Creating The Earth Giant

Serbian industrial designer Darko Markovic has recently won The Journey Transport Challenge, organized by Artstation. In our exclusive interview, he talked about the production of his amazing 3d juggernaut and shared some tips about the creation of high-quality 3d objects.

Introduction

I come from a far distant land of Serbia, city Belgrade and the hood Paviljoni. By my b.a i am an industrial designer and by M.A I am a transportation designer which had a scholarship from Lamborghini and VW group on SPD Milano.

I worked as an industrial designer for some time where i learned valuable lessons and then moved to car design in Italy. All the time , while i was working in the industry i was doing some stuff that people would say is to much for a transportation designer. Thankfully to life

Thankfully to life circumstances, I decided to move to concept art – never looked back. Though i must say i am the most thankful for my high school education in IX Belgrade gymnasium. It had nothing to do with art, but it had to do with people and work . Generation ’87 was really strong with

Generation ’87 was really strong with high-quality people which i love to meet even 10 years later. Learned a lot during that period.

Journey Project

Journey was a journey for me also. It was perfect title for the perfect moment, cause I lost my job due to not having EU passport. I was very sad and needed to think what I am going to do with my life.  So I moved to concept design, and this was a chance to show what I am made of. Immediately when I saw “Journey and Epic” I wanted to create something really new and big. Easy right? Turns out I handled it great.

Pre-production

As I said I wanted something massive, soon that massive turned into huge. Inspiration for the work came from everywhere, though I have couple of artists that I look up to since I was a student (not gonna mention names cause there are a lot). I had to explore tones of references so I could be sure I was going in the right direction. If you look at my mood boards you will see that elements come from all over the place – from military to racing to nature . Nature for me is fascinating, after all nature is the best designer ever – I think its so cause it has so much time to design the world.

Modeling

What a wonderful tool that Zbrush is. Everything is done in this amazing software.

A lot of people ask me how do I do it nowadays. Well I always start basic. I am posting a lot of images on my Facebook  cause I want for people to see how I do it. Sketch>basic>sketch>redesign basic … You wouldn’t believe how many times I reevaluate surfaces until I go forward. Then the details came, my problem was that I used to work with big surfaces when I was in a car design industry. Had to teach myself that details are craft for themselves – and I see a lot of artists struggling with them.

Composition and Lighting

Industrial design taught me to analyze everything and write words, students don’t like to do that – but man, I love it. Doing mood boards, writing branding words are all fun for me and very creative. While I was working in ED design, Torino – my boss positioned me even to work on branding of the new Chinese brand. They were super happy when we sent them 100 pages of their new brand design logic.

Scene had to be:

• Massive
• Static
• Epic
• A bit like from the other planet

So I look for examples on the internet and once I find them, fitting these keywords I then start thinking on how to composite/light the image. The image also has to resemble this scene. Since Ш move trough so many stages of the designs and departments I think it all has to be coherent at the end – quality needs to be higher and higher after each stage – but than again it has to look like it was all done by one person.

The Right Scale

This was the toughest thing, and I knew immediately that it was going to create some problems. Tons of references again, and one thing which is fun – people. Once you put a person it always gives you the sense of scale. I was “hiding” the size of a project until the very end. Then I started putting people and everyone was like “Where are the shadows under them?” Well there were shadows but since the image was so huge you cant see them – when you look at the huge oversea ships they are same like that – and human eye is not used to seeing that so it was hard.

Pallet again reference and what is the purpose of this vehicle ? It is a construction/explore vehicle that is moving for resources and saving humanity. Black and yellow reminds us of caterpillar vehicles that constructed the world we know.

Texturing was done in Substance Painter, its a great software which gives me a lot of freedom

Advice

It all comes to experience at the end. Work but work smart, donэt do something just to do it – but do it cause it needs to be done like that.

A lot of artists are sending me now their work to check and say something about it. I respond to everyone, but what Ш am seeing is that a lot of them are just doing something to be done. Concept design is hard, a lot of times it requires feeling really bad while you are doing something so you can feel good when its done.

Imagine reading a book, for exam and you are reading just cause you are reading without even thinking about it – you are going to fail – same is with the concept design.

INTERESTING LINKS

LIGHTING COMPARISON IN UE4 AND CRYENGINE

STUDYING LIGHTING & MATERIALS IN UNREAL ENGINE 4

LIGHTING SCENES: REALISTIC LIGHTING FOR AUTODESK MAYA AND MODO