Here are just a few of the pictures
I've doodled over the years. Newest stuff at the top. Click
on a thumbnail to see a larger version. If your browser resizes the picture
to fit in the window try making the window bigger or turning it off, the poor
re sampling ruins the pictures:)
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Recursive
Mirror - experiment to write a recursive script in Max to position
spheres. Inspired by a very early CG rendering i saw which I always wanted
to recreate. |
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Neural
Net - Still from a HD stereoscopic animation showing an undulating
network of linked cells. Nice medical like electron microscope fall off
effect. Great sense of stereoscopic depth. |
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KAP rig - Project to develop an automated Kite Aerial Photography rig. Modeled in 3DSMax, with 4 independently moveable stages, positions for attaching the camera and servos. Printed out at www.thinglab.co.uk using a 3DSystems Invision XT printer. 4 Servos allow the shutter to be pressed and to point the camera in any direction. Servos follow a pre-recorded set of moves recorded with a www.milinst.com wizard board. A picavet cross on top allows the camera rig to self level and prevents it twisting. A geared mechanism reduces the speed of one of the servos to allow the rig to be rotated. The gears are printed in place and once support material is removed just work with no assembly. A ~0.1mm gap between the cogs allows them to be moved separately. The whole rig is attached to a Sutton Flowform 16 kite using a pair wire hangups on 200m of cord. needs a reasonable 25mph wind to get the 1kg rig into the air. Some pictures of the second flight (the first one took 50 blurred pictures) flying over Hamstead Heath, looking south across London. Gets some really intresting looks from spectators. |
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PhotoSworl - real objects spun through time. Photos made by taking thousands of pictures of a slowly rotating object, cropping the same single line from each photo then stacking them on top of each other. The finished pictures look real, with shadows and organic detail, yet improbably thin and distorted. Developed over several weeks, I built a gear system from lego to step down a motor by ~100:1 to get the turn table rotating slowly enough. Used a laptop to take time lapse pictures of the objects on the turn table, one every 5 seconds. Had to build an external power supply for a Cannon 400D, an elastic tension system for the turntable to prevent judder. had to use a large and hot red head light to get enough light on the scene to allow a low ISO (low noise) picture with a fast enough shutter speed to photo the continually moving object without blur. Had to commondere the bathroom for a week to get a sealed room and prevent external light varying the exposure on successive photos. Tried several different objects, flowers work really well (but wilt after an hour under the lights), fruit and a piece of quartz. Used Imagemagik and a powershell script to crop all ~4000 images and stack the single lines into the finished image.
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Bonebush - solid fractal art, 3D print of a Xenodream fractal. Exported from Xenodream using the highest possible detail settings. Prepared for printing and decimated to a reasonable (~3million poly's) detail using Materialize Magics. This involved making it into a watertight mesh, filling all holes, removing spikes and self intersecting poly's. Printed on a 3Dsystems Invision XT printer at www.thinglab.co.uk, it uses a UV cure polymer (plastic), this small one took about 7 hours to print. fantastic detail looks really beautiful. |
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Crystal
Growth2 - same crystals as below, grow dozens, add dynamics
an let them settle on to a plane, rendered with volumetric fog and soft
lighting to create great atmospheric haze. |
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Crystal
Growth - crystal like structures grown with particle and metaspheres.
Spotted a posting on CGTalk discussing this method and so gave it a go.
The particle system emits metaparticles to create the underlying structure,
this skin is then optomised heavily to get the faceted look of crystal.
Great potential, the crystals can grow from an object, even the inside
of geods. Dispersion on the refraction prismaticly splits the light adding
to the realism. |
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Meta
Torus - abstract sculpture, interlocking toruses sliced through
to reveal inner gold bands. nice HDIR burn on some of the lighting. |
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Boxie
- messing around with powernurbs, random scatterings of boxes filited
together. |
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Pollen
- some renders of sculptural objects, nice realistic lighting. |
 
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Inition
Ident - few frames form a stereoscopic indent, nice effect by
staggering the animated letters, creates a kind of flowing geometry effect.
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Flames - Doodling's with fractal flame program Apophsys. Can create some fantastic structures, great way to waist many hours fiddling with the parameters. |
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Montage - Photo Mosaics using AndreaMosaic |
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Botox -
still from an autostereoscopic animation shown on a Philips
3D WOW screen. the
Botox molecule was exported from dsviewer as .vrml then touched up in
max. |
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Spherical
- reflections from the
inside of a sphere. camera, two small spheres and a light placed inside
a reflective bumpmaped sphere, allowed a reflection depth of about 8. |
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Differential
- another complex object
to test the 3D printer, a working differential gearbox, added some wheels
and an elastic band winder so it can drive itself. The gears printed and
worked first time with no assembly required. |
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Pollen
- trying to create a shape to show off the capabilities of the Invision
SR 3D printer, kind of like a pollen grain with one shape inside another,
the inner one is free to move around, almost impossible to make in any
other way. |
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Marball
- primary marballs took
so long to render it never finished the high res version. put a scattering
of little bubbles/ imperfections inside the marballs. |
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Archieline
- A forest of snow covered
squiggles. Started life as somthing completely different but quickly mutated
into this idea. the squiggles are drawn freehand with a wacom tablet then
imported into max as splines, lofted and rendered with lots of global
illumination. Brazil does a great job of soft shadows and GI, another
long render, distributed took 15 3Ghz PC's 24 hours. |
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DNA logo
- Shows how inition is
embeded in the very DNA of 3D graphics, or somthing like that. Kind of
a strand of DNA made from logos and bits of logo, doing some inition themed
artwork for the walls. Distributed render took 15 3Ghz PC's 24 hours to
render |
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Boolean
- Messing around with
power Boolean for max, nice vertex colour's on the original cube gave
that colour cube look. |
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Sicily
dive - A very hot day in Sicily, montage of 7 photos, the camera
could only do 5 at a time to this is two different dives put together
luckily the diver was able to repeat the performance perfectly :) |
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Ambience
- stills from a high
def animation. The idea was to provide ambient floaty graphics as a backdrop
to a wedding reception, loads of depth of field and white fog gave it
a dreamy quality. |
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Out of
Place - A photo
tells a thousand lies, 3D object composited into a picture, took a panorama
for the environment map to get the reflections right, little bit of reflection
to get that wet floor look, careful feathering of edges and addition of
a bit of noise to help blend the images together. |
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Transmisive
- messing around with
glass material and caustics and global illumination and snails. |
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EtherFishEye
- Great atmospherics, light you could reach out and touch. Re working
of an old theme, thousands of boxes, array 25 point lights, volume light,
creates some weird effects. Using Brazils single frame distributed rendering
feature, 10 2.8Ghz P4 PCs for 24 hours. (yep that's 240 hours of computer
time for one frame! or ~864,000,000,000,000 sums, longest yet) |
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Hand
scratching's - Got
to mess around with a Wacom tablet, just to remind myself what its like
to try and draw something by hand. Good fun, it takes a while but to get
use to the pen and pressure settings but you can get some groove effects.
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ClayPipePot
-kind of an Escher ish
plant, etched glass material with sub surface scatter to get that translucent
glass look |
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Heleblow
- Bullet time effect, the explosion is frozen and the camera spins around
the expanding cloud of debris. Great fire effects using Afterburner plugin,
managed to get the fragments of debris to emit particles while they spin
and fall away, creating spiraling flame and smoke trails through the air.
Had to write a script
to set off 400 renders from a circle of camera positions all on the same
frame of the animation to get the frozen time effect. Added distributed
rendering to the script. Stills from a stereo animation. 30mins/frame
2.6Ghz P4 |
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Corpusle
- Best looking falloff effect yet gets that microscope look, nice blue hint
to the backlighting, good depth of field (even if it takes 20min/frame 2.6Ghz
P4). Little bits of white fluff flowing along with the blood cells gives
impression of being immersed in liquid. Stills from a stereo animation. 3DSMax5 |
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Caustics2
- Reworking of earlier rings, using Brazil render plugin. 12hours 2.6Ghz
P4 3DSMax5, Brazil |
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Pottip
- Part of an animated sequence visualising a room being flooded with water.
A huge tank of water slowly tips over splashing into the camera. Used
Realflow to model the water, nice refractions and motion blur. takes 30hours
to calculate the water solution and meshes. 2.6Ghz P4 |
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Crane
- Model of a crane grab, nice technical illustration feel with the toon
lines. 3DSMax5, Finaltoon |
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Caustics
- Messing around with caustics,
uses max's light tracer and reactor dynamics to pile the rings up. Takes
a bit too long to render on a PII300 3DSMax5 |
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A few Panoramas,
these were hand stitched by feathering the edges and aligning by eye. Photoshop7 |
Composites, multiple
pictures taken, ether still or tracking the subject, then blend the different
frames together in photoshop, with clone brush or erasing layers or feathering
layers together. good for capturing action with a still pic. |
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Fake
bungee - See the making of pic for the separate components of
the picture. Inspired by fakes they were selling at the top of the tower,
shouldn't have shot us against grass, the individual blades made it tough
to get a clean outline, but it was worth it for the looks we were getting
while posing for the shot. Rendered the bungee and leg strap in 3D. Added
subtle motion blur round the edge for movement. |
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Cryogenic
distillation and electrolysis - Stills form a 10min stereo animation
following the life of a radioactive molecule through a sequence of industrial
processes. 3DSMax5 |
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Remains
- Inspired by a pic i saw in a magazine, nice spooky feel 3DSMax4 |
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Amersham
- Stills from a 3D stereo animation of proposed new site developments.
Huge model, frames take between 2 and 10 minutes to render, took a week
to render whole movie left and right eye with network of 10 x P5,2Ghz |
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Mixed media
- A mix of toon outlines and rendered shaded fill with glow on top, experiments
with mixing different renders in the same scene. 3DSMax4 and illustrate |
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Three peeks
3 - Revisiting a theme from earlier. This one's better but still
can't get it quite right. Nice clouds, bit of depth to them. Still took
12 hours on a dual PIII 866 Terragen |
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Buzzed
- Photo of some toadstools processed with Buzz, psychedelic. Buzz |
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Ether
- Great atmospherics, you can almost touch the light in the air. Nice soft
shadows. 4x4x4 array of omni lights all set to very dim yellow and shadow
maps turned on. One of the lights has a volume light to create the smog.
All the buildings are white, don't know how max comes up with all the colours.
But it works. 3DSMax4 |
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Ambient
Flock - Real-time OpenGl animation of Flocking, boids react to
each other and the chase boids, leaving trails which get blown around by
the wind. blend to soften the trails. really needs to be seen moving, For
more info see the programming section.
Download from here. OpenGl |
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Water Tower
- Nice atmosphere, greeble on greeble to create the structure, volume light,
lens flare, glow, self illuminating map for the lit windows. As so often
happens started off trying to get a water effect then this turned up. 3dsmax3.1 |
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Filled
Hand - Liquid pouring into a hand. Used real flow to calculate
the liquid, took about 100 hours on a dual 850PIII to calculate, liquid
interacts with an invisible hand mesh to slowly form the shape of a hand,
filling from the fingers upwards. some particles spray out. Still from an
animation 3dsmax3.1 |
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Mikrobe
- Microscopic particles setting up home and gradually infiltrating. Inspired
by a similar rendering in a magazine. Nice falloff material gives that electron
microscope feel. Good bumpmap, nice organic tendrils, depth of field blur
adds to close up feel. 3dsmax3.1 |
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Soldfooting
- Cool trees using Onyxtree imported using Polytrans. Lots of polys. Still
from a stereo animation. 3dsmax3.1 |
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Wethole
- Nice back light on the water and good water bumpmap, loots of fractal
cellular. 3dsmax3.1 |
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Rapel -
Inspired by a garden full of spiders but with a modern climbing gear twist.
Great rock face. Kinematic bones in the legs made positioning easier. Movie. 3dsmax3.1 |
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Hands
- Two photographs taken with hands pointing in different directions then
blended together in photoshop using the clone brush, just a little creepy
this one Photoshop. |
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Claws
- Based on a dream (don't know if I should mention it though) never really
finished it. 3dsmax3. |
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Intrusion
- Large lumps of crystal intruding from the mountains nice reflections and
haze. Used a falloff map to add snow to just the flat bits of the mountains. 3dsmax3. |
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Repulsion
ball - Small gold blobs dropping through a sphere of water, each
blob repelling the water around it. 3dsmax3. |
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BugZoid
- One of the more finished pix, nice light, the hairs are just scattered
objects. good distance haze and bolder field. 3dsmax3. |
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Rock
- A meteor impacted asteroid. Displace and bump mapped using a 16bit gray
.png generated using hf-lab 3dsmax3. |
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Imbedded
- An old rusted X stuck in ice. 3dsmax3. |
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Three Peeks
- Great atmospherics, mountains placed using an imported bitmap hightmap.
Bug with the shadows. Teragen. |
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Frame from a stereo
animation of an aircraft engine. 3dsmax3. |
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Techno
- Just messing around. Nice bit of faint glow on the wire frames. Was used
by someone as part of a collage project. 3dsmax3 |
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Fish
- Character animation of a belching, farting fish, the smooth organic surface
was created using mesh smooth. Frame from a stereo animation. Actually got
round to adding a soundtrack to this one. Movie. 3dsmax3 |
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Toon forest
- Experiment with a toon renderer. Still from a stereo animation, did most
of this on a laptop, bouncing down the road on the way to south of france.
Movie. 3dsmax3 |
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Blast -
Single frame from an animated explosion. Part of a failed rendering of a
'Bullet time' sequence which used a script to render the explosion mid blast
from hundreds of cameras arranged round it. Problem was the volume explosion
effect produced a weird scintillation when viewed from different angles.
But hey. 3dsmax3 |
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Inplace
- Rendering of models created for a project on the F3 Tornado aircraft.
Hundreds of objects, thousands of moving parts, merged together using a
script to get correct positions. Movie1.
Movie2.
For more info see. 3dsmax.2.5 |
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Sticks
- Leaf stems stuck together and balanced. Based loosely on a similar sculpture
I saw somewhere. 3dsmax2.5 |
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Glass Stack
- Pile of glass blocks with a freeform deformation. 3dsmax2.5 |
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Exio
- Things to do while crossing the pond. Just a loft with some lights and
a little reflection. 3dsmax2.5 |
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Glass - 3dsmax2.5 Mesh box with a fractal noise modifier. Nice refractions (~12 hours, 450mzh PII) |
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3dsmax2.5 Kind of a sliced water version. |
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3dsmax2.5 Chrome and bomb, variations on a theme. |
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Dandelion
- 3dsmax2.5 Still from an animation sequence. A cloud of dandelion seeds
with nano hitch hikers, drifting with the wind. 250k polys per dandelion, the furthest ones are rotoscoped onto billboarded polys to save rendering time. |
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Gasket2 - 3dsmax2.5 Another attempt at growing a aggregation gasket. C++ algorithm which fed into a max script. |
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Copper - 3dsmax2.5 Part of an animated, flapping copper sheet. |
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Light - 3dsmax2.5 Very grunge, kind of urban decay. Greeble on the walls, with volume light shining through some holes, black fog to darken with distance and a reflective lake at the bottom. (Takes over an hour to render) |
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Greebtube - 3dsmax2. Things to do with the greeble modifier. First use of the multi/sub material. Part of another stereo animation. |
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Plasma
- Fractal spark between two electrodes with loads of glow 3dsmax2 |
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BounceBlob
- Part of an animation, particle spray bouncing with metaparticles turned
on to give a mercury feel. also a wireframe version. 3dsmax2. |
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Henge
- Started off as one thing and as so often happens, ends up something completely
different. Still, nice light. 3dsmax2. |
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WaterWorld
- And all that water with just one poly. Wave noise function applied to
the bumpmap slot, with some reflection. Sky is a smoke material. 3dsmax2. |
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AntenneaOrchid
- A mix of nature and nanotech, perhaps normal plants invaded by an geneered
virus to act as a vast ground station. The petals are meshes with wave warps
and displacement warps on the edges to get the crinkle effect. 130kpolys
with a depth of field lens effect to get that close focus feel. 3dsmax2. |
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Crystal_DNA
- Inspired by 'Door number three'. An experiment in scripting. You cant
see it from the thumb so click on the picture. Script used to place 1800
cubes, random jitter, mesh smooth modifier to take the corners off, facet
shading, random material then ray traced. 3dsmax2. |
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Caterpillar
/ Perkins Stereo3D diesel engine visualisation - Part of a stereo
3D promotional video cut with live action. Nice transparent visualisation
of the piston/fuel burn cycle. Played back from laser disks (early DVD's)
Toughest part was getting the engine model from their design package, cads5
i think, into max, then culling 80% of the detail so it would render in
a sensible time. Also getting the laser disk players, left and right eye,
to start in sync. 3dsmax1.2 |
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Splash
- used to create the metareys shape added noise modifier to make it less
regular, rendered in 3dsmax2 to get the ray traced reflections. part of
a stereo animation. 3dsmax1.2 |
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Fossil
- Uses projected caustic texture maps to get the reflection effects.(used
a dark light somewhere) 3dsmax2. |
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Crystal
Jumble - Messing around with the raytrace material and a script
to place and size the objects. 3DSmax2. |
Bryceish - this was to try and render a Bryce like scene
in max The mountains are a mesh with a fractal noise modifier, the water
is a mesh with several ripple space warps added. 3dsmax2. |
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Corrode
- uses opacity and specular maps. 3dsmax2. |
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Watch
- Messing around with lens flair and particles. 3smax1. |
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Fizz
- The geometry's emitting particles to simulate a fizzing object. 3dsmax1. |
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Ribbon
- Shape lofted up a spline, noise modifiers added to everything. 3dsmax1. |
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Wavy
- Animation using combustion for the mist and wriggling fleshy tentacles
reaching into it. Tentacles animated using an animated wave space warp. 3dsmax1. |
 
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Metaring
- Animation uses Metareys and coloured lights. 3dsmax1. |
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Blob
- Animated noise on an object. 3dsmax1. |
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Cogscene
- Some old cogs I had lying around. 3dsMax1. |
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Plant
- This was grown using a C aggregation algorithm which exported a POV script. Rendered using POV. |
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Rainbow
cryst POV. |
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Swirl
- Uses a loop to place several spheres, nice blood marble texture. POV. |
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Hourglass - Forgotten the name of the package, but it was created on an Acorn Archimedes,with one of the first 3D modeling programs. |
