Some Sample Furniture Asset Renders

Here's some first-stage renders for some of the furniture pieces I've been working on - So far, even with low-res texture maps they're coming out very well I think.  I'm surprised at how reasonably convincing they are, even at this low-res stage.

Terrain Test

While working on some rocks for MediaLab, I decided to do some research into how other people have created rocky environments that are both quick to make and to render - I found one method that uses an asteroid generator script at http://vray.info/tutorials/vrayrocks/default.asp and did a quick test. 

To make the scene only took about 10 minutes, and render time was just under an hour.  There's still some geo tearing from the displacement but the method centers around using a combination of bump and displacement maps to generate the rocky surface.  It's a technique I applied to the rocks I was working on, and even on a smaller scale like lawn decorations it produces a good, convincing result.

Final Flat layout

I followed some design cues from the site concepts to help tie them together, but it still follows the earlier design.

Site Layout design

 I've created a site layout - I'm keeping the clean style of the logo + card and flat concepts but have added a sun-yellow color to break up the otherwise dull greyscale.

Final Card and Layout Design

I've finalized the designs for the card and layout page - In doing so I created a new logo to better reflect the type of work that I do.

Here's the reworked logo, as a composition it's been simplified but retains the same basic shape, and the circular objects have been re-rendered as cogs.

Cards and Flat-Layout Concepts

I've put together these concepts for a business card and a Flat-book layout to use with rendered images, both are simple but follow the same pattern.

With the card, I have the overall design as a concept I'm content with, but I'm also looking into vertical layouts, hence the two examples.  The design and coloring carries over to the flat layout here:

I've decided to have the info-bar float rather than lay flush with the bottom of the page because it feels as though it takes up less space than a flushed sit, and also gives an impression of depth over the rendered image - I found it to be more appealing this way.  I'm using a cropped version of the logo because in order to fit the entire thing in the bottom bar it would be too small, and it also breaks up the invisible bordering of the text, preventing over-repetition while still tying it into the card design.

Bacteriophage Geometry Finished

Between school projects I've finished the base model for the Bacteriophage.  So far it's been an interesting project, but not as challenging as I had imagined.  Soon I'll be augmenting it with a proper rig to animate how it delivers its DNA to a host cell, but for now it's largely static.  Although it is mostly complete at this stage, some tweaking and reworking may go into it as the project progresses further.

The one part of the model that really had me sit and think about how to go about making it was the main body connecting the base and head.  All of the references I found showed the body with spherical structures arrayed in a spiraling pattern leading from the top to the bottom.  I did several tests with a cylinder as a base before I had a flash of memory to a school project where we learned one way to model a car tire; In that project we essentially made a small section of the tire, duplicated that section into a strip, and then used a bend modifier to bring it around into a ring.

I used the same method for the Bacteriophage body, but started with two strips offset by half the width of one single face in order to produce the spiraling pattern as opposed to straight up and down rows, which you can see below.

I then used the bend modifier to bring the ends of this strip around and duplicated the resulting shape downwards to assemble the body.  After that was done, I set about shaping the head - A very quick task since it was simple, a closed hexagonal shape.

The next step was assembling the baseplate, and in doing so I kept in mind that organisms this small tend to have bodies shaped following strict geometric rules, and so used the head as a lead and began modeling a base.  The only issue I found was that some references showed it as a solid cylinder, but others showed it as a complex knot of shapes, so I made a compromise between the two and created a spoked design.  I also noticed on some of the more detailed references that there was an outer and inner ring to the structure, and just like the structures of the body I had the connecting arms of the two rings offset to be halfway between one another.

Here you can see the un-smoothed baseplate, not too complex but it did take a bit of figuring to work properly.    The overall model had a mesh smooth modifier applied to provide a more organic shape to the model.