Featured Artist: Sylvester Dorgu - Malta
“The Transform Node of Houdini”
Sylvester Dorgu 2021
Ira and Amina
The transcript of our virtual coffee with Sylvester follows . . .
Sylvester Dorgue is a 3d character Artist. His attention to detail breeds life into his creations. He likes to push the most sophisticated software out there to their limits. Sylvester is a gifted self-taught artist whose work is truly captivating.
HOW DID YOUR JOURNEY BEGIN
“When I was young, I got my first set of legos and it was a plane I think. I built it and I enjoyed it so much that I was like - oh I want to be a pilot. That was me from primary school all the way to eighth grade and ninth grade. Then all of a sudden I'm like okay I don't enjoy the piloting aspects but I enjoy more building stuff. Then in my 11th year I had this friend who was an architect and he introduced me to sketchup. I fell in love with it immediately. I was like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
ON YOUR RECENT CHARACTER CREATION
So I had done something, um, it was a black girl, Dami. She had braids and everything and a lot of people liked it. I had really good feedback on that and I enjoyed doing that one. But then the hair was so power consuming on my laptop. I didn't want to deal with that this time. I just wanted to like because I had been practicing different workflows and stuff. So I wanted to crunch it all down and see how fast I could get it. I just said okay I'm not bothering with the hair. So there's this head attire that we have in Nigeria. It's called a gilly. I just said okay since that covers the whole hair I don't have to deal with particles and all that stuff. Let me do that. It looks nice. So I went on Pinterest looking for inspiration. I did a phase using the texture in xyz and I was able to get from four weeks down to four days. I was pretty happy with myself.
HOW DID YOU FIND GRIDMARKETS
To be honest. I have never heard of it before but the email that they sent after that I just went straight on google because that's what I do and I looked up what is GridMarkets. Oh it's a rendering farm. Oh wow that price and I'm like oh this is this is really interesting. I started to see how GridMarkets could help me since now I'm going full ray tracing. I can make animations and stuff like that.
YOUR ADVICE FOR YOUNG ARTISTS ON GETTING STARTED
Basically just start. The hardest thing to do is to open the 3d software up and, I don't know, delete the default cube or something. So as soon as you do that I don't know what it does. But you're just free to go anywhere. It's that motivation that you need to get that first step. So as soon as you can get that every other thing I feel it just comes as you need it. So after you open it up you'll be like okay, so how do I start modeling? How do I start sculpting? Then you go on YouTube. You check. You bring it back. Then you start. How do I add hair? You check. You bring it back. How do I render? You go, you check. You bring it back. Then oh, this is my first work. This is uh crap. How do I make it better? You go and you bring it back and that's how it is.