DA: Welcome to Digital Artworks Shane and thanks for your time.
Would you please present yourself?
SC: My name is Shane Caudle (born 1972), I currently live in
Raleigh North Carolina.
DA: What is your profession?
SC: I work full time as Art Director for Epic Games. I have
been at Epic for about 9 years.At Epic, I have worked on Unreal, the
Unreal Addon, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament PS2, Unreal Tournament
2003, Unreal Championship.
DA: For how long time have you been doing CG?
SC: I have been doing Art as a living since I was a 17. I've
been doing CG for about 13 years. I started out airbrushing when I
was about 12 just for fun, I did a lot of murals, portraits, shirts,
etc, then I got a job Airbrushing in the Birmingham Galleria, one
of the biggest malls in the south.
After that I got a job at a company called Animotion, where I was
introduced to CG. We did CDRom demos for companies like Samsung and
Sony etc. Then a friend of mine and I started a company called Rival
Productions, where we did a full color comic book called Eye of the
Storm. We did a mix of 3D rendered backgrounds, with hand painted
characters, it was a lot of fun and I got a lot of experience with
CG there. During this time, at nights we would deathmatch games like
Doom Hexen, Heritc, Quake etc. I started making levels for the games
we were playing for fun, and started making a total conversion of
Quake, and put up a web page for it. Within a 2 weeks, to my surprise,
I had like 6 job offers from major game companies. Tim Sweeney from
Epic Games saw my stuff and wanted to see what I could do with the
Unreal Engine, so the sent me the stuff, and in a few days I sent
them a level. They offered me a job, and I decided to take it, because
I really liked Epics tools. What's really cool is, now I get to design
them.
DA: You're very talented, I'll just sneak in one of my favourites
here: http://www.planetshane.com/Paintings/Brock.htm
If you should decribe your art, what would you call the
genre?
SC: I do all kinds of art, but most of my work is game
related, characters, levels, textures etc.
DA: Do you have everything clear in your mind like lights,
textures, colors and so on when you start an image?
SC: Sometimes I do, but most of the time it evolves is an evolutionary
process. I'll add something, and that will give me new ideas for other
things to add.
DA: Please tell me where your ideas come from, and how is your
working process?
SC: I get ideas from all over the place, as I'm sure all artists
do. Things I see in the real world, Interesting movies, other
artwork,
and of course from my own imagination.
As for my working process, it changes depending on what I'm working
on.
For a portrait, I usually start real rough loosely sketching the overall
shapes of everything, making sure the proportions are right, then
I start adding in all the darker shadowed areas. then I go in and
start the detailing by doing the eyes first. I think you get a feel
for the image early on by doing the eyes first. I will then start
refining the shading, adding in more details like the in the lips,
ears, nose. Lastly I do the hair to finish it off.
Here is one I did of Angelina Jolie, this is from looking at a pic
of her in Maxim Magazine. http://www.planetshane.com/Paintings/Angelina.htm
You can see some of my other work at planetshane.com
most of this is older work, as I can't post my current work because
of non disclosure agreements etc. It is mostly for a un announced
game we are currently working on.
DA: Are you inspired and influenced by other artist's (living
or dead) work? Do you i. e. have a favorite artist?
SC:
Doug Chiand, Craig Mullins, Syd Mead.
DA: It seems to me that you are working with many different
softwares ... which ones are you using?
SC: Here are the main ones I use...
3DMax 6 - Been using it since version 1.
DeepUV
DeepPaint 3D
Photoshop 8 (aka Photoshop CS) - Been using it since version 1.
Painter 8 - Been using it since version 1.
All our custom tools, UnrealEd etc.
Lots more...
DA:
I'm sure it will be of interest to our readers to know about your
computer system ?
SC:
I have a Duel Xeon 3 Ghz ,4 gigs of ram, 500 Gigs of hard drive space,
Radeon 9800Xt 256 meg video card, Duel 21 inch monitors.
DA:
On
behalf of Digital Artworks thank you for this interview ... and I
wish you luck with your excellent artwork in the future.
SC:
Thank you!
For
Digital Artworks
Karin
Eszterhás
January 2004
Please visit
Shane Caudle's Gallery here: http://www.planetshane.com
