Interview - HowieFarkes

Martin Hedenstroem granted this interview by e-mail. Hi is know by their great landscape images that he turned into packs that are sold at Daz3D.

Stoney Creek

CL - Hi Howie, first talk a little about yourself to the readers.

Martin - My name is Martin Hedenstroem, I'm 36 years old. I live with my wife and 2 pets, a Burmese cat called Mushi and a Welsh corgi named Kulfi who is the inspiration for my Daz avatar. I live in Canberra, Australia and work for the federal government as a web programmer/developer.

CL - What are your skills?

Martin - I graduated from a Bachelor of Graphic Design in the early 90's and attended many art and design classes while at high school. However, as my training was before computers were prevalent in the design industry, most of what I know in regard to cg art was either self taught or on the job training.

CL - Do you think that a degree is a good way to start in 3D or that there are new ways like special schools for 3D?

Martin - That's not something I'm really qualified to comment on as I've never done any formal computer graphics training and I'm not actually employed as a 3d artist. My observation of the graphic design industry though is that qualification won't land you a job - but it is very hard to get one with without them.

Forest Stream

CL - Your work is more about landscapes like we can see, what is your inspiration?

Martin - Pretty much all the landscapes I have done are nothing like where I live. I usually just get an idea for the sort of landscape I'd to either like to see or visit and then create from there. I do a lot of trolling of the internet for references and will collect images that may show me how certain things should look (like light shining through trees or reflections off water).

CL - Now about Carrara. When did you start using it and why? Is it your primary tool?

Martin - It must have been about 2003 that I first started using Carrara (at version 3.5). I got it at a good upgrade price from my old copy of Infini-D, one of the applications Carrara is descended from. I'd just bought a new iMac and my copy of Infini-D didn't run natively in Mac OS X so I started looking for alternatives and Carrara looked pretty amazing to me - with subdivision modeling, GI, caustics etc that I'd never used until then.

CL - What is your hardware? It was assembled thinking in your Carrara work?

Martin - I use a Mac Pro workstation as my main machine. I bought it just over 2 years ago but it still is a pretty fast piece of kit. I have used Macintosh computers for over 20 years now and just feel very comfortable with them. When the Mac Pro lineup was released I certainly was very interested by the fact that they were 64bit quad core machines so despite being fairly pricey, longevity is likely to be very good. Plus it's very quiet which is very important to me. And it can run Windows too for any utilities that don't have Mac versions.

Nordic Village

CL - What do you think about Carrara in Daz3D hands now? Do you think this was a bad thing and that the first development team was the only that can do Carrara grow?

Martin - Ultimately I think it's a good thing that Daz owns Carrara. While there was certainly a degree of excitement and possibly more features added to each upgrade when Eovia controlled Carrara I guess that was an unsustainable business model so the fact that Carrara found a home with a strong company hopefully means it can ride out the current economic difficulties unscathed. For nostalgic reasons it may be nice if Carrara had the original development team, but nobody wants to be tied to one project for their entire career and new people bring new ideas and enthusiasm to the process.

CL - What your impressions about the version 7 of Carrara?

Martin - To be honest I haven't used it very much yet. For the past few months I've been busy creating some new products and have been doing all that work in C6. Mainly I've been rendering in C7 and have just started getting my head around the new UV mapping tools which are a great improvement. The multi-pass rendering I can certainly see I will use extensively.

CL - What other tools you use to your work with Carrara?

Martin - I use Modo for modeling some of the time, Photoshop CS3 for texture creation and postworking my renders. I'll sometimes use Adobe Illustrator for creating logos and such, either for importing to the spline modeler or as the first point creating new textures and maps. But really my toolkit is pretty small - Carrara is a very versatile application.

CL - How was your entry to the Daz3D market place?

Martin - I actually became a published artist at the request of Daz. They'd used some of my images to promote Carrara 6 and asked if I could turn some of the scenes into products - in particular my "Last one in..." image. Eventually I decided it was just too difficult to turn them into products so I had to re-think how I'd go about making sellable Carrara scenes. After a bit of experimentation, some might remember my Postcards from Harpwood County thread at Daz, I finally came up with Country Lane as my first product. Interestingly, an image I created while making the postcards series of pictures was picked up by Daz and by adding Victoria 4 has been used on the c7 splash screen and as the promo image. There are some extremely talented 3d artists amongst the Daz published artists and beside Stonemason there seems to be very little recognition outside the Poser/Daz community of that talent. Also, for what people pay, Daz customers get a lot of bang for their buck.

CL - For people that is beginning with Carrara now, what is your advice?

Martin - Don't get carried away wishing Carrara could model as well as Silo, render as fast as Modo or as pretty as MentalRay, animate as well as XSI or integrate as well as Maya. Too often people complain that Carrara doesn't do something as well as some other application but the fact is no software can do everything as well as the best of breed. That fact that Carrara can do all these things and at such a cheap price is pretty special.

CL - What do you want to the next version of Carrara? A feature that really will be welcome to you.

Martin - Oh I have a very long list of things I'd like added or improved. But the the main things that I'd really like to see are:
- Improved render engine with speed improvements and much faster GI
- Updated replicators so we can use maps to drive replicant density and size and also randomize trees
- Updated trees that have multiple leaf types so that fruit, flowers and pine cones can be added to trees and more options for driving branch bend and more realistic boughs

CL - Any of your images that you have more pride? And why?

Martin - I guess a couple of my favourite images are "Autumn Lane" because I'd tried out a lot of new things in that scene like the hedges and road surface and felt that I'd convincingly pulled it off. Same with "Stoney Creek" I had to figure out a way to model fast moving but shallow water and eventually came up with the idea of using the displacement painting feature of the vertex modeler. "Forest Stream" and "Nordic Village" are 2 images from a few years ago that I can still look back upon and feel that I did some good work there.

Autumn Lane

CL - Any other consideration that you want to add to this interview?

Martin - Observation of the world is probably the most important skill you can develop. I spend a lot of time just looking at how light plays against trees and grass and such and then think about how to replicate that in 3D later. To re-create something in 3D requires that you know already what it really looks like, and that only comes from extensive observation.

CL - Thanks Howie

You can see more of his work at:

Renderosity Gallery:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=237321

CGSociety Portfolio:
http://howiefarkes.cgsociety.org/gallery/

Daz3D Store:
http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/artistlist/-/?artist=469415&_m=d

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