Have you ever worked on a painting, 3d render or shot a photograph and it turned out looking like the subject was a toy instead of something bigger than life? I’ve seen some images made by people where you say, hmm… sure looks like a toy to me – and it wasn’t intended to look like a toy. I had a render of my Mclaren automobile that looked like it belonged in a toy box. What went wrong. Well maybe this will help a bit. It turns out that you can make reality look like a miniature set or a bunch of toys! The trick is to add a lot of depth of field effect (blurring the background and foreground). Add a high angle and voila… miniatures! These people do it on purpose, now I know what I can do to avoid it.
So it’s been an eventful few months! In the software realm I made the decision to not upgrade my Foundation XSI copy to Essentials. And boy am I glad. My main reason was… do I want to spend more time learning ‘another’ tool, or learn something cool – like matte painting or improve my drawing skills? That was a no brainer.
Of course, as many of you know, days after the deadline to upgrade, Autodesk pulls a fast one and buys XSI. My reaction: ‘eek!’ The debate on CGTalk raged on. Lots of people don’t like it. I, for one, don’t like it either – I hope I’m wrong. Anyway, the track record is that Autodesk buys something to improve their ’stake’ in the digital realm and doesn’t do much to innovate. That’s the main reason I’m still using good old Maya 7 (another reason is the cost of maintenance, I find I don’t get much bang for the buck). Now I’m seriously thinking about Blender. It’s looking really good. Maybe with the upcoming interface change it will look really, really good. Good enough for personal projects – but then again, that’s another new software package to learn! Argh. Might be worth it though…
Don’t get me wrong. As a freelancer I’ll upgrade my software to match my client’s needs, but do you know what? Most of my clients haven’t upgraded to anything remotely labled 2009 (Maya, Max, or otherwise). Even my last project in XSI was using version 6.5. Doesn’t look to me like there is a rush to upgrade.
Anyone here? Actually, yes! Busy as usual. And to make things even more interesting I decided to enter the CGSociety challenge. So if you want to see some of my recent work, head on over and check it out. Of course I have to do this in my spare time. The main problem is that the entire concept is foreign to me – spare time, that is… It is a steampunk challenge – which means what exactly? Maybe this will help? Or maybe this? Anyway, I’m going to try to wake up this blog since that silly Orphan Works Bill was killed (at least for now), but I think I’m going to be watermarking all my images from now on… just in case it rears it’s ugly head again. Thanks for stopping by!
Photography | Administrator | 
November 20, 2008 9:53 am | 
Comments Off