The Mini Cooper you modelled and animated is very nice. Did it have a specific purpose?

The Mini was done as a personal exercise and it was part of my research. Every detail imaginable was modelled and the mini was born. While I was working at Pinewood studios for Digi-guys as studio supervisor I was also responsible for stretching all the new hardware we purchased to its limits and find ways to make our pipeline more efficient. Andy Whitehurst our art director and founder was generous enough to let me use the mini to really push our render farm to the limits and see how it performs. We derived a lot of useful information from that work.

How did you create the snowy image?

I started with a displacement map for the mountain, which I painted in Photoshop. I used a slope gradient to define were I wanted snow or rock. The snow fake scattering effect is created with an Incidence gradient plugged into luminosity. Two spotlights were used with shadowmaps as speed of rendering was crucial. The rock is a procedural shader I made using standard LW tools. The clouds is again a displacement map, in order to achieve that soft feeling on the clouds the displacement is animated fractionally. In every frame it increases and until the other frame is reached it decreases, with motion blur on, the result is that volumetric and consistent "fluffy" effect. I use this techniques all the time to achieve various effects.

What's the secret to really detailing the shaft picture? Whenever I try and add "nurnies" they look really fake and tacked on...

The secret to modelling ridiculously detailed objects is a lot of patience. What I did for this particular piece was to first model the basic form of the objects then knife out all the details I wanted and then Vertibevel or Jetto Bevel like a blueprint for the first layer of detail. Repeat the knife process until it looks interesting. When production times are not pushing I approach the creation of anything by putting as much detail as I can in the geometry. The more detail you put, the better your subject will react to lighting and surfacing.

What are you working on now?

At work I'm modelling/texturing an environment for the feature we are doing here at Animal Logic. At home I'm on pre-production stage of my own short film, plus various realisations of the occasional ideas I have in my head.

Have you got anything for our loyal readers, Antonis?

I though of giving the model and surfaces of a highly-detailed Mini wheel as a freebie, it needs to be lit properly but other than that it's ready to go.

Windows	Macintosh (OS X)
Zip	StuffIt
297 KB	290 KB
For non-commercial use only

Thanks very much! Good luck with working in Sydney and next time you come through France, don't forget to visit us! You can see more of Antonis' stunning work at his website.