Life in the fast lane

Improve your work by focusing on what you love, advises Luke Reade

Luke Reade talks following his passions

Finding inspiration to make great art is always the hardest part of starting a new project. For Luke Reade, a 22-year-old CG artist working in London, the subject was staring him in the face, or rather, sat in his garage. “I have always been into my cars and I love racing,” says the artist as he reveals the origins of his latest project, Mini Challenge Full CGI. “I currently race in the Mini Challenge and this is a replica of my car. Me and my colleague Sam Milner put our heads together to come up with the idea.”

The project took two months “on and off” for Luke and Sam to model and render the mini in action. Modo was used for the CGI and Photoshop for the post effects. “I have been using Modo for a few years now and it is a great application. I find it very fluid and its render engine in 902 can produce very realistic images,” shares Luke.

When working on car renders, achieving a realistic and readable sense of speed in the scene can always be the crunch between success and failure. “There was a fair amount of trial and error on getting the motion right without the car looking like it was going too fast or too slow,” says Luke. Animating the car and wheels moving through all the scenes at the same speed proved challenging: “We made sure the camera was set up properly as per the real world to get realistic motion. We also took the day to go to Brands Hatch to shoot the HDR images; this was very time consuming, but key to the end result.”

That’s not to say creating an eyecatching still render isn’t a challenge too. The result for the duo ended up being a unique top-down view of the mini speeding through a turn. “We had been playing around with various angles trying to get something dynamic,” says Luke, explaining: “We wanted to make a unique image that stood out from normal photography.”

To see Luke and Sam’s mini project visit www.bit.ly/207-mini

We also took the day to go to Brands Hatch to shoot the HDR images

CommunityAutomotive design “There was definitely a bit of adaptation as we got into the project, mostly with changing decals on the car and moving trees around to get the dynamic renders,” says CG artist Luke Reade

Luke Reade Luke is a CGI and retouching artist who has worked in the heart of London in a creative company since 2010. He’s passionate aboutproducing quality images in a varietyof software. www.bit.ly/207-mini