-
Making of “The Museum”
Another day, another Berlin landmark… This one – Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie – was done for Ronen Bekerman’s Maxwell competition last summer, ending in the second spot. Ronen has just published the making-of, which might be of interest if you use Maxwell or are curious about it. For me, this was by far ...
-
Two-Tone Tree
Summer is turning into autumn at alarming speed in my neck of the wood. As I was strolling through the city the other day, trying to imbibe the feeling, I couldn’t help notice how most of the trees were not assuming their autumn shades in a uniform way. Rather, it seemed the chlorophyle was first ...
-
Bits of bread
When working on the Northern light images, I started experimenting with a new workflow to create food assets, in particular bread and other baked products. After having found a relatively laborious but clean and effective approach, I decided to build a small library of baked, carb-heavy assets. I didn’t go very far, and I will ...
-
Free Mat Test Scene
As promised, here is the material testing scene I used for my recent Materialism tutorial. It is a very simple scene but it may be worth downloading nonetheless as the archive includes a very high-res, 90MB HDR map. I thought about downsampling it but the high resolution is actually necessary to generate the sharp, realistic ...
-
Materialism (1)
As promised, I wanted to follow up on my Eames series with a few pointers about the materials created for the chairs. This is the first in a series of mini how-to tuts about materials. The Eames chairs are a good place to start. They all use materials that are meant to show some age, ...
-
Free caustics, anyone?
If you’ve ever cursed the gods while trying to obtain good and reasonably cheap caustics in Vray, then rejoice. You will breath a sigh of relief as you go through this video tutorial, found on 3D Total. In it, Ricardo Eloy explains what at first seemed to me like a highly implausible trick to obtain ...
-
Scantling lamp (and some fun with IK chains)
I didn’t think I would ever have rigged models in my archive, but when I set out to rebuild Mathias Hahn’s wonderful Scantling Lamp for Marset in Max, I just could not bear the thought of having to pose it by fiddling with its three axes and its pesky wires. The solution: a simple IK ...
-
Marvelous-D, road-tested
I had read about Marvelous Designer in a review by 3DWorld some months ago and remember being intrigued. But it wasn’t until Kizo posted on ronenbekerman about the application’s potential for furniture-modelling that I decided to visit their site and download the 30-day trial. MD is a CG cloth-making app that allows the user to ...
-
Vintage herringbone parquet tutorial and free (!) maps
A few people got back to me following my recent Tolix chair post to enquire about the parquet. Normally, I would use the Floor Generator plugin from cg-source to create all sorts of parquets. But this won’t do for the herringbone type. Below is a step-by-step tutorial about how I created a slightly simplified version ...
-
Publications
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve been selected to appear in Exposé 9 by Ballistic Publishing, which goes on sale today. This is great news, of course, and I’m very excited about receiving my copy. The Ballistic books were among the first I picked up upon entering the CG arena – ...
-
Digital bark and sap: ONYX vs GROWFX
Convincing architectural visualisation requires good vegetation models. But what if you’re after a very specific, hard-to-find species, or if you want to push the quality of your vegetation one notch higher?
-
Vray Balloon – Free material
When I posted a series of images featuring some Hans Wegner furniture recently, some people asked about the props and, in particular, the material used for the balloon on the floor. This is a mundane object, but the material in question turns out to be rather complex. As you can see in the Nodejoe screenshot ...
