Meet the Artist: Louis du Mont

My name is Louis du Mont. I’m a digital artist and director at weareformation.com, a London, UK based animation company I started with producer and friend Jon Reidy.

Collectively we produce commercial animation, mainly for digital campaigns, including interactive projects. I also like to work on passion projects like ‘Visiting’ and more recently ‘Isometropolis PD’, which I’d love to do much more of.

I’ve worked out of a few places and am currently in east London with architectural visualisation company Ninety90, who recently invested in a large render cabinet packed with dual xeon blade servers, which I occasionally piggy back on. However, now that I’m mainly using Cycles I’ve found little need to use them, instead using 3x Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU’s in my workstation and Garage Farm for intense render jobs. For non-commercial work I love using and contributing to ‘Sheep It’ free distributed rendering.

Getting into Blender

I started creating 3D content in Truspace and then Lightwave 3D. Throughout the years I stayed with Lightwave 3D, supplementing it with tools like ZBrush and Substance Painter to fill in the gaps.

About a year or so ago I was working on a WebGL project that made use of the three.js libraries. This involved exporting animated scenes to GLTF and, at the time, one of the more solid exporters was for Blender. So I was forced to overcome some of my fear of the Blender interface. I was setting the input preset for Blender to ‘Maya’, but, on reflection, feel that may have held me back as I was not fully embracing the interface.

A few months later I was working on a little passion project involving a large array or drawers. Modelling was done in Lightwave and texturing in Substance Painter. I was getting frustrated with CPU rendering within Lightwave so thought I’d try layout and animation in Blender to take advantage of Cycles GPU rendering. I started playing around with it, and I was hooked!

Since then, I’ve been frantically learning Blender and using it as my primary 3D program and have not had the need to open ZBrush or Substance Painter for a while.

Inspiration and Resources

I don’t have any stand out inspirations, but have spent time cultivating various platforms to provide a stream of amazing works. These are some hugely talented people I follow on the following platforms: ArtStation, Vimeo, Twitter, Sketchfab.

I also love photography/videography and sharing photos on Flickr. I find experimenting with photography feeds back into the composition and lighting of 3D renders and also comes in handy for capturing textures and HDRI environments, some of which I share on supertextures.co.uk. For those interested, I’ve documented some of the various HDRI capture techniques in this video.

Characters, my favorite type of project!

I think a lot of projects I work on are conceived to experiment with different techniques and technologies, but I often try to think of what projects I most enjoy. I’d have to say character design and animation would be at the top of my list.

I love creating something from nothing and breathing life into it. I think I’m getting to the stage in Blender now that I could create and rig most things, or at least know where to start.

Going forward, my aim is to dedicate more time to giving characters a purpose, building a personality and making a story. I’m too eager to get modelling without remembering that some of the most enjoyable projects have been significantly planned, sketched up and storyboarded. As with most projects I’m always keen to share knowledge and show production progress in the form of blog post, tweets and tutorials. You can follow my endeavours below.

Thanks!

About the Artist

Louis du Mont, Digital Artist and Director at weareformation.com