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Has
Frontier lead to more work of a similar nature?
I did 'Frontier' to see if
I could. Live action over completely 3D backgrounds,
I finished it back in 1997. I showed it to various
production houses around town but back then they
basically had no idea what I was talking about.
Australia is a lovely place but a tiny market.
I financed the whole thing, built sets, props,
wrote scripts, begged favours, shot, comped, painted
and even recruited talent from school plays, etc.,
but I had to move on. It became my (old) reel,
so it has absolutely paid for itself tenfold.
I know that we are all now
very sophisticated and demanding in our tastes,
but I for one am not ashamed to admit that making
Sci-Fi is about the best fun you can have with
your clothes on!
Was it based at all on the
Amiga game of the very same name? :)
Nope, no relation at all to
the old Amiga game.
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Any formal art training?
None. I started as a signwriter
and went from there to scenic art, painting large
scale backdrops for Film and TV in Sydney. Working
day after day usually on commercials, painting
every conceivable thing for the camera, doing
massive paintings on canvas and studio cycloramas,
well it's just the best training ground I can
think of. I've done 16 years of scenic art on
many hundreds of commercials and I still love
it when one of my old clients calls me up for
a job.
Also, I think all of the experience
I have with painting backdrops transfers directly
to creating 3D environments. All the tricks, all
the subtleties, the understanding of using colour
to trick the eye, well it all applies to 3D.
Are you a full-time freelance
LightWave artist or do you still do scenic painting?
These days it's about 70%
LightWave and about 30% scenic art. In truth,
it's nice to get out of the office now and then
and do a big, physical project like a large canvas.
And once that's done, it's nice to go back to
a clean, sit-down workstation. I find large-scale
painting to be a perfect counterpoint for 3D work.
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Any
advice, words of wisdom?
I think that concentrating
too much on learning software doesn't always help.
It's art. Making pictures has always been about
constant observation of the real world, trying
to notice why it looks like it does. Any time
spent drawing, painting, sculpting is well spent
indeed. LightWave is complex, but the core tools
are relatively easy to use. Learn these well,
then practise art; develop the eye!
And what about a gift for
our ever-loyal readership?
As for the freebie, I thought
I might contribute my basic tree object. It's
four low poly trees with UV clip and colour maps
that show true parallax and looks much, much better
than the usual x-poly trees and such. Perfect
for background and midground forests. It uses
pyramid-shaped clip-mapped polygons arranged in
clumps around a simple trunk. It really gives
the impression of volume yet renders incredibly
fast and each tree runs to around 180 polys.
| Windows |
Macintosh |
Zip  |
StuffIt  |
| 3.94
MB |
3.94
MB |
| For non-commercial
use only |
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| (DivX
- 1.65 MB) |
Wow!
Thanks Dave. I know that there will be a bunch
of architectural visualisers who'll be happy with
this! :) You can see more of Dave's excellent
work at: http://members.optushome.com.au/dave90/
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