Russian
Name: Charles Guerton
Age: 24
Job: CG generalist at Artefactory Lab
Country: France
Web site: http://www.behance.net/charles-guerton
3DA: How did you start working in 3D field? How much time has passed and what kind of studies did you do?
CG: I started 3D during Architecture school, first for my own presentations and then for Architecture studios in Paris. All in all it has been 4 years that I discovered the 3D world, but it started to be my main job at Artefactory Lab just a year ago.
3DA: Which are your favourite software and plugins for your daily projects?
CG: I like to use a lot of software to get the best features of each of them so I quite often use a combination of Zbrush, Maya, 3ds Max, Photoshop, After effects and Nuke and always render in 3ds Max and V-ray because I like the way it handles very heavy scenes with the use of V-ray proxies, it has really good displacement, supports openEXR and you can produce a lot of usefull passes out of it. I use scattering for every project, I can’t live without it anymore, not only when there is vegetation but also for furniture, rocks, structures… and so on. For that purpose Multiscatter is a perfect plugin to my taste, fast and very configurable. If you have enough RAM you can easily generate literally millions of instances.
3DA: Tell us something about a project that gave you great satisfactions
CG: I am always frustrated when I finish a work, never really completely satisfied with the final result but I love when great artists look at my work and comment, it feels that somehow I managed to reach their attention. I actually prefer when the comments are bad because you can learn from them, I of course really love when people have nice comments about my work but it is less usefull, so I think what gives me satisfaction is when I feel that I learned something from a project that will increase that quality of my future works.
3DA: From where do you take inspiration for your artworks?
CG: I have always been an addict to cinema and I am more and more interested by traditional photography, so I tend to use photographs as reference because you always learn something when looking at them and trying to reproduce a particular feature or composition. I really love the work of Viktor Fretyan (MIR), Alex Roman (Left the 3D world) and Marek Denko (noemotion) because it is not only about realism you can really feel a strong composition and nice color balance that brings a cinematographic dimension to their artworks. They are my biggest influence in the field and my greatest satisfaction would be to get closer to this level of quality.
3DA: How do you live this period of economic crisis? How is it in your country?
CG: I never got to work in the 3d industry before the crisis so I can’t really compare. The economic crisis clearly hit France, the industry is harder for small studios and freelancer nowadays but I have the chance of working for big studios that still get nice projects so I really can’t complain about it.
3DA: What would you suggest to people that are approaching to 3D and architecture?
CG: Well, i would suggest working on the core aspects, it may sound boring but looking at good pictures, studying rules of composition, knowing the color theory and most of all be obsessed with the smallest details will give a real value to your work. Nowadays it becomes super easy to produce “photo-realistic” images, but this is clearly not enough, if your render looks perfectly like an average photography then this is useless, it will be as boring as the photography and anyone with a good understanding of the software will be able to reproduce it. That is when those core aspects are executed with perfection that it shifts from a regular render to an artwork.
