Back after a long break

I'm back after a long break and now with a few more skills under my hat. My render box had a hard drive failure nearly 2 years ago and I had not got around to getting it fixed. In the last 8 months I have been learning some electronics and this blog will now cover my tinkering along with my CGI and art and graffiti. Last weekend I decided enough was enough and time to get the render box back in action and did a little research and found out the hard drive failure was due to bad firmware on the drive. After a little more research I found out there was a fix involving talking directly to the drive via TTY. So some more research shows that my Arduino boards use USB serial to TTY for programming. So I shorted out the reset switch which stuck the Arduino processor in a frozen state and hard wired the serial pins straight into the hard drive via a bodged, temporary cable and after 30 minutes of stressing, viola , one working hard drive and one resurrected render box. So to mark the occasion I thought I would upload the one bit of CGI related imagery I have done over the last 2 years and it looks poor but it is very cool. The image below is a capture from my Xbox Kinect which has scanned my living room into a full 3D point cloud and then rendered out via MeshLab.

Video of the 15th

The link below plays the video of Tizer and Dep from Paint Shop Studio painting my winning Corsa Street Style design in Old Street London and myself on the 15th June meeting the guys.

http://youtu.be/QfOx1bRBe8s

A big, big, BIG thanks to the guys at Paint Shop Studio for a great day and I will be watching your business going crazy as your skills get the recognition they deserve.

What a day

Well, yesterday was one hell of a Wednesday. I've been in Old Street London to meet up with Tizer, Dep and Suki from Paintshop Studio (check out the blogg on this site http://paintshopstudio.blogspot.com/ ) to sign my winning Vauxhall Corsa Street Style design which the guys have recreated on a massive billboard with such great talent that I was blown away. See my finished design recreated by the guys below.

Massive thanks to everyone there who made me feel so welcome and special thanks to everyone for the hours spent in the pub afterwards - it was a true pleasure hanging out with such incredibly talented yet down to earth guys and girls.

Graphic Design

After a long gap busy with work I have been bck playing with some pixels this weekend.

Einstien

and

Self Portrait

I have won the following grafitti competition with the following entry

I am now set to recieve the grand prize if a brand new Vauxhall Corsa

No updates

Well its 2011 and I have spent the last six months very busy with work but hopefully soon I will find the time to upload some new images and video.

I have been playing with the MS Kinect for Xbox360 and hopefuly looking into ways this could be used for a great mo-cap solution and possible 3d scanning solution.

So watch this space.

Character Animation - Part 2

So I've been busy applying for work and not had much time to do much CGI. When I have found time I have been wrapped up playing with some new software and so I have decided to let the ship animation wait for a bit. As I am finding the character animation stuff so much fun I've been applying my new software and some new and old skills to character animation. The new software allows for a new take on texturing and I am slowly building up a preffered pipeline for character animation. Anyway, rather than go into the technical details of how its done, here is some of my current work. Oh and I now know that I desperately want some sort of MoCap solution as it makes character animation so much easier and so much more fun.

This little guy is a little freaky, its hard to put my finger on why he is freaky. I think its because he looks kind of real and not real at the same time.

Character Animation - Part 1

Ok, the one thing missing and now so obviously missing from the "ship in a bottle" project is people or rather sailors for my ship. So as I need some sailors and I need a break from modelling the ship I have set about building a generic character shape which I will make alterations to using ZBrush to generate the different members of the crew of my ship. I need these characters to move so I have rigged my generic model with a skeleton from Character Studio. I have loaded some mocap files that I download free from off the web - I know this goes against my desire to produce everything myself but I just do not have the time or money to build a motion capture studio and mocap movement is so much better than hand animated. In the end piece of video I plan to use Character Studios standard walk motion mocap files and mix in other mocap files downloaded from the web and then adding hand animated stuff done by myself to the mocap files. After all I doubt I would be lucky enough to find a load of mocap files specific for the movement of 18th Century Sailors so its the only way I could get this done other than spending a year hand animating each member of the crew. So here area few animted test videos showing the new generic character (now nick named Mr Pink) and you can see how mocap data adds so much to an animated scene.

I have added some crew to the next still image. Can you spot them?

After some thought, I may have a new project idea and maybe I will build my own mocap solution. I have found some mocap software online and downloaded a trial and trying it out now but really need a good bit of space to do my acting to camera stuff. Watch this space for updates on my progress.

Modelling, texturing and animation - Part 2

After a short break from my animation project to do some character modelling and a few days away from my CGI all together as I have been in interviews looking for full time CGI work and touting for more freelance CGI work (either will do), I am now back and ready to pick up where I left off.

Well after some thought I decided its time to build up some detail. I knew more detail and better textures would help sell this whole animation and make it look better and more realistic. So I have been back re-modelling the ship to build detail and improve the textures and here are my first renderings with the new details added.

This is a captains view from the ships wheel. Notice the nice plank work deck and the improved rigging but now I need to add little knots to the rope work rigging and improve the masts and booms.

Here are a few views of the ships new paintwork. I can see from these renders that I still have a lot of re-rigging to do and some of the textures need major tweeking.

Well now I am going to have to re-renderer everything for video but only after I get the ship 100% right. At least now I know exactly what I want, I can get everything planned and ready to render over the nights as I sleep.

Character Modelling

Here is a high polygon character head model based on myself (un-textured) that I modelled in 3DS Max and Zbrush.

Here is another character - I see this as a Judge or member of the house of Lords etc...

Here is a young afro woman character -

Young guy (mixed race) character -

Modelling, texturing and animation - Part 1

Here is my latest work. I've been playing around building a ship model to animate. Here is a still of the finished model and ocean.

Now for the animation - THIS IS THE WORK IN PROGRESS
I had to mess around with loads of test renders to make sure the waves were ok and put in a wake of the ship (which is hardly noticable). I am still unhappy with the movement of the sails but will correct that in another render tonight (hopefully). I have corrected the colour balance and brightness /contrast in After Effects and then added some audio in using Premiere but the sound is not 100% right.

I have now had another go at correcting the sails and they are not perfect but better than before. I have also added a second sequence showing the camera onboard the ship but again this will need re-rendering soon as its not correct, the camera moves to quick in places and items on deck do not make sense.

I just had to put it in a bottle. After that I had the idea of taking the cork out and letting the water run out. An odd image but I like it.

Here is a short animation using the ship in a bottle model

The finished sequence will start with a long shot of the bottle with the camera panning in.
As it gets close you notice the ship in the bottle and the fact the bottle is dripping out water.
The the bottle disappears and we see the shots above of the real ship in a real ocean sailing toward the sun.
I then want a clunk and the sight fo the ship falling off the horizon before the camera pans back
to reveal the bottle (now virtually empty) and the ship (small once again) laying on the table in a small puddle.

Here are some more stills .

Architecture Visualisation - Part 2

Well I was worried my blog may have been getting a little to experimental recently and so I've slipped back to playing with my architectural models and Mental Ray lighting to try and get back to some photorealism. As we have had a few days of lovely sunshine which suggest summer is on its way I wanted to capture the light of a summers day with the following image.

ALL IMAGES LINK OFFSITE TO MY INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE 3D WEB PAGE

Here is another render but I preffer the colour in the first image. More playing with light and adding detail.

ALL IMAGES LINK OFFSITE TO MY INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE 3D WEB PAGE

Graphic Design

I've been thinking about the name pixel playground and this led me onto other potential names for a new media business.

One idea was Pixel Farmers. As usual I had an instant image in mind and started to put it together in Max. This next image was just a test to see how a 3D pixelated character came out. Eventually these characters will be pixel farmers on a pixel farm. I added the pixel farmers text but I do not think its right for this image. The two 3D pixel box men shaking hands does seem to work and may have uses elsewhere. I do need to make a cleared definition between the floor and the chrome (right most) figure.


What I have noticed now is the nice pixelated feel to the shadows. This has given me another idea for an image of a real person or object but where the shadow is that of a pixelated object or person.

Anyway, back to the 3D pixel farmer idea. I did some texturing and added this crop effect I quite like but I am not sure about the composition.

Commercial Design

Here are a few images I've been working on that are strictly commercial in their nature. These images link to a short youtube video I made as a Guinness beer TV ad concept. (I limited myself to spending less than 7 hours on the Guiness ad as an experiment in what I could achieve in one working day).

With the exception of FreshDefinition the companies advertised here are not real. I must admit I do enjoy making up businesses to advertise.

Experimental Images

OK, This little group of misfits are just some of my experimentations. I wanted this blog to be a place I can upload finished CGI images, work in progress and my experimentations.

This following image was an experiment with HDR tonal adjustment on CGI image. Althought I am deeply unhappy with the image compostion and angle I do like the unworldly, slightly fairytale, feel to it.

Ok, a long term goal of mine has always been to accurately model my own head. This is the current and best attempt so far. I threw this image together out of a couple of test renders, one using the proper texture map and ther using a chrome texture both images using HDR light probes for lighting and reflection.
Here I was just messing around with CGI mixed into real photos.
Ok - Time for a break from all that 3D stuff and a chance to relax and mess around with good old photoshop. I just wanted to make something more graphic than photographic and wanted to play with strong colours like in the multi-colour 3d laserscan Buddha picture. In the end I settled for just black and white and wanted the image to play with the difference between the swan and the water ripples. I still feel this would make a cool T-shirt design if I could work out what to put on the other side of the T-shirt..

Laser scanning

Well its finally time to rebuild my laser scanner and see what I can scan and hopefully some work will come in soon and I can upgrade my laser and upgrade my software and end up with a scanner thats accurate enough to use. Until then I will get scanning and see what I can produce with the £30 worth of bits and bobs I built my scanner from originally.



In the mean time my previous scanning with my £30 scanner produced the following (with a little artistic license and alot of photoshop).

I do like this image. I love the roughness and brightness of the colour, its pop art feel, like thrown paint.

Interior Visualisation

Just some interior design images. It was a great excuse to use various models I had built and play with lighting.

This first image is my take on modern interior but I must admit I am probably out of fashion but I just made the room up how I like the interior designed.

This is an earlier render of the room shown above. I was playing with interior lighting and liked the mix of blue walls/lighting and the light brown of the wood and leather seats etc. which created a more night time/man-made light lit view of the room. The focus was faked in photoshop in post production. I could have easily rendered in the focus effect at render time using Max but I can do it just as quickly by faking it in photoshop and I have more control in photoshop. I wanted the desk and chairs to stay in focus and the back ground to loose focus. The only problem I have with the end result is it makes this feel like a photo of dolls house, like everything is in minature.I wanted a simple object to play around with materials and rendering and light. After some thought I realised why not model the chair I'm sitting on and then I started on my desk but decided to model something I would rather have as my desk rather than what I currently have.

So here is the first test rendering of the desk and chair I designed, created as a first look at how it renders after modelling for a few hours. I liked the style of minamalism in this test render and just had to save it as an image.

3D Modelling from Photographs

An old family photo shows my great grandfather and Sir Timmy Birkin in the 1920 and 1930's leaning on a racing car (which my great grandfather stripped, rebuilt and tuned for Sir Tim). On the back of the photo is written 1921 - Tim Birkin and Percy Hoyte and the DFP.

After cleaning up the following old photo I decided to research the DFP racing car feature in the photo. After finding more reference photos I built the following CGI model of the car.

This final image was created by mixing the CGI with and old photo to try and bring the car back to life in a way I had never tried before.

3d Modelling and Textures - Part 1

I thought it would be fun to model something simple which is easily recognised and then go to town on the textures and rendering. After a few hours head scratching and sipping a can of coke the answer was right there infront of me all along.

I wanted to make a small staement about global warming and the idea of this last image came to me. I just thought it would be fun to show the earth as a used up can of drink.

Architecture Visualisation - Part 1

Here is a building I designed in 3DS Max and rendered (first two with radiosity - second 2 with mentalray). This building was desiged by me as part of an experiment for use in wirefusion (see http://www.freshdefinition.com/video/architecture/ for wirefusion example).

Welcome to my pixel playground.

I have decided to build a home on the web to stick all my CGI and photoshop experimentations. A home and playground for my work.

I feel its important to inform visitors to my site that all 3D models used in my images are my own and modelled by myself. Anyone with a little rendering experience can download models and setup scenes for rendering where as I pride myself on doing my own modelling and texturing.