Just walking around with the phone collecting some images that I will use for some Fall color palettes this season. Some interesting tones to pick from.
Jar Studies
Here are the three jar images all finished up and in one post to check out.
Tjalf Sparnaay Delicious Paintings
Some pretty cool paintings here by Tjalf Sparnaay.
This Machine Kills Fascists
Inspired by the Great Woody Guthrie, I made a new piece of artwork this weekend in response to the Alt-Riot / Proudboys coming into our town from out of state to cause havoc. Get out and Vote people. It’s pretty bleak out there, so do what you can.
FlowerPower Blue- Robert Peek
Amazingly cool technique on this series by Robert Peek. I was pretty sure they were paintings when I first saw them. Check out the full series on Behance, FlowerPower Blue.
Working on a little something something.....
Just mashing some stuff together for a new piece I am working on and this little graphic I wanted to drop as a preview. These two were kinda fun. The “eyes image” were scrapped form the internet but the game graphics style of “VOTE” was done in C4d.
Still lifes by Rebecca Ritchie
Was digging on these oil paintings by Rebecca Ritchie. I am such a sucker for this kind of lighting style.
Continential Breakfast, by Niall McDiarmid
Found this series of photographs by Niall McDiarmid on This Isn’t Happiness. The color and composition is pretty awesome. Really would like to try something like this in CG. That lighting is so spot on.
Principles for better design
Crazy, windy, smokey weather here and not enough time to continue with the Jar project. I did start to play with adding more jars and getting the boolean dirt to work with them before I got busy again though. Found this good article on Design though.
“The moka coffee maker may not produce perfect coffee, but it requires so little maintenance compared to a large coffee machine with radiators, pipes, grinder, etc. that it makes the compromise “complexity / coffee taste” great.
Remember the Pareto principle: in general 80% of a things can be done in 20% of the total allocated time. Conversely, the hardest 20% left takes 80% of the time. Perfection requires infinite time and energy. This is impossible and therefore should not be part of your design.”
And here is where I left off with the jars. Need to tweak the UV’s on the far left and do all sorts of other stuff, but it’s coming along.
Not a Drop to Think.
Water, water everywhere….
Newest little jar study I worked on over the weekend. Pretty happy with the sand texture I was able to come up with. The water itself works but is a hacky bit of shading held together with duct tape and chewing gum. I did one version where I punched in with a 110mm lens instead of a 90mm like in the first and added some volumetrics to the lights, but It kinda broke it out from the series too much. So now the whole series will have the same lens and light settings. I don’t even think I’ll rotate the jar. Just change up floor textures along with what’s in the jar. Might drop some cloth in the background for some texture and see if that works though. The light rig is basically a room with a slight gap to the “front” and two windows on the side. It’s giving it that nice classic still life look. As always, click the thumbnails to see bigger images.
Pretty happy with this series so far. Next one will be fire.
Been enjoying staying off of social media and my very limited news diet. Highly recommend a news detox to anyone. Also, facebook is mostly made of evil. Check the links on the right for non, “Walled Garden” content. 3 Quarks always has some good long reads to check out.
Gregory Crewdson, New Work. "An Eclipse of Moths"
Write up in the NYT about his new work, “An Eclipse of Moths”
“The section of Pittsfield where he staged his pictures is near a General Electric transformer plant that poisoned the environment with PCBs but also employed most of the town. Ms. Hiam, who was born in Pittsfield, said, “My parents worked for GE. Everyone I knew had parents who came here for GE.” Pittsfield was devastated in 1987 by the closing of the factory, which now looms over the landscape like a ruined castle in a European village.”
VIA, This Isn’t Happiness.
New Such Luck Video
Such Luck posted a new animation they created. Great stuff!
I do wish they would up their blogging game though….
Background plate study
Kinda had an idea to start doing my abstracts in environments so today I wanted to play with getting BG plates to work with the renders. Not sure if smoke helps or hurts though….
Landscape Study
Felt like getting lost in a landscape for a bit instead of messing with the technicalities of Houdini. Spent most of yesterday and this morning working up this fantasy style landscape. D&D hidden grove type thing. Made in Cinema 4d with Redshift render. Started using Redshift proxies on this one but I kinda miss Octane scatter. That is a much better scatter system.
Houdini Doodle 3
Todays doodle is brought to you from a failed animation. Way to much flickering to make it look good. But here are 3 frames from it that look pretty good.
Houdini Doodle
Today’s Houdini Doodle is brought to you by being completely zoned out and just moving sliders around in a For Each loop. Really simple node tree on this one.
Late night cloud study
Messing around in Houdini last night and felt like doing some cloud work. Here’s the result of that.
Landscape Concept Study
I have been playing with this landscape piece in Houdini for a while now and finally got it to an interesting place. It’s my first landscape in Houdini and using Quixel Bridge has been amazing. It is integrated with Houdini in such a fluid way. They made it one click to import everything ready to go in Houdini and Redshift. I still struggle with so many little things in Houdini and take classes CONSTANTLY, so to just be able to click on a plant and have it import with scatter nodes and materials all set up is a crazy time saver.
Another little mental leap for me was being able to art direct the smoke how I wanted without bashing my head against the monitor for a day.
Did some post work in Photoshop of course. ;)
Couple new Portfolio pages up
Just threw up two more galleries, one of random digital art pieces I have been doing and another one of a series I did called, “Insect Apocalypse”.
Messing Around with Strands
Was messing around with strands in Houdini and Redshift and came up with this logo concept.