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.

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."

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!

Learn new skills!

Good read by Paul H. Paulino about how learning traditional media really helped him understand and push his CG work. 

"During my lunch break I would bookmark all kinds of free tutorials I could find and at night I would follow them meticulously, trying to achieve the same result.

After a couple of months doing this, I realized that I wasn’t improving at all. I couldn’t solve problems without looking at step-by-step tutorials and I didn’t feel I was creating anything. The reason was simple: I wasn’t learning. I was copying.

I felt like I needed to do something different to learn things properly and master the skills to become an artist. Soon I realized that it wasn’t just about practicing, it was about knowing how to practice.

After arriving at that conclusion I decided to put my 3D studies aside and, instead, I began learning more about drawing and painting.

To be honest, that conclusion didn’t come quickly. I spent a long time observing, reading and studying successful stories from artists all over the world and I realized that almost everyone highlighted the importance of learning at least the basics of art fundamentals."

VRay Fun

Been testing out VRay for a bit and it has started to really grow on me. I can spend more time getting the lighting and textures right instead of hunting down the noise demons that dwell in Modo's render engine. I really just hit render and let VRay do it's thing. Here is a outdoor study I worked on last night.

"Some places are better left forgotten..."

Daily Doodle project

Been doing a "Daily Doodle" project for about 7 months now where I try to do something in Modo everyday. I seem to swing and miss more often then not but it has been a great learning experience in a few ways. My Modo chops have been improving leaps and bounds of course but it is interesting how it has helped me concept ideas and approach creating. Simple is always better when the goal is just to knock something out in a day.  But I hate to recycle ideas and I am slowly learning that it is OK to do that as people view that as your "style".  Interesting stuff for sure

Here is a sample of them that I have really enjoyed and I wanted a place to post them where they can be seen at a higher res. Did the gym render this weekend and a lot of experimenting with scale.  The boards are not big, the whole sphere and wires bit is as big as a basketball. ;). You can see them as I make them by checking out my Instagram account to the left.

Autumn in the air

Having some lovely autumn weather right now and was motivated to work on a CGI landscape piece.  Few things I am not happy with but overall I enjoy this one. 

Create Everyday.

Fired off a really succesful cloth simulation today.  Either I took my smart pills or the 901 update fixed some of the dynamic issues I was having with softbodies.  Tons of polys here and I was able to run the sim and tweak things without the whole project crashing / dragging to a stop.

Sims are like setting up a elaborate mouse trap to me. Build up all this stuff, then fire it off and watch the reaction. You can never really know how it will all react. 

Daily 3d!

A fun Daily 3d Project working with oversized micro scratches, glass and my pavement shaders. The pavement is workinig really well in Modo 901. 

Daily 3d Project

I started to do a Daily 3D project about a week ago and it has been a really intersting excercise so far.  I am attemping to post one 3D project a day to my instagram account but I don't always get something worth posting.  Which is a nice way of saying that I have gone down some real ugly rabbit holes of bad ideas and misplaced direction, lol!  It has beat into my skull that once again that simpler is almost always better. Get an idea and see how far you can strip it down just to get something decent looking. Ton of fun though and learning all sorts of things doing it.  Highly recommend it or something similar if you are in the arts. 

Digital Painting Study

Digital painting I did in Painter 2015 using oils and conte crayons.  The composition on this one is really interesting and having a non-right angle bend in the road is what gives it that tweak. Plus, there was a hell of a lot of stuff on this corner as well.  I spent a good amount of time pulling the details out of the boat bumpers and traffic lights learning my way around the brushes. The palette knife was a lot of fun to scape back down to white with, though I still have a lot to learn about the settings on that. 

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.  

Kubricks' 2001: One Mans Incredible Odyssey

Awesome blog post on the VFX in 2001 a Space Odyssey.  Great read. 

Kubricks' 2001: One Mans Incredible Odyssey

Doug Trumbull:  "Filming of the 'Dawn of Man' sequence took place entirely on only one stage at the studio. Distant backgrounds for all the action were front-projected eight-by-ten Ektachrome transparencies, using probably the largest front-pro…

Doug Trumbull:  "Filming of the 'Dawn of Man' sequence took place entirely on only one stage at the studio. Distant backgrounds for all the action were front-projected eight-by-ten Ektachrome transparencies, using probably the largest front-projection device ever made, and constructed specially for 2001 by Tom Howard.  The projector consisted of a specially intensified arc source with water-cooled jaws to hold the oversized carbons, special heat-absorbing glass, giant condensing lenses which would occasionally shatter under the intense heat, special eight-by-ten glass plate holders and positioning mounts, an extremely delicate semi-silvered mirror, and a specially built nodal point head so that the camera could pan, tilt, and zoom without fringing of the image."