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.

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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.”

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. ;)

Some recent stuff

Been kinda messing around with all sorts of things lately after doing a deep dive into Redshift. Worked up a vellum grains simulation in Houdini, a cityscape concept in C4d,a cat skull abstract piece and a more playful grapich coffee thing. Next deep undertaking is going to be doing more of a study on how to make abstracts in Houdini. Gonna dive into particles and messing with geo on a deeper level.

Skull Study

Messing around with volume meshes in Cinema 4d today and came up with this little study. It’s fairly tricky to work with Redshift materials in the C4d window though. Can’t see a damn thing in the viewport. Just basically keeping adding shapes into the volume till you get the shape you want.

Smoke Study: Houdini and Redshift

Been super busy with the work-a-day world but I was able to get a smoke sim built in Houdini over the past few days. Think that smoke sim is where I will be spending my time when I have the energy. Pretty happy with the shape and texture of this one. Learning how to art direct it is pretty tricky. Hoping to get into animations at some point but for now I’ll stick with still I think.

Release

Took some time to work on a animation of the Raven skull. This is the first time I have animated anything besides a simulation in Houdini and key framing is much easier than in C4d for me. Need to practice camera moves and learn more about time ramping. Would like this to be way more slow motion but not sure how to go about that yet.

Creating a Snowy Forest in UE4- Breakdown.

Really interesting break down by Leah Augustine on how she created this landscape in UE4. A lot of interesting solutions in here.

“When creating the snow textures in Substance Designer, I also created a detail normal of simple noise that I used in conjunction with the base normal. I found that when you use subsurface you tend to visually lose normal information, flattening out your material. Since I knew I wanted close up shots, I wanted to exaggerate the normals a bit more to counteract this.

I personally think that a detail normal and subsurface scattering is what helped achieve more realistic snow for this project. Subsurface, in my opinion, really brought it all together. It helps give the snow better highlights around the edges and creates the appearance of light shining through it. Subsurface can be costly, but it does make a difference .“

I tried making some snow in Octane and C4d and failed tragically. Will have to landscapes another shot at some point.

Animated Last Post

Wanted to play with animating the last project I posted. It’s my first go at actually getting into a keyframed animation in Houdini. Everything else I have done has just been a sim. Actually getting into the POP network and keyframing it to behave how I was wanted was nice. Overall, Keyframing in Houdini seems pretty easy. No need for the Dope Sheet like in C4d to move keyframes.