Bringing Vincent van Gogh to 3D

We were fortunate to talk with Ruslan Sokolovsky about his workflow and some of the tools, that helped him to create an awesome scene, based on the famous painting.

We were fortunate to talk with Ruslan Sokolovsky about his workflow and some of the tools, that helped him to create an awesome scene, based on the famous painting.

Hi! My name is Ruslan Sokolovsky, I am from Israel and like most of you I spend my life making 3D. I’ve been working as a freelancer for about 13 years and most of my projects are corporate movies, TV ads or realtime presentations. Usually, I work alone and have to take care of all aspects of production pipeline, beginning from modeling and finishing with editing final movie, so happens a lot, what I have to learn and try lot of new features CG industry has to offer.

From time to time, after project is finished and next one is still at negotiation stage, freelancer has some free time. I personally, do not like those gaps, so I was looking for a short-term personal project to keep my head busy. It happened to be mobile app development, I started making 3D live wallpapers for android devices. It worked out as amazing experience, full creativity freedom without a single customer revision. What can be better? I had a great time modeling Titanic wreck at the bottom of the ocean, building alien worlds and reconstructing historical scenarios.

One of the ideas was to recreate famous paintings in 3D. So I started with Escher, Goya, Sezane …

…and finished with my favorite “Bedroom in Arles” of Van Gogh.

The only reference I had was the original painting and several articles on web, clarifying some questionable details in that interior. I had to give up on impossible perspective of Van Gogh.

%d0%b1%d0%b5%d0%b7-%d0%bd%d0%b0%d0%b7%d0%b2%d0%b0%d0%bd%d0%b8%d1%8f-3

Modeling for the scene was pretty straightforward. The main goal is to keep polycount as low as possible due to very low geometry budget for mobile. So models are minimalistic, made using standard techniques of box modeling available in every 3D package. I prefer 3Ds Max, since it serves all my everyday needs. I ended up with 10 000 triangles only.

Since the scene is basically interior I used same lighting setup as I would use for standard architectural visualization. Sunlight from outside to drop nice light on the floor, chair and bed and rectangular portal in window frame. Balancing between those I tried to reach the best look. To keep darker shadows I decided to stay with gamma 1.0.

1 of 2

The main concept of the app was to use interactivity presented by realtime to let the user change colors and textures of the objects to his taste. So I created several materials for most of the models and combinations of user choices can create huge amount of final results. Customization is a great addition to keep people play with the app and reflect their own creativity.

After baking of lighting the model was exported to Unity 3D engine for final setup and settings coding. The last and the most exiting step was publishing finished product at Google Play and waiting for users reviews, which was very warm and motivating in this case.

Van gogh Room by ruslans3d on Sketchfab

It’s available for free download for VR tests, for 3d printing or just for learning how it was done.

App at Google Play

Ruslan Sokolovsky, 3D artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

Follow 80.lv on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Join discussion

Comments 1

  • Justin

    Amazing work. It looks beautiful!

    0

    Justin

    ·7 years ago·

You might also like

We need your consent

We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more