Artur J. Żarek
I’m an independent 3D generalist and a programmer from Poland with B.Sc. in Information Technology/3D Animation and over seventeen years of experience in 3D computer graphics.
In my work, I value a certain amount of variety and therefore I find it most satisfying to create digital assets or scenes from start to finish, or at least to participate in several stages of their creation. I highly favor non-destructive workflows and I’m biased towards automating repetitive tasks with Python, HDAs, shell scripts and other tools as much as possible.
My personal interests, apart from 3D computer graphics and programming, revolve mostly around the Free Software movement, digital privacy in the information age, GNU/Linux, modern history (20th century and newer), geopolitics, realpolitik and power politics, hard science-fiction novels and films, horror flicks from the 70-90s, and retro 8/16-bit computing, and many other things.
My Skills
Listed in alphabetical order. Some are purely Houdini-based.
Advanced:
- Destructive Modeling
- Python
- Texturing (Procedural And Traditional, PBR/non-PBR)
Intermediate:
- Procedural Dependency Graph (PDG)
- Procedural Modeling
- Rendering (Karma Hydra Delegate/Various RT Engines)
- Sculpting
- Subdivision Surface Modeling
- Universal Scene Description (via Solaris)
- VDB/SDF
- VEX
Beginner:
- Cloth,
- Environments,
- Lighting
- Motion Editing
- Rigging And Animation (Procedural And Traditional)
Tools of The Trade
My favorite DCC workhorse is Houdini, which I use for almost everything nowadays — from procedural and traditional modeling, to rigging, animation, simulation, and assembly. I hold its powerful non-destructive nodal workflow in great esteem and feel that it enables me to do virtually anything using just its atomic operators.
Sometimes I complement the program with other, more specialized 3D software.
Blender is my main go to application for sculpting. 3D Coat is another one which I extensively used to sculpt with in the past, but because of still unresolved issues with GNU/Linux builds, I had to temporarily abandon it. From time to time I still use the final Pixologic’s version of ZBrush (from before the acquisition by Maxon). However, as it has to be run in a Wineprefix, it doesn’t integrate well into my pipeline, so I’ll have to let it go eventually. Unless Maxon ports it to GNU/Linux, which is unlikely.
As for texturing, I’m slowly migrating from Substance Designer, which I used extensively in the past, to Houdini’s new Copernicus nodes. Even in their beta stage (as of Houdini 20.5) I already find them almost as powerful as workflow offered by the Designer. Painter is of course more difficult to replace, at least for the moment, but once the new texturing tools in Houdini mature enough, the benefits coming from COPs’ tight integration with other Houdini contexts will probably outweigh it.
When it comes to traditional destructive modeling, while Houdini with the Modeler HDA is my default nowadays, for many years in the past I’ve also used Maya, Silo, Blender and NVil. Sometimes, if I find a hard surface asset easier to create with CAD tools, I resort to Plasticity (without xNURBS, as they’re not available on GNU/Linux).
Whenever necessary, I also use other programs that can help me in my pipeline, but there are too many to list here. Pretty much all are free and open source software, and most of them follow the UNIX philosophy of “doing one thing and doing it well”.
Since around 2018 I’ve been using exclusively GNU/Linux, which is currently the only operating system I feel comfortable with.
Preferred form of employment
Currently, I mostly prefer full-time employment contracts in Warsaw, Poland, but work contracts are also possible.
This Website
It holds my modest 3D portfolio, links to my free and open source programs, as well as a small blog where I try to write down my thoughts on various topics, mostly revolving around 3D graphics. The initial goal of the blog, apart from being a place where I could ramble on various topics, was to be a target platform for entries from my local org-roam knowledge base, so I could access the information easily from anywhere and in a nice form, while also sharing that knowledge (however limited it might be) with other people. But because I don’t like writing short posts and I didn’t want to simply copy-paste information from my KB “as is”, and also because of the chronic lack of free time to comfortably sit and relax in front of the keyboard with a cup of hot aromatic coffee, I made peace with the thought that blog updates will not be very frequent. All I can do is to assure you, dear reader, that I will do my best to make each post as interesting to read as possible.