MONT.IR – RHANGGA PUTRA
Hai Anak Bengkel!
Untuk seri ini, kita akan off-topic dari industri Animation/VFX sedikit. Tim Bengkel Animasi kali ini berkesempatan ngobrol dengan seorang rockstar CG Artist asal Indonesia, Rhangga A. Putra.
Let’s start chatting and get inspired!
Bengkel Animasi (Bgkl): Hello Rhangga! Thanks a lot for having the time to chat with us. Can you give a little bit of background about yourself?
Rhangga (R): Hello Bengkel Animasi, thanks for having me too. My name is Rhangga Adian Putra, I was born in Surakarta and grew up in Malang. I am currently working at Wonderium Inc. in Tokyo, Japan before previously worked at Streamline Studios Malaysia.
My role as a CG Designer in the studio requires me to not only creating 3D CG assets, but also developing the looks of those assets. I also helped set up the modeling pipeline for the studio.
Several games projects that I’ve involved so far are Grid2/Grid Autosport & F1 series, Street Fighter V, World Of Tank, Armored Warfare, Agent of Mayhem, Paragon, Killer Instinct and few others.
Bgkl: Tell us the story of how you decided to choose CG as your career & profession, considering the local industry didn’t offer many opportunities back then.
R: It was tough back then. Not only that there weren’t a lot of companies doing CG, and if there were, they weren’t really require such specific skillset, like 3D modeling for example. They were more looking for a Generalist, which was expected to do all the CG process.
But when I started learning and doing CG on my own, I wasn’t really thinking about career and profession yet. I just felt that I liked the process of doing CG artworks and enjoyed the results that I made.
Similar like if someone likes cooking as a hobby, they’ve already enjoy just doing it, and it’d be even rewarding when someone else is willing to buy the food 🙂
Bgkl: What specific area of CG do you consider yourself an expert at? Can you tell us the process of how you get to that specialisation?
R: Hmm.. I wouldn’t call myself an expert just yet, cos there’s still a lot of things for me to learn about. I also still find a lot of other artist in this industry, who has better skills and talents than myself.
But if we’re talking about focus of expertise, I’d say 3D modeling. I’ve always love visual arts from young, and I guess that kind of brought me to this direction into 3D modeling.
Bgkl: How was your learning process? What kind of access to the knowledge did you have back then?
R: It was really fun for me at the beginning! Especially when I was still in college, where I still could just focus on creating CG artworks and didn’t have to worry so much about paying bills 🙂
But I have to say, information from internet wasn’t really enough at that time. Lucky enough we had IndoCG, an online forum that had a lot of members, where we all can share and learn from each other. I got a lot of new informations and techniques from other members on that site. We also shared our works and gave constructive feedbacks to each other .
Bgkl: Please tell us the story about your first job in the CG industry.
R: In early days of my career, I was working at a local advertising firm in Malang. I was helping in creating 3D product’s packaging for TV commercials. Until one day the owner decided to change the direction of the company into more of a video editing company.
Then, I was feeling uncomfortable and not motivated to do the editing works. So I decided to quit my job there and started to develop my 3D modeling skill further.
Bgkl: What were the important factors for you to land a job overseas?
R: Being active in online CG communities helped a lot. Also, maintaining good relationship with ex-colleagues is important too. After working at Infinite Frameworks Batam for a year, a friend of mine recommended me to Codemasters in Malaysia, where I then submit my application and got accepted there.
Bgkl: Mind sharing to us how is the workflow in creating your arts?
R: In general, it’s quite similar between creating a commission and personal works. The only difference is that for commission works, the concept arts were given as a guideline for me to follow, whereas for personal projects, everything comes out from my own creativity and imagination.
It’s important to gather a lot of references, whether they are directly related to the project or not. For example, if I am to create a soldier wearing an armour, I would look for informations about anatomy typology for soldiers, how are their body postures are like. I’d also find informations about hydraulic mechanism, and other things that are attached to the armour. I need to understand how the placement of these ornaments wouldn’t affect the soldier’s movement, as it’s important for the soldier to be agile and dynamic when he’s moving. Types of materials for the soldier’s cloth also will determines the overall design of the character.
Bgkl: What is the 3 most important things about how to be a good modeler/digital character artist?
R: Curiosity, motivation & observation.
Bgkl: Who is your biggest inspiration as an artist? And why?
R: Hanno Hagedorn, a character artist from Germany is one from a few of my favourites. The works he did for the 1st Uncharted games project was so incredible, he did that with a fine art sculpting approach, which pretty amazing and unique for the standard back then.
Bgkl: Which amongst your work, that you really proud of and feeling most satisfied with?
R: I was a big fan of car racing games, especially in college time where games like Need For Speed, GRID, Dirt, etc. were very popular. I was very proud that I was able to be involved in Grid 2 project by Codemasters, which the prequel was pretty much the reason for my inspiration and got me into learn about 3D modeling .
Bgkl: What is ur future dream and how do you grow and motivate urself to reach that dream?
R: I don’t have much future dream to be honest, I actually even consider myself to be living in my future dream at the moment, if that make sense, cos I always wanted to do what I do today ever since I was young.
It doesn’t mean that I’m not motivated tho’, I just wanna keep going in this field, while keep growing my skills, and push myself to be involved into more fun and challenging projects.
Bgkl: What do you do in spare time that helps you grow as an artist?
R: On my spare time, I like to stroll around catching up with the trends in the games industry to keep being inspired. I also collect figurines and video games to keep my passion and hobby rolling.
Bgkl: How do you see our local animation education & industry progressing in your eyes?
R: There are two main factors if we’re talking about local animation industry, the industry (business) itself, and the artists. Local industry has proven to serve as an incubator to local artists, which managed to allow such artists to work internationally at the end. On the other side, the local industry doesn’t seem to be growing fast enough to be able to absorbs those talents to still be inside the country. There seems to be no commitment in putting budget to develop a big scale feature project, and the pay rates for the artists are generally low. In this situation, most artists will tend to go abroad if they have the chance to. Kinda sad but truth situation I’d say.
Bgkl: To be able to compete internationally, what does an artist, especially Indonesian, needs to have?
R: Local artists need to adopt an international mindset. From what I know, the global trends and technology in digital arts is still favouring the western. In some cases (like Japan), a local content has the potential to compete with the western, but I’d say for Indonesia’s case, it’s better if we try to keep up with the popular trends for now.