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Interview with Rudy Massar

Character designer Rudy Massar chats to us about life in the 3D industry, working as a freelancer and how he comes up with his character concepts.

Hi Rudy - thanks for chatting with us today! I want to start by asking what brought you to 3D in the first place. Did you have any formal education or are you self-taught?

I'm mostly self-taught. I was learning to become a graphic designer and got into 3D by coincidence. Back in 1994 I was doing an internship at the MediaLab of my school, the Graphic Lyceum in Rotterdam. This R&D; lab was run by two teachers and two interns. We explored everything that was new media and how we could use this in education. By new media I mean the internet, interactive CD-ROMs, 3D modeling and animation - all of which is considered common media now.

In the corner stood a Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo workstation running Wavefront TDI Explore and manuals as thick as the computer itself. One day we sat down, grabbed the first manual and started figuring out the software and this machine from the future. It was impossible then to afford a workstation with software like this; it would have cost a fortune to own and maintain.

From that day on I was only interested in 3D. In the following years I was teaching 3D modeling and animation at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. The classroom was filled with 24 SGI O2 workstations running Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator. You could say were pioneers of 3D modeling and animation for art students in the Netherlands.

Eventually, PowerAnimator was replaced by Maya and the SGI workstations replaced by Windows NT machines. Everything became cheaper and available to a broader audience. More and more people started sharing information online and the 3D community grew rapidly, as did the industry.

In 2000 I worked as a part-time instructor in Rotterdam and as a 3D artist for a creative studio/photography agency in Amsterdam. There I learned a lot about working for production and pushing the limits of 3D modeling and rendering, and about working to tight deadlines.

The cool thing about working in the 3D entertainment industry is that the technology keeps developing, your skills keep growing and you'll never stop learning.

What led you to specializing in character design? Are there any other areas of 3D you are interested in?

I was lucky to get the opportunity to focus solely on characters at Guerrilla (Sony Computer Entertainment). At a smaller studio, I would probably still be a generalist as for a smaller studio, the cost of an employee, workstation and software licenses are simply too expensive. The budget for developing a triple-A is huge, so this way it is easier to hire specialists for each department: characters, setup, animators, weapons, vehicles, environment, etc. But in return, the publisher expects the game to be of the highest quality.

Like many other artists, I am fascinated by the human form. I especially love classic figure sculptures and the realistic oil paintings of the old masters, not so much contemporary art. I'm lucky doing what I love most: 3D character sculpting and modeling.

Of course, I am interested in many areas of 3D, CGI and VFX, and I believe you do need to keep up-to-date on developments made in the industry. If days weren't so short I would love to do more drawing, practical sculpting at Phoenix Atelier and even start learning traditional VFX at Stan Winston School, because all that is still the foundation of making digital art. There are tons of things I'd like to get my hands on, but as a professional artist I focus on characters and creatures.


Still, there are plenty of aspects involved in character art that will keep it forever interesting: modeling and sculpting, organic shapes/anatomy, sculpting cloth/ncloth, hard surface armor/robots, UV-layout and texturing, shading, hair, lighting and rendering, realistic/toony. You could say that everything from texturing to rendering is a specialism too, but in my opinion you need to master all of these techniques as well.

How do you begin your characters? Do you research an idea and develop the concept, sketch ideas, or just jump right in?

(Laughs) I don't think I've ever created a character the same way twice! I start each project differently. You can simply draw your ideas in a sketchbook or makes doodles in ZBrush and draw variants on top in Photoshop. It's fun and helps a lot during the modeling and sculpting process.

Collecting reference images is also helpful because you will never be able come up with certain forms and details on your own that you'll find in photographs. Most importantly, you need to prepare yourself before you start working out your model.

There are some workflows that I personally find useful and work best for me. For example, starting work on a low res model to define the initial shapes is a good method. Gesture and proportions are the first thing you read from a character and they need to be in harmony. From there you slowly build up form as you come closer to your character.

The character workflow can be quite different per client. It's a good thing to be familiar with different approaches/techniques. For personal projects I like to start a character using a low res base mesh and block in the major shapes. Then I would add clothes and accessories.

For one job a client asked me to design a character and a creature. This time I started working in ZBrush straight away. I grabbed a DynaMesh sphere and finished the sculptures with PolyPainting. Later I was asked to make an animation-ready mesh from the design. Again, in ZBrush I used the Topology brush

to remesh the designs, and projected the sculpt details and PolyPaint back onto the new mesh.

It seems like your career as a freelance character artist is taking off. What advice would you give to people considering making the jump into freelancing?

Well, I've just started really, but I was lucky that right from the beginning a few studios showed interest in my work. The first few months I worked on characters, totally different to those in Killzone, which was nice and I had a very pleasant collaboration with my client. Though the workflow I am used to can be difficult sometimes, especially when you don't have access to the tools and game engine you normally work with to polish your characters and textures.

Although I have worked on games for so many years, I would love to expand my knowledge and experience into film/cinematic, and also create physical models of collectible figures.

One misconception I often hear is that people think freelancers earn a lot. What is important to understand is that to freelance you have to make the initial investment in a workstation, software licenses, maintenance and a back-up system.


A large sum also goes to taxes, insurance and social securities. Then finally, you need to maintain your own administration and try to land on interesting gigs. If this all sounds fine by you, go for it.

Remember that most games or movie projects will be released a year or maybe two years later, so the professional work on your website is always old. It's important to invest some time working on your personal projects too. It's fun; you can try out new techniques and model whatever you like without restrictions.

You've recently moved into working on collectible figures and toys, and are working on a super-exciting secret project with us at 3DTotal and LayerPaint as we speak. How does this differ from normal character design? Also, where do you see this element of the industry going? There seem to be infinite possibilities with 3D printing for collectibles and game pieces!

Personally I love to create expressive figure sculptures that tell a story, like the drawing of Norman Rockwell. It's something I would be very interested in doing more off; I mean, your digital sculptures becoming physical models that people buy to place it on a shelf or their desk - how cool is that?

Since the start of my freelance career, I've worked on a few exciting projects - the most recent ones have to remain undisclosed at the moment - and one of them is indeed the 'secret' 3dtotal project. I also got a 3D print request for a private collection.

At the moment I'm working on characters and creatures for a CG film. This started as a design job in ZBrush first, but I ended up making a production-ready model, which I also enjoy doing. I would love to do this for blockbuster productions too; hopefully the opportunity will come once more people get familiar with my work. I believe a lot of success is down to luck, simply because there are so many amazing artists out there who are probably daydreaming about the same opportunities.

I'm not sure if I can give you an educated answer on how much working on collectible figures differs from designing characters for other disciplines. How I see it now, there is not much difference during the sculpting phase except for 3D printing. Here you have to make sure your models are watertight and whenever you need to make assembling pieces, you want to try and make a natural seam, so when you put your kit together it looks like a solid piece.

The sculpture would be the template for many things; from here you can create your production mesh, generate detail maps, export it for rapid prototyping or make a render and continue designing your ideas on top in Photoshop.

I understand there's much more to say about how one design differs from the other, depending on the medium or discipline and I definitely don't want to make it sound easy. Hopefully I will learn much more about the details in the near future.

Thanks for your time Rudy - we're all looking forward to seeing your next creations!

Thank you very much for this interview and the opportunity to collaborate on the secret project. It was truly a fun project to work on.

Learn more about how Rudy creates his distinctive characters, by checking out his great project overview

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