Jonathan Opgenhaffen is an experienced Art Director at Framestore, in London, with experience in design supervision (pre and post production), concept art, and visual effects. Skilled as both a creative supervisor, concept designer, and technical artist. Jonathan has worked for 15 years in companies such as Double Negative, Rainmaker London, Indestructible Production etc. Now, he works as Art Director at Framestore, well known for visual effects, creating extraordinary images and scenes for some of Hollywood’s biggest pictures, collecting every possible industry award along the way.
Jonathan worked on The Midnight Sky, Project: Power, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Avengers: Infinity Wars, Pacific Rim: Uprising, and Wonder Woman to name a few.
After you read the interview, we suggest to check Jonatha’s ArtStation profile and his amazing works one by one. They are beautiful and created (also) with Blender 3D.
Do you use Blender both in your professional works and your personal one?
Yes, absolutely… In the Framestore Art Department, we basically get to use whichever software we need to get the job done. I used to mainly use Modo as my main 3D tool, but Blender blew it out of the water, to be honest. I didn’t find the learning curve particularly easy at the very beginning, but after trying it out on a few concepts while working on Spider-Man: Far From Home, I started to realise the potential of Blender. Then once I got comfortable with Blender, I realised I could use it as a true design tool, rather than a 3D program I could use to support my Photoshop paintings.
One of my latest projects was to help design and build the Aether spaceship for The Midnight Sky, under the supervision of the legendary production designer, Jim Bissell. The exterior of the ship was modelled, textured, and shades completely in Blender. I literally didn’t need to jump into Photoshop once to do any paintover, which was not the norm for me. Jim would come by, and we could look at the ship in Blender with the Eevee viewport and I could take notes and discuss design changes and do everything interactively within Blender. Being able to annotate in 3D was a god sent! During my time on set at Shepperton, everyone was amazed by the things Blender allowed me to do, especially in real-time. I’d watch other artists rendering a small frame for what felt like hours, while I’d be able to do Eevee renders in seconds, or 8-16k cycles renders in less than 8 minutes. It was definitely a powerful tool to actually design, as opposed to just modelling. Once completed, I packed all the textures and sent my Blender file over to the VFX Department at Framestore to do their magic to build a detailed, FX-ready model for the film. It was a great experience seeing the final result being so very close to the concept model I was able to build in Blender.
Let’s leave 2020 behind and look forward to a new year, and new projects at Blender. To recap: in 2020, Blender saw huge developments, both technically and creatively. There were no less than four releases, including one Long-Term Support release. On the Studio side, a new Open Movie called Sprite Fright was greenlit, and is currently in the early stages of production. And this year, there are a bunch of other innovations coming up. Here, we share just a few. Everything Nodes This is a blockbuster project. By the time it’s matured, there will be whole new ways to create within Blender. As the name suggests, Everything Nodes allows you to use nodes to make almost all aspects of your projects, procedurally. Think of how nodes are currently used to craft shaders and materials, but then vastly expanded. So… why should you want to make everything with nodes? Well, this approach means that flexibility and granular control get a massive bump, ensuring that complex results are eas