Playing with Clay.... Renders that is

A little re-posing and rendering of some old models here, read about a cool trick in Keyshot in an interview with Liz Kerby who said using the matte white plastic material with a black background creates a pseudo AO/clay render, it works a treat! I've always loved the way a clay/AO render complements the modelled forms and details, see what you think...

STARFISH SUB PHOTOSHOP BREAKDOWN

Out of all of my mechs this one seems to have generated the most interest and questions as to how I go about integrating the Keyshot render with a photo backplate to produce a "cinematic" visual. This is something I will cover in the upcoming video tutorials but until then I've reversed engineered my PSD file to create this breakdown of the sub visual. Hope you find this interesting and if you want to see more be sure to check out my Facebook Art page

Higher Res version here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7994921/big-page.jpg

More soon!!

www.facebook.com/chrisrosewarneart

Great White Chase!

Hi everyone! Been a while since I posted anything due to work commitments but thanks to many late nights I've finished another machine!

I saw this amazing footage of a simple underwater camera being attacked by a great white so I wanted to create a drone sub that would attract sharks but rather than passively get bitten it would speed off whilst keeping them close enough for some awesome predatory shark footage, so I designed something that housed twin impellers, an underwater HD camera and various sensory GPS equipment - to boil it down, I wanted to create visuals of a cool sub getting chased by a great white! :)

It was modelled in Sketchup and brought into KS for some sweet renders, I searched for photo ref of great whites and imported these to use as backplates in KS, I would find and adjust an HDRI to match the lighting to the photo, its great being able to edit the HDRI and add lights in KS5, made for much less re-lighting work in Photoshop! Loving Clown Pass renders too!!!!! The render was then taken into PS, the plate was extend with many elements added and removed, painted out/in and cropped to create that cinematic wide screen look. This is how I go about producing visuals on a film when I use KS.

Unlike previous posts which were all about the model and render in all its glorious detail, these were more about the "shot", but its interesting to see how easily you can comp in a  KS render what ever the brief....

Hope you like them

Chris

The Starfish

I was looking at some motorbikes last week and admiring the way the hard mechanics are complemented by the smooth glossy paintwork on the fiberglass body, certain areas are cut away to allow some engine parts to show, it left me with a feeling that I wanted to create something that had this seductive material combination, glossy plastic and hard machined metal... I started noodling ideas in my sketchbook and still had this tri-head mech design idea from before that I wanted to develop further so began to push this shape around, creating flowing panel lines to break up the fiberglass shells, and designing mechanical parts that would be repeated around a center - but what does the mech do....? This is probably the first time that I didn't have an idea but wanted to created interesting shapes to allow materials to be assigned and just look dam good when photographed! I created some sort of turbine elements and exhaust vents, so visually it implies some sort of flight/hovering function - a lab drone.....? Could be, I like that and it's very fitting in white, but I know I wanted to try some other colours, red is sexy, more of a nod to the Ducati bikes I was looking at, tried a yellow version and it reminded me of an ROV sub unit, so that was the theme of the environment paint up, couldn't resist putting a shark in there (Jaws still burnt into my brain from a childhood viewing...!)

Hope you enjoy it!

ROV

Mind the shark

Original SketchUp model

Idea and form that hatched in my sketch book