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.

I got enough spare time to play with the amazing 3DSMax character rig that Brad Noble has created and made freely(!) available on his website.

OK, so it’s not the best animation you’ll ever see, but it’s just a bit of fun and I’ll hopefully re-work it over time. And yeah, I know he sort of hangs in the air a bit too long at the end, just ignore that…

One day I’ll make a nice little animation with this model. Keep your eyes peeled.

It was modelled in 3DSMax from a set of blueprints I Ifound online, so this is a well detailed, mostly accurate and fully articulated model of the famous jet. Why’d I do it? Just for a bit of fun really, and because EVERYONE does cars, I thought I’d try something a little different.

You can buy this and other lovely 3D stuff I’ve made on Turbosquid.com, if you like.

3D item/product visualization like this was used a lot while I was at Ripe.

These are some of the things I mocked up to show off various marketing assets for the Manor Village pitch.

On that last one I Photoshopped a 3D model of a shop / mini marketing suite into a photo taken in a shopping centre near the proposed Manor Village development – giving the client a good idea of how it could turn out.