READERSVOICE.COM: How long did it take to make the Driverless Car illustration and do you like machinery pictures or have a preference for subjects?

GRAHAM MURDOCH: The BMW concept car was bought — no point in doing it twice. It still takes time to understand the asset and reorganise it for purpose, then to set everything up as a scene with lighting, texturing, test renders, high res renders, compositing, tweaks and patches. It was partially animated as well, to get the motion blur working. Seven to 12 days is the usual working timeframe this would fall into. A lot of my commercial work has a technical lilt to it. I like its angular nature. Machinery lends itself well to this. Complexity and detail can be very seductive. More organic work is somewhere in the pipeline, still with that graphic sensibility.

RV: The Theme Park picture was beautiful. How did you make that and research the water color?

GM: Sometimes things just fall into place. In this instance, a material with the properties of water (highly transparent, refractive, fresnel reflection) was applied to an object placed in a model of an infinity pool. Some bump mapping was added to the water material to create ripple, and it rendered out fine first time. So often all the right ingredients don’t produce the expected cake. Great when it works out.

RV: What are your plans?

GM: Stay interested. Keep trying. Technologies, software and developers are making it easier for us to apply their research to produce high quality results. We don’t need to wrestle as much with the ‘how to’, freeing us to concentrate more on the creative aspects of the work. Despite the world at large it’s a very good time to be in this field.

– See some of Graham Murdoch’s pictures at mmdi.co.uk.
– copyright Simon Sandall