John Goodson has made the difficult transition from physical modeler and painter, to CG modeler and graphic artist. Over at CGSociety, he talks about how he got started back in the mid-80s with classic urethane foam models, and made the transition.
Most recently, he photographed asphalt surfaces to create bump maps and displacements to paint the deck of a CG aircraft carrier for ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’. And now, he’s building digital models as well as painting them. His first formal modeling job was building the MotoTerminators for ‘Terminator: Salvation’. “I always feel like I’m cheating when I build digital models,” he says, “because I get volume for free. It’s a weird process. Modeling is usually subtractive – you take a block of wood and carve stuff out of it. Here, it’s sort of a free additive process. You can take a cube and extrude anything out of it. I totally take advantage of it.”
