My name is Karol Miklas and I’m a 3D vehicle artist, working for video games, advertisement and the automotive industry for about five years now. Always loving all sort of land vehicles, I felt this was the right path to follow, therefore I learnt how to model back in 2008 and started bringing my ideas to life. I spent some time working for video games companies on-site (Techland, CD Projekt RED) while also doing freelance, and this year I moved working on my own full-time.
Besides Sketchfab, you can follow my work on Artstation, Behance and Facebook.
I run my own business, working on custom orders for clients such as Bluehole, PUBG Corp., Quartz and some others I cannot disclose just yet, providing the highest quality assets and designs possible. You can see some of my work in some of the latest E3 game trailers (PUBG, Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2).
My style varies, from old, rusty, derelict soviet-era cars, through cyberpunk to modern cars. It’s a pretty wide range, making every new task a creative challenge, to discover how to approach it visually but also satisfy the little engineering curiosity in me, and of course, make it technically viable. The tools I use are Blender, Photoshop and Substance Painter.
I can hardly find extra time for private work nowadays, but when I do, I try to spend it on developing some area that I feel I lack experience in. An example is this Porsche model:
I focused on honing my accuracy skills for the car’s surfaces (they had to be as perfect as possible, as far as modelling and optimization goes), the materials – a wet surface after driving in this case – and the car itself has to be accurately recreated.
I even took a trip to the Porsche museum last year to gather the references I needed:
You can find more pictures here.
I try to keep my showcasing style consistent and clear (I switched to white backgrounds and re-rendered most of my portfolio last year), ensuring that it’s easy to view the model and highlight its style. Lighting, value and colors play a really important role here as well. A good model is nothing if it doesn’t look attractive where it’s shown. A touch of post processing helps a lot, too. Some sharpening, some AO, recent screen space reflections, and mostly, tone mapping. I prefer to use the Filmic preset to achieve more realism.
I chose to set up a store on Sketchfab after using it daily as a tool to showcase my work, both to the public and to my customers. It works like a charm and for my needs it displays the models in a quality I can present my clients with, even as a final result most of the time. I decided to prepare some of the models and price them according to their quality and potential use.
It was really a no-brainer, as all it takes is to make sure your model files are clean and easy to use, set the price… and it’s done. It’s the easiness that made me use this particular store and why I never cared for this form of selling before when it came to selling stuff online in general.
Also, the fact you can actually see the model before you buy is something that makes the most sense. It’s the actual product you buy, not just a picture of it.
The highest priced of my models are quality models like the 911 above, as they are suitable for in-game or any other realtime usage, as well as in offline renderings. I posted some of my models for free, as I didn’t see their quality to be something that I could sell. They have more of an educational use, as they are also old and heavy (highpoly) models.
Even though I don’t plan on making any store-specific models for now, using the store will continue to be an opportunity to commercialize some of my models.
Artstation / Behance / Facebook
About the author
Karol Miklas
3D Vehicle Artist
