Great interview with Ukrainian 3D artist - Andrey Yamkovoy

We continue the series of 3D artist interviews. This week it’s going to be a young man from Ukraine named Andrey Yamkovoy (aka “Sheff”).

 

He’s an author of “Worker Bot” - a work that has been presented in our “The Most Striking 3D Robots Ever - Part 2” review.

 

 

But enough of talking - here’s the interview itself! Enjoy!

 

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1. Andrey, for how long are you in 3D Art and what was your first work?

 

Hello everyone ! I’m Andrew Yamkovoy and I’m from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. In the age of 12 I saw 3d studio for DOS for the first time. To tell the truth I was shocked with the huge number of different buttons and things that I couldn’t understand. From that time I wanted to find out how all that stuff works. When I got 3ds max 3 I felt great power inside myself to create something in 3D. My first so called “3D child” was a work called “An old sword”. All the textures were drawn from scratch. There were diffuse, specular and bump maps used and I projected them on a very simple model that I’ve done before. Here is the final result:

 

 

2. How important is it for you? Is it your primary activity or is there anything else that you do for living?

 

First of all 3d became my hobby that started to attract me more and more. After watching such talented-made movies as Terminator and Alien for the first time, I had a strange feeling to be connected to that fantastic world, to create those amazing creatures and space ships. That’s how I got involved with CG. 3 years ago I started to work in Front Pictures company where I met great, enthusiastic, creative, interesting people who are real professionals. I’ve been working on an animation for the VJ’s show for the last few months. For me, the most exciting thing is to create something really difficult in 3d.

 

 

3. What are your major principles for doing a great 3D Model?

 

References! I collect them all over. This process is very important in preparing a 3d model. Also I try to imagine the final result in my head, thinking about all difficult aspects in creating my future model in order not to miss them. And of course, taking decisions about how to avoid these mistakes before I start modeling something. These are the main rules that I follow.

 

 

4. What would your suggestions be for our audience and for 3D beginners? What are the typical mistakes to avoid while producing a good 3D Model?

 

I have some advice for those who are on the start line of CG world Try to avoid a non 4-sided polygons in your mesh, you can use a 3-sided or an N-sided of course, but some of the smoothing algorithms can’t smooth them correctly. Before starting the modeling, draw your mesh on the paper, not the complete model but the base mesh or some difficult parts of it. That will save a lot of time, you can draw a few variants of mesh pattern and choose the correct one. If you’ll try to make all that in 3d, you’ll waste a lot of time!

 

 

Talking about adjusting light in 3d scene, try to set all the light sources with low poly models, that will save your time and nerves too

 

5. Your work called “RIO GRANDE” is just great and very conceptual. Tell us a bit more about it (project duration, software issues, project’s most difficult stages etc.).

 

Yeah, this work was the most complex for me in many aspects. I was working on it in my free time. It took about a year to complete it, there were months when I didn’t touch it at all. Idea to make this piece suddenly came to my mind. As a big fan of any kind of technical devices and vehicles, I’ve made decision to make this magnificent giant. All the modeling was done in 3ds max. Only polygonal modeling and of course some splines for the wires

 

 

3D total textures were used as a base for some maps in this work. They have 2k by 2k resolution. Lighting was the most difficult part of this work. I tried different lighting setups but I end up with one direct light for the sun and ambient occlusion to fake the global illumination. My PC wasn’t ready for such heavy scenes, so I decided to render all in passes and used Brazil r\s for this task. There were color pass (textures), ambient occlusion pass, reflection pass, specular pass and some of the foreground details in the separate pass too. Then I’ve opened PS and merged all the passes in single piece with some color correction. Those were a few moments from the working process on Rio Grande.

 

6. Your works are mostly connected to the space scenes. Why are you so particularly interested in space?

 

I’m a big fan of sci-fi. My hobby is to watch the stars on the night sky. They look so mysterious to me. I think, space - is our future. Maybe someday ships from our pieces will be traveling through the cold and dark universe. That’s why most of my works try to express how beautiful the space is.

 

 

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We are grateful to Andrey for this interview and hopefully he’ll do fine in his 3D career. This is it for today, interview fans! In a couple of days there will be another interview that you will surely find useful and interesting - visit our blog everyday and you’ll see it yourself Until than - many other news and goodies.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 4:48 amand is filed under 3D robots, interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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