Another model from something that sits on my desk, this time my $3 cheapo tripod. Modeled in rhino and rendered in 3ds Max with Vray, very simple materials as usual, DOF added in photoshop with lensblur and z map.

Bread, Love and Health Care

I liked how the shadow moves across the image and designs a curve in the opposite direction of the reflective metal thing giving a decent balance to the image. Very simple, maybe the only distraction to the yey is cause by the inner reflection of the object. This render was made with an early beta version of Splutterfish Brazil R/S, some setting were cranked up all the way to make a clean and noise free render, however as I can remember the render time was something I’d like not to talk about! Let’s keep in mind the size of the images was 1600×1200 and the machine was an AMD Athlon 900Mhz with 512 MB of ram. For the blu reflections I use Dreamscape and set up a sikple sky with no clouds, some minor tweaks in photoshop to intensyfy the contrast.

We should always think that a render often cannot come out perfect the way we want it, sometimes we end up wasting so much time in the 3D package trying to fix some apects of the image that are easely fixable in Photoshop with just few clicks. Often I load up some old renders in PS and find out that they could have looked much betters with some level adjustments or color correction.

Usually when I find a shape I like I try to render multiple angles and pick up the better looking. I have to admit it, in the left image there is some sort of likeness of a popular OS logo, that was completely unintentional, I swear.

These USB pen drives were modeled in Rhino and rendered in 3d Max (vray), I used my pen drive as reference, took some pictures, aligned them in photoshop and loaded as background reference in Rhino. It’s always good to work with a reference in order to keep the right proportions. The model was quite simple, basically a bunch of boxes, fillets and extruded lines.

Very simple materials were used, a medium gray with glossy reflections for the body, glossy reflections and refractions for the plastic cap and a subtle bump map for the sticker.

I’m amaze how pen drives became so popular among people that actually don’t really need them, I guess they make them feel more up-to-date and geeky. Honestly I like these little solid state memories, I have to admit that 128 MB is kinda small (now upgraded to a 4 GB ), considering that I found it on the ground along a road with cars running all over it I can’t complain. They are strong too, I was surprised it worked without a hitch, it even end up a couple of time in the washer and came out nice and tidy, once dry I plugged in and all my data was still there, now is loaded with Damn Small Linux, this way I have a portable operating system, it comes handy whenever XP decides that it’s time to give up on life and you need to rescue your data before a new install, and let me tell ya, you’ll impress girls with it.

I had this model laying around on my drive and after posting the super sclupey octopus I decided to recreate the look of the polymer in a CG enviroment, so I loaded up this geometry in Max with Final Render stage 1a nd this is what came out. The shader needs some more tweaking, the SSS is not quite right, I’m planning to model some more alien/monster’s heads and add them up to this post, hopefully I can find a good balance between quality and speed with the shader since it took about 3 hours to render this image, well I cranked up some settings just for the heck of it, my fault.

The base geometry of this model was done in 3ds Studio Max, exported as obj and furthermore detailed inside Zbrush, I didn’t push too much into detailing it cause at that time my machine could not handle the scene, I didn’t use any displacement map, so the whole head was over 2 millions polygons, importing it back in Max with only 512 MB of ram was already a big task, working with Zbrush and its amazing capacity to manage high poly geometries with ease makes you forget 3D Max has some limitation!

To whom is into 3d stuff and render engines, like Brazil r/s, Final Render and Vray, probably is familiar with the 3 s, SSS or Sub-Surface Scattering, light not only bounces when hits a surface but can also go through it according to the translucency of the material, well super sculpey offer a real life opportunity to see the SSS effect in action, a light source behind the octopus penetrates and scatters into the polymer, true sub-surface scattering rendered in front of your eyes at the speed of light. I wish render engine were that fast!

I’n not quite satisfied with the concept of this image at the moment, it was mostly a quick and dirty render, anyhow I think it fits the illustrationfriday’s topic of the week…I think. I might revise this render, probably adding more contrast between the old mechanical lock and an extreme high tech fingerprint recognition interface.

On a website I saw a doorlock system using fingerprints as keys to secure you house, the all thing was quite expensive, from the pictures I saw the interface was extremely simple, reduced to the scan area where you press you thumb and the system recognize your unique fingerprint and let you in, it was so simple and minimalistic that a thought came to my mind, what if a “happy-go-round” fellow decide to have a little fan and smash the cover screen of the scanner…mmm, I hope they included some alternative method to unlock your door, otherwise your house wil not be only secure from intruders, but fro its own owner. I wouldn’t be surprise if they didn’t think about it, I see pretty stupid things everyday that I always think “why they didn’t think about it”.

It seems that most common locks found in the every day routines are quite easy to open, I know it’s not something new but honestly I was shock how some guys can unlock a door in just a matter of seconds just using what is called a bumpkey. Here’s a video of an eleven year old girl bumpkeying a lock.

Another one

In this case was clear I needed a shader that would scatter yellow-reddish hue as light passes through it and bluish when reflecting it. I set up the material using a blend shader, nested shellac and vray materials with traslucency turned on, the sub-surface scattering effect would return the yellow-reddish tint on one side and the bluish on the other base on the color swatches assigned, the effect is sensitive to the position of the light in the scene, in thise case a stronger light source was placed on the right side, therefore the bluish color is prominent torward the light while the opposide side would show a warmer color.

Actually, many times the results are quite impressive that a “Damn” comes out of my mouth, I think now I should start pressing Ctrl + S more often

Anyway, you guys and gals give it a try just open any image, apply any filter on it and keep going on, go wild you never know your work ends up at Moma.

Here’s an example of playing around with photoshop’s filters, noise, difference clouds, etc.

A good tip is to keep track of what you do, cause once you get something you like probably you’ll forget how you got there in a matter of days (or even minutes, better go and eat a banana), and when you need to do it again…well load Britney Spears on winamp for inspiration or suicidal ideas (j/k).

Again, another completely different result by following the same workflow as in the above image and simply applying two or trhee different filters and blending modes. This one reminds me of some sort of tissue, brain scan, whatever you would expect on a science book.
Experimentation is often the key to learn the tools in photoshop , I’ve seen people being afraid of pressing a key or clicking on a tool, c’mon guys and gals, it wont explode!
To close this post I’ll add this little line of text, I gotta do this or worpress is going to mess up the layout of the page unless some extra text is added below the image on the left, also adding a p paragraph tag wont help since the TinyMCE editor is gonan replace the extra paragraphs with noting.

OK, I’m done.