Vitaly Bulgarov is an amazing concept designer and 3D artist originally from Moldova but now living in California. His career has included video game production with Blizzard Entertainment and visual effects production at ILM (Industrial Light & Magic). He currently works at Intuitive Surgical designing real-life surgical robots and bionics.
The work of Vitaly Bulgarov is remarkable not only from a concept and technical perspective but also by the speed and efficiency he can create such amazing designs.
His “Black Phoenix Project” is an excellent example of this. He was able to create 10 stunning designs in 10 days of military robots for a fictional military corporation, in a not-so-distant future. Here’s how Vitaly described the project:
“The goal during this exercise was to create 1 mech design every day in 3d, from start to finish, without creating preliminary 2d sketches, during a non-stop 10 day period.”
He was able to complete so many high end designs due to a workflow he had designed prior to the project, which greatly speeded up the process. Here again is Vitaly describing it:
“Before starting this exercise I spent some R&D time establishing the overall workflow for speed-modeling and tried different techniques that enabled me to accelerate the design process in 3d. The workflow included re-using premade kit-bash parts, graphics/decals, non-subdivision based concept modeling and image-based lighting for the final rendering.”
There is a fascinating interview with Vitaly where he goes into more detail about his process and background on the Collective podcast. In it he discusses how he uses a physical sand timer to keep his designs on track and the importance of planning out the next day’s work in detail the night before.
Vitaly’s main tools include ZBrush and Softimage for modelling and KeyShot for rendering. KeyShot was chosen as it allows him to iterate his designs in real time, avoiding the long render times of a traditional render engine.
You can see more of Vitaly’s inspiring work over on his blog – bulgarov.com.
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