Messing around with Art of Illusion.
I thought I might need a new avatar image… I did the previous one probably about 10 years ago.
These are the first test renders.
Who doesn’t like Corrugated tubes and headphones?
I think I need to re-align various bits in the eyes. Lazy eyes.
I’m a huge fan of Enki Bilal. I like his vivid art, and thoughtful, otherworldly stories. And I admire the way he draws technology. His fighter jets look bulbous and clunky but also streamlined the same way.
Well.. this one is my design, but I really tried to get the fuselage look thick and fat.
Jet in Enki Bilal style!
I think mine is way too clean and clutterless compared to any artwork by Mr. Bilal, but technically this is still WIP.
If you want, you can download the Art of Illusion – file from here. Feel free to use it any way you like.
And Here is the low poly pilot in its own file, if you like. You may do what ever you want with that too.
Yep. Ive been racing in Simraceway and others for couple of years now. I finally got involved in some team action. It’s a new team starting from scratch and it needed some logos and stuff for the team website. Since I quite like doing stuff like that I volunteered.
The original idea for the logo was to make it look like old oil company branding from 30′s or 40′s. Think old Mobil Castrol and Gulf advertizements. Not sure how well I managed to do it, but everyone seems happy about the result:
Yep. That’s the name of the team. :)
Inkscape is a remarkable piece of software if I may say. Who needs Illustrator!?
Then of course there’s the website, and some kind of a header image was needed. Here’s what I came up with:
The finished Banner. Or header image.
As usual, created with Art of Illusion and Gimp. Unfortunately I’m not that good modeller. The car is a free webfound model, but everything else is mine.
Base render.
Base render. Just the tarmac, curbs, rails, and a ”sponsor board” in the back.
Look at the Speed!
Then a render with a car. Ooh the glowing brake discs.
The car wasn’t rendered blurred, but lassoed and copied to separate layer in Gimp, and then horisontally blurred. Darn, it’s so fast!
Stickers and a racing number.
Then as a separate layer I added few red, green and black spots with a brush, and large number ”53″ on top of the car layer and blurred them up with the same settings. Now there’s some sponsor stickers and a clear indicator telling it’s a racing car! Nott your average grocery getter anymore. Also few brushstrokes below the car as skidmarks. Later I added also slight tiresmoke and some vignetting to make it look better. There you have it.
Wallpaper for my nieces. They have a small pink laptop so why not?
Final image, different renders combined and then some Gimp wonders.
Modeled and rendered with Art of Illusion, Several renders combined with Gimp, and some grain, noise and glow added.
Base render
Base render, Nothing fancy, lot’s of tinkering with the lights and rendersettings to get it right.
Glow render
Glow render. Mostly the same as the base, except the fogmaterial surrounding the whole scene was crancked up few notches to make it glow and shine.
Black render
All except emissive texture replaced with black color. This layer was used on top of everything else to bloom out the text a bit. Blurred and mixed on with blending options.
Blue Goo pouring out of a Box. Go Figure!
Art of Illusion 2.9.2 (Yes, I should upgrade but, but…)
And Gimp 2.8
No lights in the scene, just couple of emissive cubes on the left side and on the top, and pure white environment color.
You may download the scenefile here: http://kuukahvila.com/aoi/aoifiles/goo_and_box.aoi
Render settings:
Size: 1920 x 1080
Antialiasing: Medium
Min Rays /px: 4
Max Rays/px 128
Gloss & Translucency
And Soft Shadows both ticked and set to 4 rays to sample.
Ray Tree Depth: 16
Global Illumination: Ambient Occlusion,
Rays to Sample Environment: 64
Saved several times with different filter setups.
Combined together in Gimp. Saturation boosted.
While I’m learning Blender it’s nice to rest my nerves with AoI sometimes. This is related to another personal project, so I decided to go with AoI to just quickly get some reasonable results. Idea is to give an impression of a heavy duty structures inside a factory.
The Final Product, Renders merged in GIMP.
Some lens flare and ’supernova’ filters added and few texture oddities fixed with stamp tool.Maybe I over did the Supernova and Lensflare effects. Looks a bit too bright.
These are the renders I baked together in Gimp using mostly different layermodes and 70% opacities.
Nothing fancy here, forgot to set ”ray tree depth” to 32, so the light bulb looks a bit too dark.
Basic Render. Max rays/px 128. Just to reduce the noise.
For some reason my caustic settings always produce this kinda awesome mess.
Wild shine!
I dont remember all of the settings here, But still no GI and caustics is set to ”Total Photons 1000 000 # to estimate the light 100″. What ever that means.
Then one more fast render with Photon mapping and the Ray Tree Depth set to 32. A bit noisy but the bulb looks way better.
Better lamp with Photon Mapping
For some reason I had huge problems rendering this scene. Global Illumination didn’t want to work at all, No Monte Carlo, No Ambient Occlusion. And if I tried to set Gloss & Translucency or Soft shadows, Rays to sample to 4 instead of default 1, it didn’t render anything, it just spent hours burning the processors at 100% and nothing came out.
Nevertheless I’m quite happy about the final result.
I used this Huuuge freebie hdri as an environment texture.
http://hdrmaps.com/freebies/urban-exploring-interior
And this photo by Andreas Praefcke as a backdrop. It’s just a flat splinemesh with image mapped texture. It’s not quite in right angle as you propably can see from the top right corner of theimage, but close enough to give the impression I was after.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scharffen_Berger_factory_6.jpg
So. Yeah. That’s about it.
Thank you for your interest. 
Yes, fellow Art of Illusioners, I’m learning Blender. I’ve joined the enemy. I’m a traitor and a backstabber. – NOT!
But yes, I’m learning Blender. I’ve been thinking about this for a looong time. I’ve had blender installed for years, but I never before decided to do anything with it.
Blender Master Class and a partial cup of Coffee.
Until few weeks back one of my AoI scenes expanded to a point that it seemed impossible to continue working with it. And far as I know it is not so much of a problem with AoI it self but with the Java running under it. Large complex scenes just aren’t a thing for AoI.
Don’t get me wrong. AoI is a remarkable piece of software, It’s highly portable, and it’s über easy to learn, compared for example to Blender. Which makes it kind of a ”Get the Job Done”- software.
AoI is at it’s best with projects where scenes are small, and number of objects in a scene stays reasonable. It is super good in single object scenes. There’s a lot you can achieve with AoI, and I’m sure I’ll keep on working with it, especially with PME and procedural textures. I just love those..
Anyhow, AoI just pushed me over the limit to do something about Blender.
Biggest reason I hadn’t done anything about it, is the notorius User Interface. I have had nightmares about it. The approach is so different to AoI. Sheer number of hotkeys you have to memorize to be able to do anything with it is… Oh my. My left hand hurts. Srsly.
To conquer the horrors of the UI I decided to buy a book. I gained my Photoshop skills from a book, so it felt like a good idea. The book I chose is ”Blender Master Class” by Ben Simonds. It seemed to be the latest Blender book, and the example projects in it were interesting. I believe I can learn as much about Blender as I learn about 3D modeling in general from that book.
Finally Today, Ive had few hours of time to study this, and doodle something together with Blender. Slowly figuring out the basic modeling tools. Can’t wait to get to the sculpting and texturing.
Here are some results of todays work.
Teddy bear coming on
Teddy bear has a soft pillow like belly.. And no head at all.
Hey folks!
Lately I’ve been working a lot with webpages, layouts themes and all kinds of webdesign related stuff. I’ve learnd a lot.
I also have had for some time this idea about a template which would use CSS3 property called ”column-count” to split body text into 3 or 4 columns.
This is the first beta version about the theme, and it is very unfinished. I named it Pamphlet Vol 2.
You may mess with the demo here
…and if you want to, you can download a nice zip from here.
Pamphlet Vol 2 theme preview
What I really hope is that You’d comment this one. I’d like to hear your suggestions or if there’s bugs or ridiculous mistakes in the html or the css. I tried to make it pure html5 and css3, but I can’t be sure about it. After all I’m not a professional at this. I’m mostly self-taught designer.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
Actually this thingy started, when I downloaded new version of Sculptris the other day. I toyed around with it and managed to sculpt a chunk that looked some what like a meteor. So I exported it to .obj and imported that to AoI to texture and render it there.
Then came a night that I couldn’t sleep, and since there was nothing on the telly (free DLC from finnish TV networks) I decided to rent a scifi movie to reset my brain. And that was ’the mistake’ that turned this into something that I can actually render. Still not happy about the ”Chunk” there, it looks so clumsy now. I may have to dump that in future versions or at least fix that texture.
Here’s the first render. Enjoy.
Something is going on around that blue giant.
And not just any motor but a V-Twin.
Modeled mostly from memory without any measurements or reference images. Like what just ”looks about right.” I’ve boldly combined here stuff that I know about chaisaws and Briggs &Stratton engines. So Forgive me all the inaccuracies.
V-Twin, Modeled, and rendered in Art of Illusion.