Jamie Kripke asked if I would help with a project for SolidFire's rebranded website that required a good bit of CGI and I do love me some CGI. Tricky bit was most of the server did not exist so we discussed the best way to shoot it to incorporate it into the CGI. He did a great job shooting for the end goal of the project and it all snapped together fairly easy.
AD was Randy Rogers at Grenadier.
You can see the making of in the Danklife Portfolio and on Behance.
Working on some imagery for a local band called "Whiskey or the Concrete" here is one of my concepts that I was working up the past few days.
Here is a abstract study I did yesterday, rendered over night and printed out this morning. Loosely based on works by John Chamberlain, I wanted to explore some different finishes / materials and do a lighting study with brushed steel. Keeping the highlights smooth on the steel and placing the lights was fairly tricky to get how I liked. Slightly added a HDRi map of some clouds in a landscape to just give a hint of location to the reflection. Printed on Ilford Gold Fiber Silk.
Another CGI study I did yesterday and rendered over night. Was mostly working getting a better handle on Sub Surface Scattering, volumetric lights and bump maps. Getting the render clean with SSS is fairly tricky for me still.
Just thought I would post some CGI projects I have been tinkering with. The Lebron shoe was for Nike and was never published so I just added that to the front page. I tweaked on it to add the "Lava" texture the other week which I thought made it more interesting. Shoe is from a photo shot by Ryan Unruh.
The text piece is a interior study where I am working on getting the floors and lights working right. Having a issue where I can't get the light working right in the bottom left. The abstract is just a study in making abstract art in CGI that I banged out yesterday. Both of these are entirely CGI.
New Project for Nike was recently released, "Megatron Rises." Nike Football and Hasbro honor Calvin Johnson, Jr. with special edition CJ81 Trainer and TRANSFORMERS action figure. Darien Birks from Nike Football reached out and asked if I would like to work up some illustrations for this limited launch. Megatron toys? How could I possibly say no?! Had just about a week to work these up from sketches to the final illustrations for wall murals and store front displays. Used Modo for most of it and post in Photoshop. Thanks Darien!
Really good overview of lights and rendering for anyone doing any kind of 3d. Very educational.
How competitive? Since we wrote the first Art of Rendering story, just 18 months ago, the landscape has changed dramatically. New renderers and whole new approaches have been released. There have been dramatic improvements, renderers have died, others have been bought, and there is no sense that the process is anywhere near over. Rendering, once a fairly predictable evolutionary space, has become like a quickly moving landscape. For this story alone we have done over 20 interviews and we will be covering 14 major production rendering platforms. We have aimed to focus on production renderers for animation and VFX and not even really touch on game engine rendering, GPU rendering and mobile offerings. Art of Rendering saw many compliments but also a host of complaints. To paraphrase a quote from the first article, “rendering is now a bit like a religion.”
