http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/ jamesmk's gallery of images en-us 120 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/612631

Mainly an unexpected detour while I was supposed to work on something else...

So, I'm doing some UV layouts for another project, and happen to pick up a few stray words from the TV (I always have audio switched on, but rarly actually watch anything...) - an old episode of 'Mythbusters', and someone mentions 'lava lamp' - of course, a second later a few of my neurons misfire, and I end up with this...

Modeled, painted and rendered in Cinema4D, sculpted in Mudbox.]]> Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:25:29 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/470295

Wanted to make my own version of an ancient bust of Aspasia, who was once upon a time busy doing... er... lots of stuff in ancient greece. Among other things, she was apparently married to Pericles at some point. Aspasia herself that is, not the bust...

Anyway - I found a photo of the original marble piece while browsing wikipedia a few days ago, and decided to give it ago. Unfortunately I was not quite capable of capturing the elusive beauty of the original, but I'm pretty satisfied with the final result none the less.

Technically, I roughed out a simple base mesh in C4D (around 1000 quads) and brought that into MudBox. Spent two days on and off merrily sculpting away, then extracted a 6144 x 2048 displacement map from the final 3.5 million poly sculpt, brought everything back into Cinema and painted a colour map in BodyPaint. The final lighting was a fairly simple setup with three fill omnis, one additional omni for some rim lighting, and a rather large rectangular arealight with areashadows for the key light.



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]]> Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:22:24 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/408387

Well, three days ago I got this sudden flash of inspiration, and simply HAD to make this still - preferably as fast as possible, since sudden flashes have a tendency to fade out rather quickly. Spent two days in 3D (Cinema 4D) and one day in photoshop, tweaking the living daylight out of the rendered passes.

The original idea itself called for mostly black and white with some accent colour, gritty noirish chiaroscuro, so I just went along with that, and tried to make something that was ugly yet aesthetically pleasing at the same time.

My intention is for this image to be mildly uncomfortable, a bit ambiguous, and perhaps slightly amusing, depending on how you look at it - so tell me what you're thinking...]]> Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:07:59 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/174320

Just got this idea about a really local weather system produced inside a glass jar... Being in a temporary "production mode", I tried to make it as fast as possible while maintaining a good quality - and ended up with a total of around 14 hours work (not including rendering of course).
Aside from standard C4D features, I've used PyroCluster for the smoke/cloud. The grass is generated polygons, around 220 K, and it's been rather heavily post processed to give a fluffy, toyish look.
Looking for overall crits and comments.
]]> Fri, 01 Oct 2004 18:17:43 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/304299

Just a quickie here based on models I've built for the last few challenges, and I just felt I should put them together in a new context somehow.
To avoid the "default type" car render, I decided to put a zombie driver behind the wheel.
]]> Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:26:57 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/211285

This image was entered for the Grand Space Opera Challenge. You can see the full entry here.
]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2005 04:53:35 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/167092

This image was entered for the Alienware Challenge. You can see the full entry here.
]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2004 06:50:58 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/211912

While I usually find some architectural renders interesting to look at, I've never actually had the desire to make one myself - - but then I got this idea about making something with major flaws; doors in the wrong place, stairs with less than optimal alignment and so on... and I came up with this after about four days of work.
The intention is to make something reasonably believable, yet hopefully giving the impression that "there's something seriously wrong with this picture".
Concept aside, it was a lighting excercise, mostly in terms of getting a nice result in the relatively large areas that only get indirect light. I used four cyan/blue area lights around the scene to get a diffuse daylight, a yellow/orange parallel spot with hard shadows for the sun, and six or seven omnis in various places for bounced light.
Aside from some ambient occlusion, it's traditionally lit, and finally rather extensively tweaked in photoshop using object buffers and a depth pass.
C & C welcome - particularly lighting related.
]]> Thu, 17 Feb 2005 23:46:53 +0000 http://jamesmk.cgsociety.org/gallery/455703

Just playing around with MudBox at the moment. It's truly an incredibly slick app.... In this case, I simply grabbed the base mesh from my version of Lanier (from the EON challenge) and gave him a good make-over in ye olde MB...]]> Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:27:52 +0000