It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog, but here are some updates.  I did some ecommerce design for Fizz Autosports. Also the owner of Junack USA contacted me.  He wanted the site to be more elegant and also reflect what his business was about.  Please note the sites since they are trying update their products and information on the site.  Make sure to view the designs on my project page.

I finally decided to make a short video of the Nex5 camera I modeled a couple of months ago.  It fairly simple.  The focus on this video was to show the camera.  Didn’t want to detract from the great model of the camera with unnessary effects.  It’s simple and straight forward.  Post was done in After effects.  The music is by Grace Valhalla, who makes some great ambient music, which is great for this kind of stuff.

Put my new camera to use. Someone asked if I could film their cars and make it look good. Shot at a parking garage around midnight in the nice super hot humid weather. Parking garage and hot temps aren’t a good mix, but what can you do. With this project, I didn’t want to do too much on color grading (ala Magic Bullet Looks). I wanted something subtle, but still looks like it came out of a studio.

The process for this was I edited in Premiere first so that I could get timing with the song. Then I did a very small amount of color grading. The footage that came out of the camera (Panasonic GH2) was already good, but it was a bit overly saturated in certain areas. I used After Effects for the titles.

So had to do some old fashion print design.  This piece was created for a place I’m freelancing on and off.  It’s a flyer for a gathering at their shop.  Nothing too out there, but I was limited in time.  It was a good challenge though.  Working with a typography can be blessing or curse.  Your call.  Basically this piece was to keep it simple, get the message across, and get it done as soon as possible. (click the image above for full view)

Finally got this rendered.  Took quite a while to boot.  I’m not sure how I’m going to render this in video form though.  I’m might have to resort to not using Mental Ray since the render above took a couple of hours to finish.  As far as the image above, all in all I’m pretty happy how it turned out.  Probably my only gripe with it is the shadows should have been more softer and darker towards the objects.  Tried using different lights, but it gave me really grainy shadows that always upped the render times even further (higher samples resulted in less grain).  So I guess you have your trade-offs.

Always hate distractions, which kept me away from the camera project.  I’ve finally jumped back in.  I got most of the texturing done and I’m just going to tweak little things like texture file sizes, colors, lighting, and render efficiency.  Hopefully, I can reduce the rendering times in Mental Ray to a reasonable amount because I will be creating a short spiffy “product video” of this.  You think it’s possible to render something like that at 720p with reflections, refractions, displacement, bump and raytraced shadows?  I’ll find out soon enough.  Also, don’t forget to click on the image above to see the full image.

Just finished uving, well I hope I’ve got it all.  You’ll probably see some of the seams, but since the texture isn’t very busy, it shouldn’t be noticeable.  I did the unwrapping for mostly the words that will be shown near the buttons.   Hopefully the texturing will be more engaging than uv unwrapping.

As far as the uv unwrapping goes, I’ve used pelting, cylinder, and planar.  Probably the most used is planar and pelting.  Just noticed that pelting is alright, but sometimes when you relax it, it gets really wonky.  It’s a hit or miss for me at least.  I guess the better the relax and pelting works if there aren’t a lot of faces/vertices on the given mesh. Well, it’s much faster than taking each face and stitching them together and hoping that that there aren’t any stretching.

]]> http://www.unitblue.net/site/2010/12/02/ive-been-uved/feed/ 0 http://www.unitblue.net/site/2010/11/30/modeling-complete-textures-are-next/ http://www.unitblue.net/site/2010/11/30/modeling-complete-textures-are-next/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:51:09 +0000 Ronan http://www.unitblue.net/site/?p=166 Continue reading →]]>

So, can you guess what camera this is? After making sure things looks good on the modeling side (cleaning up mesh and a little tweaking), it’s now time to move on to the next phase.  Before I can even texture this, I’ve got to unwrap the UV.   Wish me luck.

As mentioned earlier, here is my new reel. It has most of my work so far. Make sure you have your sound up, as the cuts go very well with the music. I couldn’t figure out what to do for the intro and outro for the reel.  In the end, I went with something simple, but still visually appealing (well to me anyways). One thing is for sure, this reel is way better than my previous one.  Now, it’s time to move on and work on some new visuals!

Here’s a sneak peek at a video I did for the group Unit Blue.  It’s pretty much done in Cinema 4D with the other elements added in later in After Effects.  All that spiffy color correction, transistion and timing to music was done in after effects as well.  I used Premiere to do final editing and tweaking.