I’ve finally found some time to throw together a showreel using various bits and pieces of work – some of it’s old, some of it’s new, but it’s all created / modeled / rendered by me.

Despite watching it through many, many times on my pc before I hit the ‘Upload a video’ button, after I’d uploaded it I remembered a few things I’d have liked to put in it but completely forget – so expect an updated version of it some time soon. Probably.

Software: After Effects, 3D Studio Max, maybe a bit of Photoshop

Music: RJD2 – Ghostwriter

Another recent project I’ve worked on with Andy Shillito.

Our Agency came up with the concept of a 3D globe based on an existing logo shape, with different areas of the globe representing different aspects of the business.

They handed us a a concept sketch (see the image at the bottom of the page) and we were asked to bring it to life.

This is a recent project I’ve been working on alongside Andy Shillito.

Digital Welly needed a complete 3D house and garden to use in an Flash game about energy saving. It was a fun project to work on because we were given free reign when it came to the look and feel of the house. We were told what items were needed as clickable hotspots in each room and that there needed to be an overall house view for navigating through the game, but then it was left to us to get on with it. The images I’ve shown are the ones I created – Andy worked on the bedroom and the bathroom.

For the most part the images you see are straight out of 3D Studio Max, but they’ve all been colour corrected in photoshop a little.

Modelled in 3D Studio Max and rendered with V-Ray

My entry for GSG 5 second project – Primitives

Made in 3D Studio Max and After Effects.

Loads more info here…
greyscalegorilla.com/​blog/​2010/​09/​five-second-project-primitives/​

Other entries here…
vimeo.com/​channels/​primitives

The idea was to see to what extent I could create a seemingly ‘detailed’ scene using just boxes, no real 3D modelling and really basic lighting.

Another little experiment that’s not meant to be anything in particular, but that might turn into something more exciting one day.

Take any old polygon, inset then extrude some of it’s faces, add some twist and then warp it’s vertices into a sphere. Then go crazy with the key frames and randomly animate the % of sphericalness (that’s probably not a word by the way), degree of twist and change the initial number of polygons on the base shape and this is the sort of animation you’ll probably get.

Animated and rendered in 3D Studio Max, post done in After Effetcs.

The music track is All To All by Broken Social Scene.

A quick entry to another Greyscale Gorilla Five Second Project. This time the subject was CMYK.

The blobs were animated with RealFlow and then rendered in 3D Studio Max with Vray’s ‘Fast SSS2′ material to get the waxy look.

A quick test setup using Rayfire for 3DSMax. The shattering glass was simulated and rendered in slow motion anyway, then slowed down again in After Effects.

This scene only took about 3 or 4 minutes (on an Intel Core i7-860) to simulate using the Physx option in Rayfire (rather than Reactor). There’s around 30,000 poly’s and over 1000 objects in the scene.

Using reactor that same simulation would probably take hours, even of a fast machine.

The original render output was 250 frames (10 seconds long) and took about 2 hours to render with Mental Ray. Then I slowed it down again and added some depth-of-field in After Effects.

It was a slow work day, so I made this short animation for the latest greyscalegorilla Five Second Project instead.

The subject was “Fail“

Some credit needs to go to:
The characters are just the (awesome) free rig made by Brad Noble with eyes and a moustache stuck on.

The 1920′s piano track is spliced together from a free file downloaded from freesound

Animation: 3D Studio Max
Post: After Effects

The Holman Group asked for this day and night 3D architectural visualization of some proposed chances to an office building down in Solihull.

The building was modelled entirely in 3D Studio Max and rendered using the lovely V-Ray, with a good helping of Photoshop splashed on top to make it look really pretty.

The brief was for a “Genie’s lamp in a cave, with the word ‘You’ coming out of it in big smoke-like letters”. The lamp and cave are all created and rendered in 3D Studio Max, but it proved much easier just to draw the lettering in Photoshop, using a brush and the warp tool, rather than trying to create realistic 3D smoke letters.

I think the text works quite well, if anyone out there is interested in knowing how to get smokey text like that let me know and I’ll put up a quick tutorial on how I did it.