Super Focus

By Rob Tuytel

This book tells my 17 years of experience with Blender and the peaks and valleys I experienced during my development as a landscape designer. How my love for medieval buildings snuck in at a young age and it has never left me.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is how to get my inspiration and the motivation to shape the big 3D scenes. Over the past five years, I've tried to impart the craft to over 70,000 students, but never have I approached the core question in such depth as I have in this book.

Behind every design are a story and a long run-up to giving it form. Every year I learned new techniques, but also came to insights that gave the work an enormous boost. Never have I been so open to sharing these insights, so valuable and precious to me. The book is meant to inspire and motivate, but also to get the most out of yourself and to understand yourself better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rob Tuytel
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638230588

Rob Tuytel

After quitting his studies at the film academy as a producer, Rob started to venture into the digital landscape. After pioneering VR, he started working full time to revive the old craft of the painting masters by shaping large scenes in 3D. As a best-selling instructor at Udemy, he brings the craft to thousands of students and is also the founder of the open platform "Texture Haven" used by millions of people monthly.

Book preview

Super Focus

17 years of pioneering the virtual world of the Golden Age

Rob Tuytel

Company of visuals

2021 © Rob Tuytel

Proofreading/editing Bianca Nederlof

Cover design Tony Midi

Illustrations Damian Ooliva

Translation Roshmill

ISBN 978 90 903 4517 8

NUR 600

Website: www.thesuperfocus.com

Copyright ©️ 2021All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, includingphotocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in thecase of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain othernoncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Book Design by HMDpublishing

Contents

Introduction

Everything starts somewhere

Search

Believe in the craft

Appreciation of the Work

Behind the Scenes

Chasing the Facts

The battle with innovation

Doing business in a new landscape

Super Focus

Connection and Division

New Life

Nordic inspiration

Epilogue

Introduction

Over the years I have often thought about highlighting the digital design of landscapes and cityscapes in a book of collected work.

I am regularly asked by clients, but also by people I meet in museums, what the world behind the digital 3D-pictures looks like. I like to explain how this works, yet I often feel that there are still many question marks left. To really explain clearly how it works, I have to go deeper to the core and a lot of people seem to loose interest.

What made the difference for me to start writing was a disagreement about modern art and the craft of the old master painters. On Twitter, I expressed my opinion on the lack of craft in contemporary art and architecture. I was approached by several people who disagreed with me. I was so convinced about the cultural degradation of modern art that this resistance made me feel uncomfortable. This gave me material to think about this line of thought and perhaps to come to a different conclusion.

Of course, this splurge didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a combination of an unprocessed art past where I had to deal with an indoctrination of modern art and the fatigue of a project I was working on at the time. Twitter is then a nice outlet to send your opinion to the outside world to make a statement.

Maybe I was looking for a reason to put something on paper. I love the discussion and get it going quickly too, by poking into where I think the pain is. The pain for me is that I find the current landscape of art boring, inspiration less and too easy. This is very brief and I am aware of that. I also don’t want to scare lovers of modern art, but to give a glimpse into perhaps a new generation of designers/audiences who do not understand current art. The highest achievable goal with writing this book is to inspire people with digital design on the one hand, and on the other hand explain why I have the impression that the modern abstract designers are not inspiring. The more I look at it, the more it rubs with the craft I believe in. I want to feel that the creator has made an effort for it, and besides, I can’t understand that the underlying message needs to be hidden so deeply. I believe that modern art has a message or a story, but for me art must be for everyone. Not just for the intellectuals who can see something in it that others cannot. It is the well-known ‘clothes of the emperor’ story: if you do not see the power, then you do not understand and you should not look. When a discussion has reached this point, I feel obliged to say something about it and enter into dialogue.

With this book I hope to give more insight into the new world behind digital design of 3D artworks. Showing an emerging new e-learning industry and also the incentive to work in this landscape without subsidy and the adventure that is in many projects. This book also aims to motivate people who are studying or working in the creative sector and are looking for the right choices and challenges in their field.

In addition, the book highlights the great ups and downs of many projects and learning to deal with the body in order to be able to process high effort. Burnout is perhaps more lurking in this profession than with many other jobs. Adjusting the body to process great efforts and develop a sharp focus for it is an indispensable skill to meet a deadline in a hectic time.

But perhaps the most important message in this book is the pleasure in the work and enjoyment of adventure that it entails. A new world where you can pioneer and where there are new developments every day. Discovering the inner skills that you possess as a human being and with which you can make your dreams a reality

Chapter 1:

Everything starts somewhere

To be perfectly honest, I never had an interest in art until I was 16. I can’t blame school for that, enough attention was paid to it in different subjects. History, however, was one of my favorite courses, where I was lucky enough that the teacher spoke passionately about his subject and took me into the past with his stories of antiquity.

My head has the property of being distracted in a short time if there is no interest in the subject. As long as I can remember, I’m starting to dream away at those moments. At a young age this was perhaps annoying, but now I am grateful that I possess this property.

The older I get, the better I deal with certain traits. Daydreaming is not something you have a lot of control over, it just happens and it feels like a relaxing trance that brings me deeper into my mind. I certainly won’t call it an aberration either, I see dreaming away as an important tool for getting inspiration.

From an early age, I had a rich imagination. I remember very well that for a long time I thought that my father was a pirate, namely ‘ Pirate Klaas’. In the living room we had a scanner with which we could listen to reports from the fire brigade. Since my father was here, we were able to listen to the event during a deployment. Sometimes this was exciting when there was a big fire. The emergency center often told me in a short message what the message was, on which my father ran off at lightning speed. Moments later, I heard the dispatcher and my father talking about the fire. In the background I heard the fire siren and I was able to follow closely how the deployment went. The central abbreviations used. For example, ‘Alarm Centre’ was abbreviated to ‘AC’ and every message ended with ‘Over’. After a call from my father to the dispatcher, I heard: ‘ Here AC – about’, which I always understood as: ‘Pirate Klaas’, because my father always had a fierce voice through the scanner. Because the crackling of the speakers made it quite impressive, I thought they always called my father Piraat Klaas. Not that I felt like he’d be on a ship, but it had become a household name for me that my father was called. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that my father wasn’t a pirate after all, a real disappointment.

I’d be happy to let you take me into daydreams. I found out during the history lessons that it was very useful to be able to be carried away in a story. By visualizing the story and imagining that I was there myself, I was able to remember the explanation much better. It depended on who taught; if the teacher had a monotonous voice, not much came in, even though the subject matter was fascinating. The disinterest in the less fun subjects was a matter of discipline and a lot of homework in order to be able to come along anyway.

There wasn’t a particular topic I had a penchant for, as long as it was told in a fun way I could let myself be completely included. For example, it could happen that if a maths teacher had a good day and talked enthusiastically about his subject, much more it lingered with me.

Yet the art subjects were not loved by me. I’m bad at drawing, painting and I don’t have a sense of proportion. All quite essential to shape something. Also when visiting museums I have never had much interest in subjects such as modern art. An abstract painting in which I could not see a story or meaning felt meaningless. I used to listen to fairy tales a lot, one of which was The Emperor’s Clothes. The emperor was so vain that the best clothes weren’t good enough. One day, a fabric merchant came and said he had the most valuable and special substance ever made. Only smart people could see the fabric. For all the stupid people who weren’t suitable for work, the fabric was invisible. When measuring the clothes, the emperor was afraid to say that he actually did not see the fabric. When showing his new clothes to the general public, people would not dare to shout out that they saw nothing, since they would then confess that they were stupid and not suitable for their work. It was only when a small child in the audience shouted that the emperor was naked that people dared to laugh at the emperor and the emperor realized that he had been fooled. For some modern works I felt a link to this story, I just didn’t see the power of the work.

In time, my love for my hometown Enkhuizen began to grow slowly. I had grown up here and the city had a certain atmosphere that aroused my interest. Seeing the old city map in a map book that was in our house was fascinating in a way. The idea that everything looked so different and that there was so little left of it made me feel unreal. I found it difficult to understand that there were streets full of townhouses and canal houses along the quay, and now only some barns and vegetable gardens. I could look at the map for hours. It was therefore not surprising that my workpieces often had Enkhuizen as their subject.

I remember when I was about nine years old, I tried to get into a vacant dilapidated building downtown with a classmate. Through a broken window we climbed in and saw how long time had stood still here. The large wooden beams on the ceiling and old windows had a certain atmosphere that impressed me. In the attic was a small window where you could look outside. From here we had a view of a beautiful-looking series of houses and I got the feeling of being back in time. Perhaps this made an impression at a young age. It wasn’t just the old house we came to, but the old houses where many of my friends lived I always liked to see and I loved playing there. I myself lived in a practical new house, not the place where I gained inspiration for the past.

My fascination must have started in an old attic room.

After elementary school, I almost didn’t come into town anymore. I noticed that I was sitting at the computer a lot more and had no need to go outside. It probably had to do with me being fairly introverted and having poor contact with classmates at my new school. As one of the few children in my class, I went to a high school in another city, and as a result, I lost touch with my old classmates. I can say that the switch was an outright tragedy. Nothing at the other school could interest me and given the low school advice (vbo) I wasn’t exactly in an inspiring group of students either. Although I tried to do my best, my grades were low and things were getting worse by the week.

There came a time when I didn’t want to go to school anymore and I didn’t. My parents decided to send me to a child psychologist to see what to do with it. The first day I said almost nothing and most of what they told me went past me. Still, psychologist had a lot of patience and managed to get through to me. It soon became apparent that the big problem was missing my old classmates, and the completely wrong environment I was in at the time. She couldn’t do much at the time, but she was trying to find out if my poor performance was due to too high a school level, or if there was a lack of it elsewhere. She asked me if I ever read books. I never got much further than comic books, so I indicated that this was not my interest. She told me to give it a try and gave me the book The Curse of Polyfemos, written by Evert Hartman.

Within a short time I had read the book and started looking for other books myself. I loved reading, and the more I was working on it, the better I started to feel. This also had an effect on my school performance. By the end of the year, my grades looked a lot better. The psychologist, who by the way was called Jonie, became increasingly hesitant about the choice of school. She asked if I would have preferred to go to another school and I immediately said yes!

After a new school test I had to take and Jonie’s advice, an interview was requested at the regional school where I lived. The minimum admission level was mavo, so this would be a problem. Still, I was allowed to come by. I remember sitting there with my parents and the principal of seventh grade. The principal of the school asked me in a stern tone why I wanted to change schools and if I could handle it. I indicated how important the environment was to me and that I would perform much better if I didn’t have to go back to that other school. At that moment I didn’t know what eventually allowed me to switch schools, but somewhere there must have been confidence that there was more to it than what had come out of me so far. It wasn’t until 20 years later that I read an interview with this principal in the newspaper. He described his school youth and that he had a very difficult start. Because the school had not lost faith in him, he was eventually able to finish it and obtain a diploma. I feel that when I sat there and sincerely showed the will, there was also a piece of humanity shown there without looking purely and only at the figures.

Even before Christmas I was in the class of all my old classmates, I loved it and I found myself getting more confident. Still, the year wasn’t a success. My grades remained low and I couldn’t go to the next class. I got a new conversation, where I indicated that it had been a hectic year and that the switch was not easy for me either. They gave me the benefit of the doubt and I was allowed to try it for one more year in a try class. Luckily I repackaged myself and my grades were a lot better than the previous year. I was able to move on to the MAVO, and after graduating I went on to HAVO.

Because I had got a bit older, the learning went better and better for me and I got great grades, so I didn’t have to worry about school anymore. This made me more interested in developing in the field of communication. Until then, I never let my opinion be heard, so I certainly did not want to be in the foreground. At school there were annual debate training sessions, I decided to participate. I found this terrifying, before the group gives your opinion and debates with each other. It took me quite a long time to open my mouth, but once I did, it didn’t close either. I found that I loved having a discussion with someone else and convincing him that your opinion had the best argument. It was often fierce, but due to the right guidance this was dosed and the debates remained respectful and not personal.

Every year there was also a national competition, in which different schools competed against each other. Our group did well and in the last year I competed we came into the final of the Youth House of Commons. From that moment on, the introvert layer is gone forever and I do not hesitate to enter into a discussion if I do not agree with something. This is not about expressing an opinion, but purely about provoking a reaction to make a pain point negotiable. Often this results in interesting conversations. It’s one of the most important things I learned in high school. It also explains my sharp and witty opinion today about art and new developments, it fuels my drive for perfection in the field.

In high school I also developed my interest in photography, I found it fascinating that you could capture image with a camera. At the time I was in the youth fire brigade and I was very active in recording fires and other incidents. Shortly afterwards this switched to filming, I was completely impressed by this. I loved recording fires, so I was present everywhere and always to record what was happening. The fascination with fire and the fire brigade was poured in at home. My grandfather, father and brother were all in the fire service, so it also made sense that when the youth fire brigade was founded in 1998, I would become a member of it. I was the youngest member, and I can’t help but say that I was formed here for life. Although it was the youth department, the construction and relationship was hierarchically set up. You can almost say that it was a military youth club that was given the necessary standards and values. The group was close, but there was also a lot of attention paid to