What is Compositing? Compositing is a step after rendering in the CG production workflow. The process serves to assemble all the different render passes and layers produced by the lighting deptarment. They are the 3D artists who finalize the look of every shot in a film. It takes a tremendous amount of people to do this step on a feature film. Is is also often associated with the lighting process, because they are closely interlinked […]
Lighting a Scene in Film Lighting a scene for film may seem straightforward, but it’s an art on it’s own. It’s the art of the director of photography and lighting artists. Lighting a scene in 3D is surprisingly similar to this. In the digital world, the concepts of traditional photography still apply, but with even more control. It uses the same skills, lighting theory and techniques to manipulate light, shadows and color to effectively convey […]
Studying in 3D Animation Happy March Break Everyone! It’s that time of year again!! Where nature starts shedding it’s coat of white, as winter turns into spring. The groundhog has decided it’s fate on February 2nd and school’s out for students who get a week-long break before the end of the semester. Are you taking a vacation or rather having a lecture week? Maybe it’s time to catch up on your hobbies… like 3D computer […]
Base Material Properties A 3D material is a collection of attributes that aim to simulate the visual ‘physical properties’ of real-world or imaginary objects. Each attribute determines how the light bounces off a surface for a specific method for reflecting light (diffuse, specular, reflection, sss). Any attribute can be colored, parametrized, textured or painted in 2D or 3D, inside or outside the shading software. Understanding how material attributes function are important for the texture artists […]
What is Rigging? In terms of CG productions, rigging is the process of creating controllers to deform a 3D object or CG character. Not unlike rigging in nautical terms, it creates ‘virtual strings’ that allow the animators to control the shape of its target with precision. Facial animation use sliders and customized UI to create a mix between different pre-planned shapes, and freely controlled animations. Oftentimes, every kind of controller and rigging system can be […]
Texture Artists Texture artists are the digital painters of the virtual world. They are used in everything from 3D animation films, TV series, visual effect sequences in live-action movies, commercials and video games. They responsible for creating the overall colored look for 3D models, based on designs made by the ‘2D concept art’ department in pre-production. 3D models are a flat grey or uniform color, if any, when coming out of the modeling departments. They […]