Merry Christmas!

Builders Express

Recently the new SIG brand "Builders Express" has been at the forefront of my diary.  I've been involved with everything from promotional photography, design of flyers and advertisements and 3D interior Visualisation.

3D Interior Visualisation - Builders Express Gatwick

Pickering Hutchins did a great job of coming up with the initial brand graphic identity and a lot of the subsequent banners and leaflets.  These have set the theme and I've followed for some of the pieces I worked on.

Builders Express Brentford had its Trade Day event last week on September 30th, and its the turn of Gatwick on October 20th, so for me its an exciting and fast-moving campaign.  Follow this link for the new website to see what's on offer at the branches.

Early-stages visual of Reception Counter

Relocation

For the last year I've commuted to Sheffield each day for work. I'm happy to say that from next week I'll be Manchester based once again. Look me up if you're in the area!

Woodhead pass is beautiful to drive in the summer but no fun whatsoever at 6.30am or pm during the winters.

Still plugging away

I've not updated much recently but I am still wrestling with Max and mentalRay for interior visuals when I get a chance. I'll share some progress on recent projects very soon.

sig!

Interior Render

I re-rendered this visual of my old office this evening, the lighting solution seemed to come out quite well even though it wasn't a particularly high quality.  Still learning to balance materials quality/time.

Space Marine

Well, the mesh is admittedly looking a bit ragged, but I'm quite proud of this so far considering it's my first go.  I've had to rework bits and pieces after looking more closely at reference images.  That's a lesson for the future - check your references more...

Space marine 3D model

I thought I'd try my hand at modelling a character.  It's far more difficult than I first thought!

GI and Glossy reflections

One of these days I'm going to write a basic tutorial on the mentalray render system as found in 3D Studio Max.

I've just climbed the learning curve on "glossy reflections" and "max reflection distance", chopping my render times down by about 75% in some instances.  Also when I had some free time this week (haha, there's a joke right there) I also made broke a bit of ground with "photon mapping", once again giving a time saving on photo-realistic renders.

Mentalray can produce some really fantastic images with a little understanding, but it tends to take a billion years to do so.  It's only with a lot more understanding that you can get it to spit out similar images in an acceptable time.

Photoshop Friday - Tigger

Studio render setup

 

I followed a tutorial to set up studio-style lighting for product visualisations.  Getting the lighting levels right is a bit of a challenge, but the quality of light is pretty promising.

I had a go at a glass and liquid render too with the same studio setup and this proved even more challenging to light effectively.  I will need to learn more about traditional photography-style lighting methods (and here's some more) in order to get this right.

Greeble City

Greeble is a cool plug-in for Max and it can quickly create random-looking cuboid shapes.  This took about 20 mins to build, light and render.

"That'll Never Fly". (1 hr modelling session)

Bugatti restart

After some good advice from the friendly folks at Maxforums I've decided to restart:

Bugatti

Radiator grille started, edge flow around bonnet and doors cleaned up. Wing mirrors chucked in for good measure.  Might be time to start on the engine area and back end soon, but I'm thinking I might just finish what's required for this view alone allowing me to complete sooner and move on to another project.

Bugatti

Not much of an update, but the front radiator area is shaped.  Refined the air intakes to the front and sides and added rough geometry to the rear.

A little more Veyron

Bugatti Veyron - Lunchtime project

I want to keep practicing with Max, and I don't get much of a chance to do so at the moment - most of my work is Quark Xpress desktop publishing, so I started this as a little lunchtime project.  It's a sloppy start, but not bad for an hour or so with a sandwich in one hand.

Here's what the real life Veyron looks like:

Rhodes: Photo highlights

Photoshop Friday

Monkey Business in Photoshop

Apologies and Thanks

Unfortunately I've been running behind with episode two of relay due to traveling around with work and keeping my website up to date.  Thanks to Chris Broughton of Protec Direct for his suggestions for organic search optimisation.

Relay - Episode 1

Web comic - under construction

Figure drawing is not my strongest suit - especially since I usually punish myself into drawing without any references.  That's why the idea of creating a web comic has taken a long time for me to develop into an actual finished article.

The above is partially completed version of the first episode of "Relay", a futurist sci-fi story.  My intention is to make an episode every few weeks (maybe every two weeks if I can!?).  In order to stand a chance of doing so I'll need to streamline my workflow dramatically.  It was always my intention to make the first version to the highest possible standard so I've taken the better part of about 20 hours in total to get it this far; there are still backgrounds to ink and the whole thing needs colouring.  But future episodes may just be lower detail - a manga style of character illustration.

Suffice to say, I've got a big chunk of story to tell...

Top Gun Photoshop Fun

test

Photoshop... er Tuesday

Shopping trolley for wheelchair users

One of my old Uni projects re-rendered now that I'm getting more familiar with production techniques for comic-book style artwork:

Skyscape

Quick painting using Photoshop and the tablet/pen.

Powerpoint... Wait! Hear me out.

Whilst it's still a Microsoft program, and has it's frustrating traits like those silly hidden parts of the dropdown menus, PowerPoint is actually more capable than many people realise. The last couple of weeks have seen me working on slideshows at SIG, so I had the opportunity to develop relatively intricate animations and transitions to help explain timelines and the evolution of various elements of the business. A company called 'Eyeful' have pioneered the use of PowerPoint and their stuff was very inspirational - to be honest at first i was convinced they'd used some cheeky Flash, but you live and learn: http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/samples Sent from my iPhone

Linking it all together

Im still at it; producing visuals and graphically interesting brochure designs. It's been a busy couple of months since my last post so I figured it was time to try a mobile blog update and to see if that would enable me to update more easily and hence more frequently.

Who knows, I might even figure out how to use twitter for this instead!

Edit: further to that idea... Twitter feed viewable on the right of this page!