Editorial
Hello and welcome to the January issue of 3DCreative! We hope you had a great Christmas and an even better New Year. It’s time for us to begin our New Year’s resolution by continuing to bring you an exciting collection of tutorials and artwork to get your year off to a creative start!

This issue's awesome cover image is the creation of Pedro Conti, who created this character for the short animation One More Beer, which the talented 3D artist talked to us about when we caught up with him for this month’s interview.

Our artists continue with the modeling of vehicles in this month’s chapter of our Beginner’s Guide to Modeling Vehicles series, where they have been using the 2D concept and technical drawings provided, to talk us through a step-by-step guide to turning this information into an accurate and exciting 3D model. We are halfway through the series now and this month we see Renato Gonzalez Aguilante start the texturing process in Maya, whilst Arturo Garcia completes the modeling of his vehicle in 3ds Max.

This month we see the final installment of Andrew Hickinbottom’s Female Character Creation series. In the previous chapters Andrew has covered the modeling, unwrapping and texturing of Olivia, and has also demonstrated lighting the scene and how to build up the background and composition. In the finale chapter of the series Andrew documents the final stages, including cloth simulation, fine-tuning, lighting, shading, rendering and compositing.

Andrew Finch has been guiding us through the creation of an environment built in the games engine UDK. In the last chapter Andrew demonstrated how to finalize the layout of all of our assets within the environment, ready for showing us how to start the draft lighting phase this month. Andrew also demonstrates how to place decals to add a greater level of detail.

ZBrush is an impressive piece of software that can help you to achieve so much. It offers endless possibilities; your imagination is truly the limit! In our ZBrush Quadruped series our talented artists have been given complete freedom to show us how to create the organic forms of their quadrupeds. Demonstrating the boundaries of his imagination this month is Mariano Steiner, who talks us through the creation of his cheeky salamander-inspired quadruped by covering the concept and base mesh through to the detailing and final render.