Behind The Villa Of Captain Swastika

Ville's 3D art ready to be passed forward to Juuso and Petteri. The scene will have Dr Professor and Captain Swastika sitting in front of the fire place, a statue in the foreground and the fire will be animated (see the video below)

Thesis of Evil lead 3D artist Ville V Vanninen reveals his secrets of making 3D graphics art for Thesis of Evil:

First, tell where’s this from
This pic is from Dr Professor’s good friend Captain Swastika’s villa, here you can see the living and dining rooms. Captain Swastika as a figure is quite flamboyant, the villa needed to depict his personality.

Why did you choose this picture for this interview?
I feel this is my best artwork for Thesis of Evil. It might not be the most useful scene that I’ve done but from my point of view, it's the best. This was also the scene where I think we had the best collaboration going on between me and our concept artist/designer Kim Haataja.

Tell about the process
To put it shortly, based on the ideas from Jukka and Juuso, Kim made a couple of drafts and explained his ideas to me. I continued from that. I did lighting design, added textures and brought in some architectural vision with my 3D experience.

In a little more detail, here's how it went:

This pic was made mostly by me and Kim. Jukka & Juuso had some wishes and visions such as the fireplace having a massive skull on top of it and the scenery being gloomy.

The storyboard picture I got from the guys had the basic idea as a draft with few details, just conveying the feeling of the interior. Kim did a sketch on Photoshop to show what could be in there. Based on that I did lighting tests in a small corner with a couple of polygons and wooden textures. At the same time Kim was photoshopping a new version and outlining the proportions for me. Then I took Kim’s proportions set to my mangle and from there I continued with several iterations. Despite the guys wishing for a very dark room, I didn’t want to make it too dim. I tried to accomplish the gloomy feeling with proper lighting design, so the darker areas wouldn’t get clogged up. (Meaning completely black, without any detail.)

After my part, the picture went forward to Juuso who did photoshopping and added the fire to the fireplace and then to Petteri who animated the scene. I guess we’re going to refine it a bit more before letting the movie out of our hands.

A demo pic showing a clay-wire rendering of the villa's living and dining rooms from a dollhouse point of view.

How was it to work with this scene?
For this we had plenty of time. I really enjoyed making it: Together with Kim we found the vision, had time to juggle ideas between us and perfect it to the top. I really dug the fact that there was an already fine picture (from Kim) that I had to do better! It still wasn’t too neat so there was room for me to accomplish my job.

Tell a little about the elements and textures
As mentioned, there were some elements that already existed in the storyboard. The skull was supposed to be gigantic and have its mouth open. For the skull I did low poly draft for Kim where he did the sculpting and I added the texture and lighting. We tried variations and noticed that an elk skull would work the best. Then someone got the idea: “Let’s get rid of the fire place frames and just have a giant skull above of an inferno”.

The guys wanted also me to make a massive size crystal chandelier in the dining room. Well, that’s what i did, indeed, haha. Other than these elements, I could pretty much decide myself what to have there.

The timber texture on the wall beside the fire place, if you think about it, it isn’t very rational to have right next to an epic bonfire. And there's a stone wall right next to it! It just doesn't make any sense but it looked nice, so that's what I put there.

The stone texture next to the timber one it’s a mixture of built, engraved and nature formation rocks. It was challenging to do. I tried to make it as fine as possible, it felt like my own thing. I think I found its inner essence inside of me.

I wanted to have some iron candle holders on the floor in front of the fireplace. I got some flashbacks from my childhood so I tried to make them look like them. To give an idea of the proportions of the room, the candle holders are approximately 1 meter high.

A demo video that shows the path from the sketches to ready 3D art (doesn't represent the final film).

How long did it take to create this scene?
After I got the sketch from Kim, it took about nine days of work from first opening the file to forwarding it to Juuso.

What were the successes? Failures?
I think I did a good job on the lighting. What I’m a bit disappointed with is the timber texture since in one picture in the movie they will be shown quite closely, I don't think it's up to par for close inspection. I hope we’ll have time to refine it before we're done.

When I imagine the time after this project, if I get a chance to work with similar things, it would be awesome to work in a team where there are separate artists for texture design, modeling, lighting design and technical stuff. There I’d enjoy to be the modeler or the lighting designer.

More about Ville
Somehow I always get dragged into doing 3d, even though it's just a hobby, and I'm actually more of a web guru than a 3d guy.

See more what he means: Ville keeps a user interface related blog. If you're interested in seeing more of his design works, see Ville's portfolio site (partly in Finnish).