A friend of mine wanted a background for his new phone, and after way too much time spent thinking about what I wanted to make for him, I had a revelation while working on a similar project for an Xbox One theme. This image was created in blender using a basic cube and a bunch of modifiers to add geometry, displace it, and make it explode.
After seeing some renders by Oscar Leif via BlenderNation, I decided I'd try my hand at some of the techniques on display there: environment lighting, some simple node materials, and using texture nodes to create a checkerboard effect. After playing around a bit, this is what I came up with - a lineup of rooks using different materials and then rendered with environment lighting from an HDR
I've made quite a few geometric changes to my "Parks" Blender scene since the last update, but unfortunately, most of those are not visible in the render camera that I've been using to post project updates. I've made other changes that are very noticeable however, as you can see here.
In this version of the scene, I've replaced the old single-source sun lamp with an HDR environment lighting setup. The result is a much softer look to the light, but also a more realistic color. I've greatly reduced the saturation of the background color here as well.
I'm not sure if I'm ready to say this is how the lighting will look from this point forward, as I kind of liked the garish look of the bright blue, and the hard sunlight from before. Still, I think this was an interesting experiment, and may lead to a better lighting setup for this project in the future.
The image data I used to create the HDR lighting can be found at the HDRLabs HDRI archive. I used the one called "Bryant Park". They've got a wonderful collection of HDRI images there, all graciously provided for free. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it.
Here's the final of the poster I made for one of my ex-coworkers, who is at the 49ers/Seahawks game on Thanksgiving. Maybe they'll get it on TV!
Either way, you can enjoy it here now.
Here's another status update on what I'm calling "Parks" for now, a low poly art project I'm playing around with.
After a little more work, here's the final set of portraits to be used for the football sign I mentioned in the previous post. For any 49ers fans out there, do these guys look recognizable to you?
One of my former coworkers at CytoSport commissioned me (with beer) to create an illustrated sign for her for an upcoming 49ers game. Here's a work-in-progress image of some of the player portraits for the image.
This is another graphic I created for a podcast I frequently listen to, this time for How Did This Get Made? You'd have to listen to the Monkey Shines episode to get the full context for this graphic, but I recommend it - it's a great podcast all around.
This image was created as an idea for a t-shirt graphic and was unsolicited.
This was a graphic I created for one of my favorite podcasts of the moment, Matt & Mattingly's Ice Cream Social. The quote at the bottom of the graphic is a quote from the show.
I created this unsolicited and sent them the artwork when I was finished. I hope they use it for something fun!
This is a quick render of a Blend file I've been playing around with in my spare time recently. I was feeling inspired after seeing a simple landscape painting at one of my wife's relative's houses.
The idea I'm pursuing with this project is to organically add things to the scene as I see fit. I'm keeping everything to a relative scale, but not worrying much about keeping things on the grid or being precise about placement.
I'll post more later as I continue!