Wish I Was Here

Up and Coming in 2011

Maceij, the radio DJ in Toronto, has really enjoyed my work so far and loves the final product.  He also has a sound guy (Ryan) whom he works with to get sound effects and stuff he needs for his videos (which he pays for).  Ryan has also commented on my work and thought it was very well done, and he also asked Maceij to introduce us in the beginning of next year because he has got some work to be done also, which would be paid work!

Ryan has done a lot of sound mixing and effects for various radio stations all over North America and his resume is pretty impressive with the stations he's worked for, so being requested by him for work next year is very flattering.

So, hopefully next year will finally begin the year of the Freelancer!

New Top 10 Design - Tri Wheel thingy

I started this project about 2 weeks ago and it was slowly turning into a piece of garbage that nowhere near represented what it turned into today.  At it's low point I was incredibly frustrated with not being able to get fast renders with the types of effects that I wanted.  My Global Illumination simulation (the Christmas Marble Madness) has been rendering since Monday on my main computer and it's about 75% done right now.  And in turning off Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion, things looked really bad.  So I reset the design and eventually came up with this.

For the intro, I started out with the camera inside my 3-wheel rotating numbers thingy (that's the official name, lol) and turned on the lights one by one to reveal the Fusion logo and the wheel.  Then the camera moves back and the wheel comes down into place and starts turning.  Eventually all three wheels stop in the same spot and come together with violent sparks.  This indicates the number in which we are at during the countdown.  The name of the song/artist/studio appear to the left of the numbers and then we go to a standard flare-out to begin the music video.

It looks pretty good, the colors can be easily changed and it renders pretty fast on the laptop (about 30 minutes for each number transition, about an hour for the intro).  Once the GI simulation is finally done I can move this project to my main computer and make changes at will with fast turnaround time.

Christmas Marble Madness

I'm still playing around with awesome Global Illumination, and I've also started dabling in the Mograph dynamics in Cinema 4D. I've got some bright colored marbles going through a tube and eventually crashing into a light wall, all with some physics.

I heart GI!

Illumination Without Lights

I've been working lately on more natural illumination. For instance, everything around us in the real world have some illumination properties that allows it to reflect light instead of just an image.

This is called Global Illumination in the CG biz, and allows a single light source to correctly light a scene based on object's illuminative property. In Cinema 4D, each texture has the ability to "emit" light, and with the Global property in a scene you can create some really natural looking light.

After some playing around during the Thanksgiving break, I came up with this example. There are no lights in this scene and the grilled light texture on the standing lights are what emit the lights in the scene. Light is reflected around the entire scene with Global Illumination.