3D artist of the day: Hrafn Åki Hrafnsson

Every day on Creative Bloq we'll be profiling a 3D artist and their work. Today we chat to Icelandic art director Hrafn Åki Hrafnsson, aka Raven - "My name directly translates to Raven Ravenson if you skip the middle part," he says, "so just call me Raven."

Q: How did you get into 3D?

I'm a 43 year old (although I feel 24), I'm a graphic designer and live in Reykjavik, Iceland. I have extensive history in web design, and graphic design, but until about a year ago had no real experience in 3D.

I started with ZBrush in autumn last year. I've written a series of posts about what I've learned about 3D here. I have more web design and illustration work here and here.

Q: How did you go about learning 3D?

I've wanted to learn 3D for many years to add to my illustration skills. I was lucky enough to find www.zbrushworkshops.com and thought ZBrush looked really interesting as a 3D tool. I'd tried Maya and Max but never felt like it was especially artistic, at least for me.

Inspired by one of the Zbrush Workshops newsletters, I ended up taking classes, including one that Ryan Kingslien, Note Porter & Josep Drust were doing together at the Game Arts Institute. It was in this class that I created the character pictured here. I think I made every mistake possible, but I learned a lot in the process.

Q: How did you create this character?

The character is a futuristic combat dude. I first created three different concepts then I decided to take some of the concepts further and do them high res.

Now I come from the design world, where high res means high resolution. But in 3D high res means clean 3D. So I misunderstood the task a little and created high resolution details in the shoes and pants.

After that I needed to take everything to this level to have the character feel solid: this took a lot of time and effort. In the end I was happy but I have still some work to do in the low res model through texturing.

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