How To Interpret The ‘Underwater’ New Home Of The Blue Whale Skeleton In 3D: Introducing ArchViz Artist, Sonny Holmberg

As the largest and most prestigious awards event for the architectural visualization industry, 2020 CGarchitect Architectural 3D Awards has been held for 17 years and attracts more and more top studios, freelancers and students from around the world to show their talents.

Sonny Holmberg is one of the excellent architects, whose work was nominated in the 2020 CGarchitect Architectural 3D Awards of image (commissioned) category.

The artwork is the interpretation of the blue whale skeleton’s new home in Tromsø Museum in Norway, designed by Henning Larsen. Sonny built a romantic stage for the whale with lighting that creates the feeling of "being underwater".

In this interview, you can know how Sonny created the beautiful artwork and his experience of being an outstanding artist and the founder of an architect studio.

• Sonny Holmberg
• Architectural Visualisation Artist
• Founder & Art Director of Depth Per Image

Fox Renderfarm: Hi Sonny, could you give us a brief introduction about yourself?

Sonny: Thanks for inviting me for the interview! I’m an architect from Denmark, who early in my career decided to specialise within architectural visualisation. I’ve lived and worked in Munich and London and now I’m based in Copenhagen, where I’m from. I’ve previously focused on building up strong in-house visualisation units in architectural practises, but one year ago I started up my own visualisation studio, Depth Per Image.

Fox Renderfarm: Congratulations on being nominated in the 2020 CGarchitect Architectural 3D Awards, how do you feel about it?

Sonny: The nomination in the 2020 CGarchitect Architectural 3D Awards, really means a lot to me. I’ve been following the awards for many years, and it’s a great honour to have my work recognised in such a prestigious award within our industry.

Fox Renderfarm: In this project, you created a new home for the blue whale skeleton, any idea behind the amazing design? And what's your inspiration?

Sonny: The brief from the architects stated that they wanted to create a feeling of being under water in the circulation space where the blue whale skeleton should be hanging. There weren’t any specific directions for what this might be. I did some studies and iterations and came up with the simple idea of using light projections of water caustics to create this feeling. In the end the composition and concept with the light projections turned out very successful and the architects were very pleased with the image.

Fox Renderfarm: The lighting in the image is so romantic, could you introduce how you created the lighting?

Sonny: The lighting is basically created in a similar manner to how you could do it in real life. I’ve used a photo of water caustics as a light projection in my 3D scene. The volumetric light is created by rendering an additional pass with V-Ray environment fog in the scene. In this way I had full control over the light in post-production. I’ve made a little video of the main steps of the post-production process.

Fox Renderfarm: How long did it take you to finish the project? What’s the most unforgettable and interesting part of the creation process?

Sonny: The time spent to create this image was around 5 working days. Any image creation process is interesting, but for this image I think the fact that it was a very open brief and I had many talks with the architects to convince them to go with my direction. Lucky, I did manage to convince them and it turned out as a big success in the end.

Fox Renderfarm: As the founder of Depth Per Image, could you briefly introduce your studio, and what’s the development vision and ambition of your company?

Sonny: Depth Per Image is my studio, but also a philosophy. Nowadays a lot of architectural visualisation is simply showcasing a building or space in a generic setting without any thoughts put into it. Depth Per Image seeks the uniqueness in every project we work on and always strives to bring that forward and communicate it in the clearest way possible. What we do is what I refer to as handcrafted images.

Fox Renderfarm: As a top architectural visualisation artist with international experience, do you have any advice for young artists in the industry?

Sonny: My best advice for young artists would be to not focus on the technicalities of software, but instead to train their eyes and imagination. Mastering 3D software is getting easier and easier all the time, but the top artists are the ones not relying on what output the software offers, but purely focuses on being creative as artists.

Fox Renderfarm: Any other things you want to share with the CG enthusiasts?

Sonny: To all CG and arch-viz enthusiasts I would encourage you to follow me on social media for more insight and engaging with me on CG-related topics.

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sonnyholmberg/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/depthperimage
• Behance: https://www.behance.net/sonnyholmberg
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonnyholmberg/