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  • EXPOSÉ 3EXPOSÉ 4EXPOSÉ 5The EXPOSÉ Series
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    Tim Borgmann revisits his ‘fragment.0121.02a’ and reveals how he generated the signature artwork of the NVArt competition.

    		After a long search for a signature image, industry leaders and NVIDIA scientists selected Tim Borgmann’s amazing abstract creation, ‘fragment.0121.02a,’ to head up promotions for the NVArt Competition. Tim’s work, generated primarily in Softimage|XSI, has featured prominently in the Ballistic Publishing EXPOSÉ Art Annuals, and exhibited proudly at the SIGGRAPH 2006 Art Gallery and many other spaces. Read on to discover how he generates the unreal.
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    My main target when working on free art projects is to deviate from the usual way of creating shapes/images with 3D programs, into a more intuitive, organic way like abstract painting. I gather my main inspiration from what I see during the work on an image. Quite simply, I try a more emotional and less planned approach.

    3D can be often very technical and when you work on commercial projects you often have to be very organized to fit the deadline. In my free art projects I want to use Softimage|XSI software more like a pool of interesting and sometimes surprising tools. I experiment with new tool combinations and workflows and look with fresh and open eyes on the power of the creative voyage.

    The images of the ‘fragment’ series are an attempt to create more or less complex, dynamic forms and catch their tension and beauty at a special moment. The idea with ‘fragment.0121.02a’ was to create some kind of basic simulation situation and simply let it run and play around with the 'natural' chaos. At the point that I see an interesting shape emerge, I freeze the process. I take it out of it's dynamic context to put it into a still picture like some kind of frozen moment.

    After that, I fine-tune the basic shape, creating additional elements to define the look to accentuate the dynamic of the shape. When working on art projects, I see image creation as a dialog between the nascent image and myself. Sometimes the image influences my work by itself, leads me towards its own direction. Sometimes it's just me, pushing the image into the form I want. The final image can be seen as a snapshot of the dialog between myself and the image.


    As mentioned before when working on free art projects, I avoid doing any sketches. I want to work with the 3D software like a pencil or brush in classic meditative abstract painting. Starting by doing. I simply play around with a very rough idea or feeling. When a shape or a part of an object grabs my attention I start to work it out. Watching the growing image can be sometimes a surprising journey.



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  • I first started with a simple particle emitter, adding some forces, then just playing around with the settings. The particles were connected to the great metaball addon from Michele Sandroni to create some kind of a fluid surface mesh.

    I used the grid mode in conjunction with the paint mode to build up a growing solid object. When I saw an interesting shape I froze the whole object and started to work out some details by hand using the volume tool and some deformers like push or twist to accentuate the basic shape and the dynamic I saw in it.

    After watching how the basic shape went I thought some cloth-like objects could help to support the dynamic of this fluid object. So I animated some polygon grids with the cloth tool and let them follow some spiral paths along the basic shape.

    I rarely use image textures in my free art images. I mostly like it to create something procedural. In this image there weren't any textures needed at all. So I created a rather clean, white, slightly reflective material for the fluid using incidence and gradient nodes and a slightly transparent.

    Cook-Torrance material for the cloth stripes also modified with some fall off. When working on free art projects I don't care about the physical correctness of the materials. I see them more as colors for painting and so decide what's right by what I see. It's useful to know how materials work in conjunction with light and energy, but in this case it's more the: 'if it looks right, it's right' approach.
    I mostly start lighting with the classic three heads. A key light, a fill light and a rim light. After placing some white cards with gradients for the reflections, I decided to use also Final Gathering for the final lighting to give the image some nice diffuse light bounce.

    The first test renderings were done in 2K and than went up to 4 and 6K. I often like to render free art projects in more or less one pass with some masks for fine-tuning in post processing. I used a beauty pass for the objects, a background pass, and a mask pass for the fluid and cloth objects, as I’ll want to do some color corrections on the objects.

    Since XSI 6.0, these mask passes can be easily done in one rendering pass using custom render channels. I also rendered out a depth pass for some DOF in post, because rendering DOF directly often leads to heavy render times and I want a more or less quick feedback.
    I used Photoshop for some slightly level corrections on the objects and some relighting of the background. To give the whole image a more 'photographic' feeling, I used a duplicated layer with some blur and the overlay mode.

    Finally I used DOFpro to add some depth of field effect and film grain.

    For the NVArt banner the image was rotated and flipped, and some logical hue changes were made.

    Photoshop was also used to change the 'hue' of the image; (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation). In the 'Hue/Saturation' dialog box, I selected the 'Master' channel and then used the three sliders to create the desired green hue.

    I lightened the image and increased the saturation slightly, to make sure the green highlights 'popped' off the screen and had maximum visual impact.
    Since the mid nineties, I have been working mainly as a freelancer in the area of 3D graphics/illustration and animation for TV commercials, advertising illustrations and so on. Besides all my commercial work I spend my time on different personal art projects, like the ‘microscope,’ ‘abstract.0104’ and ‘fragment’ series.

    Abstract art gives me the freedom to experiment and discover new workflows, to search for new borders and new image worlds. While working on these images I focus on pure aesthetic expression. For me the process of creation (as mentioned above) is as important as the final image when doing such images. By being open-minded to every kind of inspiration during the work, it's always exciting research to see the evolving image.


    NVArt Competition
    EXPOSÉ 3
    EXPOSÉ 4
    EXPOSÉ 5
    Tim Borgmann
    Tim’s CGPortfolio
    Softimage|XSI
    Metaball addon from Michele Sandroni
    DOFPro from Richard Rosenman
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