Please
you
introduce yourself?
Hi,
my name is Neil Blevins, I am 22 years old, and I am current a student
at
Concordia University in Montreal, studying Design Art.
I
started back in '94 with Pov-Ray, after a lifetime of drawing and
painting, and
other forms of traditional media. I started using 3dstudio and max a
few years
later, and have been hooked ever since.
It
was just a natural extension of what I wanted to do. I wanted to make
very
detailed monsters and scenes, and 3d graphics let me do that easier,
faster,
and with better results than with any other medium.
Lets
start
with "Nightmare2".
Where
did you
get the idea to create this scene?
Reoccurring
Nightmares I had as a child. Originally there was Nightmare 1, and then
I had
an idea for a similar image, so I decided to turn it into a series.
The
main body is just a set of cylinders which have been bent using bend
modifier.
The top of the mouth was made by booleaning spheres together and then
applying
a relax modifier.
I
used RealLensFlares, which you can see quite prominently in the scene.
I find
RLF a very useful tool, because it adds those little extra touches of
realism
and life to an image. A little bit of flash, although I also use it
subtly, so
the flare or glow doesn't become the subject of the piece.
Those
are some more spheres booleaned together. The rock is just a texture I
made
using some nice rock bump and texture maps I made in Photoshop.
Where
did you
get the idea for this scene?
The
inspiration for this image started from "The Odyssey", a made-for-TV
movie that had lots of cool monsters. One was the hydra, which is a
multiple
headed snake of myth. When I saw the hydra, I thought it was cool how
all the
teeth were growing this way and that, they weren't all lined up.
I
used metareyes for the main organic part of the head. I also used
Digital
Forest Max to quickly make the trees in the foreground.
I
used outburst for the water behind the head, since I was testing a new
particle
trail function. It made really nice sheets of water I think.
The
head took the most time, with lots of metaball manipulation. Then I
just kept
adding elements until it looked just right.
How
did you
map the creature? How did you create the maps, what program?
The
maps were created in photoshop, and mixed using a mix material.
One
main light from the front with raytraced shadows, and a few fill lights
from
the top and bottom to add some extra color. As for how I got it
realistic,
that's an impossible to answer question, I just kept tweaking the scene
until I
was happy with it, and that's how it turned out. It's all about
observation and
constant improvements to the scene.
How
about
"ECLIPSE"
Where
did you
get the idea, for the eclipse?
During
a Babylon 5 episode ("Falling Towards Apotheosis"), I was watching
this wonderful segment with a giant ship eclipsing a sun. Since I had
just
recently bought a new lens flare package (RealLensFlare), I thought
something
similar might be a good test of the program's abilities.
It's
just a variation on a cylinder, with a bend modifier. The windows are a
simple
self illuminated material.
How much did it take you to render the scene? The little parts in the background there is so much of them.
It
didn't take all that long, there are lots of ships, but each ship is
just a
copy of each other (I did this using particle cloud). The scene
probably only takes
about 15 minutes to render on my P100.
How did you create the light in the back ? (THE ECLIPSE)
Using
RLF. This was one of the few scenes where the focus is the lenseflare
itself.
No,
I have never used Genesis. Really the only plugin I used was RLF, and
particle
cloud to copy the ship into a whole fleet of ships.
None.
What
are your
plans for the future?
Working
in California for a few years in the studios, and eventually going
freelance
full-time doing CD covers, books, posters, etc of my own evil beasts.
Thanks for the interview Neil. Lukas