There’s been lot’s of ZBrushing in the log lately, but I’ve continued working on among other things my Katana character piece at the same time.

So while I was in LightWave 3D today modeling on Kat we talked about accessories. Yes, you do actually have to talk to your characters while modeling them. How else will they spring to life? And we decided that I should get her a Katana sword. I cleared out my screen and modeled together this piece of weaponry for her.

And here is an occlusion render and the wireframe of the above sword.

Alright starting to get time for a new update on the progress of how she is coming along as well. She told me she was eager to get a public appearance again. Stay tuned for an update of her shortly unless any new zbrush doodles surfaces first.

Modeling music: Architecture in Helsinki - In Case We Die

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

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

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)

Some things have been coming in between since I posted the first work in progress of this image. I haven’t had any time to work with it since.
Anyway, today I found a few hours, to continue the work. Tweaked the sofas and the rug and added a painting, a plant, a shelf, some magazines. And also did some work on the texturing and lighting.
I guess this project is quickly coming to an end. Well, I really have some other things I wanna sculpt and paint right now. Interesting that sometimes I can sit around and tweak and adjust things for days, and sometimes, like in this case, a project only needs a few hours to get a decent result that I feel I can stash away in the pile of finished work.
I will post the final image in the portfolio (Wohoo, for the first time in years) as soon as I’ve done the last adjustments and produced a final render.

The second work in progress of the living room.

Working Music: Hello Saferide - Introducing
(Really in the mood for this kind of music at the moment)

The heat has been astonishing in Sweden lately. Even I have had a few trips out to the beach getting some variation on my nowadays so white skin. Anyway, Friday night, stayed home for once, and found some time to start on a new project.

I’ve been playing around with my new baby, LightWave 3D 9, as it has now left beta and gone gold and all NDA’s has been lifted. The third party community for LightWave is for the first time in some years growing in the right direction again. Lot’s of interesting announcements lately, with Syflex coming for LightWave and other nice plugins and addons.
Also the 3rd party renderers are starting to arrive. FPrime was the first to arrive a few years back, and has been my best friend for previewing in realtime and doing final renderings with. And now lately Maxwell was released, but it’s at the moment not something that I feel will fit into my budget. Another 3rd party renderer that is really interesting to me is KrayTracing. Kray is the most speedy photonmapping, lightmapping renderer I’ve tried so far, and the results seems to be excellent. And the fact that the price is a bargain if it delivers what I hope does help a great deal when I’m about to make the decision to add another renderer to my arsenal of tools.

So I thought I should do an interior visualization project to try out Kray with. So earlier this night I got into modeling some furniture. And then spent some time setting up a decent lighting. Well, still some road left to travel on this one. Need to tweak the sofas more, add some depth to the rug, and add some accessories around the room, and maybe something on the wall. And of course start working on textures and details. I’ll dig into this tomorrow.

Below is the first render from this project. Rendered in FPrime while working with it. When I’ve finished modeling and are happy with the setup, I’ll do a final FPrime rendering, and then get into Kray with the same scene and start comparing and see what I think of Kray with a finished project, to make final rendering. I’m really looking forward to this little experiment.

First Work in Progress Image of this project

Modeling Music: The Embassy - Futile Crimes

Newtek was nice enough to give away LWCAD to pre-registered Lightwave 9 owners last week. Well, I just got around to install my copy and giving it a first try. At first glance it seems just wonderful, so I decided I’m going to make a little arch viz, using as much of LWCAD’s tools as possible. 3D and CAD gets a nice marriage with these tools.

I just got a floor plan of a larger apartment imported into Lightwave. So let’s see where this little baby will take the image I’ll create this time.

CAD’ing Music: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm