Who: Adam Benton
What: 3D illustration and Concept Drawings
Why: To breathe life into imaginary forms and worlds in print and onscreen

We couldn’t show you the outer limits of Mac-based creativity without stopping first at the studio of Adam Benton, the UK-based digital artist who’s modeled and rendered numerous Mac|Life’s “fauxtotypes,” including those in last month’s cover story (“What’s Next for Apple?”) and the iCar you see here.

Benton designed a prototype Apple iCar for Mac|Life’s January 2008 cover story, “What Comes Next?”

Benton first used a computer for illustration in 1985, when his tool of the trade was a Mac Classic. Twenty-three years later, he’s graduated to a machine with a wee bit more power: a first-gen 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro with 7GB of RAM, a top-end graphics card, and two 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays. But it was actually in the late ’90s when Benton first combined his interests in industrial design, 3D modeling, and sci-fi. That was when he began his stint as—get this—a greeting card designer.

“It was the best step I could take at the time, as the company was self-contained with all its designers, photography studio, and print floor all under one roof,” Benton says. “I was involved in introducing the first 3D tools, Bryce 3D and Poser 4, into the card studio pipeline, and I started doing as many of the cards as we could with a mixture of the 3D tools and the usual 2D ones, like Photoshop. I was hooked from then on.”

Hooked, indeed. And prodigious too. Benton has done work for such corporatocracies as Visa, MGM, Disney, and Coca-Cola, but it was an independent Star Wars fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, that opened up a world of 3D graphics that he’d never explored before. 

This race car–inspired spaceship is the result of a tutorial Benton wrote for ImagineFX magazine.

“I worked on the production of this 50-minute film for the three years in my ‘spare’ time,” Benton says. “CG for film-motion is quite a different discipline. I designed, modeled, and animated spaceships, and created entire CG environments and digital planet mattes for use with green-screened character footage and fully CG-animated sequences. It was very rewarding, but I could have happily quit, due to the enormous pressure it put on me. I had a second PowerMac G4 rendering short animation sequences for days at a time to get finished, quality shots.”

The film broke new ground by proving it was possible to combine the efforts of dozens of CG artists spread throughout the world, Benton says, and it also went on to win awards and generate enough publicity to garner 3 million downloads in only the first few weeks after its release. (You can download it yourself from panicstruckpro.com/revelations.)

Thus the beginning of snowballing success. After his work on Revelations, Benton went on to work on a second Star Wars fan film that earned kudos from George Lucas himself. And of course his stationary 3D objects are well know to readers of Mac|Life and its sister magazines Maximum PC and T3. Armed with his workhorse Mac Pro and the Maxon Cinema 4D software suite, Benton continues to produce the some of the most sublime 3D illustrations we have ever seen. To browse his portfolio, see www.kromekat.com.