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| Featured Artist of June 2006 - Balazs Kiss | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Below you can read
the interview with the 3D Valley's Featured Artist of June 2006. We are truly honored that Balazs made some time for us to do this interview. Balazs Kiss was one of the early artists who joined our Gallery. Since he joined our gallery in 2003 a lot is changed for him. Currently he is working for Framestore-CFC on Superman Returns and he has worked on many large projects we all (if I may say so) dream about working on; King Kong, Alien vs. Predator, Harry Potter, and Kingdom of Heaven. He is specialized in Lighting and Photo realistic rendering. Read the interview to find out a bit more about him and those great projects he works on. |
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Q1. Balazs: Most of the time I use Autodesk-Alias Maya with Mental Ray or Pixar PhotoRealistic Renderman software for my personal works. I also use Apple - Shake for compositing and various software's for texturing as for example Adobe PhotoShop or Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint. At work, I use pretty much the same software packages. Recently, I needed to use Houdini for additional FX work, and many different in house tools specifically developed for the features I am working on. It is common practice that bigger VFX houses are using additional tools to extend their pipeline and solve problems that won't be solved with 'off the self' packages or to be able to maximize their efficiency.
Q3. Balazs: I tried to experiment and move more and more towards the photo real approaches in my personal artworks in the recent years. I have tried to force myself to create as photo real images as possible, mainly, because I was fascinated about how the boundaries are widened in the past few years of the visual effect history regarding this kind of approach, and I also felt it would help in my professional carreer as well. The key factor in this kind of art is the attention to the details and to examine the nature, lights, and environments carefully and precisely. Therefore, before I start working on an image, I try to dig up as many reference images as possible and also take similar photos in the subject.
Q4. Christa: Do you have a favorite piece of your own artwork and if so, why? Balazs: This is a really hard question. I am very critical about my work. A short time after the creation, I become very picky about them. If I have to choose one or two, I would still probably say my favorites are my elephant images, not just because more or less it is still quite photo real (in Pal, TV resolution at least ;)) but these pictures helped me to get my first mayor film VFX job at the MPC.
Q5. Christa: Do you have any tips for the artists who admire your work? Balazs: One of my advices would be, to pay maximal attention to the details and also be very passionate about your job. In this industry you have to do really long hours, you also have to develop solutions that have not been approached before, so the key is to be passionate and love the work you are doing. I you have the necessary determination as well, I cant see any problem with achieving your goals, whether it is working on games, commercials, feature movies, or just creating artwork for fun. Q6.
Q7. Christa: Which projects have you worked on? Balazs: During my MPC years I have been working on many different visual effects driven motion picture movies. I was working on the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as digital texture artist and also lighting technical director. I have painted textures for the digital aliens and the digital Queen alien in the Alien vs. Predator movie. I had a great pleasure to be able to work with the amazing director, Ridley Scott on his latest epic movie Kingdom of Heaven, where I was Lighting TD on many epic siege shots of Jerusalem. Finaly, as MPC had been awarded by Warner Brothers with the vfx works of the third challenge (The Maze) in the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire feature, I had the chance to work on this very complex but interesting sequence. I had spent an amazing few months working on Peter Jackson's latest blockbuster: King Kong at Weta Digital and as I mentioned before, currently I am working on the Superman Returns at Framestore-CFC in London.
Q8. Balazs: I wouldn't say I had favorite project, I enjoyed working on many of them and I have certainly gained and learned a lot from every one of them. If I have to choose, I would mention King Kong at Weta Digital. Although the months I spent there were extremely busy, I enjoyed it a lot and managed to get to know many talented and amazing people and probably one of the most sophisticated pipeline in the VFX industry.
Q9. Balazs: Being a Lighting TD means, that you are responsible for the lighting, rendering and any technical issues of around half a dozen to a couple of dozen shots in the given motion picture. Particularly, on King Kong I was working mainly on the New York sequence where I did the lighting on around 10 -12 full CG shots, and I have also worked on the ice skating and the rampage sequences at the end of the production doing some really nice miniature CG Kong shots.
Q10. Balazs: I would say probably the most important, but very likely if you ask a modeler; he/she would say the modeling is the most important ;) I would quote a line from the Advanced Renderman book: "When asked to explain how lighting contributes to film making, I often show a completely black slide to emphasize that without light, it does not matter how great the composition and acting are - nothing can be seen." It is exaggerated a bit, of course, but might show what I am referring to. A good lighting can sell even the not really well modeled objects, can give feelings to the picture, set up the overall mood, emphasize the theme and so on, meanwhile a bad lighting can trash the hard work we have invested into the modeling, texturing or animation. I would suggest to try to establish the lighting of the scene with few, well positioned lights, try to establish the wished mood and do not rely on any GI solutions. Use it as a helper if you wish to make your images more realistic, but do not have it as the only solution. I know, it is very comfortable just switch on a raytracing switch, go for a holiday and 10 days later you have an image, but something should not be forgot: this is not lighting, just makes your image flat, boring and makes it only one of the other thousand images on the web. So, I had to realize early on, that the most important texture of the alien (or the Queen alien) will be the displacement map. Every other texture must be based on the displacement map's details, and that is the texture which you can not source from photographs, I had to paint them from scratch. All together I had a month or so to do the hero alien, the grid alien, the Queen and the nuke and battle damaged Queen alien textures. We have also developed a technique at the MPC to be able to use floating point displacement maps for the very detailed body parts of the monsters (in this case for the crown of the Queen alien). We had layered the different displacement maps above each other and multiplied in Shake. In this way we had a lot wider range of detail we were able to use, and render out with Renderman to achieve the fine detailed result the VFX supervisor was going for.
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Q13. As for the next feature project: I am still going to stay and work in London in the following year, very likely on a major feature film (remake) what will be released later on next year. The project sounds really exciting, with loads of cg characters are involved, but sadly I can't tell you more about this show yet. Q14.
Christa: Thanks again for your time and this interview Balazs! And much luck with your carreer. |
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