New Commisioned Poster Art

Just finished up a commissioned Poster for the Portland band We Are Parasols that I am super happy with. A bit of a breakthrough piece for me for a few reasons. This is the first fully creative piece I have made since recently switching to a new Windows machine from Puget Systems for my full time environment. The Mac be dead people, move on sooner than later. I also contribute the new PC workstation with helping light and build out this set since it is so damn fast. Full on game changer for me. So many more possibilities with a system that does not choke and crash in dense scenes. Another reason is it just looks super damn cool, wheee! Really happy with the feel of it.  I kinda had a breakthrough with Octane Render and understanding the node network and it's slightly quirky take on displacement as well.

Back from vacation

Just got back from a much-needed vacation in Hawaii and we caught a bit of the storms in Maui and were trapped behind a landslide causing us to miss flights and do the travel rebooking shuffle but we left the day before they really hit hard. We were in Hanalei on Friday and on Sunday it was flooded and the roads were washed out. Pretty crazy. Here's to hoping all the folks there are OK.  That footage is so crazy.

Realism Studies

Been focusing more on my realism with CG lately and wanted to post a few different pieces using Physical Renderer in C4d and Corona Renderer. If you follow me on Instagram you may have been seeing these trickle in.  Lots of little differences between the two render engines. The light plays a bit more subtle with Corona but Physical can hold it's own once you tweak the GI a bit. Corona gets the "Flare" of sunlight with shadows way better. Corona is really plug and play, no tweaks from the defaults at all but the materials are a bit different and it crashes Team Renderer every time. So it is not production ready as of yet.  Interactive render is very responsive, but save often. Physical gets some really nice details and the Multi-Pass is less glitchy.

Right now in my head I think for stills I would use Corona and for anything needing animation I would use Physical but I got this feeling I can get more out of Physical yet. Anyways, check em out. 

Clear LCDs as animated stained glass

This is pretty amazing. "‘Illuminated Glass’ is an interactive art experience that reimagines the traditional art of stained glass. The heart of the installation features a 4 panel box made with transparent screens and mirrors. A generative art system plays across the screens, appearing at first like modern stained glass. Light shines through the art, letting colored light into the experience."

Great tofu and a good story

Read this story on Ota Tofu this morning. Really interesting story on a local shop. It's the oldest Tofu shop in America.

"Anzen was Ota Tofu’s longest-standing customer until they closed in 2014 (after 109 years in business). Today, a distributor in eastern Washington is the shop’s longest-standing account—around since Ko’s parents’ day—thanks to Andy’s Market in College Place, catering to the students at Seventh Day Adventist-affiliated Walla Walla University. Most of their business comes from wholesale accounts held by local restaurants and stores, but they still graciously sell their tofu to people like me, regular folks who wander in off the street with a few bucks in their pocket. If you bring a bucket, the pressed-out soybean meal called okara is free (it’s great mixed with ground pork and fried into patties or meatballs, to eat with ramen). Ota Tofu Company does this as a service to the community. Anyone who has tasted tofu made only hours ago knows what a service this is."

Loops and Learning

Starting in May we took on a big CG project where we were doing all the finishing on product renders.  They would send us the raw renders and we would clean up and UV glitches and work up light passes to get the renders to a super clean hero look. This gave me the chance to pick the brain of the CG lead over there about what he was using in his workflow to get his results. They centered on C4d and Octane and the results were really good.  I never tested C4d because most of the rabble on the internet seem to slam it as only being good for making spheres look cool on instagram. But after this conversation, I picked up the Demo at the start of June and now can not stand to open Modo. Anything more than converting a file to FBX and I want to tear my head out. With Cinema 4D I find making animations super easy and rewarding. Plus, this also has opened up using DaVinci Resolve to do my post on the renderings which is a very powerful tool as well. Here is a before and after of my latest animation that shows what DaVinci can bring.

Before and After DaVinci

You can see more of the animations on my instagram page which is where I primarily post these things. So far I mostly just use the Physical Render in C4d and have not hit any major snags but I am running some tests with Corona which is really interesting.  Corona was also just bought out by The Chaos Group who make V-Ray which is really interesting to me as I really liked the results of V-Ray in Modo. Anyways, just some rambling on what I have been doing for fun, enjoy!

Good podcast alert!

Been busy learning C4d as of late and been listening to the Greyscale Gorilla podcast because of that. This one is pretty relevant to anyone in the creative industry. 

If you are curious my instagram on the right has some of the animations I have been doing.