Busy, busy, busy!

Been busy with all sorts of projects so I have been posting to the blog and Behance a lot less as of late. But I have been doing a ton of Instagram stuff which is just to the left there. Just posted this render there from last night.  I focused on working on normal maps, sub surface scattering and transparency. Stay cool out there!

Daily 3D project: Week two.

Plugging along with week two of the Daily 3D project with a bit more success after trying to simplify my ideas.  Went a bit more into simply fun cartoonish characters then abstracts.  Was a lot of fun to model out and render this guy.  Based off of a sketch by billiambabble that I really liked on instagram. 

Daily 3d Post

Reddit has a Daily 3d sub I have been lurking on for awhile and the one today was "Eclipse" and I thought I could do something fairly quick on that one. So this is my first submission to it.

New Work in the Wild: BdRm Album artwork

Some album artwork I did was just released out into the wild.  Jeremy Wilkins recorded some lovely instrumental piano tracks he released under the name bdRm.  I really enjoyed the music and came up with this atmospheric piece that I felt meshed with the music well.  The subtle branding was a bit daring to do as it is reaaaaaaaaallly subtle but once again, I believe that it echoes the subtle nature of the music. 

You can get it on:

bdRm on iTunes.  bdRm on This World is Against Me.  BdRm on Bandcamp.



Personal work, Office and Ice Study

Worked up two CGI personal projects this weekend.  The astronaut "Office Hell" image was to work on interior lighting, dynamics as curves and some simple UVing. Also shattered the helmet a bit to get those cracks which is always fun to do. Then I brought it all into Painter to explore some treatments in there.  I wanted to take it away from the fully clean CGI look and grunge it up a bit.

The Ice Flowers was done in responce to Makoto Azuma's installations which are awesome looking.  I wanted to see how close I could come to those using Modo. Besides some work on modeling the ice block I am pretty happy with how it came out. Fairly minor post in Photoshop adding some slight grain and darkening the foreground. Took 8 hours to render that out using 38 cores.  

Holiday Half Study

Wanted to do a little project for Sara since she just ran the Portland Holiday Half and this is the result.  Wanted to work on my text chops. 

Personal Work: Grass Fields.

Just picked up a bunch of new models of grass and did this quick test render with a stock photo backdrop.  It is a tad "glossy" on the plants but I enjoy it visually quite a bit.  Great models...

Tuts / info: Skin materials

This post on the Modo forums go into all sorts of crazy detail about getting realistic skin shaders.  It's a gold mine of ideas and information for any program, not just Modo.

"Top Layer/Skin Surface - This is pretty flat/desaturated. It's basically just the cells of your skin, most of which are dead. Although I would think this map would be colored a bit if the character/model had some darker pigmentation based on race etc. Perhaps moles/liver spots, tattoos, make up etc.

2nd Layer - This is just below the skin. Sort of a more saturated version of the surface/skin map. There is blood and active alive tissue, but for the most part, is just "more layers of skin". Perhaps moles/liver spots, tattoos etc.

3rd layer - This is where most of the color comes from. Fat, blood, muscle, connective tissues etc. This map is generally very contrasty and saturated. Really think about what elements would be contained at this level - reds and blues for veins and vessels, pinks for muscle, connective tissue - pale yellowish whites for connective tissue/tendon, darker brownish yellows etc for fat, lighter desaturated white/yellows for bone etc. 

4th Layer - Backscatter map - this map is more or less a mask, dictatiing where and how light will pass through the skin material, on thinner areas like the ears, as well as the general darker, reddish coloring.

Spec/Gloss 01 - General spec/oil.

SPec/Gloss 02 - Extra shiny/wet areas, on top of the oil layer, like lips, around eyes, maybe on nose or forehead"

Personal Work: DoF, Bokeh and particles study.

Little study I did last weekend exploring DoF, bokeh and some interesting particles and dynamics.  The bokeh has too much noise for me but I can not for the life of me figure out how to clear that up.

Building 3D with Ikea

"

Today, around 75% of all IKEA’s product images are CG, and they have a ‘bank’ of about 25,000 models. “These are all created at a ridiculously high resolution,” explains Martin, “We render them in 4Kx4K, and they need to hold up to that resolution. We need to be able to do whatever we like with the renderings - print them on large walls in the stores if we need to. Even if most of them are only ever used on the website, they all have the capability to be printed very high-res.”

 

The first entire room image to be created in CG for one of IKEA’s catalogues was in 2010. “There were a LOT of people involved in that image,” says Martin. “As you can imagine, the first time you do something, everyone wants to have a look! But then the catalogue after that had four or five images and it really took off.”

 

“The most expensive and complicated things we have to create and shoot are kitchens. From both an environmental and time point of view, we don’t want to have to ship in all those white-goods from everywhere, shoot them and then ship them all back again. And unfortunately, kitchens are one of those rooms that differ very much depending on where you are in the world. A kitchen in the US will look very different to a kitchen in Japan, for example, or in Germany. So you need lots of different layouts in order to localise the kitchen area in brochures. Very early on we created around 200 CG exchanges versions for 50 photographed kitchens in 2008, with the products we had - and I think everyone began to understand the real possibilities.”

Very interesting write up over at CG Society.  Took Ikea a number of years to make the switch but they did.  

On a side note, V-Ray for Modo exists now in Beta and hopefully I will be able to run some tests with it soon. Grant Warwick has a very impressive looking Mastering V-Ray class I'd love to go through.  As far as I can tell Modo does not seem to have a specific in-depth shader tree / node class.  And yes, I have watched all of Richard Yot's stuff I could find but it is more about rendering and not shader tree specific. ;)

Art: CGI Art of Lee Griggs

Lee Grigs does some amazing things with Maya. His Blog here with a tutorial. Now can I translate that into Modo? VIA Colossal

Art: Sarah Martinet Aerial Photos

Was looking at Sara Martinet's Aerials photos last night and I really like the post process she uses.  It's subtle but flattens out foreground to background in a interesting way which makes it feel painterly while avoiding the HDR uncanny valley. 

Art: Mark Gmehling’s 3D-rendered.. things?

Super fun high plastic 3d art by Mark Gmehling, I really enjoy the toy feel of these. A lot of whimsy and still has a consistent feel.  Motivates me to up my modeling game in Modo. 

Art: Animations by Andy Thomas

Awesome animations here of bird songs by Andy Thomas.  Really enjoy the movement and abstract look of these. 

There is a nice breakdown on his blog as well.

Testing: Tron effects and Render Passes

So this weekend I wanted to figure out a way to get a "Tron" type effect using the CGI shoe as a base.  Pretty happy with the results.  Set it in a mirror box, layered back in the solid CGI shoe for realism and added some particles to liven it up a bit. Toyed with blurry reflections but I enjoyed the sharpness of this more.  

I also made use of the Sabertooth render passes tutorial I posted below which was super helpful. I set up a render with particles, one without so I could get a clean shoe and one with the real shoe on. That saved a ton of time by being able to click through them and make sure it all works and fire off one render. The only big problem with render passes though is that it does not support network rendering so no render farm when using it.

Testing: Using Colorway.

Made a quick Demo of what is possible in The Foundry's new program Colorway. What is awesome about this is that I can provide this to a client and they can do all the color ups they want to explore and then send the file back to me for final output giving a lot more control to the end client. Lights and colors can all be easily tweaked. A pretty awesome product.  

Model was provided by the highly awesome Joe Myers at Sketchbook Inc. from a 3d scan. 

CGI study

A study of particle effects and volumetric lighting I did last night.