Expert's words: Simone Nastasi

Simone Nastasi

After graduating in Industrial Design in Italy, Simone Nastasi started to work in architectural visualization for several years before freelancing for prestigious studios like Jellyfish Pictures or Mainframe as a 3D generalist. He worked on advertising projects for prestigious international brands like Audi, Dyson or Sony.

As an all-rounder generalist, you work with particules and fluids as well. What’s the best plugin for that today according to you, and why? 
For particles: hands down tyFlow, even in beta, is the new kid on the block. Even if it's not rule-based it can let artists achieve amazing results with minimal efforts (the node trees are usually so simple at the end...) and it is FAST!
For fluids: I love PhoenixFD, but if I need more control I'd probably go with Realflow. Its daemons system is so nice.

You’ve been a 3D artist for almost 20 years. What major changes have you seen in your work since the beginning?  
Well, my beginning was on 3ds DOS, so I've seen quite a few! From time to time there's a *jump* - I remember the enthusiasm for some render engines like Brazil R/S, or Vray with its irradiance map; or the first physics plugins, that allowed realistic, natural animation for cloth or rigid bodies...

What I see now is an effort to unify everything - unified physics, universal scene description - we're still at the beginning. And let's not forget the AI. Right now it's denoising mainly, but it's gonna be bigger and bigger.

You are a 3ds Max + V-ray user. Have you tried other software and/or renderers? How do they compete with what you are using now?    

I used almost every raytracer out there. I started in Mental Ray, now I stick with Vray and Corona mainly. Still not a GPU fan, but Redshift looks really nice - as well as Vray GPU, F-storm...

About 3D packages, I know quite well Rhino. Can't wrap my head around Maya, never been able to, to me it's an alien software. Houdini, on the other side, is way more similar to 3ds Max for my logic - nodes and modifier stack, they belong to the same procedural philosophy. But I still am and probably always will be an hardcore 3ds Max user ;)