THE FOREST HOUSE

ARTIST

Julien Rollin SOFTWARE

Maya, Substance Painter, V-ray, Snapseed

CG student and artist Julien Rollin took time to find the mood of this fun environment, spending a week on the project. “I took a lot of time on lighting to avoid doing something too typical of the sunset very present in stylised renders,” he explains. The model and textures were created by 3D artist Nina Pal.

Rollin took a unique approach to compositing his Forest House, opting to use Snapseed, a complete photo editing app developed by Google. “I wanted to try some new techniques. I didn't have my computer one day and I tried to composite with my phone to see what was possible. The decrease in image quality due to this application is normally a huge constraint, that's why nobody does it, but this project was basically intended for a phone wallpaper and Instagram publication. Honestly, I was quite surprised by the result, beyond doing classic colour grading, you can push detailed editing with very nice features.” Rollin adds that people even asked if he’d used Nuke to render the piece.

The project provided Rollin with a way to test different lighting and he took the rare liberty of detaching himself from his reference imagery. “For me, the most difficult part is to keep my own creativity and add the technical side. When I want to push the technique, I focus more on the reproduction of the reference and forget about creating what I really want and expressing myself.”