Editorial
Welcome to Issue 50 – the big 5-0! I hope you love the front cover artwork as much as we do – that would be the talents of Andrew Hickinbottom shining through in his latest character illustration, Hoteru no aoi. We’re really pleased to be able to feature this image in our October gallery, so hop on over to p.16 to see more great artwork from this month’s featured artists, before getting yourselves stuck into our latest offerings…

First up, we have a very special interview with Blur character modeling supervisor, Sze Jones (p.8). Having worked on characters such as Aeon Flux, BloodRayne and Lara Croft, Sze has a portfolio that is guaranteed to impress, and not only do we have all those fine examples of character models that she is so well-known for, but we also proudly feature some of her recent sketches, too – so there’s plenty to get your teeth into, people! So that’s the gentle stuff covered; we’ve checked out the gallery and got our fill of inspiration from industry professional, Sze Jones. Now onto something a little more taxing: tutorials, tutorials, tutorials!

Those of you who’ve been following Richard Tilbury will want to check out the final chapter in the Custom Textures tutorial series (p.56) – remember we gave away a rather generous set of Total Textures for free to accompany the first chapter of this series (August 2009 Issue), so if you want to play catch up you can pick up the back issues here: www.3dcreativemag.3dtotal.com/issues.htm

Our Next-Gen Character is progressing rather nicely this month as we welcome back Joseph Harford, Gavin Goulden, James Busby and John Hayes to tackle the mapping and unwrapping chapter for 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave, and modo (p.82). Next month: normal mapping and texturing, so stick around!

For all those ZBrushers out there, we have Federico Scarbini with us to take us through his response to the brief, “Insect-Man”. Federico leaves no stone unturned in his research of the subject for the latest in our Manimal tutorial series, and the results are really quite something: great design, detail, with beautifully atmospheric lighting and rendering to set the whole thing off (p.42)!

So that leaves our Photoshop for 3D series – one of my favorites this month! Richard Tilbury takes one of his latest renders of a destroyed and damaged bunker scene, and shows us how to utilize Photoshop to great effect, dabbling with the Curves, Levels, Color Balance Image Adjustments, as well as Layer Styles and the Photo Filter (p.28).

To wrap up this issue we have the making of Neo-Renaissance Girl by Zoltan Miklosi, which was created using the freeware, Blender, along with Photoshop (p.66). This is just one in a set of stunning character illustrations that Zoltan has rendered lately using Blender, and we’re sure we’ll be seeing plenty more from him in the future, too.

Don’t forget we also have a free chapter for you from our recently released Digital Art Masters: Volume 4 book over on p.73, where Rudolf Herczog talks us through the creation of his popular scene, Fluid X.

Next month: we interview Alex Alvarez! Don’t miss out, subscribe now and stay tuned to 3DCreative; we’re working hard to bring you some great new series’ in 2010, and we can’t do it without your support, so happy reading, and we hope to see you all again here next month!