hiadammarshall

Visual Artist, Video Generalist - www.hiadammarshall.com - [email protected]

[hiadammarshall]

Summer comes by so fast. I've spent the sunny days catching up in the garden and forgotten entirely to take the time to enjoy it.

A lot of my mindset throughout my life has been "work hard now so you can enjoy it later" and lately, I've been trying to work on the idea of doing both at once.

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Summer Grass

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June Pollen

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Spring Spirit

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Gusty Grass

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Spring Light

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Movement

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Splats

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Shade

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Bluebell Ballet

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Mossy Carpet

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[hiadammarshall]

One Decade of Freelancing

According to my LinkedIn page, I celebrate 10 years of freelancing this May. One whole decade.

To be honest, I don't remember exactly when I started, but it doesn't really matter. I'm grateful that my past self took a risk (with a lot of help) and decided to start rather than wait for the right time. There was no real clarifying moment that made my career feel like this was what I wanted to do. Just a slow, steady meander through my skills and interests that whittled what I had available to me.

I look at other successful businesses, freelancers, and workers who have these dramatic stories that helped shape them and their careers. A lot of people imagine that specific, powerful, pivotal moments in their lives will reveal grand things for them. I've noticed that sometimes, it's just getting started that helps me see what I need to do. Grand things take time or chance, and if you wait for the chance, you won't create the time for it to happen.

I feel very lucky to be doing what I do, and working with the utterly fantastic, amazing, and genuine people I do. I realised while building my career, I created the space I thrived within.

Here is some tangible advice, which I still do not feel qualified to give.

You have permission to start now, or whenever you want

You also have permission to make great work or do the work you want to do. I spent many years not knowing I could be doing the work I want to do. Don’t wait for someone to tell you what you want to do; decide for yourself

You grow the space you nurture, meaning you can work how you want to and the way you want to

I still sometimes don't know what I'm doing, and that's how I got here. The lesson in this is that it helped me shape a lot of my decision-making skills

The world is a scary place, so you might as well start carving out a part of it that feels familiar to you, or start looking for others who feel the same way you do

[hiadammarshall]

Spring Cascade

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Daffodil Waterfall

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Flash

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[hiadammarshall]

your work is absolutely incredible!!! I am an animator, so my knowledge of modeling is confined to what I learned to do in maya in school. I have never seen anyone's work capture the texture and organic feel of a painting that yours does. would you mind describing your workflow a bit? what program/s do you use??

Hey there! This is such a lovely and thoughtful message, thanks so much! This is very kind of you to say, as I am very inspired by a lot of the expressionist painters, such as Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Also a huge fan of Turner, Monet and Cezanne. I loved how you could make out the overall structure, composition and subject even through the broad strokes and texture. It's something I spent a lot of time trying to capture while exploring in my workflow.

I use Cinema 4D with the Redshift render engine and edit in Photoshop (mostly just CC to get it looking right). I make procedural landscapes, sometimes using real-world data with height maps, or through World Creator. Sometimes it's just a simple landscape object, and other times it's complex layered noises or hand-brushed geometry. It depends on the look. I love to keep it simple where I can.

The flowers and grasses are usually scattered or brushed on the landscape geometry. Sometimes I layer them through noise patterns, adjusting their size, and other times it's painted on through polygon selections. I also sometimes like to bunch and group similar flowers to try to emulate that real-world scattering of seeds (imagine the little clusters of flowers seeding and growing outwards). Othertimes, I love how random it can be just flinging it on and seeing what happens.

The painting like texture is through the long exposures. I try to emulate my love of photography as much as I can, dialling in realistic area maps and using real camera settings with the redshift camera object. I don't want it all done for me in the engine, so I want it to feel manual, exposure mistakes and all. Each 'cloning' of flowers is simulated through a looping wind pattern (these used to actually all be videos, but each frame, single image, takes approx. 3+ hours to render). The blur of the flowers over this time creates lovely smears and expressive brush strokes. There's also the render settings themselves that help push this effect further. You can really dial in a perfect look in 3D workflows, but I want the opposite, i want the grain and the grit, so I don't mind dialling it back a bit to make it more raw. I am exploring a more painterly look too, but there's a lot of limitations with the actual rendering of these due to me basically using the render engine as a brush rather than what it was intended to do, so I'm trying to find new ways to break it and make it less perfect.

[hiadammarshall]

Garden Party

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