Spotlights - Readers Digest Atlas

Reader's Digest World Atlas 2004

With almost 30 years of experience in illustration and 3D Art, Jurgen Ziewe counts, among other clients, renown corporations such as Siemens, Canon, Kodak, Virgin Atlantic, American Express and Lego in his portfolio.

For the latest edition of the Reader's Digest World Atlas, he was asked to create a double foldout spread combining the world's topographical features within a single image.

Final Double-Spread Page

The publishers wanted a photorealistic approach for this spread: "Clients like Reader’s Digest have to be meticulous regarding detail, because their books are used for reference." Vue 4 Professional was the obvious choice to get the job done! The project resulted in an extensive library of textures from snow, rocks, and swirling waters to chalk cliffs, desert and savannah land. The final scene includes 502 objects for a total of over 72 million polygons! The actual model file is 250 MB and the rendered image 14,000 pixels wide by 3,600 pixels high. The rendered file is 192 MB, but took only 6 hours to render at a high quality setting on a dual G5 with 2 GB of Ram. Setting up the scene was easy thanks to Vue Pro's dedicated scenery tools. But for each type of terrain in the final scene, Jurgen created a unique texture. This is where he spent the most time.

Details of the foldout spread

"The big challenge was blending the swamp into grassland into desert seamlessly, as well as changing the colour of the desert sand. This was achieved via a complex mix of textures within VUE’s powerful texture editor. Some rocks had grass on the top and different colour grass at their bases, but non on the walls. With VUE’s texture editor I could be very accurate and at the same time make sure the rock looked realistic."

Readers-Digest-Atlas-Spread

As well as the large foldout, Jurgen also created numerous diagrams for which Vue 4 Pro was the ideal tool. "Using any other program would have been a headache, as I could so readily re-use many of the procedural textures created in the spread."
Glacier	Valley
Rain	Erosion

Other feature illustrations produced with Vue 4 Pro include the jungle and desert scenes. The resulting pictures were mapped onto a glass sphere.

Desert

The Desert sphere in the page!

Jungle

The Jungle sphere in the page!

The jungle scene was really straightforward, because most of the trees were native Vue trees. The taller ones with the vines were created in Lightwave, and then imported for texturing and rendering into the VUE jungle scene.

Some of Jurgen's Other Artwork

Other book covers and illustrations Jurgen did with Vue:

Sean McMullan - Souls in the Great Machine - (Robert Lafont)	Sean McMullan - Souls in the Great Machine - (Robert Lafont)
Otzi the Ice Man -Eureka - Kingfisher	Carlsberg Caves -Eureka - Kingfisher

The textures from the Carlsberg Cave image took a lot of experimenting and he used over 20 light sources to light the cave.

Who Is Jurgen Ziewe?

Jurgen studied fine art at Hamburg Academy and came to England in 1975 where he worked as a designer in various agencies. Jurgen have over fifty of his posters published – mainly created in 3d with fractal elements. Some became very popular and lead to a book entitled "New Territories", published in 1997. Up until now, Ziewe has kept up-to-date with changes in techniques and his work resonates well with today's digital technology.

Why Jurgen Prefers Vue 4 Professional:

" Vue allows me to be a director, photographer and painter all at the same time with the greatest creative freedom! Vue is versatile and powerful in controlling textures and terrains. The colours are more natural. The program is very intuitive."

Check out Jurgen Ziewe's web pages here.