Our Latest Featured Artist

Florian Sell - August Featured Artist

CREATED IN IRAY FOR 3DS MAX

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Hi, my name is Florian and I am a self-taught designer and 3D artist from Berlin, Germany. I have a diploma in architecture, but I started switching over to Design and 3D while still studying so I ended up never actually working in this area.

I own and run bitflare GmbH, a small creative studio where I work with a mixed group of freelancers on a wide range of mostly industry-related advertisement and trade fair projects. Since me and most of my co-workers have such a diverse background in disciplines like architecture, engineering, coding and so on, we can offer our clients a one stop experience when it comes to creative projects. They often come with nothing more than an idea to us and we develop a concept, create the content and if necessary code or even manually build presentational environments for an exhibit for example.

My job is the creative lead in general, meaning I have to come up with a concept and deliver the designs for that and also handle the communication with the client. Then I usually hand the project off to a co-worker, since I am such a slow modeler! I take over again, when it comes to texturing, shading and lighting, before I usually hand it off for final postproduction.

In this context, I cannot emphasize enough, how great it is to have a stable active shade solution available with Iray for 3ds Max. I still remember, when version 1.0 came out and I experienced active shade for the first time - fantastic! I am old enough to have worked with mental ray as my chosen renderer for years and it got the job done but this really was next level stuff.

The 1970 Dodge Coronet shown here is one of the first projects that profited from this feature. A portfolio project actually, where we wanted to demonstrate not only our ability to produce believable CGI and our passion for details but also create an atmosphere in those images, so that the viewer automatically begins to imagine a story that revolves around the car and the environment setting.

Since I am passionate about design I cannot help but like cars since there are few other man-made objects where this much time is invested in getting the shape and the design right. I can get excited about modern car design, but I really love classic cars. So, for this project I chose a classic American Muscle Car and a worn down 70s/80s setting. We took a model from Radoslav Krajcik, who offers one of the nicest collections of classic car stock models on the web. But although the model was already really detailed in comparison to what you usually get, when you buy a 3D model, we went and remodelled almost everything and added a tonne of small parts to the car. We just wanted to go to the extreme with this project and get every screw right, so with interruptions we spent months researching and modelling every detail of the exterior and interior.

When it came to lighting and shading, the layered shader system of Iray for 3ds Max and the way it handles HDRIs was a real work relief. So much faster and so much better than everything I have worked with before. Again, I had the active shade window almost constantly open. The work profited tremendously from the constant visual feedback and since Iray for 3ds Max is so stable and does its work so smooth in the background I barely even notice any effect on the performance of the whole system. In the end, the quality of the rendering was so good, we barely even needed a real postproduction, we adjusted a few curves and that was it.

Credits:
Base Model: Radoslav Krajcik
Modeling: Sarawut Nakpee
Creative Lead, Shading, Lighting, Postproduction: Florian Sell
HDRI and backplate: maground