Thing #42/365
Made a more hi res version of that weird spiky plant. Thought it looked like an environment (huge surprise!) and threw the little ship in there. Tried out some different lighting effects and finally landed on a more normal looking one.
Thing #32/365
Another adventure of the unnamed exploration spacecraft. I want to keep improving the model and maybe make some animations sometime soon. I love the idea of a peaceful, purely scientific deep space craft. Like Star Trek without blowing stuff up.
Thing #30/365
So I've been making a lot of renders with the Carbon Nanotube generator preset (link) and I am totally enamored with the visuals you can make with it. I've been really trying to master the Physical Renderer in Cinema since and these rendered really fast thankfully, which let me really start to tweak the settings and get it just right. The lens blur is totally native to Cinema and the only touchups were the contrast and curves in Photoshop.
There is definitely some potential here for something cool.
(Click for a large version)
Thing #28/365
Finished editing this right after overclocking my work machine. This was actually quite a risk since if I made it unstable, I'd be unable to work. Got it to 4.1 Ghz and no crashes while rendering. Things are looking up. As a side note, I'm currently listening to Manchester Orchestra's "I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child" and remembering what an incredible and pivotal album it was for me. I saw them in 2006 before the album had officially come out with Saves the Day (A huge deal at the time) and they were just hashing out their material and playing with so much soul and passion. I met Andy Hull and had my picture taken, both of us awkward teenagers. He was 19 and I was 16 and he was the most important figure in the universe in my mind. It's so interesting that that album has maintained it's integrity through the years, while the Saves the Day stuff just seems petty and hollow. I still love those albums, but they don't hold up. Manchester does. That's a pretty cool thing I guess.
Thing #27/365
I found a really rad carbon nanotube plug in that I've been playing around with. I put a transparent material on it and it starts to take on a very organic, egglike feel. Going to have to come back to this one for sure.
Thing #16/365
Still thinking about planets and environments and stuff. I put a lumninance channel on the bad looking exhaust or whatever and I thought 'eh looks ok'. I then changed a few settings (don't even know which), and figured out how to add textures to specific polygons. AWESOME. I go eat a fruit, have a drink of coffee and I come back to that second one. WHAT? That looks awesome! Totally on accident, I swear it.
Thing #15/365
Still thinking about environments and making them look realistic lately. I'm really digging this kind of ceramic type look but I'd like to make it dirtier in the future or maybe all crystalline. It's a start towards something.