Interview with Szabolcs Matefy
Hi could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in CG and are you self taught or taken some training?
 Hi!! I am Szabolcs Matefy, 37 and living with my wife and 2 kids in Budapest, Hungary. I am self educated in CG, mostly because in Hungary there were no CG education at all, when I started in the industry..
How long have you been in CG and what is your current job?
It was 1996 when I had turned my interest toward computer graphics. Before that I had strong relationship to the computers and graphics, but I hadn`t connected them until 1996. Now I’m character artist at Stormregion, a Hungarian game developer studio, doing artwork for marketing purposes.
As you are working in the Game Developer studio, please tell us our readers which are the main thing to keep in mind while working on any part of game?
The first rule is that you are a member of the team. Sometimes there are no possibilities to express yourself as you would. You are probably just the creative “hand” of art director, concept artist, etc. Second rule, you must be realistic. I mean that it’s easy to overwork on a 3d model or texture, but it’s not visible in the game, for example a tiny, but detailed badge on one of the straps of a sidekick character, who role is just to cross the street several times. We call it conscience detail. The detail is there, but unnecessary. The third and most important rule, that there is always something to learn. I don’t understand those saying he knows enough to make art for living. No, it’s not true. Time passes by, technology evolves, and limits are extended. A successful prev-gen artist is not successful next-gen artist by all means. We had a debate with one fellow game artist, who told me, that he knows enough to maintain his career, so it’s not necessary to him to learn normal maps, parallax maps, and their methods. Now that guy is not in the business and as far as I know he’s not employed by any of the serious game developer in Hungary. We call it professional humbleness.
What was your inspiration for the artwork “Fauna”? Please explain in detail about the modeling, texturing and problems encountered.
I always loved mythic creatures, and females. I was inspired by paintings, their styles especially, but the character I had been in my mind for some three or four years, so it was time to do it. Hajime Sorayama had also a SheSatyre, but she was not soft enough (to my taste :-0 ). I was sketching one day in my living room, when I had an idea of a faun stealing grapes, and hiding behind a tree. Then I thought it’s a great opportunity to turn him into a she.
For modeling sometimes I don’t know what fits to best to me, so at this time I made her in a polygon by polygon way. For UV mapping I relied a lot on XSI’s Walking on the Mesh feature, that helped me to maintain a rectangular shape of my UV island. It cause problems as well, in the form of stretching, but I was not afraid of doing some UV adjusting. The character has been textured and detailed in Zbrush. At first, I was using Mudbox, but I had way too many problems with it. It was too slow, I couldn`t make my displacement maps in 4k resolution. So I deleted my previous high resolution mesh, and waited until Zbrush3 released.
Rendering skin shader and hair together caused me a lot of problem especially on my 32bit Windows XP. There was a tendency to crash whenever XSI memory consumption had reached the mythic 1.4 Gigabytes of physical memory. Thanks god Mario Ucci (aka Loganarts or Vibes at several forums) helped me a lot setting up hair rendering, and I had switched to Vista64, so all of my memory problems disappeared. Pass rendering and the new OS decreased the rendering time from 4 hour to less than an hour.
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