Lava Cavern Environment

This was the environment I was working to create while at Red Star 3D. I stumbled upon this image on my memory stick so thought I might post it. My favourite part was creating the atmosphere with fog and lighting. The thing that could be improved most was the lava texture but at the time that was placeholder.

Animation Test of Motorbike

This is a test of the kind of animation I think James is looking for. Will send this over to him just to show what I did as a first test.
Obviously there is the rest of the bike to do. But this short video is proof of concept.

Visit to Renfrew

I recently visited a company called Renfrew Group International. They are a product design/engineering office and workshop based in Leicester and they gave me a guided tour and a look at how some of there work is created as well as their future plans.

They mainly work with CAD software and data so its a different kind of industry to what I am used to seeing or experiencing. However after a friendly chat with the Creative Projects Manager he kindly offered me a Model for me to experiment with and to ultimately create this 'Exploding' animation of a motorcycle.

This would involve creating some animations of the motorcycles parts individually separating out into all its separate components. Its an exciting project and is great to work with a model that is highly detailed.

The downside is that the model is an exported .obj from the CAD software, so it has messy topology and a thousand or so individual parts to control. The topology is fine however its more about organizing the parts and making sure each object has all the polygons it needs. It sounds complicated but really, its just a long process to tidy it up.

This is the bike itself, looking very realistic modelling wise. As well as the animation process I will need to assign realistic shaders which might be another big hurdle just because that is probably my weakest skill.

Underground Plan

I have been lacking updates recently. I intended to put up a post or two before but was too tired.

Anyway I have gone back to an earlier project to focus on some environment design. And really trying to focus on modelling, texturing and lighting as well. Hopefully this is a good path to lead me towards roles such as environment art, or environment assets.

I have kept the rough layout of the objects in the scene from my earlier concept frame, however this time I have changed the camera angle. I like it more and it means you can see more of the platform and more of the track at the same time. The tunnel to the left looks empty at the moment, but the curved track around will help disguise the emptiness as well as the train carriage will also block off some of the space.

This is intended for a single frame shot due to the nature of the set and composition, so I can really crank up the texture, modelling and lighting details. And I will be adding some things in post using photoshop to create glows from the lights, grain, chromatic aberation, dust as well as the usual colour correction.

The 2 main light sources I want in my scene will be the light coming from the floor above the platform and cascading down the stairs nicely highlighting the edges of each step as well as outline the column support and the vending machine. The second light source will be the few lights coming from the train itself, so the tunnel is dark, but the area leading from the tunnel to the current area of the station will be lit by a red and white glow, picking out some details below the platform. I plan to add more cables and electrical type boxes to add some much needed detail to part where the platform joins the train tracks ground.

Only a few models in the above shot are proxy's. The vending machine might be changed slightly but it depends how much detail I add with the texturing. The train will have a lot of detail than anything else, it will probably be the most poly intensive part of the scene.

I have been using some reference images for this but have been struggling to really decide what kind of underground station it is. Most of my designs are a bit of a mash up between american, french and british.