Trip to Scotland!

Selection of pictures from my little ride up to Scotland. One lovely Sunday morning the weather was stunning and I thought, why not? Perched my tent and gear precariously on the back of my little bike and headed off.

On a small overloaded 125 the trip was certainly interesting. I pottered along between 40-55mph fairly steadily and made good time in the lovely sunlight, much to the amusement of the sports bike chaps zooming past.

This little dude came and kept me company and finished my soup. 

The pitfalls of Edna.

Woke up to a frozen solid Edna. Even if I could see through the ice block of a speedo and somehow manage to turn the fuel cock, the lack of a stabilizing wheel means I'd probably be getting a lift home in the back of an ambulance. Hope this winter is a warm and quick one.

Newcastle Metro image

We have light!

 

And a terribly positioned Honda decal.... damn.

Ruddy Edna

After deciding to do a CBT in June I've toyed with the idea of getting a bike. The past few months have involved me gingerly building up my arsenal of gear and then feeling guilty about how much I've spent.

After looking at dozens of machines, one in particular spoke to me, buy me, it said, now. And so I bought something that I knew I'd probably regret but instead has provided me with a hell of a lot of fun and surprising reliability.

For my £400 I got a 1982 (a good bit older than myself) Honda CG125. There was almost no information with the bike except the certificates and logbook. It's obviously been looked after and treated well. It runs beautifully and hasn't let me down mechanically.

It came with several nasty rust patches, minging chrome, dodgy electrics, broken mirror and a strong aversion to rain. Since then I've replaced all the parts in dire need, refreshed the filter and oil, polished and painted and "waterproofed" (covered in tape) all the electrics as well as replacing a few bits. I was pleasantly surprised as all the parts are  easy to find, coming in at a few quid for most things and downloading a free Haynes manual with full instructions on how to do everything!

Roughly 100 miles through it this week and no major problems. Got the old girl looking relatively chipper now, runs like a dream! Just waiting for a £2 rectifier after the (VERY) old one broke off during some torrential rain and blew the headlight bulb.

Dronefish

He's a tiny spying device for the Navy. He works so hard. Dronefish spent weeks swimming and spying collecting all the information! He's so proud and happy. Now he's tired and old and all he wants to finally have a nice sleep :(

Solar World W.I.P

Decided on the easy route, irradiance map/light cache and moving objects rendered in separate layers.
Few stills from the current work:

Solar World (GI VS BAKING)

A quick test of render speeds between very low GI settings and a high quality baked version turns up interesting results. In both cases each test video took less than 3 minutes to render, at a guess of a full 5 minutes film render time being about 12 hours this is more than acceptable compared to the previous estimate of 500 hours!

The shocking quality of the GI render almost suits the scene as a dusty dirty eastern land. Clean moving objects could perhaps be composited in post.

On the other hand, baking requires a lot of effort and seems to be throwing up a mixture of results. Obviously more time needs to be spent learning the techniques but the fact that moving objects become a nightmare with baked scenes is wavering me towards low end GI. Perhaps a composite of the two effects could be the way forward.


Naff GI test:

Solar World

I'm slowly planning a video depicting a foreign world with a culture based entirely on Solar Power. Due to the immense number of frames and highly detailed environment careful planning is needed so this project doesn't take years to complete. It's also given me an excuse to use texture baking for the first time in an attempt to speed up render time.

Replicating this image of Therme Vals in 3D

 

Royal Theatre Finished!

Nazi Theartre

Modelled the Newcastle Theatre Royal, added some night-time lighting, I got so carried away with making it look evil I threw in the entire concept and just turned it Nazi. Nazi's are pretty evil!

Printed!

It's always nice to have a bit of work printed every now and then. The top image made a lovely gift.

Step further with the kitchen

The kitchen scene evolved into a crazy fantasy world. After some deliberation I drew and entered the person who actually lives into the picture. Although the image is a compositional NIGHTMARE with some horrendous values and kind of hurts the back of my eyes, I think it's an excellent example of what can be done purely with procedural materials and it was a good chance to put 3d displacement (something I've rarely touched upon before) to the test. Although the polycount suffers the accuracy and quality is just something else.

 

Cheeky wire showing my dreadful use of 3d displacement.

Kitchen

3Ded up a real life kitchen. With the exception of the cabinets (textures made from photo of actual unit), the entire scene was created with procedural materials.

Sell ALL THE THINGS!

A job I was doing recently fell through, leaving my plans to get a firearms certificate for a Black Powder Revolver (namely a 1858 Remington reproduction) rather too big for my budget. So it seemed the perfect time for me to SELL EVERYTHING and make some space. Selling off all the unused airguns and model railway bits I had floating around. Hopefully will make a little pile to put in the FAC pot.

Many hours of fun where had with these, farewell my friends!

Phone completed!

Bumper case finally arrived for iPhone! Now I have a matching set! A little part of me squeals in delight every time I see it together.

Morning After The Night Before

Fun project, a quiet and calm safehouse, small hints pointing to the crazy night before with undertones of violence. Quite simple geometry but with heavy material basis. All materials generated in 3DSMax apart from the whiteboard, table map and ammo box which where made up in Photoshop from stock images.

Wireframe

Jeremys Fortress Part 2

The base warped terribly with grout so I got rid and cut away the fittings so the Fortress can be used by itself. Got a couple of layers of grout down and sprayed it with stone texture paint as an underlay. Rather heavy and solid.

Shadowed...

and lightened....

Time for varnish!

Iphone Skin

Hardly a "project" but something nice I wanted to share. Excellent quality skin from www.wrapz.com for my new phone.

Arctic Warfare Pc Case

Every six months comes an urge for something new. For some people that's a phone or a car. For me it's my pc case.

As I have an acoustic case almost brand new and an old rotting steel mess hanging around I thought I'd do some modding.

The idea being I'll put my old pc parts into the acoustic case ad run it 24/7 as a server and renderer and use this modded case as the main powerhouse. It gave me the chance to open up more useful intakes to use for my water cooling radiator.

A Dremel and lots of burning hot steel later I had holes cut for some spring loaded flight case handles, new intake cut on the roof and a set of changes to the front panel to hide the mess from previous modding. 

 

Everything was cut and fixed together and painted a digital camouflage. Some new fan grills and bolts to fit with the heavy duty theme where added and a new pair of buttons for the front panel.

The case does it job. Looks exciting, easy to carry around and is cool as an block of ice. I quietened down the initial loudness using rubber mounts and fittings for all the fans an hard drives. Seems pretty spot on!!

Holo Phone Concept

This began when attempting to create a high quality gadget render. It turned onto a small animation after getting carried away.

It featured "self stabilising" legs. I started off trying to use standard hierarchy settings and lock tools to make these legs work in the correct way for their joints whilst staying connected to the phone. This turned out to be a nightmare due to the tight angles and lack of knowledge on my part. I ended up using a basic bone structure and animating it mainly by hand. This also meant the phone looks like a jellyfish when moving it around in the viewport.

After a render, z depth and "screen" pass the entire video was compiled in after effects. Although the basic movement and action is finished I intend to do a lot more with this design. 

 

Urban Invasion

This project came about when I rediscovered an old max file if forgotten about. I decided to clean it up and make an animation.

The animation will feature a quiet slightly futuristic back ally. From a burning cigarette butt will float a spark which plants itself like a seed into the pavement. Growing into a Japanese style rural house perched above the road.

I was excited for this project for a number of reasons. It gave me the chance to test out a few techniques I've been wanting to try and was another chance to improve my poor animating skills. 

Progress shots