Wednesday, January 13th, 2016 by Nadine Obst
The 3D artist and RebusFarm user Tom Stracke from Brazil took the time to tell us about his work, future plans and give us some insight into his project "Ice Cream".
Hi Tom, please tell us a little more about yourself and your work.
First I would like to thank for the opportunity to do this interview with you. I started studying 3D in 2002 and at that time I was working as a web designer. One thing leads to another and without noticing I was already learning the basics in 3ds Max. It took me a while to learn and to start working with it because at that time we had very limited access to tutorials on the web over here. So, I had to learn most of it through books that I needed to import from the US so that I could really study efficiently. Thankfully at the end, everything worked out just fine. It´s been more than 10 years since I am living exclusively from my 3D work but I also started doing music production.
Do you have any favourite work? Anything that especially touched your heart during your work as a CG artist?
Without a doubt, my favorite work is the scene that I did with the artist Roberta Yamamoto named "Sophie´s Dream". The scene has a spiritual context, to which I am very attached and had a very special inspiration from our mentors.
Since when do you use RebusFarm and what are your experiences?
I am using RebusFarm for about two years now and when I started using it I was really impressed by the affordable pricing and how quick I could complete super complex renders. Since then I´m always using RebusFarm and I even recommend your service to my friends, although most of them are already using you. Not to mention your customer service which is very close to users. The RebusFarm has helped me a lot and it has been a fundamental tool mainly when happens that last minute rush with my customers.
And which is your preferred software?
Today I dedicate most of my time to Cinema 4D. At Daemon Filmes, the studio that I currently work at, we´ve been using this software for almost 4 years now and it helps us to integrate motion graphics with 3D elements a lot.
Lets go a bit more into detail here. For your new work "Ice Cream" which tools did you use?
This scene was made with Cinema 4D and Photoshop, although at first I tried to sculpt in Mudbox and created some procedures in Substance Designer. Both had great results, however, I'm so used to working with Cinema 4D that the final result of this software was better than in the others. One of the things I couldn´t do because of the lack of time was to upgrade the ice cream texture. I wish I could have made it more with "STUCCO" texture and less "creamy", but the tests that I made didn´t achieve the result that I was hoping for, so I decided to take another path.
Can you show us a bit about how you created the picture?
No problem, let´s go! The first step was to model the strawberry, actually, the idea of making the ice cream came after the strawberry was ready. For the model I used a sphere (icosahedron), put some deformers, after that I used the command extrude inner, so the polygons created were increased in their on axis, creating depressions on the strawberry shell. The seed was made with cloner and then applied with the same polygons that were decreased. You can also notice that I added up a little bit of hair on the leafs to create more of a realism, although I didn´t use the hair at the final scene because the strawberries were too small to see those details.
At the set up of the final scene, I used the new Variation Shader to create random values of color for the strawberry textures.
The creation of the ice cream mass was made simply with spheres, with the UVs properly mapped externally for a better positioning and with a simple displacer to break the uniformity of the mass.
The principal process of this scene was definitely the creation of the ice cream texture. I spent days and days trying to figure out a shader that was 100% procedural. I even got a nice result, but at the end, I mixed it up with an image of a real ice cream texture to give even more realism to the scene. Basically, I used all of the same textures on every channel, including the displacement map with just a few adjustments.
To make the syrup I used a cloth since my experiences with RealFlow are not that great. So I used the base generated by cloth and then sculpted the mesh inside Cinema 4D
Last but not least, I made 2 area lights on the side and I used an HDRI of a living room that worked nice and smooth.
Thank you, Tom for giving us a closer look into your great project "Ice Cream".
