Archive for August 2010
Diseno-Art!
If you like me appreciate cool new concept cars, motorcycles and all things moving way to fast Diseno-Art is pretty cool place to keep track of. Editor Jeff Darling is a great guy always interested in new cool stuff. They recently featured my old Gent´s Racer (made back in 2007) and will be showing some of my bikes pretty soon.
BMW Gran Coupé
Why we love BMW!
This car already gives me the chills, even though I haven´t seen it.
Mr Anders Warming designed the first Z4, I still remember his brillant sketches. I´ll try to find them and post them here 😉
I´m really looking forward to see this new car, hopefully the concept will be well recieved and turned into production fast B-)
Bling bling inspiration
This blog in mainly about stuff that inspires me in my creative work so I thought this would be an appropriate post. Watches and high-end timepieces has always inspired me. I don´t know why but they really get my mind going. I belive that watches are one of the very few pieces of jewelry for men. We don´t wear expensive necklace, big diamonds (unless we´re 50 Cent or P Diddy) or bracelets, but we can wear a huge watch with alot of bling and still retain a masculine style.
My favourite brands are Breitling, IWC and Panerai. There´s no particular reason for this, I just like those watches. Breitling has just released a new chronograph called Chronomat B01. This is a beautiful watch! I saw it in real life last weeks and it looks awesome. Perfect shapes, beautiful dial, modern bezel, a true Breitling bracelet. This is inspiring for me!
Before & After
How much do you actually do in Photoshop?
What kind of work do you do in “post production”?
Is there alot of differance after you have “tweaked” the image?
Is it really worth the time and effort to go into Photoshop after the renderingen is completed…?
I consider my renderings that come from Hypershot, Vray or Mental Ray to be Raw-images. I treat them just like I would treat a Raw file from my Nikon DSLR (D90). The are a raw material that deserve alot of pixel brushing and color polish. I really love this process since it allows me to be very creative with colors, textures and details, it´s just so much fun!
The creativity doesn´t end when the rendering is complete and Hypershot says “Done”. This is just one phase in the imagemaking process. Post production/Compositing/Mattepainting are vital parts of the imagery pipeline. In most cases I tend to use at least 4-5 render passes that gets composited together using masks and blend modes to get the right color, nice shadows etc etc.
Thanks for reading,
Mike
Speck | Fitted Case for iPhone 4
I´m still waiting for my iphone 4, but I´ve already begun to research good cases and skins. You gotta protect this little piece of art you know. Speck has some very nice products, in particular the Fitted and the Feather. They are of high quality, great fit and nice design 🙂 We like!
Jason Castriota talks about SAAB (pretty good actually).
Saabs new designboss talk about aero heritage, driver centered cockpit and a very prominent C-pillar. Even though I´m not a big Saab-fan I must say that I really like how this cool dude presents his new employer! It is definately worth taking a look at 😉
Try this!
Everyone that knows just a little bit about how I work, knows that I talk alot about how Hypershot has revolutionized my workflow. This fantastic app has been my weapon of choice for all my renderings for the last 2 years! Bunkspeed has just released Hypershoot´s successor SHOT which gives us an even more refined, tuned, simplified and improved application. SHOT has entered the office! This is Bunkspeeds new stand-alone rendering application and it kicks butt I can tell you. Basically everything that I wanted to add/change/improve in Hypershot has been fixed 😀
The trial is ready for you to download here
Rendering process…?
I get so many question about how I do my renders so I thought I´d give you a written summary of my working procedure, I hope it will help you 🙂
1. I build all models using either Maya or Max, it doesn´t matter what app you use. I use polygons for all my modeling just because it´s so flexibel, so simple. When I open up my 3D app I rarely know exactely what to build and how to do it. For that simple reason polygons are perfect for me. They allow me to tweak, bend, stretch, add, remove, bevel, weld, smooth in a way that NURBS never could (at least not for an amateur like me).
When the model is completed I assign different materials to every part of the model and export it as an Obj file.
2. Now it´s time to launch Shot (or Hypershot or Keyshot). I use this renderer because it gives me so much freedom to play with the image. It´s so easy to assign different materials, play around with various HDRI-environments and so on. I usually spend quite some time experimenting to find a good setup. It´s very important to find a good camera angle, decide on what kind of lens to use to portray the design in best possible way.
3. When I have found a setup that I like I output a couple of different variations of my image using different material and perhaps some tweaked lightning. This can be done by simply setting the real time resolution to something like 4k, or just doing straight ahead renders (at high res).
4. When this stage is done all these images are assembled into one file Photoshop. Now I start to select which colors and shaders that work best together, I play with different blend modes, do alot of color correction to the individual layers and just have fun. It´s important to find a well balanced color palette, to tune the curves to get good values etc etc.
When this stage is done I start to add textures, paint in new details, fix errors and remove ugly render artifacts.
This stage is probably the most fun, it´s great to watch the image come together with all details, textures and light corrections.
5. When the image is done, or kinda done, I make some final grading and apply some different sharpening techniques (High pass, Unsharp mask and paint daubs).
Done!
This was a very short and compressed note about my rendering process but I hope it helps 😉
I will probaby do a short video covering the same process pretty soon, so stay tuned 😀
Concept Design & Inspiration 
