3dTotal: Hello Jonas. Well it’s about time that we interviewed such a talent as yourself in this magazine, so we can really treat our readers to some truly amazing artwork. But I must apologise because I’m going to start off with a truly boring question: could you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you get into doing 3D?
Jonas: Hello Chris! Thanks for your kind words. Well, I’m 28 and from Stockholm, Sweden where I lived most of my life. Although for the last six years I’ve been living in London and Milan, working for various companies and on many different projects. I’ve also freelanced with many other studios all over the world, from Blur Studios in LA to Eden studios in Paris.

I got into 3D a long time ago now; I was almost 14, so 1992-93 I guess. I remembered watching Disney’s Aladdin and I was so impressed by the characters and animation that I knew I wanted to work on something like that one day. And then a year later Jurassic Park was released! Back then I enjoyed drawing with pen and paper and it was my father (who worked at IBM at the time) that got me interested in computers. I remember a friend of mine’s big brother owning a copy of 3D Studio for DOS (version 4 I think) and I thought it was amazing! From that day on I knew that’s what I would be doing when I grew up.

After completing college I tried finding schools in my area specialising in 3D art, but back then it was such a new thing it just didn’t exist. So I decided to apply for some jobs as a 3D artist here in Stockholm and I actually got one (you didn’t need to know that much to get a job in the 3D industry in those days!) I got to work with some really talented people and learned loads from them - not much about 3D maybe, but more colour theory, anatomy, composition... you know, the stuff that really matters.		    
    3dTotal: Ah cool, so what sort of work did you do for Blur Studios?
Jonas: Oh, I have done a lot of work for Blur, all of it creature/character modelling, texturing and shading. I started out working on their Reebok basketball commercials; I modelled the heads for the two basketball players and I also did their textures and shading. I’ve also worked on a Coca Cola commercial, a MTV Aids campaign, James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep and I’ve done loads of creatures/humans modelling for some of their game cinematics, like Fantastic Four, Punisher, Hellgate London etc.

There are some really great people at Blur Studios and working with them has always been a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to their upcoming feature film Heavy Metal. It’s about time they did a feature film and with David Fincher, Tim Miller and Blur Studios... it just can’t go wrong!

3dTotal: From creatures to people, one thing that stands out (apart from the amazing models) is the realism of the skin textures. How long did it take you to perfect this and can you give us any tips?
Jonas: I always loved doing characters and anatomy, so making good-looking skin is something I learned during the 10+ years I’ve been doing this. It started with loads of falloff nodes to get all the subtle colour shifts skin has, to the more recent use of subsurface scattering. The key, as always, is good reference. I start by looking up some good reference images of the kind of skin I want to reproduce: the translucency, the amount of surface bump, specularity etc. I either find my references on the Internet, in my own reference library, or I take some pictures myself - whatever does the trick.
    
 

 

Then comes the texturing - a very important part of the process. On commercial projects you usually have images of actors to start from; for personal works I mostly use images from the Internet, my personal library or www.3d.sk/ as a start, and then I project these onto my geometry in 3ds Max or Maya. I spend a lot of time “flattening” them out once projected, removing all shadows and highlights. I also render out different procedural passes, like different noise and celluars. The good thing about these passes is that they have no stretching and can provide a good fine detail layer in areas that are missing good texture projection.

Once I’m happy with the colour texture, I use that to create the rest of the property maps: usually a subdermis, SSS strength, bump, specular strength, gloss and reflection map.
 

 

The work on the shader begins when the colour texture is done. Since the property maps depend on the shader, and the other way around, they get tweaked while working on the shader. I don’t have a “perfect” skin shader that works all the time and under all light conditions, but I have a good base that I start out with (insert link to SkinPlus+.mi here).

I plug my colour texture into the unscattered diffuse and epidermal (I tweak the epidermal colour somewhat, making it slightly brighter and more yellow by using an output node). The rest of the maps go into their corresponding input slots. For skin I think it’s very important to use a slightly stronger bump map, which only affects reflections/specularity, together with a weaker diffuse bump. This gives the skin a much softer and translucent look. I tend to only use reflections for my skin nowadays, together with photometrical lights and a good environment map. It takes a bit longer to render, but I like the results it gives.

Then there is just a lot of tweaking of values and correcting of textures until you get the look you want. If it’s for animation, I put it through an existing animated light rig to test it under different light conditions. It’s easy to make skin that works for one image, but a lot harder to make one that works well in animation and different light conditions!

Of course, the lighting itself is very important too. I always use large photometric lights. For the Hulk image I only used three of them: one main from above/front, one large and very bright from the back and a rather weak one from the camera’s position. Sometimes I use “final gather” to get some nice bounce light, or when the light comes from a environment map. For the Hulk image I wanted a contrasted final image and so I didn’t use any final gather. 		   
     
 
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