Guest of January 2001 : Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky by the Linuxgraphic.org team
I n t e r v i e w

Linuxgraphic.org:
Hi, Svo. First of all, thank you for having accepted to be the guest of Blender-Cafe this month. In fact, you are the first of the new millenium ! ;o) Could you tell us in a few words who you are ?

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
I'm 24 years old, male, single Russian. I live in St.Petersburg since I was born and I intend to stay there for a long time, I really love this place. I'm a student of a technical university, majoring in computer science. But in parallel to studying I work for TogetherSoft Labs as a Java developer. 3D graphics is only my hobby. I think that I like it more as it is, because any job becomes boring, while hobbies do not. I also play guitar for myself, well, anything that makes noises goes well - I also enjoy harmonica and mouth organ but it's better for the deaf. Another hobby of mine is photography.

My favourite 3d artist: all of them!
My favourite musicians: PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Loreena McKennitt, Bjork
My favourite photographer: Jan Saudek
My favourite writer: Milorad Pavic

Surprisingly, I have no favourite OS/platform. I used to like Linux but I gave it up because of weak hardware support and really evil RedHat attitude. I think OS is something that you should not notice at all, it's the applications you can run that really matters. As long as an OS/hardware can run Blender, it's a good platform for Blendering.

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
The software situation in Russia is quite specific. We have lots of software developers. I have a suspicion that about 50% of modern softwares are written in Russia ;o) Free OS's like Linux are really popular too but not because they are free, but because they are worthy. The people here are not used to pay for softwares, we're only beginning to realize that good stuff worths money. Beacause people have the best choice of warez, they can use whatever they like and pick the best stuff. I guess the fact that despite of availability of expensive OS's people still use Linux, so it must somewhat be a good OS itself.

Similar situation here is with 3D software. Nobody is really concerned about the price, people with a hole in their pocket use 3DMax, Lightwave and even Maya without getting shy. Some of them accomplish great results, some are don't. Blender is not popular at all. I and several other people are trying to advocate Blender among russian potential artists, but I think it has a long way to go yet. There is a large public gallery of 3D art on http://www.render.ru. I didn't submit anything there, I think I'm not that great yet.

There is a market for 3D here, but mostly it is interior/architectural design and web design. And unless you are really famous, designer jobs are not paid as good as, say, programmer jobs. 3D animation here is limited to commercials and there are not many positions, I believe. We have wonderful traditions of handcrafted cel animation, instead - all russian animated movies are done frame-by-frame. This is not cost effective at all and there are not so many animations, but those that are made are beautiful.

Unfortunately, current market trend pushes old-fashioned animation behind, but there are not many good 3D animators around. I hope that in some time we'll have a wonderful new school of 3D animators with old traditional background. This is something I really would like to see. Good animators should express their own feeling and fantasy instead of following the trends.

Linuxgraphic.org:
That would be wonderful, because russian handcrafted cels are famous among the animation french sub-culture. But let's return to Blender related topics : we have chosen one of your picture as our picture of the month. Can you tell us a few words about it ?

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
Yes of course. I'm starting to hate this picture :) The time passes, I create new works that are far more sophisticated but people still love this Dust Puppy made long time ago. Well, I love the Dust Puppy too, not this one, but the prototype.

The creation of this picture was very simple. I constructed the eyes first, as I remember now it was mostly a metaballs exercice. Then the fur was made with Blender static particles and then legs. The legs were the most complicated part, as I wasn't very familiar with mesh editing techniques these days, so I used metaballs again. Just lots of metaballs. Later I converted them into meshes and voila !

I didn't use any EnvMaps or any other features that were locked by C-Key at this time. You can see a beautiful b&w picture of a nude reflected in Dust Puppy eyes and another nude picture is projected through the main spotlight, which makes lighting a little more irregular and realistic. Some people think I'm weird.

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
I think my customs are only dictated by the matter of convenience. I always use the default layout when I start. Then I split 3D window vertically only when I feel that I really need it. I prefer working in one view.

I operate the hotkeys in order to switch parallel views and rotate/scale the view with mouse. A large view that can be rotated gives me better presentation of objects than traditional x/y/z/perspective views set as in Rhino or Lightwave. Furthermore, I usually set Temp Save time to 1, it saved my work many times! Another Pavlov's Dog thing that I have is pressing Ctrl-S after every little thing I do within Blender.

(note : as I learned during the interview from Svo, Pavlov was the scientist that discovered conditioned reflexes among higher animals, using dogs for his experiments : he made evidence that his dogs salivated even before smelling or seeing food whenever he made the lights blinking, because he used to blink the lights before feeding them).

Linuxgraphic.org:
I see that you are a resourceful man, used to many crashes with experimental Blender versions ;o) What is your favorite Blender tip ?

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
Hmm.. I don't know.. I think that my most favourite hot key is E: Extrude. With extrusion you can make a vertex becoming an edge and an edge becoming a face, and then again a face becoming a volume. Isn't it wonderful?

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
If you want to become a good Blenderer, experimenting is the way to go. But I think it applies to anything, not just Blender. Let your fantasy work, experiment bravely and don't feel pity if you have to drop some work - il always pays in experience anyway. If you don't like what you've done, drop it. You'll do better next time.

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
This is hard to answer, I think this is for other people to decide what I'm good at. My certain weakness is hi-tech stuff... Everytime I try to do something technological, like modeling a car, I end up with a toonish thing. Probably here comes my strength : toons ! :)

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
HAHA!
I don't mind sharing at all, my favourite idea is to put a corresponding .blend next to each picture/animation in my gallery. But this really takes time because if you go publishing something you have to tidy the stuff up. My room is a total mess, this is the problem of my life!

Hmm hmm hmm.. I browsed my blends and I didn't found many things that could be good gifts to the community. I've found this project, though, which is my very first Blender animation. It has NURBS surface with vertex keys and UV Orco mapping. I think it might be interesting to study.

Link to Svo's gift

Viacheslav 'Svo' Slavinsky :
Me too :)