I wish I could draw » 3DStudio

resurrecting the tumblr blog

Spence — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:50:07 +0000

There’s a need in my life for more complexity. So I’m starting a second blog.

Earth

Spence — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:42:22 +0000

Lot’s of talk back and forth about building planets and good ways of rendering them in the past few days. Here’s the latest Earth render:

We got the maps from the Blue Marble site over at NASA but the shaders are still not right in my opinion. Take a look at an actual shot of our Mom from space:

A giant version of this is available here and the Blue Marble mapping resources are here.

Stand Back! I’m going to try Science!

Spence — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:41:09 +0000

We’ve been working on a lot of new stuff – totally unable to find time to upload. Here’s a sample of some of the science-focused work we’ll be doing in the next year:

Electron Micrograph look and feel. This is spectacularly difficult to tune.

DNA Strand.

Mother Earth. May she continue to bear our weight.

CoML

Spence — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:59:26 +0000

We’re building four short films for the Census of Marine Life (have I mentioned this?). The stories are coming along nicely and it’s time for me to start building images for it.

Here’s the first rev of a small ROV for the logo build:

Normal Mapping

Spence — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:30:31 +0000

Andrew Kramer over at VideoCopilot.net has a cool new tutorial on using normal maps to get realtime lighting effects in after effects. Export an unlit image sequence from your 3D package and then apply all the lighting and reflections in AE. Pretty cool. Here’s my version of his test:

3D from 2D

Spence — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:46:59 +0000

We’ve begun pre-production on a series of short films for the Census of Marine Life. The researchers have sent us tons of video and stills but most of the video is relatively low-res or highly compressed. In order to get around the lack of video footage, I’ve been experimenting with cutting 2D images into planes and rendering them with projection mapping. I think I’m getting there, but definitely need to keep going. Not there yet.

This one works really well due to the short distance from the building and all those dimensional angles.

This one doesn’t work quite as well because there are essentially two planes to work from and I didn’t get in there and animate the water.

(Yes, those are particle birds and yes, I know they’re cliche’.)

Updated the gallery

Spence — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:51:02 +0000

Render tests for some work we’re doing for Intel.

Sky Environment Tests with Mental Ray

Spence — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:31:40 +0000

lsuntest-desktop.m4v

I recently started using Menta Ray in 3D Studio Max. We’d been using vRay for a while and though vRay is awesome, I wanted to make sure I could use the default Mental Ray engine if needed. I also just love the challenge of geeking out with something I don’t know very well (yet).

This is a test of the MR Physical Sky environment modified with a spherically projected cloud map that’s plugged into the haze channel of the sky material. Unless you’re a 3D geek, that probably didn’t mean much, but for me, it’s ubercool.

The tutorial for getting a sky map into your Mental Ray sky is over in Sweden at Master Zap’s blog.