Decided to spend some time over the winter break going through older experiments that had potential, but were only rendered at 1280x720 to see what I could do with them. In the process I also decided to uprez some of the images in the 3D stills gallery to 4k. I recently got a new 30" monitor and some of the images in the gallery looked a little small! The images below are the result of some of the time spent adjusting textures and regrading / color correcting. Of the few I played with, I think I like these two the most...
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Founder/Director, Gnomon
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And... I have a YouTube page. Added some misc animations as well as an entire tutorial on the making of Dirge: a lecture from the Gnomon Workshop. Still not much there for now, but hopefully I can record some more casual tutorials and things to put in there if time permits. Ultimately there are some things I'd be happy to share in regards to process that don't really need to be an 'official' Gnomon Workshop title. So we will see... but for now... it's a start!
Titus
New image... inspired by Titus Canyon in Death Valley. This summer I spent some time experimenting with Photogrammetry and created a bunch of assets such as tree trunks, logs, rocks and cliff faces. Fun to have an excuse to get in the car, find cool things and take a bunch of photos in order to build models with PhotoScan. This image incorporates a few, specifically the tree on the right, a couple small logs and rocks on the ground and the cliff wall on the left of the image... so about 35% of the screen real estate. The rest is made in Maya, ZBrush and a little bit of World Machine. Textures are a combo of 3D and some Photoshop overlays just to be quick about it.
Ladder Canyon: R2's journey to Mecca
This is a five mile hike near Mecca, CA... in the canyons east of the Salton Sea. The R2 that you'll spot is actually mine from when I was a kid... i.e. I've had that little dude since 1978...! He's a little battered and missing his middle foot, but holding on nonetheless... given that he's 37 years old. Oi... that's weird. Anyhow, this was an awesome hike, with various forks in the trail that were marked by arrows made out of rocks by past travelers. Without them it would have been easy to get very very lost... So thank you... whoever you are.
Death Valley
New galley in the photography section! Decided to try my hand at shooting bracketed photos for HDR tonemapping... so I drove out to Death Valley on a four day exploration. Album also includes some things along the way such as Vasquez Rocks, Fossil Falls and Mojave. Definitely was an inspiring journey... makes any attempt at digital landscape making seem a little futile. Heh. Turns out that HDR tonemapping is really fun but man... definitely just stepped into a rabbit hole! Time to figure out where i'm heading to next...
New DVDs on Creating Terrains
I just released a couple new DVDs on working with satellite data to create terrains using a variety of tools: Google Earth, The National Map, GlobalMapper, ZBrush, Maya, Photoshop and Mental Ray. There's over ten hours of lecture over the two titles, so a lot of info!
3D World Cover, December 2013
I was comissioned to create a cover illustration for 3D World magazine, which was a lot of fun. The editor Ian Dean contacted me asking for 'a stone head in a jungle'. I ended up having about three weeks to create the image, so a lot of late nights as I used this project to finally delve into SpeedTree... which is awesome. I also wrote a four page tutorial on the creation of the image for the issue. It was an honor to be asked, and hopefully I can do something for them again one day!
Forest Path
I've been obsessing over natural environments lately, developing my workflow for plants/trees and techniques for object placement. Maya, Mental Ray, Paint Effects, Onyx and a little Zbrush for the path. 110 million polys. Rendered with physical sun/sky and all miaMaterialX. Surprised by how many polys I can throw at Mental Ray!
