Article from ANIMAGO Award Conference:
Could there be a more mundane motif? A small bathroom whose open wooden
door gives us a view of a tiny room with a small window. A small wash
basin, a toilette, old yet well-maintained tiles – it’s a snapshot that
could have been taken in any old house. In this case, however, it is a
still life with the simple title “WC” that was made on the computer of
Juan Siquier. As so often in art, the beauty of this image lies in the
detail.
Siquier used a bathroom in his parents’ house – one that was located
directly next to his room and holds special memories for him – as the
inspiration for his still: “It was a tiny narrow bathroom that I only
used at night or when I wanted to smoke behind my parents’ back when I
was a teenager”, he remembers. “The rest of the time we all used our
other, bigger and much better equipped bathroom”. Siquier still has a
photograph of that bathroom: “It’s an old photo of poor quality, but I
love the composition. Light is coming through the window and creates
wonderful reflections on the left wall and on the door at the right”.
The room in the photograph also contains very beautiful and provocative
aspects, including a toilette paper holder, old water faucets with a
delicate patina and a towel rack in whose reflecting metal surface the
light of the window breaks. Together with the delightful perspective
that approaches the window, the result is the perfect challenge for a
digital work of art: “I wanted to filter the entire composition through
my own personal style and create a render with a deep atmosphere – one
in which CG illustration and artistic photography mix and generate a
good balance”, notes Siquier.
Photo Realism with an Eye for DetailAnd
Siquier succeeded impressively with “WC”. The photo realism is
outstanding and, at first glance, one doesn’t recognise that it’s a CG
still. The artificiality that once sees time and again in other
“realistic” digital works is entirely missing in this work. However, the
execution of the motif was anything other than easy. There is no sleek
sports car or airplane in this image, only raw surfaces, a door with
tears in the paint, a faded window pane and reflecting yet lightly
blunted tiles with slowly blackening seams. The wood in the window frame
is weathered, there is a worn-out roller blind and a rusted water pipe
in the corner. Siquier succeeded entirely in depicting the different
surface structures in very different stages of utilisation and decay. He
uses an entire series of references as the basis for his work. In
addition to the photographs of the bathroom, Siquier collected as much
image material as he could find: old doors, water pipes, surfaces and as
many things that could serve as samples for the finished product. For
the modelling of the individual objects, such as the wash basin and the
water taps, Siquier used 3D Studio. After that, he arranged the objects
to form a rough composition and adjusted the proportions of the objects
to fit one other. He used Photoshop and Bodypaint for the textures. More
precisely, he used Photoshop to apply traces of dirt and rust and
Bodypaint to depict details of utilisation and decay on the different
surfaces. He used V-Ray for shading, illumination and rendering and UV
Layout for the UV mapping. The reflective surfaces were a huge challenge
in terms of lighting: from the tiles and the paint on the door all the
way to the metal objects and the wash basin, even the toilette paper
reflected light and had to be taken into account in the effort to create
a realistic impression. In order to face these problems head on,
Siquier used – in addition to the big light of the window and the
surface of the door – small lights that lit up those areas that would
otherwise not have received enough light.
A Place of MemorySiquier
then rendered the almost-finished image in a resolution of 4,198 by
6,394 pixels – a task that his old Quad-Core computer from 2006 took
approximately 24 hours to complete. He did the final work on the still
using Photoshop and made some final adjustments to the colour
temperature and contrasts one last time. “The major challenge in the
development of this still was the attempt to show an old and decaying
site that is, at the same time, clean and still in use” explains Siquier
with respect to his project. “In this way, my aim was to call up the
memory of similar locations in the viewer – memories that we all have
from our past”.
