The Maxx on DVD
After far, far too long they’ve finally done it – Mtv’s The Maxx is now available on DVD!
If you’re familiar with the show, that should be all you need to know – go buy it at Amazon
If you’ve never seen The Maxx, read on…
Spoon Net-Casting Spider Sketch
The first sketch I’ve done in a long time, this one was created in Corel Photo-Paint with a Wacom tablet. For reference I borrowed my wife’s excellent book on spiders, and this may have been the coolest spider shown!
The Making of Labyrinthine in 3DS Max
Labyrinthine.wmv (600×400, 1.5MB, WMV9 video)
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It feels like it’s been too long since I’ve been able to work on a 3d piece. One of the last chances I had I was able to produce this, which suffers somewhat from a shortened time allotment but did give me a chance to work on moody lighting.
Gossamer Gypsy Studios UpdatedIt’s been long overdue, but we put together a bunch of updates for Gossamer Gypsy Studios.
The Making of Corruption in 3DS Max
Corruption.avi (320×240, 1.1MB, MPEG4 video)
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Corruption was essentially my effort at something like a fine art sculpture, but with 3DS Max instead of ceramics. Saved file versions and test renders from along the way make up this visual roadmap to how I achieved the final sculpture and image effects.
Valentine
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Fresh off my vacation, I thought it would be a good time to post this image. Especially since she is now my wife! I may have had a naive approach to image manipulation, but I don’t regret for a moment choosing to spend my life with Valerie.
Dynamics Demo
Download the animation:
dynamics.avi (400×225, 3.3MB, MPEG4)
-or-
dynamics.mpg (352×198 5.6MB MPEG1)
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This was my first attempt to inject realism into my 3d animation, leading to my discovery that it’s not easy to do.
Labyrinthine
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While I feel less than happy with many of my previous images, this one still pleases me. Probably my favorite aspect is the texturing, achieved almost entirely by lighting rather than traditional texture mapping.
Lighting (and texturing) is something I’ve traditionally struggled with, and it may not be perfect but the lighting here did accomplish much of what I wanted it to do; flaws are more in the realm of design than technique. Anyway, don’t you just love the contrast from shadow to highlights, and the soft bloom those highlights give off? I do.
Hot Line
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The bad is easily the texture on the circuit tracing shapes and the dark beveling that doesn’t look right.
The good is the fairly intense glow and light vs. dark values, plus the sort of shiny scratches among the dark areas. Almost as if old copper was being scratched to reveal fresh-bright redness underneath.
Corruption
Update: see The Making of Corruption!
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During my early sculpting days, when I sat in on a few of Valerie’s art classes, I developed an interest in making my own 3d digital sculpture pieces. This is perhaps my most literal attempt, the lighting and depth of field and little details were all intended to produce the effect of realism while still obviously describing an art piece sculpture.
Der Gruntlig
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Sometimes I’ll still find myself ready to draw but nowhere near my computer. Though at the time of posting this it’s more that I haven’t actually done any drawing in a long time, digital or otherwise. Speed of life I suppose. Back on topic, this is one example of a traditional pencil drawing I enjoyed doing. It was much more about the inspiration than the medium.
Shackles
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Here’s a dark one, and I’m not just talking about theme. The thing I remember most about making this image is that it was the reason I began to think about monitor calibration.
This was probably around the time I started working the graveyard shift for a part-time job, and I hung up towels and blankets over the blinds in my room to block out as much light from the windows as possible. Having created, for the first time, a truly dark environment for myself (really just to be able to sleep when I got home in the morning), it started having an effect on the way I used my computer.
Delilah: Contemporary Elf Chick Drawing
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Drawing Delilah (no, not Running Delilah, though that may have been where I got the name) was fun. At this stage in my artistic development I was starting to do a few things right, like drawing from photo reference for a (meta)human figure, and drawing at a larger size (higher resolution) than the final version shown here.
Dawn Eye Sketch
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As this was something like the second drawing I made with my Wacom tablet and Corel Photo-Paint, I fell into a trap that snares many new digital artists. The final presentation of the art is the same resolution as the original working copy. I drew it at 1:1 of the final size. Or put another way, I didn’t realize I could have been drawing at a very large size and then reducing it for the final presentation.
This is important for essentially the same reason that drawing instructors tell students to draw big (not that I ever spent time in art classes, to my detriment). It’s a way to let the small shakes and defects blend and get smoothed out as you resample the image down to presentation size.
Creature Face Sketch
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The neat thing about trying out my then-new Wacom tablet in Corel Photo-Paint was that it made drawing both familiar and completely new at the same time. It wasn’t until some time after this sketch that I arrived at pencil settings I liked, yet the experimental settings used in this piece were fun.
Drawing on the tablet but looking at the results on screen took a little getting used to, but once I got over that I realized it offers one big advantage: I never had to worry about my drawing hand obscuring some part of what I was working on (let alone smudging it unintentionally).
Widget Autospork 350
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Somebody once told me that this looks clearly like a glue gun. The amusing thing is that I think the person who told me that was interviewing me for a job, something with CAD and 3d visualization of industrial design pieces.
Morph and Explode Animation TestsDownload the animation test videos:
morph.avi (320×240, 388KB, MPEG4)
explode.mpg (240×180, 1.01MB, MPEG1)
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Simple tests I did while getting the hang of basic animation tasks within 3DS Max.
Demon Hand: 3D Modeling Project
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It seems like this was a point in my artistic development that I was just beginning to gain some confidence working in 3d, and suddenly started biting off more than I could chew. I can remember some very ambitious plans for characters that were simply hands, fighting each other with all manner of Asian weaponry like kusari-gama, nunchuku, etc. They were going to be animated pivoting and kicking as if fingers were legs, all the while performing complicated manuevers with chain weapons. No wonder I never finished such a project.
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Demon hand is simply a working title for this modeling project, where my current goal is to make a fairly life-like hand. To begin the model I used the technique of box modeling, extruding and scaling faces on a primitive mesh to get the rough shape down. The hand will be modeled in a relatively neutral pose, for easier animation setup later.
Plasm
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It seems strange to me how an image made so simply can still captivate the eye, if briefly.
This image definitely falls under the category of “happy accidents”; some people think that term applied to digital art is akin to stating an oxymoron as everything in digital art is precise and controlled. In fact, that’s not always the case.
Vortex
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My favorite aspect of this piece must be the funky greenish texture of the walls, everwhere the circuit traces are not etched. It’s both blockish and nicely grungy and tarnished, like metal with some sort of fungus growing on it. If only I had come up with textures as inventive for the rest of the materials, this might have more appeal overall.
After Hallway, this is the second in what is essentially a series of mine in “corridors”. I guess I just enjoy the long perspective shots (or have compositional stutters).
Occum’s Razor
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The modeling has its problems, but what bugs me most is the lighting on this piece. The sky is pretty great, but the guillotine itself is rather poorly lit. Hindsight, I suppose.
Then:
Spines
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I can still enjoy this piece as a 3d doodle. The simplicity and reasonable textures feel more forgivable than some of my overworked and under-designed 3d images. A part of me, seeing this again, wants to develop more simple, iconic 3d images and achieve better results on such a low level of complexity, before attempting more involved scenes again.
Female Face Drawing
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I remember this as one of the early drawings where I made use of reference. Drawing from a reference photo (probably a magazine) was a new thing for me at the time; it felt like it had to be cheating somehow. Nevertheless I had trouble getting proportions correct, and obviously the hair was a disaster. Then there was my inexplicable choice of presentation; it probably seemed like a good idea at the time to use some Photo-Paint effects.
I do feel that this piece works to show my skills progression, compared to others before and after it in my timeline.
Hallway
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A very simple piece, this is probably the most basic modeling I’ve used in a rendering. It might have been fine, but the materials and lighting don’t feel like they do enough to add significant interest to the basic modelig setup.
On the other hand, I think I still enjoy long perspective shots. This was made before I had experience using depth of field, and it might have been nice to see some of that employed here; I have to admit I have a soft spot for distance and compositions that pull the viewer into the frame with great depth.
Power: Animation TestDownload the animation test videos:
power1.avi (320×240, 1.99MB, MPEG4)
-or-
power1.mpg (320×240, 6.99MB MPEG1)
Download an early test animation of the pod and its holder:
podtest1.avi (320×240, 840KB)
Highway
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I think that when I was composing this piece, I had some (vague, at least) idea of the composition I was seeking. That drove me to produce it.
The unfortunate part is that I had no idea what to use when filling in those compositional elements. Something dark in this lower corner of the image? An amorphous blob. Color? Er, yes! To bad they’re all over the place (in every sense of the word). Value? That means something in a visual design sense?
Ah, strangely it feels sort of good to MST3K my own work. Perhaps I’ve moved on from this level, though it might be hard to tell since I’ve also moved away from making 3d images, primarily due to time constraints. If I had the time, and could remember what Tom Servo’s profile looked like, I’d add an MST3K silhouette mouseover to this image.
Murder
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What still interests me in this image is the attempt to tell a story. Most of my earlier pieces were either abstract or lacking any suggestion of a story, but here I started to imagine a narrative and fit this image into the puzzle. I was originally planning multiple images in a series that would tell more of the story, before software woes bade me move on.
Maleficent Head ModelNow:
Back in my Max R2.5 days, I was still very new to 3d modeling. Organic curves and shapes were (and still are, most of the time) a big challenge. Working from, I believe, a Maleficent postcard image, I started practicing by roughing out basic features and then refining into finer details. Of course it seems that I didn’t get all that far into the refining stages, but it was fun for a time.
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Maleficent is a modeling project, my effort to create a 3D variant of the dark majestic villain.
Time Wisp
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For me this was a landmark piece in several ways. It marked the first time I combined a 3d rendered image with processing and effects in a 2d raster image application (in this case Corel Photo-Paint, probably version six or eight).
Red Sand
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Ah, an early experiment in photo manipulation with Corel Photo-Paint. Making her face into the black-blue-green-red of an oil slick was fun, as my little way of getting one step closer (so it seemed at the time) to the superlative techno style of Rick Berry. Too bad the rest of the piece is so lackluster.
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Rick Berry has long been one of my art idols, and his cover to Neuromancer, along with a few of his other works, were part of the inspiration for this image.
Wandering AI
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When I look at this piece I think of the old inspirations that planted the idea for it, especially Darrel Anderson’s excellent illustrations for the Shadowrun Virtual Realities sourcebook. I also see many weaknesses in technique, particularly camera placement, lighting, and texturing. Though it was definitely still a fun piece to make.
Fountain
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Unfortunately this is not a piece that has aged well. It has some sentimental value as my first 3d image but the flaws are glaring now. Still it was, at the time, a worthwhile attempt at getting into (and succeeding, in that regard) an art gallery show, still my only participation in a show to this day.
Dragon Lizardman
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Wow, is this old. I guess when I was starting out with digital art I decided that a high level of control implied and required a high level of tedium. Because that’s what it was, creating all those individual scales, especially late in the project when one edit required a screen redraw that took 30 seconds+ to fill in all the other gradient polygon scale objects (this was the days of working on a Pentium 75MHz machine, after all).
Welcome to 3D Metropolis3D Metropolis has been my personal art gallery, animation showcase, occasional audio dump and writing outlet plus more for years. In more recent years it has been too cumbersome to maintain and was sorely in need of an overhaul.
That time has come, starting now with a fresh blog install and a chance to allow for quick updates that will make it more tempting for me to keep it going.
In the hustle and bustle of transitioning to an actual blogging platform, from a pile of flat HTML files, things are bound to get lost in the shuffle.
In an effort to keep the old parts of the site accessible until the transition is complete, here’s a list of links to the main graphics, artwork, writing, drawing, and audio pages that are still around:
RSS Feeds:
