Renowned for his artistry that blends skillful technical expertise with a bold and creative approach, David Ariew — affectionately known as ‘Octane Jesus’ — has made a significant impact in the world of 3D art since discovering his passion for Cinema4D and Octane Render in 2013. His impressive journey has led to collaborations with the likes of Beeple, Deadmau5, Zedd, Katy Perry, Keith Urban, Excision, and many more.

In a Render Network exclusive interview, David delves into his journey into immersive digital art, focusing on his latest work, “Interdimensional Shift,” recently featured at the Digital Art Fair Asia in Hong Kong in October.

What inspired you to create the “Interdimensional Shift” VR meditation, and how did you conceptualize the journey throughout the experience?

Over the last several years, David has immersed himself in a style of work described as ‘infinite mirror rooms’ that combine fractal geometric rendering, stunning lighting patterns, and distinctive soundscapes. The spark for ‘Quantum Transcendence’ came during work on a job for the country music artist Keith Urban, during which David was able to expand the ‘mirror room’ format, producing over 100 frames in a single day, a previously unthought of prospect for him.

As he put it:

“After a decade of work as a 3D artist, this was the most free I’d ever felt, and it was also an extremely quick and fruitful process too.”

In his early NFT work in 2021, David built his style around pioneering the ‘infinite mirror rooms’ as a type of digital art that combines the visual immersiveness of 3D with procedural fractal rendering and geometry often seen in generative art. This distinctive form of digital art leverages digitally native media to create expansive, virtual worlds that are impossible to replicate with physical media.

Over the course of 2022 and 2023, David entered a new creative phase, experimenting with new mediums beyond 2D video outputs. This shift led to the creation of his longest piece, an 11-minute meditative virtual reality artwork. Through the encouragement of his Discord community, the artist decided to venture into VR, starting with a 360-render and progressing to more complex full 3D VR pieces. His transition into VR resulted in a deeply moving experience for himself as he created a high-resolution 3D animated immersive scene that felt like a breakthrough, opening up a new dimension in his art.

“The second scene I rendered felt so vast and intricate, I started crying. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before and I was honestly shocked that it was my creation. I finally felt that I’d found a medium where my art could graduate beyond something people look at, say ‘cool!’ and swipe past, to something people could experience, and that could leave a profound impact on them.

I feel as if I’ve cracked a hole into another dimension, the mirror realm, and all I want to do is explore and reveal this place for as long as I live!”

This creative breakthrough was enabled by a tremendous amount of technical work that David walks us through next on recent projects including Quantum Stargate, which was auctioned at Phillips.

What are the challenges that you faced designing an immersive art experience in VR compared to those that you have done in 2D?

“With 2D renders, I could push the look much further, and create much crazier distortion effects. A lot of the tricks in my bag like using insanely wide fisheye lenses or interesting bokeh and shallow DOF looks simply don’t translate to VR. With VR, you basically have one lens, and it’s a full 360 of the scene. I’ve also found that while shallow DOF is possible, it doesn’t look great because your eyes are used to doing the focusing for you. It just kind of looks fuzzy, blobby and weird in my opinion. I also used to do a lot of tricks that would create extra distortions like putting a mirrored or glass torus close to the lens, but because VR reveals all the true dimensions of the scene, those objects close to the lens just immediately hurt your brain, so that’s a definite no-go. Similarly, the visual language I often used for concert visuals is too energetic, and the second you try to ‘do a barrel roll’ inside VR, you’re going to make people either topple over or puke, or both.

That being said, though there are constraints, there are absolute benefits to the medium too. You get to communicate in depth, and your art turns into something that wraps around the viewer completely. Just moving the camera forward will make the viewer feel like they’re flying, and your creations can be anything from a tiny world to an awe-inspiring palace. Nothing communicates scale better than VR, and the more you play with it the more you’ll realize that you’re now responsible for the sensations the viewer experiences, which is a godlike power.”

For those wanting to try experimenting in VR, could you walk us through the technical process of creating works like “Interdimensional Shift” and “Quantum Stargate?

“I start with some form of geometry whether it’s a simple cube, or a platonic object. . .”

“I use bevels in all of my mirror rooms, because those are what catch the light and allow the viewer to understand the geometry of the space, even if it’s just a hint of light catching. . .”

“I often use objects like chandeliers, or lots of little bulbs to create interesting patterns of light, but most often I go with simple atom arrays that have an emissive texture within them, so that the emission gets broken up. I animate the texture within the array so that the reflections dance around, creating a ton more complexity for very little work.“

“I squish the rooms down to practically nothing and animate them expanding, which creates a surprisingly beautiful reveal effect, and I fly cameras through the spaces, some of which are hallways with changing dimensions so that at times they feel more closed off and then at other times the space opens up. ”