DRIVE: page 174 comp

I just hit on this "detail-shot collage-look" for parts of the book.

Generally happy with the look and feel of this spread.

Moving onto others now.

Brooks Robertson's new site

If you liked that music in the video below, get an earful here:

http://brooksrobertson.ning.com

Cousin Brooks working his magic!

DRIVE overview

Here is an overview of all 176 pages as of today.

Lots of work left to do.

Retro Aero

This one is not making the cut for the book, so I thought it could live on here. I have finished my rough compiling of the book and it is going to be 176 pages! 32 more than Start Your Engines and Lift Off, each at 144 pages. Now the next big push will be to tweak and tweak until each spread is the best it can be.

very cool experimental painting programs

Thanks to Ahmed Aldoori for the link to these cool experimental painting programs by Peter Blaskovic.

http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments.html

4 new spreads

Four example spreads which are just first cuts right now. Two from the military styling chapter and two from the pro-sport styling chapter. Color of text headers and book credit at bottom of the pages TBD. Bit of everything on these pages, modo 3D and rendering bases, Photoshop painting over the top, Alchemy sketches with Photoshop again, then some simple pen sketches.

Sunday-Sparth-SciFi

Inspired by Sparth to do a quick Sunday-sci-fi-sketch.

See ya! F1 is about to start their engines.

more rendering tests

Composed 20 new pages today for DRIVE, 42 last week. Not quite ready for prime-time viewing yet so in the meantime here are a couple of rendering tests I did a few days ago.

original Start Your Engines sketches for sale!

I just decided to put some of the original work printed in Start Your Engines up for sale on Ebay. Here are the first three going up for bid. You can enter any of these item numbers to find them on Ebay if you're interested in owning an original sketch.

page 90: item number 320499081465

page 92: item number 320499082476

page 97: item number 320499083102

DRIVE page comps

Here is the first cut at the layout comps for DRIVE. The book will be 9" x 11" landscape format. The same as Start Your Engines and Lift Off. As of now the thought is to have a big zoom-in shot for each chapter break that is printed full bleed with text floating over the top. The sketch page comps are mostly about changing the color of the sketches and the background. I'm leaning away from the very clean look of art against white pages for this book. I'm liking the texture and warmth of a toned page.

big blog update 2010

As you might have noticed, if you have been to my blog in the past, there have finally been some updates! Links galore have been added. I've had all the links to the right bookmarked forever but never got around to adding them to the blog. I'm making some time now to gather them from various machines and add them here. I've still got more to come over the next few weeks before I get them all up. 

To that point now that I've made a commitment to keep this blog updated if you would like to reciprocate the link back here that would be great and I'll try my best to keep my content link-worthy!

style test 3

Another tweaked modo rendering. Played with the volumetrics, a displacement map for the mountains and layering on some traditional media texture as well.

This image is a raw test of motion blur, my own HDR image and the 9b carbon fiber material. Still need to refine it in Photoshop to reduce the faceting as the model is not subdivided. The HDR swap is the interesting part of this test for me. It was created by working in Photoshop on one of the base modo images and then swapping my new image for the base one. The only other light in the scene is an illuminated polygon rectangle over the car. The car is for my upcoming book, DRIVE. To see some of the work-in-progress images click the link under my other websites.

DRIVE, style test 2

Here's another style test I did in Photoshop.

style test

Tried to stylize one of my simple vehicle models in Photoshop to see if I liked this possible visual direction for parts of the book.

new rendo WIP for DRIVE

Just added this to the DRIVE work-in-progress site.

Still needs Photoshop work to refine the surfaces and add details.

Was mostly a BG test render. Done in modo.