Black Arts & Strange Fruits

Black Arts web site has been featured on the excellent design blog Strange Fruits - they even said it was "elegant". I'm blushing.

The Strange Rick Griffin Homage

Finally got round to uploading this. Hopefully Mister Griffin would approve. ;)

Dental as Anything

Saturday morning - got up at stupid o'clock and legged it through to Glasgow for the Scottish Wedding Directory Show with Spring Grove. Naturally they all looked like they'd just stepped out of a spa and we looked like and felt like we'd been abducted and expertly beaten up by the KGB before being dumped back in our beds after two hours' sleep. Which is why I'm not in the photos.



Gill, Colleen and Naomi arriving at the show, fresh as daisies!



The lovely stand, courtesy of Davy Peters.



Detail from the stand.



The grrrrrls getting warmed up: (left to right) Colleen, Naomi, Paula, Dawn and Nicola



The gang's all here: (left to right) Dawn, Colleen, Paula, Naomi, David, Natalie, Gillian and Nicola. If you look closely this shot also captures a rare instance of Davy Peters in the wild.




Last but not least: cameras are funny things and are picky about who they make look good. It's been great fun shooting the Spring Grove staff, almost all of whom have that mysterious quality and take a great picture with almost no effort. But a special mention must go to Nicola here, who is just brilliant to photograph and has a totally natural way of lifting her chin and turning to a good angle when she smiles which makes every shot a cracker. I could just shoot her all day. (okay enough creepy stalking)

Editing and effects for Spring Grove!

Lots of computers + a couple of terabytes of disks + lots of luck and guts = Dave & Steve getting stuck into editing the video and adding overlays, effects and titling for the Spring Grove Clinic videos. Yummy!

Flash Particle Wipe Effect

Lunch hour well spent yesterday: a nice wipe effect with flaking particles in Flash. Coming soon: an After Effects version with Trapcode Particular. Probably.

Shooting Spring Chicks

Great fun at the video & photo shoot for Spring Grove clinic on monday - here are some of the retouched shots. Looking forward to working with Nat, Naomi, Nicola and the others this Monday!

WIP: the strange Rick Griffin homage

Just a quick post with WIP on the homage to psychedelic legend Rick Griffin which I'm working on. Griffin sadly died in a motorbike accident in 1991 at the age of just 47 but I'd like to think that if he was still working today he'd had thrown himself into the weirdness of digital 3D with great enthusiasm.

So far so good: a nice eyeball based on my original sketch and the rest is coming along nicely. More to come later!

Vue from the top

Since it's the holidays, I've got around to spending some time tinkering with another one of those 3D programs I like so much, and writing up a little bit about it.

This one's called Vue and it's from E-On software. They bill it as "digital nature" software, which in plain english means it's a landscape generator. Fellow old farts like me will remember a package called KPT Bryce from the mid nineties which did roughly the same thing (Bryce still exists by the way as the property of DAZ software and is well worth playing with) and Vue owes that dinosaur a lot for its evolution.

The work flow is simple: pick a sky with sun, clouds and mist, add seas, land and mountains as you see fit, sprinkle it with trees, bushes and flowers then render it all. If that sounds suspiciously like good fun, it's because it is - great fun! You'll definitely feel a bit god-like as you create and alter your own little worlds. The package does manage a neat trick: it's very good at producing instant results with masses of preset skies, clouds, mountains and materials to choose from but if you want to you can actually tweak every minute detail of the environment to get exactly what you want - this is no toy, the software is apparently well-used by film studios to produce landscapes for special effects.

So far so good; it's fun to use, clever, intuitive and can produce pretty incredible results.

So what's the downside? Well, there are a couple of issues that keep this from wider use. Most important is that the ability to create new objects is limited - terrains and simple solids are easy enough but that's about it. If you want anything even remotely sophisticated - the spray cans in my examples were created and textured in Maya - you'll need another package with a proper modeller. Vue can import most common file types though (I used .obj) so it's not a disaster.

The other niggle is a real double-edged sword. As I said earlier the renderer is great at producing instant results and it has a range of environment types which simulate physical lighting conditions. Most will be familiar to experienced 3D users - radiosity, global illumination and spectral models. These can be selected and swapped in a couple of clicks and generally produce good results. This is great for beginners and the time-poor but if you're used to using Mental Ray or another third-party renderer the lack of fine control will quickly grate. In short if you like the ground-up approach of Mental Ray, you probably won't like the renderer much, but if you think MR is fiddly, you'll love it. The renders generally have a pretty distinctive quality which marks them as being Vue images, but that's true of most renderers and not really a criticism.

So all in all, it's a bit of a conundrum. I definitely recommend it even if you just want to have some fun and it should find a place in most 3D users' collections as an alternative renderer once in a while. But since you'll need to already have a separate program for modelling anything beyond the most basic, you'll probably use it less than you might like.