Digital Art, Paintings and 3d work created by Christian Tigaer Hecker. News about the artist and Interviews with Artists like Dylan Cole, Gary Tonge and Syd Mead.
After some thinking over the past few weeks i decided to split up the galleries a bit. Usually i took some of my commission work into my standard galleries. Now i have a separate gallery for selected commissioned artworks. Since i always feel that commissioned work is different to the personal work. You have restrictions and descriptions to follow and your own ideas sometimes don’t work with the requested art. That can make commissions very difficult to execute. On the other hand it’s a nice challenge for your skills. =)
Every once in a while someone is asking me for an interview and i gladly take these. You never know what interesting questions come up. It’s also interesting what memories these questions spawn. This time Chris Kapzynski from kapdesignstudio.com invited me. I’m sure it’s an interesting read for everyone so feel free to check out what his site has to offer. The direct interview can be found here.
Ever since the picture learned to move we remember our wars best in movies. May it be “All quiet on the western front”, “Paths of glory” or “Saving private ryan”. Just to name a few. All of them intense. All of them show the brutality of war. All of them show what war can do with an ordinary person. How it takes your life and makes it something you aren’t even able to explain to other people sometimes. People who haven’t experienced war.
Now this movie falls right into that line of movies. It’s a very smart movie too. In this movie we follow three soldiers stationed in Iraq. They are a special bomb squad and called in whenever there is something suspicious found anywhere in Baghdad. Kathryn Bigelow amazingly accomplishes it to create a suspense in these scenes when they are working on the bombs. The camera work is just great. It’s always an open movie. By that i mean that i never knew what will happen. Will the bomb go off. Will they make it. Will one of these guys be dead by the end of the movie. The plot was nicely unpredictable and i loved that. While we follow our main guys through their last 30 days of duty we can also get a glimpse at how it must be to live there. How dangerous it all is. How thin that ‘peace’ there actually is. It’s a world very hard to understand for our main characters. And not just for them. I couldn’t imagine to live there too. Always living in fear. On the other hand i guess to learn to process all the bad and sad circumstances there.
Jeremy Renner is our main character in this movie. I always liked him. I even had sympathies for his evil character in SWAT. I really loved the part he plays in this movie. You can understand the problems he’s having living in this war environment world but still having his head at home. Where he’s having tons of problems too. It’s almost like he’s fleeing into war. To not have to deal with all these nonsense normal life things. The other characters are played nicely too. Especially Brian Geraghty, who also did a remarkably job in “Jarhead” (very underrated movie from my POV), is doing nice work here too. It’s a similar role but nonetheless. I like to see him on the screen. We also have guest performances from people like Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes or David Morse. I love all these guys.
From a technical standpoint i would say that this movie is a perfect movie. It’s a very dry movie. And by that i don’t mean story wise or suspense wise. I mean that it’s a movie placed in a desert environment. And the movie is able to bring over that feel. The hotness. Dust everywhere. There is also almost no music in that movie. It must be one of the most quiet war movies i have ever seen. Because of that the sound fx really kick into gear and work so great. The explosions and the environment. It just works.
Check out his amazing piece of work. I highly recommend it. It’s my pick for the best film oscar this year.
It’s been quite a while since my last try in animating a painting of mine. While the older tries were quite respectable i really wanted to push it this time. I read, heard and saw a lot about camera mapping and its theory. Now Vue has the ability to do camera mapping (also called camera projection) too. This allows you to lay a painting on a geometry and allows you to create limited camera moves with nice perspective shifts. Depending on how much work you spend on it. I surely spend a lot for this one.
I worked on this project for almost 2 months. Not on and off though. Partly because the rendering out the different elements took ages. Especially the volumetric things like fog and clouds. And these were rendered on very low quality settings. Since motion blur is smoothing out certain things it was not too important to render the volumetrics in unnecessary details. While the rendering of the projected painting took 6hrs for 511 in 1080p frames, the fog pass took about 12-15hrs for 511 frames. And i didn’t render it once. I had a lot of testrenders for each of the passes. Now i can roughly estimate how much CPU power a big VFX studio must have.
I chose my Red Dawn painting because in the painting i didn’t change much of the actual Vue render. So the geometry in the Vue file still fitted the painting nicely. I removed the forground element though since it wasn’t a good addition to the camera move i had in mind. I already had an animation project in mind when i did the painting. Now i had the right ambition and time.
A lot of postwork got also done in After Effects. Especially the stitching of the different elements. The blending of the render passes. Vue is able to render out the animations in uncompressed avi format. That means for 511 frames in 1080p it resulted in a 3gb file. Unfortunately the files were corrupted and not to open by any player. I reopened these files in VirtualDub, which was able to read the files, and saved them through VDub as avi again. That made the files recognizable for all players and After Effects. I don’t know what was going on but as soon as the animation video file reached 1gb, it made them uneadable. Maybe some avi internal limitation thingie from ancient times. I have no idea.
Ultimately i must admit that i’m not 100% happy with the end result. But that’s because of technical and time issues. You could work forever on stuff like that. Nonetheless it is a nice step forward in comparison to my earlier tries.
Hope you guys enjoy this shorty. For me it’s always a special thing to see an animation of one of my paintings. It’s like bringing these static pintings to live. That’s a cool thing!
It’s time to make downloading of wallpapers even more comfortable than it already was! The future! New alternatives! New hopes! New dreams! Alright… enough advertising phrases for now. Windows 7 has that one unique feature that allows you do create your own Wallpaper Packs! People can download and doubleclick these and *kaboom* Windows automatically applies the pack and its settings! I really dig that. That’s why i decided to create some packs for selected artworks in my gallery from time to time. All at once would be boring right? ;) However. In these packs i try to cover all possible standard resolutions. So it’s surely worth a look. I thought that Fractal and Abstract pictures, which work magnificient as wallpapers, are the perfect start for this collection. For now you can find Themepacks for the following pieces:
Recently i had the chance to finally see it. It’s one of these Sci-Fi movies that make you go ‘WOW’. The movie was made for 5 million dollars. And what a movie it is. It lives without to jump to tons of locations. Without superexpensive VFX. And it works great!
Storywise it’s about a man trapped on the moon, in a station/control center, watching over some mineral collectors. Huge machines crawling the moon surface. If there’s something wrong then it’s his job to look and fix it. He’s also trapped in a 3yr contract. A long time. The only other being he can talk to is Gerty. The concept of Gerty is similar to HAL 9000 from Kubricks 2001. It’s there to help and to make living a bit easier. Our lovely main guy has still 2 weeks to go when some weird things start to happen…
Sam Rockwell is one of the actors i really really love. He can do so much. A wide wide artistic arsenal. And that’s what he’s showing off in this movie. He’s basically the only person we see. It takes him almost no time and you connect to the character he’s playing. You feel for him and you hope for him to end the last 2 weeks without complications. He’s able to get across the isolation and what it does to you so amazingly well. When the things start to happen you can read the confusion in his face. You don’t actually need any words. He’s carrying the movie. And he’s doing it so good.
VFX wise there aren’t many scenes. But the ones we see are done nicely. Nothing that blows you away but good and absolutely believable.
The only disappointing thing was the too fast ending. The last two minutes so to say. The off comments when we look down to planet earth. I guess i would have chosen to deliver the infos via written text instead of spoken messages. But that’s two minutes of a 90 minute movie.
DIGITALPhoto Photoshop hat mich eingeladen einen Digital Matte Painting Workshop zu verfassen für die ausgabe 02/2010. Das magazin erscheint alle zwei monate und ist randvoll mit nützlichen tips zum thema bildbearbeitung. Das bild welches ich zu diesem workshop erstellt habe kann man sich hier mal ansehen. City View war anfangs nur eine inspiration zu einem bild von Kai Bellmann, einem freund der vor kurzem in Vietnam unterwegs war. Dort hat er einige sehr schöne fotos machen können. Unteranderem eben auch diese strasse. Glücklicherweise hat das magazin angeklopft und ich hatte die perfekte gelegenheit etwas mit diesem foto anzustellen. Dabei habe ich versucht dem leser ein paar meiner techniken im feld Digital Matte Painting näher zu bringen.
Vielen Dank an DIGITALPhoto für diese möglichkeit.
Schaut mal rein. Es ist durchaus einen blick wert!
Digital Artist is still a very young magazine that comes from the same publisher like the Advanced Photoshop Magazine. The Digital Artist Magazine focusses on a more wider spectrum of tools though and gives you the chance to explore a wider spectrum of artists. In case of the workshops it shows you how to combine different tools in one artwork and how to seamlessly combine the various elements the different tools give you. In my case i got invited to write a workshop about extending photos. In that particular case i took some Digital Matte Painting techniques to get things done. I took a fairly boring snapshot i took in Berlin and added a sort of futuristic skyline to it. Nothing too exciting too but sexy enough to get the techniques explained. Ultimately i really like the result. Looks cool. Check it out!
The Digital Artist Magazine invited me to write a workshop about extending photos. I decided to go for Digital Matte Painting techniques and searched my archive for a good plate. I found a nice photo i took in Berlin and it turned out to be a great plate. All the other materials were from my archive too. A lot of buildings from the Frankfurt skyline. Not many skylines here in germany though. Nonetheless i tried myself on manipulating what i had, to make it look different to what i already had in the picture. In the workshop i tried to explain parts of the work process and how to push a boring photo to something more interesting looking. It was fun to do.
This is the result of a workshop i wrote for the german ‘DigitalPHOTO Photoshop’ magazine, issue 02/10. The goal was to create a Digital Matte Painting and to explain the various steps that lead to the final product. For the picture i had a really nice plate from a good friend, Kai Bellmann, who recently visited Vietnam. He captured that nice street view and i really wanted to do something with it. Luckily the magazine came knocking on my door and i had the perfect opportunity to create something. Everything done with Photoshop. No Vue this time. I dig the result and it was something different from the things i usually do. I should do more into that direction.
For all german visitors… the magazine is now available and also includes a character painting workshop from my buddy Gary Tonge. A side by side workshop with Gary… never thought that could happen. :)
This is a movie i wanted to see on the big screen when it was in theaters. Unfortunately a nasty flu crossed my plans. However. I read a lot of reviews and almost every review had a bad tone. So i had no big expectations when i had the chance to watch it. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing to have. Because i somehow like this movie!
Alright alright. This movie has a lot of flaws. Indeed. But you will get a pretty solid action packed movie when you’re able to overlook them. It’s fun to watch. Even if it’s not what you would expect this sequel to be. It’s not the actual continuation of the series i had in mind when i heard of a 4th terminator movie.
Storywise it’s war. The machines have risen and try to search and destroy the last human being to get the control over the planet. What we see of earth is pretty depressing. A giant desert and destroyed cities. John Connor is a grown man now and leader of a resistance cell near Los Angeles. Christian Bale does play the John Conner in a solid way. Exactly how you would expect him to play Connor. Now he is not directly the focus of the story in this movie. It’s more focused on Marcus Wright, played by Sam Worthington. He’s a machine who doesn’t know he’s a machine. He still feels and thinks like a human. Worthington plays his part really good. Reading his face you never know what exactly he’s up to. Now with him being in Avatar, a leading role too, it’s really nice to see someone new stepping up. I already like to see more of him. Eventually Marcus Wright and John Connor meet up and have to work together. That leads us to some very interesting places.
The VFX are really cool and nicely executed. Not much more to say here. It’s pure fun to watch the destruction and action sequences unfold. I think ILM did a nice job there.
It’s a good fun movie. Check it out if you’re bored!
After some thinking over the past few weeks i decided to split up the galleries a bit. Usually i took some of my commission work into my standard galleries. Now i have a separate gallery for selected commissioned artworks. Since i always feel that commissioned work is different to the personal work. You have restrictions and descriptions to follow and your own ideas sometimes don’t work with the requested art. That can make commissions very difficult to execute. On the other hand it’s a nice challenge for your skills. =)
Ever since the picture learned to move we remember our wars best in movies. May it be “All quiet on the western front”, “Paths of glory” or “Saving private ryan”. Just to name a few. All of them intense. All of them show the brutality of war. All of them show what war can do with an ordinary person. How it takes your life and makes it something you aren’t even able to explain to other people sometimes. People who haven’t experienced war.
