Week 3 - Forefront Friday: The Artwork of Jonas Ronnegard

Jonas Ronnegard is a freelance environment artist who has built an arsenal of tools and resources for other artists to purchase. I was very impressed with his portfolio on Artstation and one video in particular, where he demonstrates the effectiveness of his ornamental brushes in ZBrush made my jaw drop. 

You can watch the video here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=119&v=dNUHjB4YK5c

A selection of the alpha brushes that Jonas has created.

This is honestly why I need to start using ZBrush as Jonas showcases with ease how quickly he was able to create ornate details and then texture them in Substance Painter. When it comes to my own workflow I spend a lot of time carefully positioning details within 3DS Max and then exporting them for hard surface transfer. Whilst I feel I have gotten the workflow down, when compared to the cutting edge brush details created by Jonas, I obviously could be a lot faster in this area. For me this seems the quickest way to simulate details because when I start to use a lot of high poly models in my 3D scenes the computer performance starts to struggle. This is a problem not present in ZBrush as the software can display an incredibly high amount of polygons without performance loss.

Studying Ronnegard's portfolio I can already see areas that I need to improve in such as organic modeling. As an environment artist I need to make sure I am capable of both hard surface and natural details. Currently my portfolio leans very heavily toward architectural models and if I am to reach the high standards set by Jonas Ronnegard, I will need to prove that I can diversify whilst retaining a consistent quality throughout my work.

RONNEGARD, J. (2017). JRO - 55 Ornament Brushes/Alphas Vol 2. [Online Image] Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5ggxA [Accessed 08/06/2018].

JROTOOLS. (2017) Ornament Alphas/Brushes Vol 2 - Preview. [Online Video] September 5th. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=119&v=dNUHjB4YK5c [Accessed: 08/06/2018]