The Dark Knight is descending from the rafters on July 18th, with graduate and Double Negative TD generalist Pietro Ponti representing VFS Animation & Visual Effects in the credits. But there’s another connection, and it’s something a little different.

3D grad Kolby Jukes is a freelance character artist who, since graduating from VFS in 2004, has found a niche in the game and film industries – with a laundry list of clients that includes id, EA, Midway, and Frantic Films – while starting a growing online community for 3D artists called Tweak.

He’s also making a name for himself in collectibles. His work for DC Direct has meant modeling sought-after Batman and Joker statues, busts and the like for a fan base that can’t get enough. And that’s where The Dark Knight comes in.

Let’s talk Dark Knight. The pieces you did for DC Direct, especially on the Joker, are completely jaw-dropping. How did you get into that kind of work?

Early in 2007, an art director at DC Direct, Shawn Knapp, had seen some of my work online and got in contact with me about doing a series of half-scale busts. I eagerly accepted the contract, since I’ve always been a huge Batman fan, reading the comics and playing with the toys as a kid and watching the Bruce Timm/Paul Dini animated series religiously.

Just after finishing my first bust (a Jim Lee inspired Batman bust that was released in April of 2008), I was offered the chance to work on the Dark Knight film merchandise. I ended up sculpting the majority of the line, working on 6 pieces. It was a really great experience, and I’m really happy to have been involved in what looks to be an amazing film.

How is the approach to modeling for busts or statues – real, tangible things – different than for, say, animation?

The approach is remarkably similar. The software used to create the Dark Knight pieces is the same I use to create characters for a video game, film, or cinematic – primarily Autodesk Mudbox, Pixologic Zbrush and Softimage XSI.

The only notable difference, as I see it, is that I didn’t have to pay much attention to the line-flow and topology of the model, since these assets would never have to be reposed or deformed – as opposed to characters created for movies or games, where proper deformation is of the utmost importance.

I was fortunate enough to work with the legendary sculptor Oluf W. Hartvigson on all my DC Direct pieces. Oluf prepared, printed, and assembled all my sculptures, and guided me through all the technical hiccups that come with the technology. I honestly could not have done the work if not for his guidance and advice.

Freelancing seems to have been a very deliberate choice on your part – what drew you to that lifestyle?

Freelancing gives me a great deal of variety: one week I might be making a photo-real digital double for a movie, the next week making monsters for a video game, the week after that creating making characters for print or television ads. As opposed to a full-time studio job where you would be working on the same project, day-in, day-out for years at a time.

Freelance also give me a lot of flexibility in my schedule, which works well for me since I tend to do my best work late at night. There’s definitely something to be said for fulltime studio work though – I definitely miss the teamwork and artist camaraderie that comes with working in-house, not to mention the joy that comes with being a key player in the creation and development of a project.

About Tweak Pro: what made you start the Tweak community in the first place? What’s the importance of a site like it for CG artists?

Tweak started out as a small ‘vanity’ forum, attached to my personal website. It was meant to be an online hangout for my friends and I to chat and give each other critical feedback on our personal artwork.

The forum grew beyond my expectations, and was soon filled with some of the best character artists from around the world. I realized the forum was, to some degree, outgrowing its roots, and about 1.5 years after its conception, I moved the community off of my website, and onto its own domain, tweakcg.com.

Forums are a great place for artists to share their work and meet people who share similar interests. In the CG community, forums are quite vital – especially for artists who don’t live in cities/countries with a high concentration of CG artists and studios, without these forums it can be difficult to stay on top of current industry trends and techniques, as well as find work.

Maybe you could talk about your vision for the recently launched Tweak Pro. What’s new, what’s different?

Approximately a year after moving Tweak from my site to its own domain, I felt that the community had lost a bit of its edge, a number of other sites had sprung up that offered artists the same resources and communities, and a lot of the content on Tweak could be found on 5 or more other sites.

I felt that Tweak, to some degree, had become redundant and unneeded. It was around this time that I was in Seattle, giving a lecture at Massive Black’s Conceptart.org workshop. While there I was talking to some of my friends about forums and Tweak in particular. I expressed that I wanted to make Tweak more personal, and push the networking component of the forum experience, give it more of a face-to-face approach – essentially Facebook for Artists. My friends responded positively to the concept, and so I began to look at options and approaches to implementing those ideas.

The fruition of those ideas is Tweak Pro, a community for 3D artists layered over a social-networking framework, with an integrated forum and an internal hosting solution for people to share their artwork. It is my hope that Tweak Pro will enable artists around the world to get to know the person behind the avatar/screen-name, so that they can forge long-lasting, mutually-beneficial professional connections and friendships.

And what’s next for Kolby Jukes?

More of the same. As always, I’m very busy with my job – working on some high-profile movie and game projects. Hopefully sometime in the near future I’ll be able to scrape together enough free time to further develop some of my personal projects.

Thanks, Kolby! Visit kolbyjukes.com to see more of his amazing work.

Update: Kolby’s handiwork is featured on the cover of the August 2008 issue of ToyFare, along with the headline “Are These the Best Batman Toys Ever?” Wow. You can see a scan of the cover on Kolby’s site.