I got back home today, after being on the road for a few days during the Christmas holiday. One of the two December holidays are over anyway. Now I just gotta make it through New Years Eve alive as well and everything will be just excellent.

The first thing I did when getting back today, was booting up my workstation and got working on a new female character. I’ve just spend about 2 hours so far, but blocked out most of her proportions, made some basic facial features and added some dummies as clothing placeholders. I’m pretty happy with the overall progress so far.

I am going to need this girl for a project pretty soon, so I hopefully wont delay this one, so I’ll just take this opportunity and post this fist work in progress image, and get back to work.

Overall proportions in place and first simple clothing added, so I can start detailing.

I’ll tune her proportions some more, and add in all details to the clothing. And then finally give her face the appearance and features I want. That should be the end of the modeling part me thinks and I can move on to texturing her. This is going to be some sort of 3D toon / semi-realistic style. At least that’s what I have in mind right now. Let’s see when the next update comes, soon.

Working Music: The White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan

Oh yes, the living room is finished. I made some final adjustments on the color scheme from the the last work in progress image and also added a bottle of wine and a decorative bowl placed on the cupboards.

A version in higher resolution can be seen in my portfolio. Also feel free to see how it evolved in my Work in Progress images. This was just a personal project of mine where I wanted to test out a couple of things. Time flies and 2006 wasn’t a very productive year for my website, yet. But there is still two weeks left. ;) I’ll actually take some time now and prepare some more things to update the website with and set my CG pace for the next year.
As mentioned some blog entries back, I’ve have a filmmaking project in the pipeline, and I’ll post more about that in January, and before December ends I’ll try to get another character and another environment online.

Stay tuned, I’ll soon post some more about everything mentioned above, and in the meantime, enjoy this image, I hope some of you out there will like it.

Until next time, take care and live life well!

Working Music: Stan Getz - Utopia
(Of course, I needed the jazz when finalizing this image)

Here’s a new update of the living room. I did some major redesign of the mood in the room. Changed the location to a city night shot, in a more pleasant area than the industrial view. I also completely changed the color scheme of the image, to a more pleasant combination.
Almost done now, just gonna add some small detail objects, some minor texture tuning and then do the final render of the image.

Working Music: Slagsmålsklubben - Den Svenske Disco

Alright, I’m back, a few days later than expected, but now I’ve started texturing and lighting the living room. It’s a pretty basic daylight lighting at the moment. I’m thinking of taking this image into a nighttime shot instead.
I still though have to work a bit more on the textures, and add some objects for detailing the image so the room doesn’t look to empty. I’ll continue working on this image tonight, and hopefully post the final image tomorrow. Stay tuned for another update soon.

Working Music: Baby Shambles - Down in Albion

An evening a few weeks back I started working on this living room. Then I didn’t touch it until today. Other things have come in between, like my daytime job. And the last two weeks I have been doing some house cleaning, I’ve gone through every image and animation I’ve done since the 90’s and sorted all renders and all 3D files in a very structured way. It was kind of a mess before. And that feels pretty good to have everything I’ve ever done in order.
I’ve also kept myself busy with some independent filmmaking. But, that I’ll write more about in another blog entry later on.

Anyway, so I loaded up the scene file for the living room I started some time ago and continued working on it tonight. The last time I just blocked out how I wanted the overall layout. So tonight I spent some time sculpting in some details in the objects that were present in the scene. The modeling went pretty quickly, so tomorrow I’ll get very close to finish this image, as I’ll be doing the texturing and lighting. And maybe add some final details and props into the scene.

Now it’s actually starting to look like furniture.

Working Music: Elliott Smith - XO

A very interesting site surfaced the other week, dedicated to the sphere. Check out the site over at CGSphere.

“Sphere: [sfeer, noun] a space or solid enclosed by a surface, all points of which are equidistant from the center. - The Penguin Concise English Dictionary

The sphere is arguably one of the most basic and fundamental primitives in computer graphics. Its uniformly curved structure allows for wide field of view coverage, as well as full diffuse tonal range shading. When reflective, its convex shape can reveal more of it’s surrounding environment than any other primitive, and when refractive it can bend surrounding light into a single concentrated caustic point. The sphere is an inherent form chaotically evident in nature and continually apparent in man-made designs. From the smallest atomic structures to the largest planetary globes, the sphere continues to be perhaps the most common geometric form in existence.

The Sphere Project is a website dedicated to the evolution of technical and creative 3D sphere design. The purpose is simple; to create the most captivating and visually appealing sphere from our provided scene using your 3D program and renderer of choice. We encourage everyone to submit his or her renders regardless of their skill level so long as they adhere to the rules. However, those with the best renders will receive the highest ratings and possibly make the front page. Your goal is to rise to the top, through the use of clever ideas, thoughtful execution, technical expertise, and dazzling presentation.”

Above is the basic 3D scene provided to create something imaginary out of. I think I will take a few hours to give it a shot and see what I can come up with. I love the idea behind this project. So simple, so intriguing.

Woah, I finally got disillusioned. I’ve had a brownish design of artstorm over the last years. But a few month back I killed it of for a lighter white design for the reasons I wrote about in this entry, artstorm is dead, long live artstorm. Well, a few months later when I’ve got some perspective to the design and been living with it over the time, I realized that I never got the cosy at home feeling with it. I simply didn’t like it.
So I took some time this weekend to fix it to something I like, so here we go again. Coffee colors all over the place. And oh, I like it so much more. So this new look will be the one that will be here to stay for quite some time. I also took the opportunity to fix some other problems that have been a disturbance to me and also removed all transitional HTML code and rewrote all pages to XHTML 1.0 Strict/CSS. The blog software also got updated to the newest version at the same time.
So bye bye, artstorm light…

Designing Music: Caesars Palace - Cherry Kicks

Oh yes, I really couldn’t help myself. I’ve been glaring at those 24″ screens for too long now to resist it anymore. I’ve been running 24″ at work for some time, and really enjoy the extra size. And it’s been pretty lousy sitting at home staring at the same resolution of 1920×1200 at my laptop 17″ screen. So now when Dell had a good deal at their new 2407wfp screen I jumped on the train and ordered one which arrived yesterday.

I’m already in love. It’s so pleasant to work in front of. Now my upgrading frenzy will have to rest for a while so I actually get some time over to get some work done in the evenings.

The refurbished workspace in my apartment with the new baby.

Luckily I got the rev A03 of the screen, which all of the problems that I’ve read about with earlier revisions of vertical banding and such are nowhere to be seen, the image quality is as close to perfect as it can be, according to me and my preferences.

Oh well, back to doing some artwork now… until next time…

Weee, I got around and upgraded my old workstation this week. I’ve been running on a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a Pentium M 2.0GHz processor for about a year now. It has served me well, but I have been drooling to get a Core Duo processor since it’s release. And now when the Core 2 Duos where available I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Anyway, I got my new Dell Inspiron 9400 the other day with a Core 2 Duo processor and some other goodies, and have spent the last days configuring it. It does take some time to set up all my software from scratch on a new machine, but finally everything is perfect, just the way I like it.

The creative corner in my apartment.

The new Core 2 Duo processor really is a dream come true. It renders about three times faster than my old PM 2.0. I haven’t had this huge leap in rendering performance since the middle 90’s in the Lightwave 4.0 era, when I made the jump from my trusty old Amiga 4000T with a 060 processor to my first Windows based workstation, a Pentium 133MHz machine which were running circles around my Amiga when using Lightwave.

Now more than ten years later, that feeling has emerged again. It’s a joy to press the F9 button to render and have blazingly fast results pumped out to the screen.
Some quick numbers I did to compare the Pentium M 2.0 and Core 2 Duo 2.0 when rendering the same scene in a couple of 3D applications on both the PM and the C2D, both machines are equipped with 2GB RAM.

• LightWave 9; PM: 39 minutes - C2D: 15 minutes.
• Modo 202; PM: 4 minutes - C2D: 1 minute 32 seconds.
• Vue 5 Infinite; PM: 7 minutes 42 seconds - C2D: 3 minutes 13 seconds.

Wonderful difference, and will make a big impact on my workflow. I couldn’t be happier with this upgrade. Also the GeForce 7900 GS card in the machine makes the OpenGL viewports a joy to throw real heavy meshes at.
Just drooling over a 24″ screen to go with this setup on my desk sometime in the future.

Setting up music: Anna Ternheim - To Be Gone (EP)

Well, I was pretty pleased the other day when I finished a new image. The living room image I just posted to the portfolio pages. It was actually the first portfolio update I’ve done since the year 2004. Time flies, doesn’t it?
But well, this really got my juices flowing. And I started looking around for all my old sketches, ideas and searched deep inside my own mind, looking for those disturbed ideas I have laying around in all those dark places.
I really feel inspired to get my creations going again, and will continue posting work in progress here and new images to the portfolio regularly.
I have so many ideas, so I have a hard time knowing where to start. Shall I begin with my mentally disordered characters? My angry bird collections? The nudity thing for all pinup lovers out there? Or just some plain viz stuff?

Had some thought and decided that I will do some hard surface scenes to begin with. Arch viz and maybe some vehicle. Just to get up to speed with my different tools I prefer to work with and to try out some new things. Will probably be two to three viz scenes, and maybe one vehicle scene. None of these takes that much time to complete (says the optimistic guy), and I feel I’d like to have some of that work published here as well, to weigh up from my other works that are more of a personal nature.

I’ll definitely get into characters in the month, and go from there. Won’t speculate to much right now, but in a few weeks, time will tell.

Anyway, wanted to continue doing interiors at the moment, and I decided to go for another living room. I just started it and put together a quick scene to block out the proportions of the intended furniture. And get a feel for how I want it laid out. This is going to be somewhat of a more modern living room than my last one.

First wip - laying out the overall proportions and placements.

With the proportions in place, I’ll now get into modeling the actual detailed geometry and think of the design for the different pieces of furniture. I’ve a pretty good picture in my head of how I want the end result to turn out.

Working Music: Hello Saferide - Introducing
(Still into this… Mmmmm)