Paper Raincoat is featured in this month’s issue (22) of Advanced Photoshop Magazine. I put together a six page step-by-step tutorial for creating the rainy splash page for this site. It should be pretty easy to work through. It also follows my workflow pretty carefully – linework, basic color values and a very 3d-style shading and color grading. It actually goes from daylight to a rainy dusk in the process, again very typical of me.

You can view the full article in .pdf format here (10MB). Thanks again Emma Cake for the feature!

I’ve spent the past month or so trying to wrap my head around photon mapping. In theory it’s pretty simple, but in practice there are a heck of a lot of settings to get right. Too far one way and you’ve got blotchy pools or light… too far the other way and you’ve got razor-sharp caustics and rendering times that are best expressed in scientific notation.

Here are a few of the cooler tests. I’d put up a tutorial, but there’s already a lot of really top-notch ones out there. (Click for high-resolution versions.)

This 3d image has been taken about as far as the original sketch/concept allows. I think. It’s pretty hard to say when dealing with stuff that doesn’t exist.. but I don’t really want to throw in any spaceships or what not. It was partially inspired by Stainslaw Lem’s ‘Solaris’ – where an alien life form was a planet-sized sentient ocean. These things are intended to be a bit more floral.

Client Todd Chaney is working on putting together a full-sized working prototype of Kaneda’s bike in the anime Akira. I worked with him to put together a few 3d mockups to give some idea of how to put together the outer pieces. It’s a pretty ambitious undertaking – I believe he’s going to build it with an electric/battery powered engine rather than try to encorporate a traditional combustion engine.

Here are a few stills:

I started testing out a new renderer along with Brazil and VRay. Mental Ray is used mostly in feature film work, but is a fairly speedy and serviceable renderer for many types of work. Here’s a global illumination and regathering of a test architecture scene. It’s still a struggle to get light into all those corners realistically.

Panoram Technologies has contracted me to put together a 3d mockup of their new 3-paneled monitor, the PV290. It contains three 19″ screens arranged with a 30% tilt on the sides to provide a more ergonomic viewing angle.

Here’s a 3d mockup of the frame itself before the panels are put in.

I’ve started playing around with Afterburn - a 3d Studio Max plugin put out by Afterworks. It has a ton of settings to play with, but can produce highly realistic results (probably in hands more skilled than my own).

Here’s a quick test. If anyone has tips for making these look more like clouds and less like shaving cream, drop me an email. (Click for higher-resolution sample).