[3DA#31 cover facsimile] 3D Artist #31 Online Supplement

3D Artist magazine issue #31 Online Supplement
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Cover Story The cover image is by Kreg Branden of Meme-X. He writes that it was done with Kinetix 3D Studio Max r2 for modeling and scanline rendering, and for cartoon rendering, Digimation's new plug-in, The Incredible Comicshop, created by Meme-X. The 3D characters are tugging on the 2D character's cape, a comment about the limitations of using 3D to do 2D cartoons. Eventually he'll break free and escape on his own.
___ This character, Super Max, was built as a spline cage. He was posed by creating a hierarchical box structure to use as bones, and linking the splines using Linked Xform modifiers. This allowed for exact control over areas such as the shoulders, elbows, and legs, where sharp edges needed to be maintained. Once the pose was in place, Digimation Surface Tools [see page 26] was used to convert the spline cage to a patch surface. An Edit Mesh modifier was added to the top of the stack, followed by UVW modifiers. Then the stack was collapsed, resulting in a polygonal object with proper material IDs and UV information.
___ With the 2D cartoon version in place, the original character file was merged to build the 3D "realistic" version, followed by the wireframe. With all of the characters in the scene, the cartoon cape was built with Surface Tools so that it conformed to the various characters. Finally, walls were added, then lights.
___ The original plan was to use just Comicshop, as it can render standard Max materials. However, the wireframe character (the original spline cage) made this impossible. My first approach was to have its surface be transparent so that only the ink would render, achieving a wireframe look. And it looked great, but ink doesn't cast shadows, which I wanted. Since Comicshop doesn't recognize standard wireframe materials, both renderers were used and the resulting images composited in Adobe Photoshop.

Kreg Branden is an animator/modeler who got into 3D starting with Impulse Imagine on an Amiga 1000. He is a cofounder of Meme-X, which has created plug-ins published by other companies for 3DS Max and LightWave 3D. You can reach him at <memex@teleport.com> or visit http://www.teleport.com/~memex. See his article on page 18 about the technology of 3D for 2D.
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Table of Contents & Supplementary Info

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Page
 Title
 Author
 Description
3D Artist Reports
6 StudioPro 2.1.1 John B. Crane Review on PowerMac. This 3D app is also coming very soon for Windows 95/NT.
10 SurfaceSuite Robert Undi First look and some tips for this 3DS Max r2 plug-in. (The product reported as SurfaceSuite Lite is actually named SurfaceSuite Classic.)
12 EI Plug-Ins John B. Crane Review of ZaxWerks EPS Invigorator and Northern Lights 3D Artifex 3 plug-ins for EIAS/EIB.
22 Bryce 3D Alex Kiriako First look
22 World Construction Set 3 Christian Gahre First look
23 World Builder 2 Alex Kiriako First look
24 3D Studio Max r2 Alex Kiriako Review with some important notes for new users
24 3D Speed Alex Kiriako & Paul Kakert Report on PCI-based 3D acceleration
25 ScalpelMax Paul Schuyler Review of this 3DS Max r2 plug-in
26 Surface Tools Jaqcues Hennequet Report about how and why one would use patch modeling over 3DS Max r2 NURBS, and how this plug-in assists such work.
[Related Tutorial - 252K download]
27 Organica Gregory Denby Review and some tips [more info]
33 Alpha Update Peter Plantec Some follow-up to the author's "Build Your Own Alpha" series in the preceding two issues.
3D for 2D Toons
16 Cover Story Kreg Branden [jump]
17 3D for 2D Mike Caputo Keynote intro to using 3D applications to get 2D cartoon results.
18 3D Technology for 2D Toons Kreg Branden Explanation about 2D cel shading and inking, and the different approaches taken by programmers. A brief sidebar tells what current software supports toon shading, from just under $200 to well over $20,000.
19 In 'Toon with MH3D Mike Caputo Ways to get started with Toon shading in MH3D and Animation Master.
Landscape
21 Landscape Generations Douglas King Keynote intro to landscape generation software, including a brief history and overview, and a look at some of its uses today. From an author with the no-nonsense viewpoint of site-based entertainment and game development.
22 Bryce 3D Alex Kiriako First look
22 World Construction Set 3 Christian Gahre First look
23 World Builder 2 Alex Kiriako First look
40 After the Falls Christian Gahre How the author put a big particle waterfall and an imperilled boater into a big landscape scene for an animation that starts in World Construction 3, moves to 3D Studio Max r2, and ends up (whew!) in Digital Fusion.
More How-To's!
14 A Vision Realized Phillip Finch The author takes his LW3D Mayan sculpture (see "Easy Eyes" in 3DA#30) a big step, finishing the model and adding texturing and lighting. There's more about creating MetaNURBS, plus tidbits about Morph Gizmo, PointExtender, and Gaffer.
20 Max NURBS Sanford Kennedy A fresh look at this under-appreciated Max r2 feature, shown by creating and animating a stingray. (But you'll need to get the NURBS fix and do the tutorials first, to get to where this intermediate-level how-to starts.)
91K GIF stingray animation
91K GIF animation
32 RAID: Cure for Backup Blues Peter Plantec How to build your own low-cost RAID (redundant array of inexpensive devices) for bulletproof hard drive operations and for recording large animation files.
[more info coming]
Columns
10 Editorial Space Bill Allen Warming Up to a Subject: There's more of the landscape focus in the works for the next issue, along with the architecture focus originally planned for this issue.
12 Taming The Wave David Hopkins Making Movies: Twisted movies, in fact. A detailed tutorial.
Tricks & Tips
8 DV Dirt Cheap Tim Wilson High-quality digital video for less than a 20th of going prices! [more info]
14 Plug-Ins that Complement MetaNURBS Phillip Finch You can make the already powerful LW3D MetaNURBS feature go even further with these two freeware and shareware plug-ins.
22 Getting them DEMs Alex Kiriako OK, so Bryce 3D still doesn't have DEM import. But, if you've got LightWave, 3D Studio, or PolyTrans, then you can get them DEMs into Bryce using its new .3DS and .OBJ file import. [full text]
Departments
35 & 37 Business Card Ads Lots of colorful messages about services and products.
38-39 Classified Ads Employment, schools and training, 3D Swap Meet, and more!
38 Contacts Where to find info about products mentioned in this issue.
Tell 'em you heard about them from 3D Artist!
16 Errata Corrections and updates for previous issues.
16 Cover Story The making of this issue's cover.
16 Masthead Details about 3D Artist magazine.

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Errata & additional info:
p10: Sven-Tech's product reported as SurfaceSuite Lite is actually named SurfaceSuite Classic.
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