More Progress with Vue

I am currently completing a freelance project making use of Vue XStream and Maya. After some trail and error, I arrived at a pretty good workflow for making the two pieces of software work together well, and for rendering all the buffers I need to get the composites working. the way that I want. Below is a frame from the project showing the difference a little compositing makes. More on this project later.

Groovebox

Hurrah! I finally textured my MC-505 Groovebox. This is a very accurate model of a Roland MC-505 - all done in MAYA.

Love those IGs

Recently I began to pull some models that I have made out of the archives and touch them up a bit. Here's an Italian Greyhound that I modeled in Maya and Zbrush - now with a collar, eyes, teeth, and a tongue.

301 Mission / Millennium Tower

Hello All - long time no post... A project that I have been managing for a year now through my work at Screampoint has recently gone online. My part was to manage the creation of the 3d architectural visualizations of the building, the interiors, and the surrounding city model.
The actual building is currently under construction and when completed will be one of the tallest structures in San Francisco.


Have a look at some other renderings at the final site -www.millenniumtowersf.com

Landscape

It's been a while, so I sat down the other day for some fake landscape fun - the next landscape will be totally different, I promise....

Ellie

Michelle and I have added yet another pet to the family. Meet Ellie the Italian Greyhound.



For the curious, pictures of all the pets are available here.

Look Out Blogosphere

It's official - after a long time of being teased by a "coming soon" banner page, you can now delight in all the goodness of Michelleboenig.com. Take a moment to check the site out, and be sure to check out her blog while you there are she has been very diligent about keeping hers current (unlike me).

Hiatus

Good citizens of the internet, right around the time of my last blog post (March of '06), I started working for Screampoint, llc. While at Screampoint I have been working on projects involving architectural rendering, city modeling, workflow creation / documentation, and custom technology development. Fun stuff. The job has even taken me to China a few times. One of my first projects involved managing the creation of a 3d model of approximately 2 square kilometers of San Francisco. (rendering pictured below)


In all of this time, I have woefully neglected my site and this blog. Hopefully I will be able to resume the pace and make this something worth visiting again...

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.