The house and concept is by the brilliant guys at D*haus, and it’s a very interesting idea with loads of creative applications and uses. You can find out more about it D*haus here as well as see other places it’s been published and shown.

D*haus in Made Magazine

D*haus on the Weather Network Canada

I’ve also put a new script in the resources, it was something very small I wrote for a colleague who wanted to select a checkerboard pattern on a plane. I’d never tried to edit on the sub-object level in maxscript so it was a nice gentle nudge into it. I know it’s possible with graphite tools as well but they seemed to be having an issue that day so this made it nice and easy to do.

Deus Ex Concept Art

I decided to pay homage to it by re-creating an environment to cinematic quality, and what better setting than his apartment. It’s still early days, but I will be posting updates to this as it progresses and hopefully put together a making of when it is complete. Current state of project is below:

Wip 01

Teaming up with my close friend Michael Charalambous who’s an expert in SEO amongst other things, he set about acquiring domains and I have been setting up various websites to take advantage of their ranking in search engines. We’ve been doing this systematically, and have targeted various keywords which he chose based upon their relevance and search volume.

My role has primarily been setting up the sites and making the necessary changes to ensure that they not only are SEO friendly for search engines but also that they are as efficient as possible in generating revenue. It’s still early days, but it’s been positive so far and we’re hoping that they take off and do well.

My next update should be 3D related, I’m working on an exciting personal project that should hopefully come to light soon as well as a few more minor workflow scripts!

Drag and drop to install, add it to your shelf and to use just select some objects and hit the button. It’ll use your current render settings so if you’ve got it ticked to save your file it will prompt you in case of overwriting!

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted some work here, a lot of work I’ve done over the past few months has been just on a professional level. It’s been hard to find a balance with time for personal work but as the colder weather approaches I’m sure there’ll be more time for it.

One thing I want to try and do is write up posts on projects I work on, just a little post-project blog post with info, what worked well and could have worked better.

Something I did work on was this animation for Dhaus, I was responsible for the first minute of footage which is all CG. The turnaround for this was particularly tight due to some unexpected time off which reduced a 4 week timeframe to little over 2!

A few bits of information about the project:

•  Vray was used for the fully CG parts and because of the right turnaround it worked out in our favour to render out half-res irradiance maps. This worked really well for the most part, there were some patchy renders but some post work in Fusion managed to clear a lot of it up.
• Getting the trees and grass to look right was particularly difficult, a 2D VrayDisplacementMod was used on the ground and this impacted the render times greatly. Turn it off for the animation pre-pass, the difference is *barely* visible and the time you save is huge.
• Because of time constraints, I ended up doing some of the animated house opening shots in layers with a single background frame and then rendering the house and shadows separately. I should have done this with all the shots that would have allowed it, the time saved was huge.
• Render time should *always* be over-estimated, especially with limited resources. With no dedicated renderfarm, I only had evenings to render it out with the start of the work day being cut off point. This was a serious limitation and hindrance to the animation.

I really wish I had more time to render out the shots as they could have really benefited from higher quality settings, especially with regards to the light cache which was lower than I would have liked it to be. You can see some patchiness in the stills which is a bit less evident in the video.

Here’s a few stills from the video and you can watch the video here where it was featured on the magazine Frame’s website.

Something that I’m really happy to blog about though is being in the latest issue (32) of 3D Artist! I’ve attached the clipping below, and I’m really glad to have been in this issue and for the opportunity that they gave me. A personal thanks goes to Lynette Clee!