This is where I store the stuff that I make for myself. Most of these came out of sessions where I had an interesting model and was just playing around, trying to get better results and improve the quality of my work.
The skin of the Nyan Cat Lambo was inspired by Deadmau5’s Ferrari 458 Italia. I was aiming to teach myself not only how to accurately apply decal images to replicate the look and feel of the inspiration images, but also how to create an image that looked photoreal. I did quite a bit of playing around between Photoshop and KeyShot finding the right balance and taught myself a lot during the process.
Everything that I learned doing the Lamborghini images was then utilized in the image of the Audi R8 as well. Additional specific focus was placed on the environment and lighting and trying to really make it look not only like the car was real, but like the car and environment went together seamlessly. After completing this image and posting online, I was approached by 3D Artist magazine who included it along with my writeup on lighting and rendering processes in Issue 89: Supercharge Your Renders.
From there I played around a bit with material creation in KeyShot and created a material that very closely emulated bubblegum. While playing around with this I popped the material on a model of an Ariel Atom just for fun. My daughter wound up loving it enough that I decided to simply use it as the demo case for the material. KeyShot wound up featuring the material (and the images attached) along with a writeup of how to create it in the software. Nowadays this sort of thing is super easy – but back then this was a bit tricky. 😛
The image of the Tron light cycle was simply an exercise in rendering dark materials in a dark setting without losing the overall form of the model… not too much special going on there.
Lastly, when I went to Japan several years ago, I brought back this Fanta bottle that I bought from a vending machine while I was there. The drink was total rubbish, but the bottle was super fun and had a lot of character – so I decided to try my hand at creating a magazine-style advertisement for Fanta featuring that bottle. You can definitely tell that my camera at the time wasn’t the greatest. 😛 I built a lightbox for that sucker and everything… oh well, I suppose everything shows its age at one point or another.
