Articles 465
March 17, 2014 8:00 PM
by Editor in Chief
Other than architectural, product visualizations, besides animations and VFX, 3D tools have found their usage in illustrations including matte paintings. How useful can Blender be for that usage? Check out the works of this week's winner!
How, then, can you too qualify for this award? Please have in mind that this award is reserved for those that are on par with or that excel top notch works published by artists and studios. If such work does not appear during a given week, this award is not being given to anyone. So please submit your best work to www.blenderartist.org or to the Member's Gallery of this site, or Contact Us to show where your work is available on the internet. It doesn't have to be a Blender render, internal or Cycles. Any other render engine is fine as long as Blender was used as a part of your workflow.
So, it is with great pleasure that www.BlenderNews.org introduces to you the winner of the Render of the Week Award for the week of March 17, 2014: Karen Carr
Title: "The Ancient Life Timeline Series"
Genre: Scientific Visualization
Renderer: Blender Internal
Final Renders:
Making of:
Artist's Comment
About Me:
I work in the science, education and publication markets. My work, in traditional and electronic media, has been used in publications, zoos, museums and parks across the United States, Japan and Europe. My most recent works include illustration projects and publications for the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum, the US Army, US Marine Corps, the Audubon Society, Scientific American, Random House, HarperCollins and others.
I am beginning to transition to rendering in Cycles, while learning more about the tools Blender offers. I also promote Blender as a powerful and invaluable modeling program in master classes at universities and other institutions.
A final note: I really like working with plants, and I am working on a large long-term Blender animation project with a paleobotanist on Miocene plants.
About "The Ancient Life Timeline Series"
I was originally trained in traditional media, primarily oils. I began using personal computers and Corel Painter in the mid 1990s, when computers became large enough and fast enough for the size of murals I typically create (often several hundred square feet or more). Since then, I have worked exclusively in digital media.
In 2012, I began learning Blender and ZBrush, relying heavily on the Blender Artists Forum (as a lurker) and on both free and paid training from Andrew Price at BlenderGuru.com. The Ancient Life Timeline series of murals is part of a larger project that was the first paid work I created in this pipeline, learning Blender and working at the same time. Several new projects are underway, including new images of modern sea life and people.
My images are created in Blender, usually after a "pencil" 2D layout created in Painter. Some characters are started in ZBrush, but more often I begin by box modeling components in Blender, then moving to ZBrush for texture and tweaking, and returning to Blender for lighting, scenic elements and rendering.
Scenes are most often rendered in multiple passes and usually undergo several client revisions before the image is final. Several commenters on the Forum noted that the water clarity in the mural series seems a little unrealistic… which I think is a good spot. To my (minor) annoyance, the client insisted on gin-clear water and pristine animals. Post render work is done in Painter and Photoshop.
Related LInks:
1. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?328554-Finished-work-mural-series
2. http://www.karencarr.com/