3D The latest tips, insights and news for 3D artists

3D The latest tips, insights and news for 3D artists

The basics of a 3D production pipeline are essential for any student or new artist looking to either start learning the entire production pipeline or focus on one of the steps.This is what your typical project will go through from start to finish.

Steps of the 3D CG pipeline you need to know:

Pre-production:This is the phase where the direction of the project first takes form. Concepts for style, look, sets, characters and much more are determined to help everyone and everything make it through the pipeline.

Modeling: Assets to be used in anything from animations to VFX shots are all modeled from scratch, or adapted from other models, using a variety of techniques to meet project requirements. This phase takes all of the concepts from pre-production and starts bringing them to life. Assets are usually modeled with the style or concepts set forth in the pre-production phase. If you have a sculpting application, like ZBrush or Mudbox, you’ll also be able to digitally sculpt assets or add more detail to your models.

Modelers often start with a completely empty 3D scene and build up the 3D geometry to look like anything from simple props, or environments, to complex characters. A 3D model is made up of a series of points called vertices that are connected to form a mesh. These vertices have all been meticulously placed by a 3D modeler. It’s one of the first and most important steps in the 3D pipeline because it is essentially the creation of the assets that all of the other steps in the 3D pipeline will use.

Painting and Texturing: Your awesome models, or assets, reach the next step where color and textures will take over that gray look, known as a default shader. This step is where you will learn about materials, shaders, textures, maps and all of the ways you can add physical textures and color to your models.

A texture artist will work with what is referred to as a shading material that, when applied to a 3D model, gives the artists the ability to control things like color, reflectivity, shininess, and much more. This way, what was once a 3D model with a solitary color can be transformed into a 3D model that looks a lot more realistic with colors and materials applied.

If someone else is rigging and animating the model, the model might also be getting rigged at the same time you or someone else is texturing it.

Rigging: Your models are ready to move, but how do you get them ready to jump across the screen? Rigging, like all steps of the pipeline, is an important step in making this happen. By creating rigs for your characters and objects that move, you or an animator can control the movement to create life-like or stylized animations.

Before an animator can begin the animation process the computer needs to be told how the 3D models can move. For example, should a 3D model that looks like an arm be able to bend at the elbow like a realistic arm? Or can it be stretched into wacky shapes like a cartoon character’s arm? Setting this up and telling the computer the range of motion for each part of the 3D model is what the rigging process accomplishes. This is done by creating control points on the 3D model that an animator can bend and deform to create the animations. Think of it as the skeleton for the 3D model

Animation: In the animation phase, rigged assets are animated using controls to match the desired shot. A lot goes into creating seamless animations, but this is where you really see everything come together and results you can show others. Using a timeline, an animator will set movement in frames that play back as an animation.

Animation can mean anything from adding motion to a piston for an engine, all the way to creating complex character performances that you see in the latest 3D animated movies. 3D animation is essentially a digital version of 2D animation and uses the same concept of as a flipbook animation. Except instead of creating a new pose on each sheet of paper, 3D animators create poses on a series of still images that are referred to as frames. By creating a series of poses and playing it over a certain amount of frames you can create the illusion of movement. It is an animator’s job to make the 3D characters and objects come to life in a believable way.

Dynamics: Closely tied to the animation step of the pipeline, dynamics allows you to create simulations and real-world forces like a model shattering on impact with the ground. Dynamics lets you save time, instead of hand animating everything, and usually produces better results you can fine tune.

Lighting: As the name might imply, lighting is the step where you can control most of the light elements of your scenes and shots (you may touch lighting in both rendering or even a 2D application like Photoshop after creating the render). Lighting lets you control everything from where the sun is in a shot to how much glow a light might have that’s in the scene. While it sounds easy, and it will be with practice, lighting can add that exact feel you want a shot to portray.

Rendering: Closely coupled with lighting, and sometimes even texturing, is rendering. In the rendering step of the pipeline, you take your scene, or what is seen through the camera you setup, and output files for a variety of uses: your final shot, your animation or a final beauty pass of an asset for your portfolio.

Rendering can take anywhere from a few seconds, to hours or even days depending on the quality of the render, the complexity of the scene, and the computer it is being rendered on.  In order to render a scene you would first want to set up an environment, and tweak the render settings to add shadows, and adjust the quality till you get the desired end result.

These are the major steps of the pipeline and as you keep learning, you’ll discover even more steps like compositing to help you or your team create stunning work.