Maria Pan
Graphic designer, 3D artist
Posted in artist, designer, illustrator, windows
Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Maria Pan, a freelance graphic designer, 3D artist and illustrator from Italy. Online I'm known as Paarsec and I run an Instagram account where I publish my 3D experiments. Throughout the years I developed a very stylized, colorful style, and I'm especially interested in applying new CGI techniques to my work. I've always been in love with art that makes you go "Wow! How did they do that?", and that's what I'm trying to achieve with my work by using unusual materials and creating illusions that couldn't otherwise exist in real life.
What hardware do you use?
I work on my own and I do most of my work on a SANTECH X86 laptop, and I use an external LG Flatron W2252S monitor which comes in very handy when I want to study reference pictures or follow a tutorial. My laptop has an NVIDIA GeForce 965M graphics card, an Intel Core i7-6700HQ 2.60 GHz CPU and 16GB of RAM.
I sketch most of my render ideas in a physical notebook, while I often use my Wacom Intuos Pen & Touch S tablet to draw my illustrations and to sculpt my 3D models.
And what software?
For 3D work my main choices are Blender and Cinema 4D. When I need to create complex physics simulations like smoke, grains, fire, fluids - especially when they need to interact with each other and I need a lot of control on the final result - I use Houdini. When using Blender and simulating fluids I often use the excellent FLIP Fluids add-on, while for cloth simulation I use a standalone program, Marvelous Designer. Most of my rendering is done with OctaneRender. I usually edit my animations with DaVinci Resolve and still images with Adobe Photoshop, which, along with Adobe Illustrator, I also use extensively for my graphic design work.
When I need to work on illustrations my software of choice is Paintstorm, a cross-platform sketching app that is very versatile and easy to use. I especially love how fast it is and how much control you have over its brush settings. I also sometimes use Rebelle 3 for its amazing watercolors and rulers, especially when I want to work on my outlined illustrations.
What would be your dream setup?
I love travelling, so I would love to have a machine that is portable, powerful but that also has a great cooling system. As of now my dream setup would be an Asus Mothership with an external monitor. I would also love to try VR sculpting with tools like Medium and an HTC Vive.