Mac Break

Last week, my adventures with the Pixel Corps continued with the shooting of several episodes of Mac Break. It looks like this week I'll be helping out with the keying of all the footage using my new favorite piece of software Shake - fun stuff.

Underwater Test

Last week I sat down to continue my experiments in Vue 5 Infinite. My goal was to achieve a convincing (I think it still needs some bubbles added in the composite) underwater look in a short amount of time. For this image I focused on achieving an appropriate atmosphere as opposed to spending a lot of time modeling - to that end I utilized stock models for the fish and the shark. The image was rendered out as layers and ultimately composited in photoshop with no digital painting.

Panorama

Being an independent contractor sometimes takes me to interesting places. On the 14th of this month I shot and stitched this spherical pano (the real image is huge - over 8000 x 4000 pixels) for a client specializing in architectural visualization. The platform that I shot from was a couple of wooden planks on top of a 30 foot scaffolding in the middle of a construction site. The width of the platform was exactly that of my open tripod legs - it was quite a dance to maneuver around my camera rig without disturbing my tripod (it's very important when shooting a spherical panorama not to move the nodal point of the camera). I'll admit that it was a bit scary, but the results came out great.

Big River

I was fipping through an outdoors magazine the other day and got inspired to attempt a realistic outdoor 3d rendering. Last night I drew out some rough sketches of what I wanted to achieve, and today I built, textured, rendered, and composited the whole scene. I think the result (pictured below) came out quite nicely for a first go at it. To achieve the look, I modeled and textured the scene in Vue 5 Infinite, then did the render as a series of passes each possessing one characteristic of the scene (ie reflectivity, shadows, etc.) The final image was composited in Shake which is fastly becoming one of my favorite pieces of software.

Fish Eye

Recently a friend lended me his Sigma 8mm fish eye lens. Shooting with a fish eye is a big change and I'm not sure that I'm used to it yet. One odd thing is that since I'm shooting with a DSLR that has a conversion factor of 1.6, the fish eye is cropped. Below is one of the first images that I shot with the lens on a recent trip into San Francisco. My wife Michelle (pictured) and I stumbled into a crazy store near Union Square, and I snapped this as we were walking down the stairs.

Sculpture

Every once in a while I get an image in my head and try to make it in 3d within a short period of time. The inspiration for this image came from a picture that I saw in a recent sculpture magazine. The only light sources used are the white cylinders insdie of the glass and metal cases. The image was rendered in passes using the Mental Ray renderer and assembled in Shake.