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Autodesk® 3ds Max®
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Autodesk® Maya®
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Autodesk® Softimage®
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Autodesk® MotionBuilder®
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Autodesk® Mudbox™
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Autodesk® Sketchbook® Pro
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Autodesk® Smoke on Mac®
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Loïc “e338” Zimmermann has worked in the CG business for 10 years. In 1997, he graduated with a Fine Arts degree with First Class Honours and immediately started working as a class instructor. Two years later, he worked on CG projects in various fields such as architecture/urbanism and commercials.
In 2002, choosing to focus on character design and illustration, he opted exclusively for freelance jobs. For a couple of projects, including a virtual fashion show, he worked with everything from technical tasks to directing and editing, which gave him a global vision of the many steps you have to go through during a production phase.
Later, Loïc joined a team in Italy to work on a born dead feature film (“Anne Frank” for 263 films) and then he headed back to Paris where he was hired as an artistic director and rendering supervisor for Sparx Animation. There, he also monitored student progress on final projects at the Art School Les Gobelins (Burning Safari, Coq Hot).
Recently Loïc or “e338”, has spent even more time on personal projects (exhibitions, books) professional illustrations (Motionbuilder7, Maya8, etc) and publishing (a cover for Silent Hill, Science et Vie Jr, Imagine Fx, Fantasy Flight Games...)
In 2007, Loic recreated himself as a “digital double” in order to design and pre-visualize a tattoo that was then unwrapped, printed on a carbon paper, and then applied to his real skin with accuracy before the inking could start. These images ended up on Gizmodo, Wired and other high publications.
Loïc now works as a conceptual designer and character lead at Luma Pictures on projects that include Harry Potter, Wolverine, City of Ember, Underworld, and Percy Jackson.
In the last six years, I’ve really focused on modeling and texturing characters. I sometimes do a little bit of ‘lookdev’ but I don't really like it --and I don't think I'm really good at it anyway.
I like the modeling process because there's no waiting, no computation, just you and a bunch of vertices to move around. It can be a little creative sometimes, that cannot hurt.
I can use 3D for concept design, in order to get the perspective right on some complex shapes or simply to help visualize a weird idea. I can jump into Maya and quickly roughen up volumes. I use an "out of the box" skylight preset in mental ray to render out a few angles that I will paint over in Photoshop or Painter.
And finally I use my CG double in Maya to previz the progress of my tattoo. Each time I design a new element I go back and forth from Maya to Photoshop to adjust the design according to the flow of the anatomy. Then I use it to unfold the tattoo for real world "application".
If you like the unknown, then yes, it can be a very exciting industry. A subject will come for which you'll have to think pretty hard, or battle with a few times to make it successful. No matter how hard you try to plan things, there's always a storm during a production. As far as I hate being in one of those, I confess a certain thrill about them too.
I don't have the same appetite than I used to have, but I still follow with a certain excitement the evolution of the hardware and stuff. Hardware and software are in a “healthy” race for the sake of our productivity.
No matter if you're out of school or self-taught, it's about work and about how confident you are about what you know. And there's no fear to have since computers don't bite. You can try as many times as it takes (well, of course, there's this "deadline" thing...). Learn from whoever you can learn from and practice. I always encourage personal projects too.
