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.

Well, I’ve continued my explorations of Vue. And I guess there will be a couple of more of these entries until I’ve learned everything about this new tool in my arsenal. New productive tools are always a joy to learn.
Today I explored constructing my own terrains by painting them with the airbrush and then constructing a river in it with some foam on the shorelines, and having it populated with an ecosystem were I explored some more about controlling placement and distribution of the objects using functions connected to the rest of the environment.

Well, have had a soft weekend, but tonight I got some time to continue playing around with Vue. I just continued learning about Eco Systems in Vue, a very powerful feature that really seems to rock.

Here is a small Eco System render I just created. Enjoy. ;)

Music for Vue’ing: Lars Winnerbäck - Live Summer ‘05

Amazing, blog entries two days in a row, that hasn’t happened for months. I hope this is a good sign and that it’ll continue down this path.

Experimenting with how to simulate foam at a shoreline

Today I am attending a wedding, for a colleague at work, but I had some hours during the morning to spare to continue my Vue explorations. It’s becoming very intriguing with Vue as I start to learn the different possibilities with it, and also leaving the basics and coming up with my own solutions. Next week will be a Vue week where I plan to finish my explorations of Vue and then have all knowledge I need to let it be a part of excelling my productions.

Exploring the different Global Illumination settings of Vue
(A pretty dull image I know, but I learned a great deal.)

Working Music: Broder Daniel - Cruel Town

I haven’t written in my blog for a long time. Mainly because of my current work at GA has been taking up more or less all my time and I really haven’t had any time left over for personal things like Artstorm. Now I think I have been able to plan up things so I can dedicate more time towards my Artstorm projects though.
So let’s keep an eye on the site and see what happens in the next couple of weeks, hopefully there will be some action around here. :)

On another note, I purchased my Lightwave [9] preorder the other day, together with the Vue 5 Infinite bundle (an incredible deal by the way). LW[9] won’t be out for a couple of months, but my Vue 5 discs arrived this week. So I just started playing around with Vue tonight to start learning this software.
My first impression is that is seems to be very interesting, especially to accompany Lightwave with creating environments to composite Lightwave renders together with. I’ll for sure spend some time to really dig into Vue to learn more aspects of it.

Here is my first Vue render that was just completed an hour ago. Well, it’s my first, trying out the interface and some functionality, and I’ll continue posting some more renders as I continue to explore Vue.