Artist Research - Low Polygon Artists - Timothy J. Reynolds - JR Schmidt

Low Polygon Artists

Timothy J. Reynolds

Timothy J. Reynolds is an American Freelance 3D Illustrator best known for his work using Cinema 4D to create artwork for a vast range of clients including Facebook, Greenpeace and Popular Mechanics.

His work based around Low Poly landscapes interests me significantly more than his other work as the manipulation of Polygons to simulate water and terrain has a very nice balance between detail and clarity. His work uses high quality materials and textures to give the illusion that the artwork exists in a real world and that the polygons are affected by real lighting such as sunlight.

On Timothy J. Reynolds' Behance page, there are several images of how the image above looked pre render and from this image it appears that he used a variety of tools and objects in Cinema 4D such as the Displacer tool for the water and a Polygon Reduction Object to create the base rock formation in his imagery. From this point onwards I believe he manipulated the rocks and water to achieve a very basic idea of what he wanted.

JR Schmidt

JR Schmidt is another 3D motion artist who created a series of works called Geometric Landscapes and Polygonal Posters which use a similar technique to Timothy J. Reynolds'  Low Poly work with a few differences.
The artwork features a lot more thin polygonal faces, maybe indicating that the mountains/hills had been created by extruding or dragging certain areas of terrain upwards or maybe just being used to give a sense of intensity and dimension to his work. Generally Schmidt's work is less minimalist than Reynolds' and features a lot more 3D objects such as characters and props.
Maybe due to the amount of things happening in these scenes or perhaps due to a style decisions, the materials and colours used in Schmidts artwork are much more cartoon-like and colourful than Reynolds' work helping to give a completely different aesthetic all together.

The similarities in technique between the artists is very similar and the main distinguishing features are the choices in composition and the colour/material scheme. However, the way in which dramatic coloured lighting is used remains the same and obviously adds a significant amount of depth into the artwork. The use of lighting when creating these static landscapes in Low Poly is drastically obvious and if I was to create a similar piece of work, I would experiment heavily with lighting and textures.