Phil Laschewski | Environment Artist | CG Generalist
Hi, my name is Phil, and I am happy to share my first-ever demo reel with you. Having recently graduated, I am passionate about entering the industry and finding a place where I can continue learning and improving my skills.
Journey Through The Snow
About Me
Hi! My name is Phil and I am a recent graduate from Germany. During my 18-month education at PIXL VISN | media arts academy, I discovered my passion for environments. From the beginning, I enjoyed doing a lot of different disciplines including but not limited to modeling, texturing, layouting and lighting. So, for me it was very difficult to decide what I wanted to pursue most until I found out about working in environments. Working on environments incorporates everything that I like - creating assets for the environment but also the more technical side of scattering and proceduralism. That’s also something that I want to dive into more in the future - creating procedural setups and getting to know about coding in Python or VEX.
Why this project
I chose this project to showcase a wide variety of skills. I wanted to create an environment where I would need to create a forest, scatter foliage and light the shot. My goal was to finish a project from the beginning to the end with everything that came along on its way. I also wanted to show that I can create assets for the scene if needed, in this case the train, to also show modeling, texturing and look dev in my project. I also did the animation and rigging (mostly working with constraints) of the wheels of the train and created the steam of the locomotive. I had a lot of fun working on this project and enjoyed all the different stages it went through. I hope to show my interest and diversity in many different areas with this project and to showcase my understanding of the processes behind creating a shot like this and my ability to work on one including all the different disciplines that went into it.
Reference
Here is an extract of some of the reference that I used to create this project. Finding the right reference is obviously essential for every project. For this project I needed to find a lot of reference for the environment and the train.
Reference – Environment
Once I chose the type of environment I wanted to do, I had to go into more detail and find references for this specific environment. I started with searching which plants would grow in this kind of environment and where they would typically grow. Finding reference for the lighting, time of day and shadows was also important. For this shot, I decided to go for a dusk-like lighting, with the sun illuminating the environment and casting long shadows. Although being a cold environment, I believe this adds a sense of warmth to the scene. To exaggerate this feeling further, I decided to go for trees where the snow has already been melted, indicating that the last snowfall was already quite some time ago. Also allowing grass and rocks to peek through the layer of snow on the field.
Reference – Locomotive
Fortunately, it was relatively easy to find good references for this locomotive, as it is quite known among train enthusiasts. Also going by the name of "Flying Scotsman", this LNER A3 locomotive is known to be the first to reach 100mph and connecting London and Edinburgh. It is also know for having toured the globe, having visited many different countries on its journeys. Though there was one downside with most of these photographs. Most of them were taken when the locomotive was freshly polished and cleaned. For this project, where the train probably has quite a long journey through the snow already behind it, I decided to give it a bit more of a used and weathered look instead of being freshly polished.
Modeling, Texturing and Shading
After finding enough reference for the train for now, I needed to find blueprints with measurements to start creating the rough blockout of the dimensions for the locomotive, tender and coaches. After that, I could start modeling the train. Starting with the very big shapes like the boiler or the cabin and working myself down into the details and adding more and more smaller details like pipes, screws and other smaller parts after that. For modeling, UVing and constraining the wheels, creating the movement of them, I used Maya. After that, I moved on to Mari for texturing it. First finding the right color values for the train and creating a rather clean version of it like seen in many of my references and then adding more and more breakup like scraping and peeling of paint revealing metal, adding rust or creating generally a more weathered look. Assigning the textures and shading it was done inside of Houdini with MaterialX as a shader and utilizing Karma as the render engine for this project.
Assembly
Assembling everything took place inside of Houdini in the Solaris context. Although barely scratching what USD really means when it is used inside of a pipeline, I liked the thought of having a first contact with it. As a base for this, I learned from an incredible series explaining the basics of USD from Adrien Lambert on Youtube. I thought about describing my process and what I did and which nodes I used in text form but I ended up taking some screen grabs from my node tree inside of Houdini and adding some annotations. I think that’s a way more clear way of presenting what I did and how I did it. So here they are.
Ground – Trees – Grass – Rocks – Final
Scattering
Same thoughts as with describing the assembly. So, here are some more final screen grabs about how I did the scattering for you to scroll through!
And that’s a wrap!
I hope you enjoyed my entry for this year’s The Rookies and got an insight into how I created this project. With everything I learned on the way, I definitely feel ready to continue my journey into the industry. I am looking for a place where I can continue learning and grow as an artist and as an individual while having a blast doing so. I am actively searching for opportunities to enter the industry as a junior, trainee or intern. So, if you have any opportunity ready, I would love to hear from you! Let’s have a chat! I am also very open to relocating inside of Germany or to other countries, especially to the UK or to countries inside of the EU and I feel prepared enough to meet and exceed the expectations, tasks and challenges a junior would encounter and would love to get an opportunity to show this.
I genuinely thank you for taking your time and looking at my entry!
~ Phil
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