Matthew Baldwin moved to New York City after getting a liberal arts degree, to get an MFA in painting at Pratt Institute. All he could see was huge paintings and even bigger school debts. This was a big turning point for him, graduating 20 years earlier into an economic recession and staring down the barrel of poverty and no practical skills.
"Pants-wetting fear gave me the incentive for bluffing my way into Pratt’s nascent computer graphics lab and learning digital apps, hoping to build some marketable job skills," explains Baldwin. "Once I discovered the digital paint programs I was hooked. Here were these seductive tools that allowed me to create art, luminous and wonderfully flexible."
The conundrum for Baldwin was that it was stuck in a monitor. He's been trying to figure that out for the last two decades. One answer is create things for moving graphics and animation, and let film and video be your medium. "But I’m a still image guy at heart: rather than tell narratives over a length of minutes, I love filling a single frame up with a ponderous sense of time," he says.
"That was a year and a half ago and we’d just moved to Austin, Texas. I was back in the middle of the country, because I grew up in the woods, hills and farmland of rural Minnesota. 20 years of dense NYC urbanism really makes the contrasts pop. I was thinking about living in horizontal landscapes again, the frontier prairie, layers of cultural history here and where they’ve gone, the spread of suburban development."
At the same time Baldwin was playing around with 3D objects. Someone online had done an instance test with a cow mesh, sticking replicated cows all over a bigger cow. It was just a five minute experiment, but was kinda cool. It reminded him of the cosmological myth of the giant turtle with the world on it’s back.
Putting both these inspirations together, it felt natural for Matthew Baldwin to construct this bison-as-world-to-native-Americans thing. "Someone on the forums had mentioned the final piece was an eulogy," explains Baldwin. "I like that notion, the feeling of something passing away. It’s not accidental that the bison/cart is slipping off the backdrop, pointed east instead of west."
Matthew Baldwin was also paying homage to all the Victorian photo portraits of Native Americans. But by working within this photographic style, He found a way of finishing 3D renders that he really liked. "Less pristine digital and more fuzzy analog."
BISON
The technique was running start to finish without getting distracted, sort of skimming the surface of modo! "Seriously, I must have a thing for glowing lights and technology–I’ve been perpetually seduced by 3D modeling for the last ten years. I’ve tinkered and puttered and fiddled with thousands of dailog buttons and tools. Like Rip Van Winkle, I woke up and looked back dismayed by the lack of finished pieces. I made a promise to myself: more art, less winkle."
The trick with this piece was to simplify. Baldwin kept the geometry low and rough so he could play with it quickly in modo. Move cameras and lights around quickly. He also cut the chroma down so he didn't have to assign appropriate colors to everything. This also had the happy side-effect of amplifying the emotion of the piece. He could ditch render-intensive materials and camera effects so high-res renders could be rendered quickly. "I could do a lot with a final color render, and an ambient occlusion render, even a surface ID render to grab masks from, describes Baldwin. "Then throw it all into Photoshop and work out a comp of the final that felt balanced and had the emotion I wanted. Once I had that target to hold on to, I went back to modo and added the modeling detail. But it was great having locked down the camera position and lighting early."
Plausible surrealism
For Matthew Baldwin, 3D is about how much you want the viewer to suspend their disbelief. "I love how utterly believable you can make objects in 3D," he says. "I like the realness but also want to tell stories, so I’m aiming somewhere between product render and fish-riding-bicycle. Too close to the fantastical and it starts becoming illustration. On the other hand, unless you painstakingly sweat every surface parameter on a straight product render, it winds up looking just wrong. Ultimately, I hope it makes a viewer buy into the believability, the realness of the piece."
The Long Voyage
As a Minnesota youth, Baldwin had a picture of a 50’s cruise ship hanging on his wall. This image of the Santa Rosa from Grace Line would beckon the viewer to escape, like all good travel art does.
Matthew also remembers stumbling into an antique store in his home town when he was 14. Duluth, Minnesota is a harbor city on the Great Lakes. "Some old sailor had welded a six-foot steel replica of a freighter in his spare time," he recalls. "It was crude and sloppy, detailed and awesome all at the same time. He was near-fanatical modeling every hatch, cabin, ballast tank, light and rudder. I understand the impulse, and thought of the dude as I was assembling my own sea-faring vessel. Hopefully you get a sense of longing looking at the piece, but also get that itchy adolescent vibe of building a cool Revell model and then setting it on fire with an M-80."
Long Voyage process
The process of recreating the Long Voyage, is similar to that of the Bison piece, where finalizing lighting and composition FIRST (using rough geometry) is crucial. Baldwin's work starts in modo, but much of the compositing is done in Photoshop using multi-render pass techniques.
"Since I’m purposely simplifying color schemes down to something more monochromatic, the shapes need to read very quickly. I’ll add a layer in the shader tree for a diffuse amount trick using incidence angle. I’ll apply this globally to everything in order to get lights and darks to show up across the smokestacks or define where the corners of ships are. It reminds me of the chrome Mario in the N64 days. I’m trying to deploy it a little more subtly, of course!"
"Since I’m purposely simplifying color schemes down to something more monochromatic, the shapes need to read very quickly. I’ll add a layer in the shader tree for a diffuse amount trick using incidence angle. I’ll apply this globally to everything in order to get lights and darks to show up across the smokestacks or define where the corners of ships are. It reminds me of the chrome Mario in the N64 days. I’m trying to deploy it a little more subtly, of course!"
There was a time effect Baldwin was hoping for, "to have the cruise ship chase the setting sun westward, and find a way to have both day and night depicted in the piece." Rather than totally solve this with lighting in modo, he created a ‘day’ version of the ship and a ‘night’ one, then composited them together in Photoshop. Flicking lights on was achieved simply by grabbing the surface ID for the windows and using a mask to illuminate the lights towards the stern.
There’s been an effort to create atmosphere in all the work from this series. One drawback of a straight 3D render is that it lacks any hints of the alchemy going on in traditional photography, or the meaty materiality of traditional painting. Lens blooms and artifacts, exposure, grain, ghosting, all remind a viewer of the liquid quality of light. "One way I like to add a little viscera into the final look is to dupe a layer of the final image in Photoshop, blur it, and set the above image to ‘Overlay’. I usually then mask off the highlights and darks to control the effect. The result is an image whose lights and darks pool. It’s also a great way to emphasize broader tonal areas, downplaying the chatter of finer detail."
