Tom Breuer is the winner of the Sketchfab Kaiju Low Poly Challenge
Interview by Mike Haggerty
Sometimes you stumble across an artist that just seems to have a blast making the art they do and sometimes that artist is slid across your desk after winning an awesome challenge like the latest Sketchfab Kaiju Art Challenge. Tom puts a lot of work into his art while still creating pieces that explore concepts in a pretty fun way.
He has a large body of work spanning several years, all available to check out on his Artstation page. The piece that won him this challenge was a really awesome looking lava Kaiju that captures aspects of deep sea life, earth and volcanic eruptions all in one crazy package (he animated and added some cool effects to it as well).
Tom seems to be well on his way to being a master character artist with a clear emphasis on creating fantastic creatures. His creatures are crazy combinations or interpretations of his own design as often as they are creations of popular myth and legend. He provides some insight into his history and processes in the interview below so check it out!
You can see more of his work on is Artstation and connect professionally with him on his LinkedIn!
Mike Haggerty: Is this your first art challenge? What other ones have you taken part in?
Tom Breuer: No, this is not my first challenge. I really like taking part in challenges and getting out of my own comfort zone.
One of the other challenges I did was the Discord #scifi-motorcycle-challenge on the Discord channel of Sketchfab. Since my current focus is more on character and creature design, it was a nice challenge to deal with Hard surface models again and play with it.
In the end I designed a self-propelled motorbike with movable arms — maybe my preference for character design had more influence on the motorbike than I thought at the beginning.
I also participated in challenges on ArtStation, for example the ArtStationChallenge NVIDIA Metropia 2042 — Characters of the Future”.
Mike Haggerty: Where are you from, what where your motivations for jumping into 3D art?
Tom Breuer: I come from Germany from near Cologne. My motivation to work in the 3D area has been built up very early and I had the thought “How cool would it be to be able to do that” — for a long time.
For example when I saw a documentary about Jurassic Park. They showed how the T-Rex was animated and integrated into the forest and how they adapted the light setup to the forest with Gizmos.
But I actually started with 3D art when I had just started studying archaeology in 2009. The whole recording and documentation of art objects and landscapes was still based on photography, hand drawings and maps back then.
For a presentation about the pyramids of Giza I modeled the platform with the help of map material so I could walk through the areas during the presentation and stop at appropriate points.
Unfortunately, I had only created the standard Blender Gingerbread tutorial at that point and was incredibly slow. Because of this I lacked time to do other researches the rest of the presentation. Therefore it didn’t go well, except for the documentation and the preparation of the map material.
But after that I was so enthusiastic about the possibilities, this kind of storytelling offers me, that I stayed with it. I am still overwhelmed all over again by the possibilities.
Afterwards it was simply the way I tell my stories.
Mike Haggerty: How long did this particular piece take you?
Tom Breuer: A rough estimate, 28 hours. Unfortunately, I was only able to work on it in the evening, in my free time, for a few hours, and so the whole process took about two weeks.
Mike Haggerty: What software suites do you swear by? How long have you been working in 3D and how has the industry changed around you since you first started?
Tom Breuer: I started with Blender 10 years ago (version 2.49) and have been with it ever since. Due to work I had temporarily tried other 3D software, but due to the rapid development, which makes Blender what it is, it always had exactly the right tools for my requirements.
Apart from Blender, which I use for modelling, rigging, animating and rendering, Substance Painter is currently at the top of my list as a texturing suite, but closely followed by Quixel Mixer.
I had Quixel as a Photoshop extension 3 years ago and was very happy to see that it has made the leap as a standalone software. I use Substance Painter for my characters and Quixel Mixer for Environment/Props.
Photoshop is also part of the Software Pack — but I am definitely not a 2D artist and my skills in this area are specialized in fast sketches, texture creation and editing.
How the industry has changed depends very much on the areas where you have the points of contact.
If you look into the museum and art history processing, photogrammetry is the big milestone that I believe has been worked towards for a long time.
In my studies, for example, I had the job of sorting the shards of broken vases (by the kilo) found on excavations and documenting them via photo and hand drawing.
At that time, normal “3D modelling” was simply too imprecise to properly document and process broken vases — for example: the smallest colour deviations at the breakage edge of a shard that can be quickly overlooked.
By means of photogrammetry such details can be captured much better and (for example via sketchfab) shared with people.
In the exhibition stand business, where I have been working for the last 5 years, the use of 3D has not changed that much yet.
The 3D tools are used to create exhibition stands or showrooms and visualize them for the customer to imagine.
Here was a further development when VR became usable for everyone and the models were not just there to be seen but became an experience.
In short I can say that the biggest development since my first 3D model until today is that we have come from simply showing and visualizing the 3D data to experiencing and interacting with the 3D data.
Mike Haggerty: What are some of the Artists that YOU look up to or who inspire you?
Tom Breuer: There are many artists that I follow on social media and whose work is very inspiring to me. But mainly I like studios that work with such artists and combine their expertise.
A good example is Guerrilla Games, who work with big names like Loish to get the best out of their stories.
Just as exciting is “The SPA Studios” around Sergio Pablos, whom I have been following since “Treasure Planet”.
Mike Haggerty: Where did you go to school, what was your experience like there? What are some of the best non-school resources you have used for learning on your own time?
Tom Breuer: I changed my orientation during my studies of archaeology at the University of Bonn and changed to the University of Applied Sciences Aachen to study communication design.
During my communication design studies, we were given tasks that we had to solve and prepare with our own tools.
The wide range of tasks, which at first had nothing to do with 3D, later helped me to look beyond my own nose, because I wanted to find ways to solve those tasks in 3D.
That’s how I developed my skills — one task after the other (or even 3–4 at the same time) and then I looked at which way I could get the best results.
In the beginning I did all the basic Blender-tutorials I found on their website. Then came the first tutorial of BlenderGuru in 2010 — of course the donut (I think even version 1.0 :D).
But the best platform for me was CG Cookie — very well done tutorials, which I often just turned on besides other work, like I’d listen to a podcast today.
Mike Haggerty: What were the inspirations for this piece?
Tom Breuer: At the beginning I thought of a rough story for the Kaiju. Where does he live and what does the Kaiju do to survive. Then I started to look at pictures of Kaijus and to think about what is special about the creatures — for this I usually use Pinterest and create a separate pin board for each project.
The initial considerations that the Kaiju lives as a volcano and mountainous creature dominated the elaboration — I used scanned data from rocks to build the rough shape before I started to work out the figure.
I often let myself be inspired by the animal world and ask myself the question, which animals live there, where I place my characters and adjust the basic features accordingly.
Mike Haggerty: Love the added effect of the lava beam, it definitely adds a “Flare” to the piece, pun absolutely intended. Do you animate a lot of your pieces or was this a special step for this event?
Tom Breuer: I try to animate every character I create, because for me the movement of a creature says as much as the outer shape.
But with the Kaiju and the Lava beam it was completely different than with my previous models. Normally I only animate the figure itself and no effects around it.
The beam took a third of the total creation time and was a bit of a challenge because of the fast sequence of keyframes and the dynamic that the beam should have.
Therefore I was especially pleased that it was so well received and mentioned.
Well the Beam animation definitely drew my eye as well as the judges I think. It has great effects attached to it and it captures some the fundamentals of animation with each frame. Thanks for talking with me Tom and I can’t wait to see what other art you come up with.
You can see more of Toms work by checking out his Linktree!
