As the world has become a global village, there are so many things that we see clearly now a days more than ever, but we still have so much to learn. When my professor asked our class to write a report on an artist, the first question that came into my mind was that do we have any really good artists from Pakistan? And I started searching on the net; I was very impressed with the quality of work of a lot of talented Artists from Pakistan including Graphic Artists. One artist that impressed me the most was Amaan Akram. One can tell just by looking at his work that he has an excellent sense of observation and a keen eye to work with the special effects of light. According to one of his interviews online, “I didn't get any formal training or anything like that. I just dig in to reference material. I scour the internet and look for anatomical references in as many different lighting situations as possible. I make sure that the form of what I have to model is very clear in my head. And the perception of form is greatly dependant on how it is lit.”

Amaan Akram was born in 1976 in Pakistan , and currently working in the field of Computer Graphics (CG) in London , UK. He has been involved with CG in one way or another since 1991. He graduated with a B.S. degree in computer science in 1999. Other than CG, he is in to rock music and photography. He is skilled in the areas of digital lighting and 3D modeling. You can visit and enjoy his work on www.warpedspace.org I loved his photographs also; he has a beautiful selection of landscapes, both in color and black & white. Amaan leads the team that builds environments and work with compositing and shot finalization. He also runs an online Pakistani CG site/community known as cgexpanse.com . When asked what tips you can give to our readers to improve their renderings, he said, “ Study real life reference like crazy. There is no trick, technique or substitute that can make you a better rendering artist, it all depends on your ability to imitate and learn from real life references”.

Amaan says, “I am an art college reject and that rejection kind of quashed all my hopes of getting formal training. I spend a lot of time thinking though about what I need to do next and what I am not doing right. Time spent away from the computer is as equally important as the time spent at it. Every day I discover a new inspirational artist! But If I were to mention names of 3D artists, I'd name only-- Jeremy Engleman . He is the single most inspirational artist whose work I have come across. I would also mention that I am an avid follower of the works of photographers. They are the masters of capturing light. And I also study the work of traditional chiaroscuro artists. They are the masters of inventing light.His work involves all aspects of 3D i.e. modeling, texturing, lighting and compositing, depending on the type of character or model he is working on.”

When he talks about one of his most impressive creation Red Glass Demon, he says, “I set up an environment around the Glass Demon for it to reflect and refract. I also used typical glass surface settings (fresnel reflection, refraction and transparency), but added some diffuse and translucency to give the surface a glowing-from-inside look. I added a light in the chest of the Glass Demon, and one outside the surface to get that diffusion and translucency to work the way I wanted it to. And yeah, the polygons for the glass surface are double-sided. This helped in enhancing the illusion of depth. I set up my lights to tell a story about the subject being lit. Lighting gives me the opportunity to give a lifeless character a sense of past, present, and future, of depth, emotion, and of existence. That is what I strive for when creating my artwork--a story is critical, detail is complimentary”.

According to him, the whole process of editing point by point seems very straightforward, but he gets stuck when the look is not very clear in his mind, and that's when he gets help from the reference material again. He works with LightWave, Maya and messiah:Studio, but he uses Lightwave the most, because he thinks that its modeling tools are amazingly powerful and very user friendly. He also works with a tool called Renderer which lets him transform his ideas into rendered images gives him the control in the modeling/texturing/rendering process. According to him he is emotionally attached to the application as well, because he has followed up on Lightwave from the days when it was known as VideoScape 3D since he was 13 or 14 years old and was fascinated by the possibilities it presented. It takes him hours and hours to shapeup a model till it gets to the point where he wants it. For detailed models, he starts with tracing out the contours of the model's surface (muscles and bones) with points and polygons. He looks at a detailed surface to see which key areas define its shape, and makes sure to get the same areas in to the wireframe. For example, areas where two muscles go over each other affect the look of the skin flowing over them, and then put some extra points and polys around this traced shape to provide the bulging effect of muscles on the skin surrounding them.