He’s done work for Saatchi & Saatchi, that most prestigious and tony of advertising firms. He’s done work for Activision, a video game company that seems to make one out of every three titles that gamers play. And he’s done work for T3, the world’s preeminent gadget magazine, which is published in 22 international editions.

 

Indeed, to say that Adam Benton is a “successful” 3D illustrator would be an understatement. The Northamptonshire, UK resident is at the top of his game as a professional artist, and we’re thrilled that we were able to cajole him into making the four Apple fauxtotypes featured in Mac|Life magazine and on maclife.com. (Words of wisdom to budding illustrators: Editorial assignments don’t pay jack compared to “commercial” work!)

 

You can see Adam’s full portfolio at www.kromekat.co.uk, but for now please check out what he had to tell us about the finer points of 3D illustration, and what one needs – both talent-wise and resource-wise – to be a success.

 

> Choosing the Best Software & Hardware
> Mastering the Art Itself
> Becoming a Working Professional
> Five Must-Know Tips for Beginners

 

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Choosing the Best Software & Hardware…

 

“Here I use warm and cool color opposition to create a sense of depth and interior/exterior,” Adam says. “The blue light cast from the door doesn’t technically cast itself on the lead character in a ‘real’ physical sense because of the angle and distance. But for artistic reasons, and light consistency throughout the scene, I added additional blue lighting to the characters far side to echo that of the door.

 

Describe the specific software packages you use, and how they’re employed in various stages of your work flow.
My primary 3D package is Maxon’s Cinema 4D, but I also use Pixologic ZBrush, Eon’s Vue Infinite, and good-old Bryce on occasion. I also use the standard Adobe Creative Suite apps, of course, Photoshop being an absolute must-have for any digital artist.

 

But Cinema – aka C4D -- is the central hub of practically all my illustration work. I model, texture, render and animate (when required) within the diversity of this package. Photoshop is used for additional texture creation, which is then imported into C4D, and once the final renders are complete, I use Photoshop again for final touch-ups, color tweaks and finessing.

 

The other 3D apps are generally used for specialist tasks, and the results are either imported back into C4D for final rendering, or used as 2D renders which are then composited in Photoshop.

 

“It’s important to be aware of the imperfections, aging, grime, and irregularities in surface forms,” Adam says. “This is just as important as recognizing how items are constructed, or how their materials react to light in the real world.”

 

What computer components are most essential to pro-level 3D illustration?

Processor speed is paramount in 3D, because almost everything is processor-intensive, and the faster something can be calculated or rendered -- even as a preview -- the faster you can work without lots of frustrating waiting. Also, many clients don’t factor in the rendering time for print resolution images when it comes to deadlines, so it’s worth having a machine that can crank through that work ASAP.

 

Like with most things, more RAM is always useful too, and will have some impact on overall speed, since it allows more data to exist in RAM than being cached into virtual memory on the hard drive. And, if you have a particularly complex scene or object, too little RAM could prevent the model from even being rendered at large sizes.

 

Videocards play their part when it comes to real-time previewing – that is, during the modeling process, and previewing an animation’s motion in the viewport. The more RAM on the card, the better, and, indeed, batter specs mean that your interaction with the 3D elements will be more fluid and smoother in terms of anti-aliasing.

 

But I have to provide an important caveat. The absolute high-end card available for the current Macs is complete overkill. It’s power goes mostly unused by standard 3D packages, which is why I opted for the basic 7300 nVidia cars at a greatly reduced price.

 

Speaking of which, what is your precise workstation set up? What hardware fuels all this good stuff?

My main workstation is an 8-core Xeon 3GHz MacPro with 5GB of RAM. I’m running two nVidia 7300GT cards, two 500GB internal hard drives, and two optical drives. A pair of 23-inch Apple Cinema displays are attached to all of this, giving me a lot of screen real estate.

 

I use a Wacom Intous 3 A6 wide tablet for all my navigation needs, since I prefer the feel of a pen and tablet to a traditional mouse setup. And I also suffer less RSI because of it! I also have a MacBookPro 2.16GHz and a G5 dual 2.5GHz, which are useful for additional rendering requirements.

 

Finally, I have a couple of external HDs for backing up everything, which is essential when your living depends on your data remaining safe.

 

 

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Mastering the Art Itself…

 

 

This sequence illustrates the development of a rubber-gloved hand created for a West End musical show poster. The first screen shows one of the most basic cubic stages. Screen two displays a more detailed mesh, and the final screen shows the finished product.

 

What are the most difficult physical elements to model?

When you first start out with 3D modeling – like with drawing – most things, whether they’re organic or engineered, seem insanely difficult to replicate. But with experience, the process involved in modeling, say, a cutting-edge phone is barely different to that of a human hand. It’s all about simplifying the reference object in your mind, and trying to reduce it to its most basic structure.

 

With a human hand for example, at it’s most basic form, it could be a single, flattened cube for the main part, and five groups of three small cuboids for the fingers. Once the initial form factor is correct, it’s all about refining the shapes. That said, with a hand – or face, or any other familiar feature – if you get it wrong, it’s very obvious to almost everybody, since we al’ know what these things look like, and we have an innately keen eye for such errors.

 

With an engineered object, it’s all about clean lines, and knowing where best to make cuts in its polygonal form to define its form realistically. But either way, the most essential tool in 3D modeling is your ability to look at the physical world, and interpret what you see.

 

“The choice of colors of this scene was inspired by how the orange of a low sunlit object looks against that of a stormy sky in nature,” Adam says. “This creates pure color opposition, making the foreground character really stand out, as well as imparting a sense of menace and foreboding. Lighting was added to the character purely for artistic effect, rather than for physical light simulation.”

 

Does your work require any special artistic knowledge of shading, highlighting, industrial mechanics, that sort of thing?

I’m positive that my background in traditional painting plays an important part in my current digital work. However, this has far less to do with any actual techniques than it does about simple observation skills. The ability to really see how something is constructed, how light falls upon it, how the environment it’s within affects it’s colors… All this is far more beneficial in achieving a good finished result.

 

For product related imagery, a knowledge of studio photography might be of benefit, since you’re ultimately trying to create the illusion of reality, and most ‘real’ items of this nature are photographed using a classic lighting and reflector setup, which is easily translated into 3D.

 

3D software is capable of millions of real-world physical calculations in seconds, but it cannot make creative, visual decisions. It remains a tool – or box of tools – like any other set of artists materials, but without the artist to drive it, it’s just code! We all marvel at the incredible work created by the likes of ILM in many blockbuster movies, and it’s fair to say that they do have some of the most cutting-edge 3D tools available today, along with a lot we all have on our own desktops. But it’s not those tools that do the work. It’s the immensely talented teams of artists who use the tools.

 

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Becoming a Working Professional…

 

 

When modeling real-world objects, pay special attention to fine details, such as the patina on an old antique. These are the nuanced flairs of artistry that separate great illustrators from the rest of the pack.

 

How did you get your start?

I have no formal training with computers or 3D, but I did study art and design, followed by illustration, after leaving school. The first Macintoshes were already out, but there was no real indication of where they might go in the future. So I started out with paints, brushes and airbrushes – and then went on a decade-long diversion into music production!

 

Anyhow, in ’95 I bought a PowerMac 7200 for music, but also discovered Photoshop, etcetera, and started to rekindle my love of the visual world. I quickly realized that my real strength was as a visual artist, and got a job with a publishing company as a designer/illustrator. They employed me for my traditional painting skills primarily, with my knowledge of the Mac being a bonus. But I created most of my illustrations digitally using Photoshop and Painter.

 

A colleague introduced me to Bryce and Poser, and I saw a whole new avenue of possibility opening up. After a year with the company, I realized that I was not a company man, and needed to get on and begin doing what I should have been doing when I first left college -- go freelance! I bought a G4 400 and a 21-inch CRT at the end of ‘99, started out officially on my own in January 2000, and have never looked back.

 

What separates top-notch 3D illustrators from “merely OK” ones?

That’s a tough question! Generally, the better illustrators are the ones getting paid and published, although there are plenty of talented artists out there who find it hard to get a first break.

 

Artistic skills speak for themselves. Potential clients can either see that you have it, or you don’t, from your finished output alone. But I also believe that your success as an illustrator is determined by how well you listen to clients, work with their ideas, and are able to adapt and perfect a project without getting egotistical or too precious about your work. It’s not always an easy path, though. Remaining professional and sticking within, or close, to the deadlines -- as much as possible! -- is also very important for how you’re perceived.

 

Are there public resources where artists can find common figures and objects – in effect, models that can be reverse-engineered, to be used as learning tools, or customized, in order to save time when doing common models like people and cars?

There are a number of 3D asset resources online, many of them free, and many for reasonable prices. Beginning 3D artists can start out by downloading somebody else’s models, and experimenting with lighting, composition, etcetera, until they gain enough experience to create their own.

 

Also, many experienced illustrators will purchase a high-quality existing model and adapt that to a clients need’s if there’s not enough time to start from scratch, or if this approach would simply be more cost-effective, allowing more time to concentrate on actual texturing, lighting and rendering. Now, with conceptual modeling this is obviously impossible, but it’s amazing how quickly you build up your own library of assets, and can re-use, adapt, or simply reference a technique that you used previously to save some time on a new project.

 

He may not have been paid for all the time he spent reimagining the Star Wars universe, but Adam Benton says working on a Star Wars “fan film” was one of his most interesting experiences as a 3D artist.

 

Most interesting job you ever worked on?

I would say that on a scale and diversity perspective, it would be the huge body of work – unpaid! -- I produced for a couple of Star Wars fan films. “Revelations” took three years in my quote-unquote spare time, and included designing original ships based on classic Star Wars design motifs, as well as modeling and animating a number of scenes and sequences for the final film.

 

I learned so much about CG film production, and also produced matte paintings and composites for final output, all by purely throwing myself in at the deep end. The finished result was downloaded some three million times in the few months after it’s release alone.

 

I then went on to work on another film, “Pitching Lucas,” with the same team. We submitted to the Atom Film Awards in 2006, and won both the Audience Choice award, and, the ultimate accolade for any Star Wars fans, the George Lucas Selects award. All this, plus we had our film playing proudly on StarWars.com.

 

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Five Must-Know Tips for Beginners…

 

> Observe the real world -- a lot. Absorb how things look all around you. I can’t switch this habit off! I am constantly interpreting objects, and how they would be recreated in 3D.

 

> When you start out, avoid software rendering assets like global illumination, radiosity, etcetera. They use physics to calculate how light is bounced and reflected around objects and scenes, but you should learn how to fake those effects yourself using basic lights at low intensities and colors. This will not only help you understand how objects interact with environments in reality, but will make you more in control of your image’s lighting creatively, which can make fundamental differences.

 

> Start with simple primitive shapes like cubes, etcetera, and try out all the different modeling tools like extrusions, bevels, scaling, rotation, as well as move tools, knife and selection tools. A short time experimenting to see how these all work will pay off when it comes to creating something for real.

 

> Get used to moving around your object a lot, and constantly alter you viewpoint to gain a fuller perception of its overall shape. Just like a painter steps back from his canvas, or a sculptor moves around her clay form, a 3D artist needs to be constantly re-appraising his own model.

 

> Take regular breaks away from the screen! Like with above tip, getting some perspective away from your creation is essential for both the object you’re modeling, as well as for the health of your eyes.