Read the BIG 50th issue of Digital Art Live Magazine
Welcome to the BIG 50th Issue of Digital Art Live magazine!
The BIG 50th issue featuring in-depth interviews with Digital Artists in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. This issue spans 112 pages with 27 update interviews from many of our previously published artists including Anaor Karim, Neil Blevins, Tasos and Hal Tenny. Each artist tells us about their new projects, how things have changed for them during the COVID-19 crisis and what successes or skills have they achieved during lockdown. Our artists are creating using Adobe Photoshop, DAZ Studio, Poser, Mandelbulb 3D, the Unreal Engine, Unity, VUE, Terragen, Plant Factory, 3DS Max, Marvelous Designer, World Creator, Cinema 4D, Adobe illustrator, Substance Painter and Sketchup.
Also – discover Photoline 22 – software that has many of the qualities of Photoshop, including PS plugin support but more affordable at $65 – read our exclusive in-depth review!
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Magazine Contents
50th MINI INTERVIEWS SECTION 1
We invited all our past magazine interviewees to contribute a short mini-interview for the big 50th issue.
VARIOUS
“The virus put a lot of investors in ‘the red zone’. … it will be necessary to find new financing solutions. But I’m not letting go! I continue my projects on the volcano here on my remote island, and I have another with an ecological character to it.” — Anaor Karim.
PHOTOLINE 22 REVIEWED
PhotoLine 22 is a near-perfect Photoshop clone with Photoshop plugin support, Actions and .ABR brush import. For $65.
SOFTWARE
“The lightweight PhotoLine will likely become your go-to daily graphics wrangling and editing software. It is especially useful for those moments when your PC is already groaning, and to try to launch Photoshop CS6 would cause a nightmare system stall.”
50th MINI INTERVIEWS SECTION 2
We present the second and concluding half of our set of mini-interviews for Digital Art Live’s big 50th issue.
VARIOUS
“After 16 wonderful years at Pixar … we moved to the Seattle area, where I am now a senior concept artist at Monolith Productions … I am hard at work on my second book, Megastructures, a visual encyclopedia of scifi megastructures.” — Neil Blevins.
Also….
- OUR LIVE WEBINARS!
- EDITORIAL
- BACK ISSUE INDEX
- CONTESTS
- VISNEWS
- GALLERY
- IMAGINARIUM
Excerpt : interview with Michelangelo Cellini
See ALL the interviews in issue 50
DAL: Michelangelo, welcome back to Digital Art Live magazine. What have you been excited or pleased about, since we last interviewed you?
MC: Hi, I had the pleasure of moving to the UK and starting to work for Cloud Imperium Games. The project I was hired to work on is very exciting and it has been fun to get to know a new team and experiment with new software, while exploring the country — abiding to the necessary restrictions, of course.
DAL: Great. Well you chose the best time to see the nation — in that fabulously weather we had through most of the springtime. It’s not always like that! Now, how has the virus lockdown changed things, for you? Either in terms of work or home, or both?
MC: I started my new job working remotely, which forced me to be more mindful of my time management while having a somewhat flexible schedule. Fortunately, I spent some time working as a freelancer in the past, so I already had the chance to test different time trackers and management tools that are proving to be essential right now.
In my personal life, I had the chance to connect with other friends in my same situation, and we have been playing together online after work, the perfect ending to an Internet-based daily routine.
MC: Great. What have been your ‘skills learning’ successes during virus lockdown? Or, what personal project have you successfully used this time to complete?
MC: I have completed a cinematic project which was inspired by an essay that my sister wrote, about nature in videogames. To build the scene I used Megascans extensively for the first time, and Houdini for most of the modeling.
Creating a game level with assets that someone else made is something that I used to avoid. But after realizing that this actually happens quite often during work, I now take set-dressing more seriously and set aside more time for this phase when tackling a personal project.
DAL: Super. What’’s the most useful bit of new software / plugin / script you’ve found since we interviewed you? Or, what’s the most useful new technique you’ve discovered?
MC: I have grown very fond of Houdini, similarly to Substance Designer for texturing, Houdini is now my preferred option for all kinds of procedural modeling processes, in this case operations like mesh cleanup, UV-ing, low-poly creation. In some cases I concept and generate assets entirely in Houdini, mostly because this allows me to create multiple variations of the same mesh extremely quickly.
From the recent updates, it’s been clear how SideFX is determined to continue supporting game artists with their software, and I can attest that using Houdini has been saving me a lot of time.
DAL: Great. What are you planning or working on at present?
MC: I am working on a late Baroque interior environment in Unreal.
DAL: Late Baroque… so that’s the 1730s…
MC: The goal of my previous scene was to tackle the representation of nature in art, and during my research I came across baroque very often, so I was inspired to build another lifeless scene with intricate architecture, where the impact of man and nature hopefully comes across indirectly through shape language and sculpted details.
DAL: Super, we wish you well with that. Many thanks.
MC: Thank you for this fun catch-up interview, and congratulations on the 50th issue of Digital Art Live!
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