Occum’s Razor
20070930
Now:
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:
Art
Spines
20070927
Now:
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
20070925
Now:
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
20070924
Now:
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 Test
20070923
Download 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
20070920
Now:
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
20070919
Now:
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 Model
20070918
Now:
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.
Then:
Maleficent is a modeling project, my effort to create a 3D variant of the dark majestic villain.
Time Wisp
20070913
Now:
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
20070627
Now:
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.
Then:
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
20070624
Now:
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
20070612
Now:
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
20070612
Now:
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 Metropolis
20070612
3D 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:
