There has been some unhealthy long periods of silence between my posts lately. The usual reason, commissioned work has kept me a busy bee. CG artists need to make a living as well - bills, bills and bills - unfortunately.

Some of my paid gigs are interesting and challenging though - gives me opportunities to tune my skills and dive into creating pieces using all my arsenal of CG tools which I might not have gotten into if I only worked with my personal projects. But still, some of the things I have planned to do for myself I really long to do. I’m working on a solution to switch between gigs and personal projects more freely, which seems to actually work out and become reality.

Anyway, I’ll probably be able to get back into posting regularly again, at least a few times a week. Starting from today. So now I don’t have any choice to not post, do I?

Even though my postings have been sparse I’ve spent a lot of my free time working on my projects. One of my different short films and animation projects have progressed rapidly, and I registered a new domain name for it a few days back, so it’s getting ready to be revealed real soon. Just a few weeks away for the initial release.

I’ve also been working a lot with my CG character development. Updates to those will be posted shortly. Just a quickie to go with this post to not make it completely boring without any images. A CG chick I’ve been trying out some things with in the last days. Modeling and sculpting is finished, currently working with textures and some hair guide styling.

A quick screenshot from the OpenGL view in LightWave with a temporary texture I’ve painted and the beginning of my hair guide styling.

Posting to be continued in the next days….

3D World issue 97 (December 2007) just went on sale, and I am delighted to have my The Pod Bay image published in this issue.

The Pod Bay was my contribution for the Vue 3D Environment Competition 2007 and ended up in the 3rd place. 3D World Magazine runs a print of the winning images in the current issue. So if you get your hands on the latest issue you’ll find my image there together with the two other winning images by Julien Chabot and Dimitar Tzvetanov. Great work by you guys and congrats in the competition!

3D World is a great magazine for any 3D Artist, so it’s well worth a read for more reasons just than looking at our Vue images. :)

A few days ago I posted an entry that my image, The Pod Bay, was selected as one of the twelve finalists in the Vue 3D Environment Competition 2007. Today, at Siggraph 2007 the final winners was announced. I was happy and surprised to see that my submission was selected as one of the three winners in the competition as second runner up.

The judges consisted of leading experts in the 3D entertainment industry coming from the companies - Industrial Light & Magic, LucasFilm Animation, Polygon Pictures, Electronic Arts, Psyop, Whiskytree, 3D World magazine and Softimage - motivated the choice of The Pod Bay as one of the winners with the following comments:

“A great work. Very interesting design and a great composition.”
“I like the fact that I’m wondering what they are. I keep feeling like they’re a part of a much bigger (science fiction) story that I’m not quite clued in to yet.”
“All parts are well-arranged to produce the impressive colors.”
“It vaguely reminds me of the Myst series of games!”

I needed to get up to speed with Vue and thought this competition was an excellent opportunity to spend some time with the software. This image was the result of some of my experimentation and it took me around one day to complete from start to finish. It was a very pleasant experience for me to get to know Vue better. It’s a very capable application and amazing in many ways, and I will for sure make it an integral part of my pipeline for upcoming work.

I didn’t want to make just a plain landscape render, so I came up with this idea of some Alien Pods populating my environment to bring some interest and excitement into the image. Postwork wasn’t allowed, which created a challenge for me to get as good render as possible straight out of Vue. I usually do a lot of post processing on my images after they have left the renderer like color correction, adjusting balance between elements, combining render passes and many other things. The Pods are modeled in LightWave 3D and then imported into Vue where I sculpted the landscape and the other assets. The texturing, vegetation as well as the lighting and final render is Vue all the way.

See the image in my portfolio in a higher resolution: The Pod Bay

e-on software, the maker’s of Vue, has together with Electronic Arts, Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm Animation held a competition this summer called Vue 3D Environment Competition 2007.

I have had Vue in my toolbox since I got it bundled with my LightWave 9 upgrade about two years ago, but never really started using it, but well, when I got the announcement of this competition, I thought it was a nice and fun opportunity to learn this application properly.

As usual I waited until the last week of the competition before starting to dig into Vue and learn all the bells and whistles, and I came up with an image in about a day which I submitted. I didn’t really think it would be noticed by the jury, but that was okay, I had learned a new powerful application to use in my work.

Today they announced the 12 finalists from the 339 entries, and my submission was among the finalists. I got pretty surprised and pleased at the same time. I hadn’t expected this for my first Vue image that I had made in such a short time while learning the application.

My entry is called “The Pod Bay” and is available for viewing at the competition finalists showcase here, http://www.e-onsoftware.com/showcase/competition/2007/

Siggraph 2007 in San Diego is next week and the three winners out of the 12 finalists will be announced there. I wasn’t really interested in the competition before, but now I am a bit curious to see how it turns out next week. I have already set my mind to which 3 images in the competiton that will take the first, second and third place. 1. Snapshot, 2. Last Refuge and 3. White Ducks under the Bridge. But well, we’ll see if I am correct.

Oh well, back to sculpting my Destrachan creature now.

Already into February and I haven’t yet posted a blog entry in 2007. The two first months this year have been unbelievable hectic. I had to rearrange a lot of things and start planning how 2007 should work out for me. Anyway, the first blog post of the year is finally here.

The image above is the cover of my 2007 manual. For the curious, other than the cover it’s a 12 page manual containing everything I intend to accomplish this year together with how I should work and dedicate my time to actually realize those plans. It also contains some other goodies related to artwork, like my different pipelines and how I most efficient shall utilize them. Perhaps not much interest to others than myself, but if there’s interest I might share it down the road.

Other than writing a manual, which of course isn’t the only thing I’ve made so far this year I’ve been working on a few commercial projects and have set off a bigger project together with some other talented artists. And at a parallel path I’ve come a long way with my first one-man CG short. I’ve wanted to make a few CG shorts for a long time, with me doing everything from screenwriting and directing to the modeling, texturing and animation. It’s been difficult for me to find time for that, but now it seems like my first movie soon will leave my domain. More about this within the next weeks. The first movie is anyway completely developed in LightWave 3D.

Even though I haven’t blogged about it, I’ve expanded the gallery at the site with two new images this year as well. I have had a license for Luxology’s Modo for quite some time in my toolbox, but haven’t got around learning it deep enough to use it seriously until now. And I really love that software. It do bring back the fun in CG art. It feels good not to spend time fighting the software as it often happens in this business.

This guy was started and finished tonight. I have been having a cosy evening drinking a few Dry Martinis myself so I thought why not make one in 3D as well, and I wanted to work a bit more with shaders in Modo, so this was a good opportunity, and as I had the reference to work from standing on the desk next to my workstation it was just a given.

Check out a higher resolution render here.

And this one I made last month. It was my first Modo project and I’m into 60’s retro at the moment, so this was a must do. It also fitted well to submit to CG Sphere, obviously.

Check out a higher resolution render here.

Tonights Working Music: The Magic Numbers - Those The Brokes

There has been a serious lack of updates to the artstorm website for quite some time now. The reason is that I unexpectedly got hired by a company in mid January to do quite some work for them on a very interesting project. Things have been really hectic since then and I’ve had about no time at all left for my own projects during this time. Things will slow down with that project soon as it seems though, so then I’ll get back into art storming with all ideas I have had time to sketch down in my notebook the last weeks.
I’ll be back soon again with another update.
Until next time…

2005 is finally here, as usual, the last year came and went like a running train. Anyway, as the artstorm site finally got finished not so long ago, I guess 2005 will be the year where I start utilizing it completely and all the features I added to it. Lot’s of portfolio updates as well as the movie and software sections are ready to get their doors opened very soon. So expect some interesting stuff appearing here.

Personally I’m quite excited as Newtek has recently announced that Lightwave 8.2 is around the corner. Can’t wait to get my hands on that update as it contains many goodies I’ve wanted for a long time for my work.

I’ve apparently finished my last commercial project some weeks back, and I’m brainstorming out a new plan/endeavor to get going with in 2005. I’ve promised myself to have it finished before the end of this week, let’s see what happens.

Over and out, I’ve a character called Maia in the pipeline which I’ll post some stuff from soon.

Some of my recent work and many of my coming projects will be available as prints on glossy paper from DeviantArt in different sizes with or without a frame when ordering. I configured my account last night at DeviantArt so it’s functioning. Now I just have to fix a little bit with my files so they are activated for printing as well. I’ll go through the Deviant’s DPI and ICC guides and hopefully get the hang of it. I do wanna have my prints look the best.

Check out my DeviantArt hangout

I’m updating my website so it will link better directly into the appropriate DeviantArt sections.

Web Dev Working Music: Pulp - Different Class

A long time has gone since I took the old site down and there has just been a couple of frontpages during this time on artstorm.net. I’ve actually built a couple of different websites underneath it, just to throw them in the trashcan after a while. Well, now I think I’m finally happy with this one. I’ve tried everything from very ambitious management coding to some graphic filled versions with lot’s of stuff going on.

But now I’m finally pleased. Clean and simple design. Quick to update. Nothing special, but will work excellent to present my work, and that’s whats important with this site.

I do have some minor tweaking left to do on the different sections to make sure everything is ready. I will do those final adjustments as soon as I get some time over from working. In the meantime I’ll have this Work in Progress / Blog Section available anyway. This section is a part of the site where I’ll post my wip of projects I do and other news of interest. I guess some wips will come online before the entire site is open if I know how my schedule for these things usually turns out. ;)

It’s on it’s way, and a wip/blog section which is a part of the final site in the meantime is not to shabby either.