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How Blender is used at Le Monde: Meet Jacques Louradour

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I recently found out that Blender was used for illustrations at Le Monde, one of the leading newspapers in France. After some digging, I met Jacques Louradour and I'd like to introduce you to him and his work.

Hi there,

My name is Jacques Louradour, and i'm a Graphic & Motion Designer. I live and studied in Paris.

I First made my classes in ENSAD (the french national school of Art and design) where I learnt the principles of graphic design & Animation. I graduated in Animation direction in 2006.

Today, I'm mostly working for the french Daily newspaper Le Monde.fr as a freelancer, where I regulary make animations, and 3D illustrations for the scientific review pages. I've also the chance to teach the animation process and Motion Design at Sup'Internet.

First of all, it took me a long time to convince myself that you could be interested in my work as a graphic designer for the Press. But as long as I am using Blender for years now in my own workflow, you might be interested in my works.

It’s only my opinion, but I feel the gamification of media in all the professional fields is getting bigger and bigger every day. And because of that, one my goals, is to promote the 3D interactive in the media more. I think people, even serious ones, they still like to play with a 3D model when they have the opportunity to do it. They like to turn around, zoom in/out like they could turn around it in real life. The fact that some platform are so easy to handle (like Sketchfab for example) make the thing more attractive for people. And so, the combination between Blender to Sketchfab is becoming very natural.

02-DOSIMETREX1I1-1024x661

As for me, I started three years ago because I had no other choice.

To tell the truth, I first wanted to learn C4D but we didn't have the license to run it. So the only opportunity to do better images visualisation was to move for something free --> Blender & Cycles of course!

It took me a while to understand how it works, plus, I didn't have much skill in 3D softwares except few little things with max ..) And these days, i’m still spending a loooooot of time doing tutorials. Actually a part of my life is: tutorials.

For the pages, I try my best to render complexes things like "how it's inside a smartphone" and stuffs like that.

As for the animations, I love to introduce some 3D elements inside my 2D After Effects compositions. Most of the time people doesn't expect 3D in my animations, but when something that change the esthetic is coming, they become more surprised. Now, I try to focus on this feelings. So everytime I judge it's necessary, I introduce 3D.

I know i'm not a 3D killer ... I’m hardly a generalist but passionate.

https://vimeo.com/160287048

I discover every day new techniques and tools through your site and others: Addon that has changed the way of modeling...Rendering and animating...Thanks to these, I can now transform the painting of my father into a modern landscape (with “CubeSter”) as you can see above, or I can choose to reveal a factory like it’s constructing itself (with the “Unfold transition” Addon):

I recently discovered another one for the post processing called “easy FX” that allows me to simply make color correction, DOF, flares and many more things inside blender. I used it a lot for almost most of my latest renders like this one:

50-SCIE-1106-Impression-3D-Organes-WEB

And here, I am only talking about free ones. But so many other addons are completing the list…(HardOps, bool tool, etc...) These incredible tools are making the things easier for everyone. Now that the community of developers and designers is growing, blender is being ten times more powerful.

I'm happy to see some french university had chosen the way of free software as you can see in this article. Many agencies will be surprised to see that the new generation won’t have to pay for using software that can do exactly the same thing. I trust so much in the power of free softwares. These last days, I ve tried Krita and even though it’s not blender, I must say I had a lot of fun playing around the tools…it’s so powerful and it would fit extremely well inside the workflow with blender.

Blender-experimentation-Plexus-Terrain

I'm hoping that blender will improve things in Motion design in terms of simplicity where I think C4D is probably a little bit in advance. But, I’m pretty sure the Blender foundation will work on it one day. :)

Thanks for reading! You can visit my website here.

 

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

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