After a serious sinus operation in January, I have been resting at home since then, trying to recover. Last week, I was able to sit at my workstation for few hours and have finished up this tutorial which I had started some time ago but hadn't any time to finalise.
So would like to say Hello back with a new tutorial:
Hope you find it useful and all your feedback is welcome.
I was a guest instructor at University of Venice (IUAV) , a breathtaking experience with brilliant people. I missed my university days again but this time I was on the other side, lecturing to master degree architecture students. The lecture was about Advanced Vray Materials and Shader Techniques, 2 days, 16 hours of lecture on some techniques for building complex shaders.
It has been long time, I couldn't post to my blog as I didn't have time with many sweet changes in my life. Today I publish my new web site with a new design. I transfer my site to Squarespace.
Another news is that after many people asking me and telling me to have a Facebook account, I also signed into Facebook now. I have a new facebook page now which will show updates on my blog and web site. So if you are facebook user, feel free to check out my Facebook page too.
I have been in Almhult Sweden in 2012, freelancing for Ikea ICOM and had a nice oppurtunity to work for the Ikea 2013 Catalogue together with a team of many great artists and nice friends. I would like to share with you some of the images I have worked on being a part of this nice team with all interior designers, graphic desginers, 3d artists, copywriters, re-touchers, art-directors and project leaders in Ikea ICOM.
Alberto Mera from Interior Deck team contacted me and informed me about INTERIORDECK INTERNATIONAL STUDENT DESIGN CONTEST, which I would like to share with you on my blog.
It is an bi-annual contest for interior design and architecture students. At the beginning of every semester, a project which could be a house, a restaurant, an office, etc. is presented and the participants are asked to design the interiors. The projects are always fictional; and a series of requirements should be fulfilled. For every contest there is a professional jury based on the country the project takes place.
The current contest is called Snow Haven. The project to be designed is a house placed in the Aran Valley (Vall d’Aran), in the Catalan region, surrounded by 3,000-metres peaks and more than 200 lakes.
For further details of the project, contest and the prize and jury, you can visit www.interiordeck.com
Wish is my latest scene, that I was not able to write in detail about it although I have published it on my portfolio few weeks ago. This personal project is a set of images to celebrate Christmas and New Year. I was too busy before holidays so couldn't manage to finish the project on time, and then during the holidays I spent time with my family instead of my pc. I was able to publish the scene in Mid-January.
I was inspired by some photos which I encountered on the Internet on various photography, design, and/or furniture blogs/sites. Unfortunately I made a mistake not to take note of the name of the site for each image as I save to my hard disk.
All rendered with Vray, with different lighting and render settings. The images each took about 30-45minutes to render. The tiles at the kitchen render are done with Mighty Tiles which is a very useful plugin if you need to make some realistic tiles.
You can also see some wireframe images below.The fun part of the project was the texturing. I like painting textures in Photoshop a lot. It gives a certain freedom.
I wish everyone a happy 2013 full of happiness and time with your loved ones.
Today I would like to talk about Relink Bitmaps, a tool that I can't do without a day. It is a very useful script which helps you easily relink all missing files (Bitmaps, VRayMeshes, Mental Ray Proxies, VRayHDRI, IES, etc) when they change directories or when you move computers. Using this script it is just to find the missing resources and associate with your file again. The author is Colin Senner who is a very helping person whenever you need help.
I can't imagine my workflow without this tool. You can assign directories as search paths and configure the script. Here is a video to have a better understanding of the script.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxfqodWjd4
And the Link for Colin's site and the script is:
http://www.colinsenner.com/scripts/relink-bitmaps
A space, a work corner I designed for my own. When I was designing this corner area, I made a fast 3D render just as a design aid to get a better picture. Then I decided to add some more elements and turn it into a full 3d scene. Again I was playing with all the colored pencils and markers and felt pens. Both the real and the 3D corner evolved a little differently than the original concept but I like both. And my workstation is not an Apple but I do have colored pencils and markers on my desktop. I wish I had the Tolomeo ... But I discovered that modeling furniture pieces I love gives me such pleasure as having one at home or in the office :) Strange but true.
I presented the breakdown of this scene during the State Of Art Academy Day 3 Conference in Venice in the beginnnig of October 2012.
You can find and download the slides which explain the production stages from modeling to texturing to lighting at State Of Art Academy site.
http://www.stateofartacademy.com/ad3-interviews-pixela/?lang=en
This is an imaginary photo-shoot space/studio I created and prepared for the display of bed products.It is a commissioned scene. I rendered some more cameras to test my models I created with Marvelous Designer and the different cloth shaders I created. I was experimenting with satin-silk, velvet & cotton cloth shaders and how they react to light.
I intended to make a nice morning light for this scene.
I am very much interested in mythology and I was reading about Eos and come up with amazingly beautiful descriptions which inspired me a lot. Eos is the Goddess of Dawn and is called Aurora in Roman mythology. There are very sweet descriptions of her in Iliada, She is a rosy-fingered, saffron-robed and golden-throned goddess and she opens the gate of heavens for the sun to rise. She is the bringer of light and her tears are considered to have created the morning dew. I was very inspired with things I read and I wanted to create a rosy-fingered lighting and ambiance in this bedroom. It is a commercial scene so the bedcover and bed is nice and tidy.
The name of the scene comes from the word rosy-finger in ancient Greek rododaktilos but instead of daktilos I used half of the word finger and liked the sound of this new word.
I used Marvelous Designer to create realistic duvet , pillows and bed-linen both in close ups and futher away. I made many close-up renders to check how they look under different light directions and POV and even how they behave even with slight changes of the camera.
My interview at Evermotion has been published today:
http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/show/7995/alfa-smyrna-interview
When I was modeling a sofa the other day, I collapsed one of the meshes which has a Turbosmooth modifier in Isoline Display. In fact, I didn't notice until this time that there is a bug and I didn't even notice the buggy result at that moment. Probably I was in edge mode and when I noticed the outcome pretty later that it was too late to undo.
The image above shows the problem. As you can see, the new edge loops are not there but only the vertices.
It is a very easy fix with a simple box model, but I had a complex mesh which was really hard to fix and which would take a lot of time.
I was very lucky to find this script which saved my day:
Vertex Killer by Mauricio B. Gehling
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/vertex-killer
This tool will remove any SELECTED vertices that are shared by ONLY and EXACTLY 2 edges. Thought it might be very useful for someone who collapses the Turbosmooth in isoline display.
Slides of my presentation at Academy Day3 are ready for download from the State of Art site:
http://www.stateofartacademy.com/ad3-interviews-pixela/?lang=en
The pack consists of all the slides I presented for Making Of Boho scene with all the modeling, texturing, lighting stages.
During my presentation in AD3 in Venice on 04.10.2012, I introduced few scripts that I use frequently in my workflow. Many friends were very interested and asking me about these scripts so I decided to write about these useful tools on my blog as well.
The first tool was QuadChamfer wich you can find the related post here.
Second tool is the great Layer Manager by Blur Studios: The Onion
The Onion was originally created by David Humphres from Blur Studio and Paul Hormis from Hyperbolic Enterprises made it compatible with 3dsMax 9 and above and he is currently maintaining it.
It is a free tool which you can download from Hyperbolic Enterprises.
It is a great tool for managing your layers. I use a lot of layers for my architectural visualisation workflow and The Onion for me is the best way to work with layers. It is very easy to turn on/off, freeze,unfreeze layers with one click and nest and group layers. With just one click you can turn on/off grouped layers and easily select contents of a layer or move selected objects from one layer to another.
I can't think of my day without The Onion and I would like to thank both Blur Studios and Hyperbolic Enterprises for this tool very much.
Here is the quick help for you to find your way around:
During my presentation in AD3 2012 in Venice, I introduced few scripts that I use frequently in my workflow. Many friends were very interested and asking me about these scripts so I decided to write about these useful tools on my blog as well.
The first one is the Quad Chamfer by Marius Silaghi.
I have been using this tool since earlier versions and recently it has also become a modifier. This useful tool makes your modeling faster and easier by helping you to eliminate tris and n-gons in your chamfer and it helps you chamfer in quads (4-gons.) Anyone who is into poly-modeling well know that when chamfering complex shapes, we come across a lot of tris or n-gons which are not favored by the Turbosmoth or in other words, subdivision methods. With quad chamfer, I get nice quads very easily and I use this a lot.
Another useful benefit of the script is that you can add your chamfers as modifier and they will appear on the modifier stack which makes it possible to go back and tweak this chamfer value again and again. There are different methods for chamfering: such as with edge weights. User interface and plugin is pretty straight-forward aand very easy to use. You can visit Marius Silaghi's web site and buy this great tool there:
I was in Venice on last weekend and had great time attending State Of Art Academy Day3 as one of the guest speakers with Peter Guthrie, Adam Hotovy, Tomek Miksa and Ronen Bekerman. I felt very happy to meet a lot of friends in real after being friends online for long time. And it was very fun to make new friends of course ! Days in Venice was like 3D Heaven where there are a lot of artists from all over the world. And everyone is talking about 3D. There was so much to share with each other, and ask each other and conversation never stops.
Another very interesting thing was to watch different workflows and approaches from different artists and how everyone has his/her own way. It was nice to watch how our works and workflows become distinguishable with the personal ways and styles.
I liked so much to be in Venice and our dear friends from State Of Art, Gianpiero Monopoli, Roberto De Rose, Manuela Grandesso and Riccardo made us feel at home with the sweet smiles and all their welcome and care.
And last but not the least, I love all the pasta and pizza and spritz and wine. Now looking forward to AD4 and already counting days down.
