I am an artist specialising in computer generated 3D images for games, film, print and TV.
This portfolio features some quick shots to showcase my FX work. All the work in these videos is solo work – 3D modelling, texturing, simulation, animation, rendering and compositing.
Beats Headphones: Photo-Realistic
Brief: Create a completely photo-realistic pair of Beats Audio headphones for use in an animated sequence.
Challenges: The model and textures had to be ready in under 24 hours. Creating the base model was straightforward, and creating materials for the hard-body surfaces (metal and plastic) was easy enough. Creating a believable faux leather material for padding on the ear-cups required sculpting several fine layers of undulations and stitching on the surface, which were then rendered out as displacement maps. The effect of this coupled with a fine bump map for the leathery surface and a wider spread on the specular component provided the subliminal feeling that the surface was of a softer material.
Apartment – Architectural Visualisation
Scene modelled and textured in Blender, lit and rendered in Unreal Engine.
Challenges: To create a photorealistic environment showcasing the design for the small loft apartment, lit for both day and night, with specified furinture made to precise scale.
Game Assets: High detail, small size
Brief: Create 3D buildings plus a cathedral and galleon for a game set on a fictional 18th century Caribbean island. The style is realistic, but painterly.
Challenges: As the final destination for the assets was a game requiring high quality and high frame rates during real-time rendering, the object was to create high detail whilst keeping both polygon counts and textures sizes as low as possible. To achieve lower poly-count, I spent a lot of effort keeping the geometry efficient, removing unnecessary density, whilst keeping clean quads. This extra effort also helped generate better LOD (Level-of-detail) proxies within the game engine. To make the textures as small as possible I spent time optimising the UV maps so that no texture space was wasted.
The models were created in Blender, with textures created in Adobe Photoshop and Substance Painter.
Independent Film: Using every trick in the book…
The brief: Create digital assets and visual effects shots in a consistent, visually distinctive style.
Character Modelling and Rendering:
Due to the low-budget nature of the production, rendering had to be greatly optimised. Animated characters were kept as low-poly as possible to accommodate the animators, using larger displacement maps to generate the detail at render time.
The entire 1hr 35minute film was shot on green-screen, with the live-action actors composited into digital environments. A major problem was in matching studio lit footage with photo-real digital environments. I solved this problem by a stylistic suggestion to the producer to not render photo-realistic, but instead rendering the scenery using a simple raytrace pass, then faking global illumination rendering with an ambient occlusion pass, which was composited on top. The live action footage was then colour corrected to match the computer generated environment. This gave a less realistic, but overall more pleasing and integrated result, whilst also being much quicker and less expensive to render.
Matte Painting Samples – Cinema 4D & Photoshop.
More of my art and design work from the film:
For more examples and breakdowns of my work, please take a look at the following video.
As well as the aforementioned software, I am also very capable using Adobe Creative Suite, Houdini and 3DS Max. I have reasonable understanding of Python, C++, Unreal blueprints and C# for simple scripting, debugging and custom fixes. I am also fully conversant with shotgun, Git, Subversion, AWS and Google Cloud.
Will Carter 