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Make An Impressive Space Rover With Spherical Wheels in Maya

Space invider © Yuri Kozhevnikov Hum3D Space Rover 3D Competition announced the winners in early June, and we are glad to see lots of creative space rovers created by talented artists all over the world. Fox Renderfarm, your TPN-Accredited cloud rendering service provider, is honored to interview the third-place winner Yuri Kozhevnikov, whose artwork Space Invider was appreciated by the judges because of the fantastic atmosphere and the great design of the space rover. Details Here’s the interview between Yuri Kozhevnikov and Fox Renderfarm, and he talked about the making of this artwork, including how he made his Space Invider by using Maya, Blender, Substance Painter, Quixel Mixer and Photoshop. - Yuri Kozhevnikov - CG Artist & Senior 2D Artist at Wargaming - From: Russia - ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/yura Fox Renderfarm: Hi, Yuri! Could you give us a brief introduction about yourself? Yuri: Hi, My name is Yuri Kozhevnikov. I am 32 years old. I was born in the old small town in the north of Russia under the name Kargopol. At the moment I live with my wife Maria and a dog named Schnapps in St. Petersburg. I work as a senior 2D artist at Wargaming. Yuri’s battleships artworks for Wargaming Fox Renderfarm: How do you feel about winning third place in the Space Rover Challenge? Yuri: I was very happy to participate in this competition, even more, I'm glad that I was able to win a prize in the place. By profession, I am not a 3D modeler and therefore I am very flattered that I managed to take 3rd place in the 3D competition. Fox Renderfarm: What inspired you to come out with the idea of making the work Space Invider? Yuri: Nothing unusual, inspired by ArtStation and the works of other artists. I came up with the idea of round wheels from the references listed below. References Fox Renderfarm: How long did you take to finish the work? Yuri: It took a little more than a month to work. Modeling UV mapping texturing Fox Renderfarm: We are all attracted by the unusual sphere wheels you designed, could you tell us how you designed such a space rover? Yuri: The principle of the action of such a mechanism was immediately born in my head. In fact, it is an ordinary electric motor. The spherical wheel is a rotor. Magnetic locks on the wing is a stator. Between them is a magnetic field, that's all. The rotation of the wheel in any axis gives tremendous freedom in movement and maneuverability. Fox Renderfarm: The fantastic colors and lighting create a mysterious environment on an alien planet, could you tell us how you set the lighting and color? Yuri: The reference was a frame from the movie Avengers: Infinity War. There was such a planet, where the stone of the soul was stored. Lighting is very simple, an HDRI card (NoEmotion), one directional light and a little fog. I slightly changed the HDR map in Photoshop, added a planet with rings and a characteristic solar disk. In the blender, a purple hue was added through the color correction node. Then I made two renderings: normal and with a purple tint. The most simple processing in Photoshop. Compound 2 renders, select the rover by mask, and overlay several textures with particles. Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties when creating this work? And how did you solve it? Yuri: There were minor difficulties, but they are also an interesting experience - this is the study of new software. I first worked in a blender, did visualization on the Eevee engine. Test renders Fox Renderfarm: Could you briefly tell us your educational and work experience along your CG journey? Yuri: I studied everything on my own. I started about 10 years ago with Photoshop and photo manipulations. At the same time I tried in 3D, but quickly rejected this idea. Probably because I decided to study 3D with Maya. Not the easiest software for a beginner. For a long time, I was a graphic designer. I painted logos in CorelDRAW. Gradually, about 6 years ago, I began to include 3D in my pipeline. My first 3D program in which I could do something sane Cinema 4D. But in the end, I still mastered Maya. This is my main modeling software. Fox Renderfarm: What do you do to enhance your professional skills? Yuri: Workout. Just like in sports you need to train and then your skills will improve. Naturally, you need to train not only "familiar movements" but also learn new ones. On personal projects and with participation in contests, you can include new software in your workflow, learn new techniques and much more - this is my training. New York © Yuri Kozhevnikov Kalitinka © Yuri Kozhevnikov

How to Create an Epic Leviathan Rover in Maya and ZBrush

Hum3D’s Space Rover 3D Competition, sponsored by the TPN-Accredited render farm, Fox Renderfarm, attracted 98 artists to take part in the competition. Among them, the artwork Leviathan Rover created by Malchus Akash, an aspiring concept artist /3D artist from Malaysia, won the Special Prize for the “Best texturing”. It is overall a solid work! We can feel the attention to details at every step of the creation process. The texturing work just feels right and really helps add life and credibility to the overall scene. Special mention to the composition and lighting which are just perfect. Here’s the exclusive interview between Malchus Akash and Fox Renderfarm, in which he talked about the inspiration and creating process of this excellent artwork. Leviathan Rover © Malchus Akash Fox Renderfarm: Hi, Malchus! Thank you so much for accepting our interview! Could you give us a brief introduction about yourself? Malchus: Thanks for the opportunity to have this little interview. My name is Malchus from Malaysia, an aspiring concept artist /3D artist. Recovering anxiety disorder artist so to say. I have been doing this for the last 8 years. Fox Renderfarm: Congratulations on winning the Special Prize in the Space Rover Challenge, how do you feel about that? Malchus: I feel very pleased about winning anything to be frank haha. On a serious note I am very thankful to have been given the chance to be noticed for the work. Fox Renderfarm: What’s the inspiration behind your artwork “Leviathan Rover”? Malchus: The inspiration behind this piece came from Dune, big truck like vehicles just because everything always is a lot more epic when it's bigger and Mars inspired movies. Raw Image from Maya © Malchus Akash Fox Renderfarm: How long did you take to finish the work? Malchus: I'd say it took about a month in total time not including the breaks in between. Fox Renderfarm: Featuring characters by lighting enhances the power of the image in storytelling. Could you tell us how you designed the lighting? Malchus: Cinematic lighting always gives a lot more depth to images. Even though I might have liked to push a bit more on the dark and light. I wanted to have a sunset-like feel to the overall image to give the sense that the occupants were looking for a place to set up base. ©Malchus Akash Fox Renderfarm: The amazing work has great composition. How did you make it? Any references? Malchus: The composition I'd say came from many many references which would make it hard to pinpoint. I tried to follow the rule of thirds mainly to get an overall shot of the rover.Tilting it ever so slightly from left bottom to top right to give that sense of progression to not over do it just a subtle change from a flat plane. ©Malchus Akash Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties when creating this work? And how did you solve it? Malchus: I think the biggest difficulty was the ground which I still am figuring out the best method to do. I did end up using for this piece multiple meshes with mixed textures to solve it but I'd say if it were to be a close up shot it might not have the clarity of it. As it was the first piece using few softwares it was just brain consuming at times to learn up all which just took a bit of time to just get through it. ©Malchus Akash Fox Renderfarm: Could you briefly tell us your educational and work experience along your CG journey? Malchus: I went to Australia and studied at QUT for a bachelor of fine arts in animation, though I can't animate to save my life haha. My work experience is a bit odd. Well with having anxiety disorder after I finished university was a big challenge at times still is. I did have a few stints in Australia and coming back to Malaysia but due to my issue it was difficult.I had to do freelance because I used to have attacks which caused me to not be able to go to work the next day. So currently I continue doing freelance. Fox Renderfarm: Do you have any recommendable learning methods to improve professional skills? Malchus: YouTube, I'd say, you want it, YouTube it and you spend the time learning it and adapting to what you want to do. That's mainly how I learnt it because the skills are all technical based which in today's environment has given us an amazing amount of resources to learn from free and paid. Fox Renderfarm: Anything else you would like to share with CG enthusiasts? Malchus: CG is not all fun and games.It does take sheer will and mental capacity to learn the many softwares, techniques and skills to produce these images. Coming from my gym mentality no pain no gain comes into this extremely. But if you're willing to put in the time and continuously work at it , the final images you produce always gives you a sense of accomplishment, joy, amazement at times thinking how you even came out to it and even peace when it's what you wanted or sometimes happy accidents. Finally I'd like to say if you want to do this know if you want to do this professionally or as a hobby set that first.

Creating a Realistic Moon Environment in 3ds Max and V-Ray

Hum3D’s Space Rover 3D Competition, sponsored by the TPN-Accredited render farm, Fox Renderfarm, attracted 98 artists to take part in the competition. Among them, Space Walk created by Patryk Urbaniak stood out and won 1st place in the challenge because of its great composition and fantastic photo-realistic render. Patryk Urbaniak is a Lead Lookdev Artist at Method Studios Montreal. Some of the movies he worked on include Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Deadpool 2, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and many more. Generalist background helps him to tackle 3D scenes from a simple concept to a finished product. Here’s the interview between Patryk Urbaniak and Fox Renderfarm, in which we can find out how he created this wonderful piece. Clay Render © Patryk Urbaniak Space Walk © Patryk Urbaniak Fox Renderfarm: Congratulations on winning 1st place in the Space Rover Challenge, how do you feel about it? Patryk: Thank you so much for your kind words. It truly feels amazing. I remember waking up, going through my emails when I read what Hum3D wrote to me and I was just speechless for a good few minutes. I really couldn't believe it as there were so many good submissions. Fox Renderfarm: What’s the idea behind your artwork 'Space Walk'? Patryk: I had an idea to do a render of a realistic moon environment and then put it into an image, behind the camera I would render a film studio and I would place the astronaut on some wires and cover everything in green screens. After some trial and error with the frame composition I found out that the image is losing a lot of impact and I couldn't properly place it in strong composition points. This time I had to revert back to the first idea I had and that was just an image of a rover on the moon surface. Fox Renderfarm: How long did you take to finish the work? Patryk: It took close to a month to create my work. I was able to put around 3-4 hours each day after work and a few weekends. Fox Renderfarm: The piece is extremely photo-realistic which received loads of praise from the jury. How did you make the render? Patryk: Thank you. I rendered everything in V-Ray and I have to say that this renderer is super intuitive. The realism is super easy to achieve when you just use the proper ranges of a PBR workflow. Right now a modern renderer does a lot for you and you can just iterate your work with such effectiveness that you are able to compare your renders to the reference much frequently. Fox Renderfarm: The lighting is capturing the Moon feel really well, such as the harsh sunlight and shadows. How did you make it? Patryk: The lighting was quite challenging because you mainly have to create a very interesting piece only with one light (I used a few additional rim lights to slightly detach the objects from the ground). What I did is I animated the sun going from left to right, and from top to bottom on a 200x200 preview. I was able to judge the shadows of each render and see exactly how much we can see and how much goes away. I picked the best scenario for my idea and I just added a few small lights here and there. But again, just because it was super fast to iterate the light, I was able to hit a few different approaches. In terms of the shadows, you might think I'm crazy but I just started to decrease the diffuse bounces. The less bounces or GI I had the more realistic it was looking. While there is no atmosphere at the moon it was easier to match the references with less bounces and I guess about 0.2x the GI. Fox Renderfarm: There are many nice details of the models and materials. Any references? Patryk: A lot of materials are fully procedural based on seamless textures and triplanars. The ground for example is a composition of 8 noises and one footprint texture with one mud texture that I created. In terms of the references I had an opportunity to visit a Boeing Factory in Seattle in order to look at a lot of space equipment that took us to the Moon so I took some pictures but in general the Internet is full with super quality images on that topic. Fox Renderfarm: Did you encounter any difficulties when creating the work? And how did you solve it? Patryk: I faced many difficulties. Let me start by saying that the whole scene was rendered on V-Ray GPU and I’m working on a 2015 laptop. Like said above, the ground itself was done procedurally by using a blend of certain nodes and 2 seamless textures. The displacement being set to the satisfying quality took almost 80% of my VRAM so it was hard for me to create an illusion of the horizon being far away from us but after some optimization, I was able to free some space for the rover itself! Fox Renderfarm: Could you briefly tell us your educational and work experience along your CG journey? Patryk: I don't have any graphic designer education or an art degree but I was attending a film school for 2 years and it gave me a good understanding of camera work or light. As for my experience I started in a small company as a 3d artist and I had no idea what I was doing at that time. After 4 years I joined the biggest studio in Poland, Platige Image and in 2017 I moved to Canada to work on slightly bigger productions. I have to say that I was incredibly lucky with the people I have met and friends I still have today. Being an artist is like running a marathon. It takes time and perseverance but it leads you to a whole new level of understanding the world through an observation. Fox Renderfarm: How do you enhance your professional skills? Patryk: I think I just stay with problems longer. Whenever there is an issue I always dig for days until I figure it out. I read the documentation of the tool as well as "help". It gives me a little bit more information about the broad usage of a software. And then I just give myself a task each week and I try to complete it. I fail most of the time and then after a few more tasks I learn how to do it properly. Fox Renderfarm: Anything else you would like to share with CG enthusiasts? Patryk: I would like to thank you each and one of you guys! Everyday I go to your website and it motivates me so much for the day that I can't even describe it. It is a great feeling that all of us can learn from each other and be an inspiration. Thank you so much for having me and I wish you all the best. ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/gothamneedsme