Peter Sanitra

Peter Sanitra was born in Slovakia in 1980, back in the days when it was called Czechoslovakia. He started playing around in CG at age 16 under DOS with 3D Studio R4. While he never actually attended any CG school, he began his self-education from help files and books that were available. “I was always trying to learn as much as possible from all parts of 3D equally,” he adds.

“This approach can really help the CG artist to deal with all kind of scenes and tasks,” continues Sanitra, “and he can then become more useful in a production environment, because he knows the needs of other departments as well.”

Sanitra has now a decade of experience in CG working on a large variety of projects in architecture, films and games. “Right now,” he adds, “I am working on an upcoming full CG movie ‘Dear Anne’ in Italy.”

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While he isn’t a professional photographer, Peter takes a lot of pictures everywhere he goes, but mostly he just uses them as reference for lighting, natural phenomena or textures. “Through all the years, I’ve gathered quite a nice database of images. References can save a lot of time in every part of 3D process. Manipulating a photograph is for me a technique that I use a lot when dealing with realistic environments, to prepare backgrounds, textures for models and camera projections.” Usually there is quite a bit of research before Peter starts to work on the piece. Looking for what is typical for the scene, what kind of lighting will suit. He goes through stock photo databases searching for lighting references and textures.

“Just lately,” Sanitra explains, “I`ve done a lot of environments, lighting and rendering, I think this is the part of CG I love the most. When working on scenes, usually I do the modeling very quickly. If you know where you are going, there is nothing to slow you down. 95% of the modeling I do is polygonal modeling. I like to have control over every vertex, and usually I do the ‘cage-smart’ way so I can use subdivision and still keep the good shape of the model. This way ensures you can use the same model for closeups and as well as for further distant shots.” While working on rendering and shaders, Peter has usually already started to create the composite in Digital Fusion to see if the render is good enough to be used as final.

“You cannot separate the creative and the technical process completely,” Sanitra says, “but usually the creative part should go first. When you prepare the scene, do the design, then you can think about the lighting and cameras. Later it gets far more technical. So if you get some new ideas for image you want to create, think a lot about the techniques and tools you’ll use. This approach can make the process easier and more effective.”

For most of his jobs, Peter Sanitra works with Autodesk 3ds Max. “In Max, I love the particle flow system,” he says. “You can make really complex particle systems and it’s a very intuitive node-based application. For me, 50% of a good-looking image can be achieved in finding the right composition and having good effects in post-production.”

Light and shadows can really change feel of the image. With light we can define the way the viewer perceives the image and it’s idea. A good knowledge of traditional art can help you a lot when you work in CG. Knowledge of perspective, color perspective, theory of colors etc. “In CG projects,” Peter says, “many times we used techniques that were known to traditional artists hundreds of years ago. If you are doing some realistic renders, it is essential to know how materials behave in different lighting conditions.”

The challenge to generate the next realistic image, is what really attracts Peter Sanitra to his work. He is also a big fan of science fiction concepts and speed sketching. Sanitra wants to never complete learning the apps and digging deeper. “I want to grow and advance in artistic and technical knowledge.” He adds. “For me, there is only one way to the top, and that is training and practice. If you want to be better then the rest, you have to practice more then the rest. Simple as that.”

For the last two years Peter has been really busy working in his full time job and freelancing from home. “I needed something new, something personal,” he quips. Then in Spring 2006, he was lucky enough to get the nice job in Milan as an environment artist on the ‘Dear Anne’ movie. “I had some time left in the evening and weekends, so I decided to make my own demo reel. I had no big plan at the start, just a presentation video, a couple of interesting scenes, four or five maybe, put together to show my work as 3D generalist, that I always was and want to be.”

For compositing the reel, Sanitra’s choice is Digital Fusion. “With Fusion you can match the histogram of your footage to the reel image, and this can help you achieve the look you want. Right now, VRay is my render of choice. It has very fast glossy reflections, proxy geometry and fantastic displacement. I also use a dirt shader a lot. But for extra passes like zbuffer, normal map, volumetric light etc. I still use default scanline render.”

Peter’s main motivation was his need to do something dynamic and visually stunning, not with only still pictures. He describes his thoughts on the guidelines he followed. “The key was previsualization of my animation with sound. You can have nice renders, models etc, but if they don`t work together with the camera edits and music, it will be just another average presentation. You need to know where you are going in every stage, and what you want to achieve. I did the soundtrack first and then I was animating cameras with music already loaded in 3ds Max, so I was changing the camera position and movement according to sound. It took me five months of work every night to finish.”