In your opinion, should LightWave 3D stay separated or become integrated?

Actually I do like it the way it is. Probably because it resembles the way I do work like as a photographer. You get your props and/or models, finish your pre-production and then you go into the studio or on location and shoot your images. But I would ask for something like a make up artist or stylist in layout. One should be able to paint vertex maps in layout or move points or polygons to apply small changes to one's models.

What are you working on now?

I just finished two projects, again with animals (a giraffe and a horse) and a "real" looking character and loads of props. While the work on the giraffe was pretty easy, the guy on the horse did take some time, as I needed to model all the accessories a jockey needs, the horse and the jockey himself. As I didn't want a cg image only, the background and HDRI lighting references were shot on location. Composing everything, match colours and contrast has been quite some fun.

There are loads of ideas for stills and a children's book to be unleashed in the near future. But as all these projects are complex it's always connected with a lot of work and time.

What was your octopus picture for?

The octopus is for an advertisement for the PlayStation 2 Winter Air Games. The claim is "Preparez-vouz a plus de glisse." - Prepare yourself to maximise your gliding (skills).

Where did the idea come from?

The idea came entirely from a friend of mine who works as an art director for TBWA Paris. He had the image in his mind already, but didn't know how to realise it. A traditional dummy-/model-maker would have been the other possibility. So he asked me if I would like to give it a try. I really needed to convince him and the creative director that it could look real and not fake. That's probably a problem in the 3D community, as a lot of users lack a certain feeling for lighting, image composition and interesting topics.

What research did you do to get the texturing and modelling right?

In the beginning of this project the Internet and local library have been my main resources. To my delight I managed to find a book on cephalopods with hundreds of species. Actually this made me realize that there isn't anything like one "look". Each specimen did look different in terms of the colour and the colour pattern. That's due to the fact that an octopus can change its colours by contracting or expanding small muscles on its skin. Thereby the size of small colour patches is changing which affects the overall appearance of the surface.

As an octopus is quite a flexible being (some pretty big fellows can suck themselves into a pop can) I felt at one point I needed to get the real thing into my hands to enhance my model.

The local fish market finally provided me with a 2kg heavy deep-frozen fellow. Dissecting him/her, in order to scan different parts was quite an experience. My art director also bought one, but after a small photo session, to provide me with more reference images, his wife prepared a lovely meal with the octopus. Somehow I couldn't follow suit.

What was the hardest thing to model?

The arms. Not because it's so difficult to model, but it slows down your computer so much. On each arm there are more than one hundred suckers. Quite a lot of them are pretty tiny and positioned near the tip of the arm. Although they are pretty small, nonetheless you see them in the final image. So I couldn't cheat. As there are quite a lot of weight maps for the texturing applied, the final size of my octopus was around 100MB. So working with the final model was almost impossible. A dummy with no suckers did help me to find the right pose in layout.

How long did the project take from concept to finished art?

More than six weeks. That sounds like a pretty long time, but if you are running a one-man show, doing the research, the modelling, the texturing, rigging, lighting and rendering all on your own, six weeks are gone instantly. Also the further you get with the project, the slower it gets. The feedback is getting worse, the test renderings take longer, and the bone deformation is far from real time feedback (more than 100 bones). Also the agency needs to take a look at the tests. And it's not only the art director who makes the decisions, there's also the creative director. And that all just takes time.