Ritam Chatterjee: Interview with 3D artist

Hi everyone! We continue a series of short interviews with the best artists from Hum3D competitions.

Ritam Chatterjee, author of the “The beauty of Porsche RWB”, will answer six questions and give us a look behind the scenes of his work.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do and how did you become a 3D artist?

I am Ritam Chatterjee a 3D generalist/Unreal Engine artist from Kolkata, India. I’m working as an Unreal Engine artist for arch viz, product renders, and advertisements.

I like to work on 3D Modeling, texturing, automotive renders, and environment renders.

Back in the time, I used to play a lot of video games which got my interest in the field of 3D Art. As a hobby, I started playing around with 3DS Max watching a few online tutorials, creating small 3D artworks, and then after completing my school I thought of making a career out of it.

What was the workflow behind your latest challenge image? Where did the idea come from?

I opted for Real-time workflow using Unreal Engine 4.27, to achieve a photo-realistic quality I thought of incorporating the path-tracing feature in Unreal Engine 4.

I was inspired by the automotive renders done by artists like David Baylis, Carlos Colorsponge, and Matteo Gentile.

What’s the biggest challenge you faced while modeling? Did you learn something new?

As I was using Unreal Engine setting up the scene and lighting it up was pretty intuitive and real-time but the main challenge that I faced was to render the Image in high quality as I only have a GTX 1060 to render the scene and that’s why there were a bunch of crashes I faced while rendering it from the Movie Render Queue. At this point of time, my friend Surjendu Das helped me to render out the scene as he had better Hardware.

I was very excited to use the Pathtracing feature in Unreal Engine 4.27 so while working on this project I learned a lot about using Pathtracing in UE and rendering a photo-realistic Image out of it.

How often do you do personal projects and keep your portfolio up-to-date? Which one is your favorite?

I usually try to work on personal projects whenever I get free time and motivation to try something new.

What or who inspires you today? Are you a member of any art communities? Any favorite hashtags you check on a daily basis?

I get Inspired by automotive renders and vintage style photography. Recently I have been more excited about real-time environment creation and rendering. I get greatly Inspired by a few artists like Marek Denko, David Baylis, Carlos Colorsponge, and Matteo Gentile. Unfortunately at the moment, I am not a member of any art communities.

The hashtags which I like to follow daily are #unrealengine #automotivecgi #cgrender #quixel #automotivephotography and so on.

Please tell us your five short tips for creating 3D art.

My five-short tips for creating better CG Art would be:

1. 1) Gather a lot of references as you can about the subject that you are going to create/replicate in CG, because the more references you have the easier it will become for you to create a visual vocabulary for your Ideas.

2. 2) Create a rough block out/sketch of your Idea.

3. 3) If you’re going for realistic renders, always add Imperfections to your models, textures, and renders because that’s what realism is all about.

4. 4) Always try to achieve a photographic quality in your renders. Try to emulate the real-world camera settings in your CG camera. It will instantly get you a realistic look.

5. 5) Try to photograph the world around you. It will help more than gathering references from the Internet.