Editorial
Welcome to the 47th issue of 3DCreative – a magazine that we should probably rename “3DTutorials”, as we have some great plans for tutorials for the upcoming issues! We kick things off this month with not one, but two brand new tutorial series for you – alongside the second in our new Manimal Character Creation Series.

So what’s new? Well, our biggest new project to get your teeth stuck into is our Next Gen Character Creation Series, in which we have some great talents in the forms of Joseph Harford, James Busby, Gavin Goulden and John Hayes writing for you a six-part series on how to create a next gen character in 3ds Max (Joe), LightWave (James), Maya (Gavin) and last but not least, modo (John) (p.83). The first chapter in the series is all about the low-res base mesh, which our artists knock up using ZSpheres in ZBrush and then proceed into the various software packages to clean it up in preparation for part two of the series: the high-res sculpt! We’re looking forward to seeing how this tutorial goes down over the next six months – we’ve already seen the final results and it really is worth signing yourself up for a subscription to make sure you don’t miss out and get each instalment when it’s hot off the electronic press!

Our second new series for you all is – and no, we’re not crazy – a Photoshop tutorial series! Photoshop, I hear you ask?! Well, we can’t deny that Photoshop is a valuable tool in 3D when it comes to post-production of your renders, and the results we’ve witnessed over the years from artists who utilise Photoshop to give their renders that extra bite have helped confirm that what we’re missing in 3DCreative is a series on Photoshop for 3D. So here we go: part one of our new series looks as how the most common render passes can be used in Photoshop, and we have non-other that post-production pro Zoltan Korcsok back to teach us all he knows (p.40). Stay tuned for part two next month when Richard Tilbury will be taking us through retouching your final renders – another great reason to stay with 3DCreative!
Jesse Sandifer is back with us again this month to talk us through how to create a Mammal-Man in ZBrush, in the second instalment of our Manimal Character Creation Series. Jesse has gone for a surprised deer-type creature crossed with a guy, with great emotion and expression, and he also teaches us a neat trick of how to paint our textures in ZBrush to achieve some pretty cool results (p.50).

In this month’s interviews we catch up with two artists that we’ve got to know through the creation of our recent book project, Digital Art Masters: Volume 4 – we thought it’d be great opportunity to learn more about them and show off their stunning portfolios in all their glory! Our first interview is with CG all-rounder, Weiye Yin, who never fails to impress us with his latest works – be they of the 2D or 3D genre. Weiye has a fantastically diverse portfolio that is well worth checking out on p.6. Second up we catch up with senior artist, Tomáš Král, who rather modestly only sent in just a few of his stunning 3D renders for this interview. We knew he had more to show off than that, so check out p.16 for a visual treat as you step into the mysterious mind of this talented 3D artist.

To wrap this issue up we have two great making of articles by Andrew Averkin (p.60) and George Krallis (p.72). We’ve also had a play and got our first moving image featured in Andrew’s making of feature, so prepare to be hypnotised by the seduction of things in motion! Last but not least, we’ve got our usual great selection of 3D images in the Gallery section – this month we feature the latest work from Michal Kwolek and Rudolf Herczog to name just two. So enjoy July’s offerings, we’ll be back with more next month! Ed