Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Fork design

I was on pinterest the other day and became really inspired by all the amazing utensil design.
Here's my crack at a fancy fork..

Vray DOF recreation

This is a like for like recreation of a shot I found while trawling the internet. I can't find the reference for this so if anyone knows PLEASE let me know and I will credit it.
Post-production depth of field plugins have been round for a while and do a great job in production. That being said, when it comes to refractive and reflective surfaces and materials... well, a normal z-depth pass can't handle it.
Granted there are some obvious differences between the render and the photo but the test achieved what I set out to find out. (how rendered dof reacts for interacting reflective and refractive materials)
  

Leica camera Corona test

This is a test for the newly released Corona renderer. At the time of rendering Corona was still in Alpha testing and I decided to see what it could do. In comparison to other iterative engines that I have trailed I found it extremely straightforward to use. The render times are long compared to a biased rendering system but I think the results are worth the wait.
This image also has some creative post production which was not part of the initial render.



The second shot is a straight render using Corona Alpha.

https://corona-renderer.com/

Monday, April 20, 2015

Jet Fighter circa 1850

I was inspired recently by a piece in a magazine. It showed an element that was really out of place but had been made to blend in with the surroundings. This Harrier jet in a pre-ww1 street scene is my effort.
Modelled in 3ds Max, rendered with very and composited in Photoshop.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

WIP character

This is a character I've been working on for quite a while.. I've picked it up and put it down a lot while the concept evolved. The initial idea was some sort of post-apocalyptic snow soldier...
This is a work in progress shot. The face and hand are photogrammetry captures (thanks to my willing wife for modelling). Hopeful I'll wrap this up at some point soon.

Friday, April 17, 2015

Star Trek wear and tear

I love Star Trek, including the original series.
I've always appreciated the design style of that series but always wanted to see more dirty, wear and tear. 
This adaptation of the TOS Phaser aims to describe the more functional, mechanical nature of the design. 
A bit of fun for the most part but I also used this as a test bed for Ddo. Really interesting software.

Aim low, play bass

I started modelling this bass guitar while I was at uni in 2001. After a few re-models I decided to do a lighting study for gloss material properties.
My aim on this was to achieve the finished result using the least amount of direct light as possible, relying predominantly on bounced/reflected light.

Friday, April 10, 2015

slitscan prop rendered result

This is an example of the seamless texture generated by the slitscan technique.
Because the captured texture is so close to the final requirement, the time needed to produce the final piece is minimal. 


Render including DOF in post




















Processed in black and white.. (even though it's CG I still love black and white)






















Processed using a Holga/Lomo style.


Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Slitscan textures & map generation

I purchased a cheap motorised turntable from China about a month ago.
This was intended to be used for a photogrammetry project but instead became
really useful for a different application.

Slitscan photography or temporal photography is typically used for photo-finish images in eg. the 100m sprint.
There are some examples where it has been used in a different way

This script by Martin Dixon processes a video file and extracts a strip of pixels. These are then stacked together
to form a single image.


I sat a bottle (empty) of beer on the turntable and switched it on. I then set up my
Nikon 3200D to shoot portrait hd video.

The processed file looks like this:



Taken into Photoshop and processed. I needed specular, diffuse, mix and normal maps
to create the final rendered version in 3ds max.



I created a simple studio style lighting setup and rendered using Vray. The model that I mapped it to is a generic bottle. At some point I will recreate an accurate Moretti bottle. This should complete the look.


Observations at this stage: The lighting while recording the footage needs to be more even as some of the colours are not accurate.

The normal map for the glass is a bit on the heavy side. It seems to be suggesting a condensation look.

The camera wasn't aligned correctly when I recorded the footage, and as a result the textures are wonky..

Other than that, I feel this is a pretty successful first attempt at seamless, (semi) automatically generated texturing for cylindrical based objects :)