Of Harps and Beats

It's been quiet for a while, so I guess it's time for an update. In between changing nappies I managed to get some web design done for a client.

It actually turned out to be quite a challenging project for two reasons. First, the theme of the website demanded a colourful, child-friendly design which is a radical departure from your usual 'designer' website or formal design. I wanted it to be both visually attractive as well as provide easy navigation.

 Secondly, although the client had provided a pretty well-defined brief, it still proved quite a challenging process finding a happy medium between what the client had in mind, and making an actual useable interface. What the client has in mind is not always realistic or manageable (this is by no means a criticism).

Anyway, it was a lot of fun working on this project. I spent quite a lot of time to add tons of little details and I even managed to build a mail form from the ground up with no previous development experience.


In the end...if the client is happy and everything does what it is supposed to do, that's all that matters.

oh, and of course, here's some screenshots:

Car Journey 3D - Part 3

More modelling done and added some textures. I also fixed some minor issues relating to distance,  dimensions and relative sizes and I spent a considerable time tidying up the geometry.

It's starting to come together, but lots more modelling to do yet.

Car Journey 3D - Part 2

Ok, here's a test render i just did. You can see that i have added more geometry, the first building is almost ready and i added some tables and chairs.

Render was done using Mental Ray. To provide for lighting I temporarily used Mental Ray's Physical Sun & Sky, which provides a quick way to simulate outside daytime lighting.

Car Journey 3D - Part I

Now that i finished the car in Maya (see below), it's time to place it in a setting. I took a couple of screenshots of one of my favourite places using Google Maps. The idea is to recreate the scene as realistically as possible.

Using the reference images i just started modelling the scene item by item. I will keep posting updates as i progress...

The first image is the reference image I took.

The second image is the progress so far after a few hours of work. The cilinder in the centre of the image is there to represent the approximate size of a person, so everything has the right size in relation to the other.

Gothic Horror

A piece I did for a uni module called Visual Effects Storytelling. The brief instructions were to shoot an image somewhere in Edinburgh and turn it into a an aged ghost picture from around 1900.

The original photograph taken near Greyfriars Kirkyard, which was an ideal location, as it is supposedly haunted:

Underneath the same image, but after a rigorous Photoshop treatment.

To make the picture more authentic and aged looking, i changed the edited image again, which resulted in the second picture underneath. I am in two minds, as even though the second treatment made the picture look more realistic, it also dimished its gothic horror atmosphere somewhat. Which looks better? You decide...

More Maya 3d work

Been doing some more 3d work to get back into the swing of things. I focused on hard surface modeling, applying a variety of basic techniques like box modeling using basic poly shapes and creating surfaces using NURBS.

The first image is the finished car model without any lighting or shaders applied.

It's amazing how quick realistic looking results are achieved with a few basic shaders and some HDRI lighting. The shaders I used:

• Mental Ray Car Paint Phen material
• Mental Ray Chrome material
• A variety of tweaked blinns and lamberts.

The scenes were both rendered using Mental Ray 

 

and to satisfy my Lovecraft obsession, a custom number plate using a simple image and a bump map:

More Corporate branding

Design:

The brief entailed building an online presence for a delivery service named 'Chomp!'. Although the name 'Chomp!' really shouts fast simple food, i wanted to create a logo that would rather invoke images of high quality gourmet food made with love and pride.