the holy lance

future pyramid

hydro-electric power plant

broadcast tower

a broadcast tower for my computer arts practice group

Final Renders

Here are my final high definition renders of my environment, I have already explained the piece in a previous post, the additions are billboards pointing out our consumerism, smoke from the chimneys highlighting pollution, and some nice water with a dock.

Here is a futuristic billboard I made, I applied the image I made to the colour, the transparency, and the ambient and then gave it a glow of 200.

snippets i forgot

heres how i decided the colours in my city and on my moai head

City: first renders

           Here are some pictures from my city which is not quite finished but not too far off now, I have basically been adding and adding to it for a long time which is a slightly less organised approach but because its a city and rather try to keep adding things to make it feel more busy and clustered.
           The piece is about how we surround ourselves with material things, our possessions are our own monuments, they have a hold over most of us.
           It also highlights pollution and overpopulation, but so many things can be linked to our materialistic views, and it says the future we are creating is one were making money is more of a concern than ones own happiness and the happiness of others.
           But im not that bleak, this is an exaggerated piece and acts more as away to draw attention to our way of life and not insinuate that this is what could actually happen.

Here is my new and improved Moai head, I used bump maps for nearly every texture as this will be the highlight of my piece.

Here he is with his lovely glowing eyes.

This is building on an initial human bee hive idea where the world is so over populated we need to create entirely new ways to live, people use the hive as a home, as transport, and as a way to keep everything under control.

Here are some more buildings I experimented with mental ray and all of its fantastic mia_materials and mia_materials_x and got some interesting results, I found this be following a tutorial which basically pointed out where to find the materials and then said have fun with them.

new idea

moved away partially from the Easter Island resource destruction idea, its still about that but more about obsession and consumerism, and the way we build gigantic buildings the way the rapa nui people built they're giant Moai heads.

pumpjack

started using bump mapping and playing about more with textures

its a cog powered pumpjack

Final piece, Earth Island

This piece is drawing attention to the similarities between the planet earth and Easter Island, the wastefulness of resources, obsession with statues or buildings (making them bigger and bigger), and wars over scarcity of resources, in Easter Islands case food in our case oil. I watched "Princess Monoke" by studio ghibli to give me ideas on composition.

Palm Tree and Crane

This is actually the second palm tree I made but I destroyed the original during the creation of this one by mistake I simply extruded and twisted a cube until I got a nice trunk shape stuck a texture on it and used automatic mapping, then made one leave textured it and duplicated it a dozen times.







The karakuri crane I made probably took about as long as my entire piece, and in the actual composition it is barely visible, I found that I really enjoyed working with cogs and mechanical things, the crane would function if it where real all of the cogs are aligned and when the handle turns the crane would turn aswell, this I made using the knowledge from the mechanical pieces along with my imagination.

Mountains

I followed this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYaLpSK4XY the guy who does them is really thorough and explains alot, I made the mountain by making a displacement map on photoshop and then converting it to geometry and playing about with a few of the settings like 'aplha is luminence' and then got these mountains:

Then I textured, scaled, and made a little scene using another plane and an ocean shader.

Smoke

This is the product of a tutorial on clouds that I messed about with abit to try and make smoke, it doesnt look that great I'm still trying to figure out how to manipulate the shape of it more but unfortuneately the tutorial didnt cover that.

Grass experiment

I followed a tutorial online on how to make realistic grass, it didnt turn out that well and was more hassle than it was worth but it looks ok

Textures I made

These are some textures I made using digital photographs and photoshop

Moai Head

This is my Moai statue (easter island head) development, getting the initial shape didn't really take long but I have made so many changes over the last few months to it the final one is at the bottom.

Resource Destruction

These are my Resource destruction pieces they are essentially along the right lines of what i wanted visually but there was always something off, so i started again, but i believe they were necessary in order to explore lighting modelling and composition.

this piece includes very bad grass texturing and a pretty rubbishly drawn sunset by me