sheen

Wanted to play with using basic geometry (in this case a warped icosahedron) to build more complex geometry on top of. I was going to add lights and whatnot on the surface but ended up liking the way it looked with just a single light (albeit a ring-shaped one) in the scene.

10/6/15

diamond

I spent a while playing with the internal shapes in this—at first there were a lot of arcing rounded bits, but that took away from the sharp look I was going for. The lighting took a lot of fiddling too: I couldn’t get the upper tip of the thing to highlight properly until I set up a sort of test array of colored lights around the scene to figure out which one of them would actually show up in it.

8/29/15

shield

I really like the art style (and a lot of other things) in the show Steven Universe; the title character’s magic shield seemed like it would be a nifty modeling/lighting challenge. Not sure about the scuffed effect on the shield material—it might have been better with something more like ripples—but I’m pretty happy with the way the colors turned out.

9/03/15

rover

Goal for this one was to start with simple shapes and build detail into them rather than making the shapes themselves complicated. I went back and forth for a while on how much to add to the exterior—I think it could have done with even less trim than it currently has, but it turned out all right.

The rocky ground took a surprising amount of time—you’d think rocks would be easy (they’re… rocks), but making their forms interesting and plausible was pretty complicated. Made heavy use of the Maxwell materials gallery for the source textures.

6/13/15

glass flower

I’d wanted to do something like this for a while but wasn’t sure how to go about it; recently came across the article on phyllotaxis and gave the Fermat spiral a try. It didn’t end up looking much like a flower, but there’s definitely something kind of organic about the pattern.

3/20/15

turbine

Inspired by some of the things by beeple and ethikdesign. Little bit of post work in Photoshop for halo-y blur effects. Dunno what happened with the bump map on the rougher metal, but the bit just inside the blue rings looks filthy. I like it.

3/01/15

pipe block

Saw some cool photos of lab equipment so I made this dumb thing. Those pipes are clearly superfluous. Good studio-lighting practice though.

2/09/15

pyramids

Quick and dirty: playing with glass and metal as usual. Really like how the reflections turned out, though it might have looked better with another level of smaller pyramids around the currently-smallest ones.

4/21/14

room

This one took a lot of fiddling. For the room itself I was originally going for a stark Apple Store-y aesthetic but it turns out all-white-everything isn’t that interesting to look at. At one point one of the materials glitched and the walls turned black and it made things look a lot nicer so I left ‘em that way. The sculpture thing took a while as well… initially it was going to be something green and conical, which ended up looking just like a dumb attempt at a sci-fi Christmas tree, so I kept throwing different things at the wall(s?) until one of them seemed to fit the space well.

12/30/14

totem

I love Monument Valley for a number of reasons—it’s an exquisitely designed, atmospheric, thoughtful masterpiece of a game. They put out an expansion called Forgotten Shores a little while ago which was similarly fantastic; having played that, I felt like making a little tribute to the game. Most of the time here was spent on lighting, trying to get at the sort of stark, clean, pencil-shaded-y style the game uses. Would’ve liked to get more depth-of-field blur in the background, but the problem with a physical camera is that it has rules: I couldn’t get it shallow enough without also losing the almost-orthographic look of the foreground. Seems to’ve ended up at a decent balance though.

11/13/14