Titus

New image... inspired by Titus Canyon in Death Valley. This summer I spent some time experimenting with Photogrammetry and created a bunch of assets such as tree trunks, logs, rocks and cliff faces. Fun to have an excuse to get in the car, find cool things and take a bunch of photos in order to build models with PhotoScan. This image incorporates a few, specifically the tree on the right, a couple small logs and rocks on the ground and the cliff wall on the left of the image... so about 35% of the screen real estate. The rest is made in Maya, ZBrush and a little bit of World Machine. Textures are a combo of 3D and some Photoshop overlays just to be quick about it.

Ladder Canyon: R2's journey to Mecca

This is a five mile hike near Mecca, CA... in the canyons east of the Salton Sea. The R2 that you'll spot is actually mine from when I was a kid... i.e. I've had that little dude since 1978...! He's a little battered and missing his middle foot, but holding on nonetheless... given that he's 37 years old. Oi... that's weird. Anyhow, this was an awesome hike, with various forks in the trail that were marked by arrows made out of rocks by past travelers. Without them it would have been easy to get very very lost... So thank you... whoever you are.

Death Valley

New galley in the photography section! Decided to try my hand at shooting bracketed photos for HDR tonemapping... so I drove out to Death Valley on a four day exploration. Album also includes some things along the way such as Vasquez Rocks, Fossil Falls and Mojave. Definitely was an inspiring journey... makes any attempt at digital landscape making seem a little futile. Heh. Turns out that HDR tonemapping is really fun but man... definitely just stepped into a rabbit hole! Time to figure out where i'm heading to next...

New DVDs on Creating Terrains

I just released a couple new DVDs on working with satellite data to create terrains using a variety of tools: Google Earth, The National Map, GlobalMapper, ZBrush, Maya, Photoshop and Mental Ray. There's over ten hours of lecture over the two titles, so a lot of info!

3D World Cover, December 2013

I was comissioned to create a cover illustration for 3D World magazine, which was a lot of fun. The editor Ian Dean contacted me asking for 'a stone head in a jungle'. I ended up having about three weeks to create the image, so a lot of late nights as I used this project to finally delve into SpeedTree... which is awesome. I also wrote a four page tutorial on the creation of the image for the issue. It was an honor to be asked, and hopefully I can do something for them again one day!

Forest Path

I've been obsessing over natural environments lately, developing my workflow for plants/trees and techniques for object placement. Maya, Mental Ray, Paint Effects, Onyx and a little Zbrush for the path. 110 million polys. Rendered with physical sun/sky and all miaMaterialX. Surprised by how many polys I can throw at Mental Ray!

Gathering

New image made with Zbrush, Photoshop, Bodypaint and Maya/Mental Ray. This project started as an interest in trying out Dynamesh, an amazing new modeling methodology in Zbrush. I started with a sphere, which become the demon, and then decided to give him a place to exist. Learned a lot about rocks/plants/etc and now feel way more comfortable with the mia_materials. Hope people dig it... was a lot of fun to make!

Fast Company praise for Gnomon!

Well this was a surprise... Fast Company magazine recently announced their list of the ten most innovative companies in film, which included Gnomon! Weird but very cool... my sincere thanks to them for the accolade! Click here to check out the complete list.

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