Early 3D concept

Old 3d concept shot of an animation idea I had about the life of an artist's mannequin.This is an idea for the final shot as its replacement arrives and sees the horror of its predecessor.

Artlantis Studio Rendering - Review

Artlantis studio is another "realtime renderer",by now Ive learnt realtime means a nice preview..and you still have to hit render at some point!.My first time trying out the program I didn't give it much of a chance,the included sample files are fine but rendering them out was painfully slow.I decided to give it a second chance though and import a .obj of my own scene from Maya.
Once in the program you import a scene or model,there is sunlight setup allowing for location,time of day and cloud cover.A material bank containing some presets such as wood,floors etc and some simple objects you can use.The setup is fairly easy and the preview window will give you a pretty good idea how the scene is going to look.Render settings include radiosity and the main draw of the program is that it creates indoor and outdoor natural lighting well.

5 Min (1280x720) render with hard shadows and high radiosity 

Added soft shadows,7 Min render.Click images to enlarge.

The interface itself while being easy to navigate and understand i found a little off putting,a nicer layout would have drawn me in a lot quicker as when i actually rendered my scene the render time was pretty good.
There is a couple problems in the program,there are only 2 render options (high or low) for anti aliasing and 3 similar settings for radiosity and adding additional lights slow the render time massively.The program also crashed a few times when changing basic settings on a low poly scene.
I'm still undecided on what i think of Atlantis,its certainly worth trying again though.

Unity 3 lighting tests

Spent a hour or two playing around in Unity 3 engine,previously I found the final rendered game graphics to be a bit disappointing so I thought I would experiment with lighting options and see what I could come up with.I imported a couple of my Maya models into the engine to test indoor lighting and anti-aliasing effects.

Some realtime shadows,image effects applied to camera to soften jaggy edges

Forward lighting with some point lights to fake ambience

Lamborghini Turnaround

Character Model

Character model from a few weeks ago,most of the detail is on the head.The coat and clothing
could use some work and a stronger design.

Rendered real-time in Autodesk Showcase

Genetica 3.51- Texture generator

Spiral graphics Genetica 3.51 is a custom texture generator,capable of building almost infinite amounts of textures for 3d modelling.Begin by selecting a type of texture from dozens of category's such as metals,planets,bricks and buildings and then you move in to 'node' mode.Here you drag and drop elements rearranging a tree of effects,you can click on individual effects and alter them which in turn alters the final texture.Normal maps can also be created at the click of a button and images can be exported for use in any program.

A basic texture and bump map made in 2 Min's from presets.Worth noting the
program does everything from brickwork,windows,landscapes and tons more.

Genetica is a pretty interesting program for texturing and the massive amount of custom and copyright free textures it can create was what drew me to it but its one and maybe only failing is that the results are often slightly random,I couldn't help but think why not just create exactly the texture i wanted in photoshop.For more info on the program check it out here- DEMO

Twitter

Now on Twitter,say hello- HERE just getting used to it!

AutoDesk Showcase rendering

I must have  tried at least a dozen "real-time" render programs by now but forgot to actually look and see if Autodesk had one of there own,I stumbled over Showcase while looking at game engines and another rendering program called Marmoset on You Tube.Showcase is a hard program to judge,it has tons of features and presets,its got hdri lighting and a library of materials to play with but compared to some of the other software I tried it isn't particularly fun to use.It might be strange to describe it as not being fun but I think the best programs encourage you to play around,in the case of realtime renderers slapping textures onto objects they clearly don't belong to and looking at the results.Compared to Lumion the renders do come out more realistic and with a less like a game engine.The program is good though,there is huge amount of options and you can create turnarounds and movie's and even add animation but what stops me going back to it is that performance wise its below some of the other software I tried.On my laptop it ran very slow when I tried upping the details,if you have a good computer give it a go for sure but there's quicker realtime software.

I imported my train model and was pretty happy with realtime results
but beyond this level of detail my PC came to a standstill.

Rotating camera on this scene it looked fair,one thing I did notice is
that Showcase doesn't support .obj importing 

Hero Engine testing

Another quick test I put together using HeroEngine Game development kit,the online engine enables collaborative world building for MMO games.I brought in an old factory model I built to see how many polygons the engine could handle importing from Maya.

Speed Challenge 4# : Alice in wonderland

Model based on some of Tim Burton's Alice in wonderland concept art,was a fun scene to build and a good theme I would like to do some more models based on.

40 min's Modelling.

Speed challenge 3#

One hour challenge,was going for a Japanese style street scene,
built it up quickly using repeats and mirrors.

Would be nice to see all the sign texture's added and colorful
lights flooding the scene.