showreel the edge, as it’s this sort of attention to detail that will get you noticed.

Create your showreel at the highest possible resolution with the largest bit-rate, so you can flexibly downsize if needed. I use full HD 1,920 x 1,080 pixels at 25fps wherever possible. If you have to scale your clips, make sure you maintain the aspect ratio or your clips will become stretched.

Keep it short

Keeping your showreel brief will help to focus the viewer on your particular strengths. Make it no longer than three minutes and no shorter that 30 seconds. A client will be able to get a feel for your skills quickly, so show diversity but don’t feel you need to explain your life story. Around one minute and 30 seconds is generally considered the optimum length for a successful showreel.

If you have an extensive amount of work over a number of fields, break the reels up and have one for each discipline; for example animation, effects and so on. This will enable you to apply for specific jobs.

Never repeat clips in your reel and if you only have one or two projects to show, it could be worth showing them in full, rather than cutting two together. Showing narrative rather than chopping back and forth in a jumbled mess would be the better option in a situation such as this.

Good pacing

Keeping people interested in your work is the main goal of a showreel. If you pace the reel too slow your viewer will very likely get bored – they may be inclined to skip forward or even hit Stop. If you time it too fast you will fail to show off your talents – another recipe for a quick exit. These rules can be pushed a little in either direction; if you’re editing a motion-graphics reel it can be pushed a little quicker, whereas character animation reels might be a little slower to enable a better read for your viewers.

Caption where needed

Captions will help the viewer understand what they are looking at. Keep captions simple and use a bare minimum number of words. I recommend captioning a shot with the role you played in creating it; for example ‘Character animation’, ‘Effects animation’ and so on. When you create a caption, keep the font simple and the size large enough to read, but not so large it overpowers the clip. Use a complementary colour – usually a simple white or a muted yellow that’s easy on the eyes. Be sure to keep your captions positioned consistently throughout the reel so your viewer learns where they are placed and can therefore read them quickly.

Stay in tune

Most people create a reel for personal promotion and think its okay to use copyrighted music. It’s really not okay. If the music is copyrighted then you should get explicit permission to use it. It’s much easier to find music that’s copyright-free from websites like www.jamendo.com, which hosts thousands of tracks to choose from. Just remember to credit any music you use and read any terms and conditions before adding it to your reel.

Using the right soundtrack will set the pace and speed of your cuts. You can cut on a beat or at key moments in the musical piece. Choose your track wisely and don’t pick a tune that’s offensive or difficult for the uninitiated to listen to. Using a track that’s too isolating will guarantee the soundtrack is turned down. You may think it’s the coolest music on Earth, but if it’s muted it will fail to serve its purpose.

Choose something that enhances your particular style of reel. If you’re creating an effects reel with particles and explosions, think about using music that’s punchy to help accentuate events. A fluid simulation reel might benefit from music that has a serene feel to it – something that flows along and complements the beauty of the simulations. Also, select music that has many facets to it rather than just a monotonous beat, as this will enable you to cut at interesting musical events. For example, if we have a clip where a large creature jumps off a tall building and lands heavily on the ground, we could align the landing with a key moment in the music or edit the clip so the creature lands on a beat to accentuate the animation.

Use sound effects

If adding sound effects seems like your kind of thing, check out www.soungle.com, www.freesound.org, or even www. soundjay.com for tons of free effects that can help add atmosphere to your reel. If you’re feeling really creative, why not write your own track that can be tailored specifically to your needs? You can find a collection of royalty-free tracks supplied with this issue’s disc (unfortunately unavailable for digital readers).

If applicable, lip-syncing should be demonstrated, but this is something you will have to consider when choosing your audio track. Put the speech into the edit, if at all possible, then add a new audio layer for the dialogue to the audio track and lower the music levels so the client can check your lip-syncing skills. It’s at this point you may find you haven’t used a soundtrack with vocals running throughout, so also consider this when choosing your music and placing your lip-sync clips.

There are lots of tools out there for editing audio, but one excellent piece of software that will help you edit sound effects or tracks is Audacity, which can be downloaded for free at http://audacity. sourceforge.net. Try to work with WAV files rather than MP3 if possible. MP3 files are compressed and suffer a loss of quality. Also use files that are stereo 16-bit 44.1kHz (CD quality). When you finally come to encode your reel, the audio and video will get compressed.

Once you’ve edited your audio clips, bring them into your editing software and layer them up in the timeline. You can then sync them to key events in the showreel. This process may take some time, but the impact it will have on your reel is huge.

Link your clips for the best effect

During the edit you will transition from clip to clip, but you shouldn’t just dump one clip after another. While this gets the work in front of the client, it pays to give every transition some thought. Good transitions create a nice, smooth flow throughout.

Simple five-frame blends can soften between clips and reduce the jolt from an abrupt cut. Quick fades also soften edits: simple take your first clip down to black for three frames and then fade your second clip for two frames. Try to use the shots to drive wipes and fades; for example if you have a camera move from left to right, create a five-frame wipe from left to right that follows the speed of the camera. This five-frame wipe adds detail to show you’re thinking on a creative level about every shot. Try not to use too many standard wipes and transitions often found in editing software, as they can be very cheesy and dull.

When putting together a reel it’s also good to show shot progression. A modelling reel should start with the wire cage to show how clean the model is, then transition to a shaded view and again to a textured model. If you have a compositing reel, then show the clean plate, add each layer and ultimately the complete shot.

Go out with a bang

The start and finish of your showreel will be the most memorable to your audience, so it’s vital it opens and closes on strong pieces. You need to make an impact and you want to leave them desiring more, so pick your very best piece to end of a high.

After the final clip has played out, add your credits and contact details – primarily your name, email address and telephone number – again in a clean, legible font. Leave contact information up long enough for it to be read slowly and then end the reel. Try not to fade out at the end, as some players will leave the last frame up on the screen.

Be flexible

You should always be prepared to refresh your reel on a regular basis, so consider updating it and sending it out at least every six months. Remove weaker clips and reorder your reel to cover new and better work. This is where you may need to adjust transitions and possibly tweak the cuts to fit in the new clips. Good luck!

Thanks go out to Filippo Veniero for this Blender tutorial. See more of his work at ifilgood.it

01 Begin modelling

We’ll use simple objects for this tutorial: a cup to fracture, a bullet to simulate the impact and a drinking straw in the cup to make the scene more interesting. Add a circle (Shift+A>Circles), then in Edit Mode Extrude (E) to model the cup. You can model a bullet in the same way (with a circle and extrusion) as well as the straw (Shift+A>Cylinder). Simply place the straw inside the cup and proceed with your lighting setup. Add a set of white light emitter planes above the scene and two lights at the side (one warm and one cold). Don’t forget to set Ambient Light in the World panel to 0

02 Textures & materials

We’ll use the Cycles render engine now, so choose a nice texture for the cup (here we’re using the Blender logo), select the cup and in Edit Mode unwrap the mesh. Don’t forget to use UV as the texture co-ordinate. Add a second material to the cup to be used as cell add-ons for the sides of the shards

03 Begin fracturing

In Object Mode, select the cup and move it to another level (M). Drawing with the Grease Pencil, break the lines of entry and the exit point of the bullet, then add some extra points that will form the other chips. Each point is the centre of a chip. Enable the Fracture add-on and select Cell Fracture. Set the Point Source to Grease Pencil, Recursion to 2, Material to 1, Margin to 0.000001 and Group Name as ‘fract’.

04 Set up the game engine

We should have the cup divided into fragments on a new layer. Select all the chips, move them to the main layer, pick Blender Game as your render engine and Game Logic as the layout of the windows. We need to freeze the fall of the fragments before impact with the bullet and enable the impact to its passage. Select a chip and set the logic nodes as shown, then grab all the chips (Shift+G>Group), hit the spacebar and search for ‘copy logic brick to select’. Use the same settings for the straw.

05 Adjust your settings

Select the bullet, then in the Physics panel tick Actor and in the Game Logic window add a new property: ‘trigg’ (it’s a variable used by logic nodes to unfreeze the animation). Add a motion node, as shown, to move the bullet along the X-axis against the cup. In the Game menu, tick Record Animation and then click Start Game Engine. Blender will simulate the impact and record all movements as IPO curves.

06 Rendering & post work

Select the Cycles renderer and go back to the window’s default layout. Choose a good frame from the animation, set the camera and enable the new motion blur for Cycles. Press F12 and wait until the end of the render. Save the image and open it in GIMP for post-production (Levels and Curves)

Simulation troubles

Here are some problems that may arise:

• If the add-on behaves strangely, and instead of the cup it shows a cube, the normals of the mesh are inverted.
• If the object has visible cracks after the add-on, close the gap between the various pieces using the Margin parameter.
• If the bullet doesn’t move all the chips, simply replace it with a sphere for recording the animation and then undo the replacement for rendering.

Thanks to James Morris, director of t-zero communications for this review

Essential info:

Price: Prices are available on the official website

Specifications:

• 3.2GHz Intel Core i7-3930K running at 4.4GHz
• 32GB 1,600MHz ECC DDR3 SDRAM
• 3GB NVIDIA Quadro K4000
• 240GB PNY PREVAIL ELITE Enterprise Solid State Disk
• 2TB Western Digital RED 7,200rpm SATA hard disk
• 18x Sony NEC Optiarc DVD rewriter
• Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
• Three-year warranty: the first year on-site; second and third years RTB

The Good

• Incredible graphics performance
• Good rendering power
• Decent storage selection
• Reasonable price

The Bad:

• None I can think of!

NVIDIA’s first Quadro card based on its latest Kepler GPU generation, the K5000, arrived in October last year. However, we’ve had to wait until now to see the full range appear. With the Magnetar S16-AW750 Armari has brought us the high-end K4000, which promises to be as much of a leap in performance as the previous Fermi generation 4000, but without a high-end price to go with it.

The S16-AW750 is based around Intel’s Core i7-3930K processor, which runs at a nominal 3.2GHz. Armari has permanently raised the clock speed, so this CPU will run at up to 4.4GHz across all cores and has a custom water-cooling system installed to ensure that temperatures still remain under control. The 3930K is the top non-Extreme processor from Intel’s Sandy Bridge generation, so offffers six physical cores, which hyper-threading presents as 12 virtual cores, giving parallel tasks like rendering a boost. The processor has also been partnered with a healthy 32GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory in four 8GB DIMMs, leaving four slots free for upgrading to the maximum of 64GB.

This brings us neatly to the star of the show: the new NVIDIA Quadro K4000 graphics card. Numerically, this is the successor to the Quadro 4000, but its specification even surpasses the Quadro 5000 and 6000 in some areas. For a start, it sports a whopping 768 CUDA cores, where the 4000 had just 256, the 5000 had 352 and the 6000 had 448. This would imply a threefold leap in performance over the 4000, but it’s not quite as simple as this.

The previous few Quadros had double- pumped CUDA units, where the Kepler generation keeps these at the same frequency as the main GPU core. This is sure to make the performance increase a little more muted and Kepler Quadros have reduced double-precision performance too, although this won’t affect most mainstream 3D software. Memory bandwidth has also gone up from the Quadro 4000’s 89.6GB/ sec to 134GB/sec and the quantity from 2GB to 3GB of GDDR5.

Armari has provided an impressive storage provision, too. There’s a 240GB PNY Prevail Elite Enterprise solid state disk, for super-fast main operating system and application loading, as well as a 2TB conventional Western Digital RED 7,200rpm SATA hard disk for general data. There’s an 18x DVD rewriter, but this more budget-conscious Armari system doesn’t include the company’s usual multi-format card reader.

The K4000 doesn’t disappoint when it comes to performance testing. The score of 96.69 in Maxon CINEBENCH R11.5’s OpenGL test is one of the highest I have ever seen. SPECviewperf 11 results were similarly impressive, with 91.78 in the lightwave-01 viewset, 113.41 in maya-03 and 67.14 in the SolidWorks-based sw-02. All are among the best test scores I’ve recorded. The Armari system also managed a very healthy 12.48 in the CINEBENCH R11.5 render test, which is what I would expect for a frequency- enhanced six-core Intel Core i7.

Despite these phenomenal test results, the Armari S16-AW750 still comes in at £2,295 ex VAT, which is a decidedly mid-range price for a workstation. This sums up NVIDIA’s new Quadro K4000 nicely: high-end performance for a mid-range price. It’s a very exciting proposition for independent 3D content creators or studios looking to expand their seat count without breaking the bank.

NVIDIA’s Kepler Quadro range

NVIDIA has taken an unusual route with its Kepler generation of Quadros

The high-end K5000 was released alongside the consumer-grade models based on the same generation about six months ago. We’ve seen a number of workstations using the card, with very impressive results. Sporting 1,536 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR5 memory, the K5000 is a formidable professional 3D accelerator. However, at over £1,300 it’s also pricey. Those looking for a more cost-conscious workstation have had to wait until now for the more reasonably priced K4000, mid-range K2000 and entry-level K600.

All three new cards are pretty exceptional. The K4000 is a little over half the price of the K5000, but offers much more than half the performance, as shown in this month’s review. The K2000 has an even more compelling value proposition for the professional 3D content creator on a tight budget. It offers 384 CUDA processing cores and 2GB GDDR5 memory, so has a better specification than the previous high-end Quadro 4000’s 256 CUDA cores, although memory bandwidth is only 64GB/ sec compared to the Quadro 4000’s 89.6GB/sec.

The Quadro K600 similarly offers specifications to compete with the next class up from the previous generation. It sports 192 CUDA cores, twice what the Quadro 600 had, the same as the Quadro 2000 and 1GB frame buffer. However, this is DDR3 memory, so bandwidth is just 29GB/sec, whereas the Quadro 2000 offered 41.6GB/sec. The K2000’s power consumption drops a little, too, drawing just 51W compared to the 2000’s 62W, although the K600 remains similar at 41W compared to the 600’s 40W. With twice as many CUDA cores, you’re getting quite a bit more performance per Watt.

Overall, NVIDIA’s Kepler Quadros bring unprecedented performance for the money, with the K2000 in particular providing high-end performance to low- and mid-range workstations.

Our verdict:

Features: 9/10
Performance: 10/10
Build quality: 9/10
Value for money: 10/10

The Quadro K4000 provides awesome performance, decent rendering and can be bought on a budget

Final score: 9/10

For more information, head on over to the Armari website.

“At Weta Digital, our focus is feature film visual effects. In order to fulfill the director’s vision for the shot we often create digital doubles of characters in the film. These digital versions of the characters are used in place of real actors in situations where it would be too dangerous to use a real person or it was not possible to shoot the scene with a live actor.

These digital doubles need to move and act like the live action character; indistinguishable from the actor. We use dynamic simulations on their hair, skin and clothing to add a high level of realistic movement. These replicate the effect a real environment would have on an actor and his/her clothing on a live set.

For The Hobbit we wanted to create a larger number of clothes that would be indistinguishable from the behaviour of real clothes when simulated. To do this we chose a pattern-based approach at the modelling stage which could accurately create the volume of the real clothing. Marvelous Designer 2 was chosen because it had a fast and stable solver for draping the clothes when modelling and a simple, user-friendly interface.

The patterns for the live action costumes used-on set were available for us to use as templates for our digital cloth patterns. We then created accurate digital copies of the characters’ bodies from reference pictures and scans and used these as our models.

Although we did not render the geometry from Marvelous Designer 2 , the wrinkles and draping the software produced were an invaluable starting point. This geometry was used as a template and the topology rebuilt in Maya with seams, buttons and other details added and used as the hero digital costume for our Models Department.

The Marvelous Designer 2 geometry was also rebuilt in our Creatures department with topology that fed into their cloth simulation approach. The hero geometry was wrapped or attached to the simulation geometry, which was invisible in the final renders.

For The Hobbit we had to produce a digital double of nearly all of the characters seen in the movie. This amounted to hundreds clothing elements – most of which used Marvelous Designer 2 in their creation. The most intensive use was the dwarf costumes that had up to five layers of clothing. The ability to manage that many layers in Marvelous Designer 2 was a real bonus and made the set up for cloth solves simpler and more stable.

Even though Marvelous Designer 2 was created as a tool for the fashion industry it was adaptable enough to meet our needs for film making and we were very happy with the results.”

You can learn more about Marvelous Designer 2 over at the official website.

Within Can Pekdemir’s world, bones disappear from faces while whales are dropped from great heights, deforming beautifully at the shock of landing. On first discovering his work, you can’t help but take notice of the oddly incredible works that Pekdemir presents, while on further investigation you’ll be glad that you wanted to know more. Though Pekdemir’s images are seamless and bizarrely natural, his execution is calculated. Nothing is done without reason, so should you spy melting bovine hind legs among his breathtaking portfolio of artwork, you can rest assured that there’s a very good explanation.

Pekdemir was born in Istanbul in 1982 and he is still based in the hustle and bustle of the city. In 2008 he took the leap of faith that so many fine artists wish they could bring themselves to take: he quit working for agencies altogether.

Swapping creative, corporate projects for a new environment where ideas and learning take centre stage, his move paid off. Pekdemir went to work at Istanbul Bigli University as a full-time instructor at the Department of Visual Communication Design. Here he feels the benefit and influence of working with people from different disciplines, giving him an excellent grounding to start introducing justification into his work. “Working in a school [provided me with the] great advantage of being able to reach both theoretical sources and technical equipment at the same time,” he explains.

Theory and methodology are an imperative part of Pekdemir’s approach to his art. While he’s stepped away from academia for the moment to focus on his work, his academic experiences still inform a lot of his creative decisions. Pigs can fly in Pekdemir’s world and when they do, he ensures they fly with great artistic merit.

Learning 3D for art

3D is the tool of Pekdemir’s trade, using programs such as modo and ZBrush to bring his ideas to life. “I’ve been into 3D for around 15 years,” Pekdemir offers. But his interest in computer graphics stretches right back to the demo-scene time when real-time 3D graphics were created by code. He later moved to using 3D software to create artistic forms. “For the last four or five years I’ve been using it not only to form shapes but as a platform for deforming them – sometimes by misusing tools, letting mistakes happen as I work and doing methodological pieces,” he says.

Digital 3D is a fascinating medium to work with, because it’s very nature can be misleading. “Even though we work in a 3D environment on our computer screens, it is actually a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional space,” Pekdemir explains. “Although we deal with all angles of a model, most of the time we end up with a two-dimensional image looking from a specific angle.” Because of this, the artist ultimately chooses for the viewer which side of the multifaceted creation should be observed. “With a real sculpture, the viewer has the freedom to control his or her point of view and walk around the work. In 2D images [this is limited by] the decisions of the artist,” he adds.

Defining methodology

3D may be Pekdemir’s method of choice, but the artistic decisions and theoretical nuances that form the final piece mean that his work takes on a three-dimensional quality quite separate from what a software package can offer. “I joined an exhibition in Istanbul’s 2010 European Culture Conference,” he explains. “At the time I was interested in the semiologic analysis of facial movements. I decided to analyse how a news speaker’s face moves and changes during different kinds of news titles, like politics and sports. By 2D-tracking the eyes and mouth visually, and using the audio form as a different visual element, I was then able to visualise this data and draw alternative news-speaker portraits. Following this, I continued working on methods to deform anatomy.”

While his ideas have developed and refined over time, Pekdemir points to a single statement that had a great impact on how he approaches his work: “Once I was reading an article titled ‘Art Common Sense and Photography’ by Victor Burgin, who is a British conceptual artist,” he begins. “I found this sentence in the article: ‘There is no content without a form and no form which does not shape content’.” Reading this made him revise his old work and try to analyse the decisions he had made throughout the creative process. After some analysis, the decisions and justifications of his work became a bigger part of the final outcome. “At the beginning of the ‘Procedurals’ series I made, I composited models into photographs by deforming the 3D shape affected by objects in the environment, or by placing them in deserted areas where no living thing is seen. These decisions were made very personally,” he offers.

Pekdemir’s ‘7 Sculptures’ series is perhaps one of his most methodological, linking concepts with images in both surprising and meaningful ways. “In the ‘7 Sculptures’ series, I tried to connect sculpture and photographs by using the time and location numerical data of the photographs, to control algorithmic image parameters,” he says. “This meant using specific numbers as input data to create a procedural in modo. This results in a unique virtual sculpture to be (de)formed for every location and time.”

Weathering the creative process

To begin any work of art is a tremendous act of violence, if the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke is to be believed. In Pekdemir’s creative process, he finds the hardest part comes just one step before, while the final image is just a distant dream and the initial thought is still embryonic. “The biggest struggle is to be satisfied with the idea you are coming up with, not with the final visual output,” he says.

Pekdemir begins with a question and lets the answer lead him to the result. “Most of the time, I start my works as though they are experiments by asking: ‘How would a form react to a certain impact/force or to an extraordinary condition?’” Whether that form is a human body or an animal drawing of a theorem, Pekdemir follows through in his own way to break up the delicate membrane between idea and creation.

His images have sprung from questions such as, ‘How would we look if we turned into boneless structures in a second or if the gravity on Earth was different?’. He also challenges the boundaries set within 3D programs, questioning the use of certain tools and applying them beyond their original purpose.

These key ideas, deforming images and misusing tools, run consistently through Pekdemir‘s work. A series like ‘Soft Body’ illustrates the haunting results of morphing a recognisable shape. “‘Soft Body’ is an ongoing project to experiment with how a body reacts and deforms when it suddenly becomes boneless, or the rigidness of the bones change, or how we would look if gravity was different,” Pekdemir explains.

A glance over his other works shows that the act of distorting reveals just as much as it hides. The premise of his creations may be fictional, but the results offer the viewer a unique perspective into what is real. When asked how he wants people to react to his work and how he knows when he’s got that reaction, Pekdemir doesn’t have a clear answer. He does have an observation at one way his images have been perceived, though: “When I see my work featured on different websites, I notice the writers often use keywords like isolation, depression, loneliness and amorphous,” he notes.

Surround yourself with inspiration

While Pekdemir draws his ideas from posing himself questions and then answering them visually, he also believes that social environments play a big role in how you act and behave.

When he began at Bilgi University, Pekdemir found inspiration in the company of like-minded people, but he also thinks that the place where you live plays a role in the way you think. Born and bred in Istanbul, he feels that the rapidly changing capital is inductive to complex thought. “Social environments surely change people’s ways of thinking; their approach to handling problems and creating solutions,” he says. “Istanbul is a chaotic, crowded city and the centre of migration in Turkey… It’s home to over 13.5 million people and ranks as one of the largest cities in the world. You have to deal with traffic, catch buses, be at work and work harder to make a living here. This affects the way a person thinks and gives him or her a more complex point of view, rather than a simple one. You may lose your ability to think, in clean and simple terms.”

A 3D future

Looking to the future, Pekdemir has plans to overcome the limitations of 3D work in a 2D space, by using a 3D printer to take his images from the digital realm to the physical one. As such, he is planning to print works such as Clash (right) to a life-size scale, to give viewers the ability to walk around it and appreciate it from every angle, rather than stick to the angle that he offers them.

3D printing is achieved when a machine reads a digital design and lays down layers of liquid, powder or sheet material and then builds up from a series of cross sections. Since layers are added, printers have the potential to create almost any geometric shape – a must-have feature if they are to attempt to re-create Pekdemir’s artworks!

There are also plans to take the dynamic series ‘7 Sculptures’ one step further, as Pekdemir explains: “My future projection is to turn [the series] into an interactive project, where the user can be a part of [the art] by determining the location, time, space and exhibit it as a dynamic holographic sculpture.” For now, though, Pekdemir is focusing on his current work and developing images around his new fascination with cloud and plant forms.

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