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Digital Asset Library
Over the past couple decades, I have accumulated a large library of digital assets. These digital assets are the bread-n-butter to my digital workflow. A well organized stock pile of high quality 3D model and textures is fantastic, but they come with time. I remember spending hours looking for free 3D models to use in projects. Those days are long gone, but sometimes I need something that I just never needed before. My modeling skills are pretty high, but my time is relatively valuable, so off to the internet I go. Unlike a couple of decades ago, I have larger budgets, so a quick trip to Turbosquid usually does the trick, but before I go there, I always stop over at arcive3d.
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The Sketchbook Project
The Sketchbook Project is the flagship program of the Art House Co-Op, a New York-based organization that stages collaborative art projects. beginning in 2013, participants may sign up at any point and assign their book to multi-city tour of their choices. For further information on entering or viewing The Sketchbook Project, as well as other Art House Co-Op initiatives, visit www.arthousecoop.com
The Sketchbook Stories from Art House Co-op on Vimeo.
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Susan Cain Helped Introverts Find Their Voice; Now, She'll Teach Them To Embrace Public Speaking
Susan Cain made a splash with "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking." Now, she plans to help introverts overcome their fear of public speaking. Here are her tips for taking the stage successfully.
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V-Ray Color Mapping
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I Am Now On Google+
Now there's another way you can connect with me. Add me to your Google+ circle where I will share links to blogs and articles, photos, and interesting videos!
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How Does The Magic Start?
“All the magic, be it in code or design, starts with a clear mind, pen and a blank paper.”
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Caesarea Villa
Architect: Gottesman–Szmelcman Architecture
Music: Moshe Chitayat
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Some say it takes 10,000 hours, or 10 years, to be a master of something. To create photo-real architectural renderings it takes a lot of hard work, and only a few have mastered the craft of photo-real architectural renderings. It takes a lot of screen time, more than you might imagine.
Some say that unless you are in the photo-real business nobody is noticing the subtleties that keep an image from being photo-real, but I would have to disagree. Humans have a keen sense of perception and can perceive even the smallest errors in what they are viewing, which makes them feel uncomfortable.
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of 3D computer animation which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.
One study conducted in 2009 examined the evolutionary mechanism behind the aversion associated with the uncanny valley. A group of five monkeys were shown three images: two different 3D monkey faces (realistic, unrealistic), and a real photo of a monkey's face. The monkeys' eye-gaze was used as a proxy for preference or aversion. Since the realistic 3D monkey face was looked at less than either the real photo, or the unrealistic 3D monkey face, this was interpreted as an indication that the monkey participants found the realistic 3D face aversive, or otherwise preferred the other two images. As one would expect with the uncanny valley, more realism can lead to less positive reactions, and this study demonstrated that neither human-specific cognitive processes, nor human culture explain the uncanny valley. In other words, this aversive reaction to realism can be said to be evolutionary in origin
Our clients don't understand what it takes to produce a photo-real rendering. But, they expect something that makes them feel comfortable when viewing it, and not something that seems off, or wrong. There is a wide gamut of work, which is being called photo-real, but unless it looks like a photo, it's not photo-real.
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Help Move The Eye Around The Rendering.
While developing a rendering, an artist strives for interest by creating differences that emphasize the degrees of importance of its various parts. These differences result from compositional considerations - some features are emphasized, and others are subordinated. This creates both primary focal points and secondary areas of interest that help move the eye around the rendering.
Areas become dominant when they are emphasized by contrasts that make them stand out from the rest. Contrast draws attention like the spotlight in a dramatic production or crescendo in a musical piece. In general, the greater the contrast, the greater the emphasis and the more dominant the area becomes.
Renderings that neglect varying degrees of dominance seem to imply that everything is of equal importance, resulting in a confusing rendering that gives the viewer no direction and fails to communicate.
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V-Ray Interior Preset
Here is a preset that I would like to share. This preset is the settings I use for my interior renderings. They are quite high settings, but it is fail-safe, and I use it all the time. These are the exact settings that I used on my Luxury Kitchen rendering.
DOWNLOAD
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Balance
Gravity is universal, and we spend our daily lives resisting its influence. While walking, standing on one leg, or tipping back in a chair, we experience its effect and intuitively seek a state of balance.. When we are off balance, we have a strong fear that gravity will pull us over and we will fall down. Those expectations are so strongly ingrained in our subconscious that they also have an effect on the art we experience and produce. Most artwork is viewed in an upright orientation - in terms of top, sides, and bottom. as a result, gravity effects the visual composition.
Do you know why we frame our art? Artists often mat their work to gain an "aesthetic distance" or separation from the every day world. The hope is that we will see the work in a new context. But, even here, psychological factors can affect the visual weight and balance. In the case of a mat with two inch top, sides,and bottom, the bottom may have the illusion of being pinched or smaller than the other sides. This is an optical illusion that would make the artwork appear to be unstable, even rising on the wall. To compensate, the bottom measurement is generally made wider that that of the top and sides so that the whole rendering seems stabilized or balanced.
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The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something
““Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” - ”
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Sharp and Diminishing Detail
Because we do not have the eyes of eagles and because we perceive things through the earth's atmosphere, we are not able to see near and distant planes with equal clarity at the same time. A glance out the window confirms that close objects appear sharp, and in detail, whereas those far away look blurred and lack clarity. In your rendering, either using environmental effects in your rendering engine, or in post software like Photoshop, you can slightly blur the background, make it less saturated, and even add a slight blue tint to it.
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Google+ for Business with Lorrie Thomas Ross
In this course, author Lorrie Thomas Ross teaches you how to use Google+ to effectively promote a business. Discover how to set up an account for a business or client, and add company information, post photos and video, create compelling copy to market products or services, and improve your reach with contacts. Find smart ways to leverage the power of Google+ circles, blogging, and video sharing to make a real and lasting connection with an audience. This course also shows you ways to improve market visibility and open an online dialogue about your business.
Topics include:
- Using Google+ Pages
- Organizing contacts with Google Groups
- Incorporating local listings from Google into your marketing campaign
- Creating a profile
- Adding contacts
- Building a business page
- Posting photos and videos
- Hosting live online chats with hangouts
- Using the +1 button
- Using Google Analytics to measure a page's success
- Changing or deleting a profile or posts
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A ground level view walks you right into the space
The most experiential and dynamic perspective is a ground level view. It offers the most telling opportunity to explain height and scale to our human dimensions, and through close proximity better explains choice of materials and perceived patterns/textures through color. The downside is that the further the point of interest is away the flatter and the less interesting the project. Plan element beyond 100' are harder to perceive by our standing 5'6" average eye height and must rely on more vertical element (people, vegetation and built forms) to perceive the use of that location.
To further the dynamic perspective, it is important to have a foreground,middle and background elements. This furthers the illusion of depth and can literally walk one into the rendering. What happens in the first 60 feet is the most dynamic area in the horizontal plane. If the horizontal plane is underdeveloped or unimportant, a worms eye view can increase the dynamic perspective and removes this area from the viewers perception.
In choosing a perspective, I create several perspective viewpoint based on requirements to best access the strength and weakness of each view and find that which I want to emphasis.
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Photoshop CS6 New Features with Deke McClelland
In this course, Deke McClelland offers a sneak peak at the new features in Photoshop CS6. He reveals the secrets behind the new dark interface, searchable layers, the powerful Blur Gallery, Camera Raw 7, video editing, and the Adaptive Wide Angle filter, which removes distortion from extreme wide-angle photographs and panoramas. Deke also covers the new nondestructive Crop tool, dashed strokes, paragraph and character styles, editable 3D type, and the exciting Content-Aware Move tool, which moves selections and automatically heals the backgrounds.
Topics include:
- Enabling auto recovery and background saving
- Filtering layers in the Layers panel
- Modifying multiple layers at once
- Applying layer effects to groups
- Working with the Content-Aware tools
- Redeveloping photos in Camera Raw 7
- Creating depth of field with the Blur Gallery
- Correcting wide-angle panoramas
- Filling and stroking shape layers
- Editing videos in the Timeline panel
- Previewing 3D shadows and reflections
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Critique Guidelines
Unfortunately, many beginning artist let their fear of making errors prevent them from creating anything at all. Don't stop before you start. Get your work out there so people can look at it, give you some advice, and you can get some critiques.
How does one begin a critique? Unfortunately, there are no formulas. You may want to identify the three components of the work (subject, form, and content), evaluate them separately, and then examine how they work together as a whole. Analysis may seem awkward in the beginning, but asking some of the following questions may help.
- What area feels most successful and why?
- What areas feel incomplete or troublesome, and what is the cause?
- How is the subject presented?
- Are there visual or symbolic metaphors that could have helped expand the rendering?
- If the rendering is nonobjective, what suggests the meaning?
- How are the elements used to support or destroy the rendering compositionally?
- Have the principles of organization been observed?
- What is the intention behind the rendering?
- What is being communicated - a feeling, and idea, a personal aesthetic?
- Is it too esoteric?
- Is it to obvious?
- Where does the rendering succeed in integrating these components, and where is it less successful?
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Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush with John Derry
Join John Derry, a pioneer in the field of digital painting, as he shows how to master the natural-media painting features introduced in Photoshop CS5 in
Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush. This course shows how to use the Mixer Brush, the Bristle Tips feature, and a new mechanism for blending colors in Photoshop to add beautiful, painterly effects to photographs, enhance artwork with paint-like strokes and illustrations, and paint entirely new art from scratch. This course also covers customizing brush characteristics and surface textures, applying keyboard shortcuts to paint smoothly and efficiently, and using a Wacom tablet to get the most out of Photoshop CS5’s painting features. Exercise files are included with the course.
Topics include:
- Understanding the axes of motion with a Wacom tablet
- Choosing a brush shape and Bristle Tip
- Adjusting brush angle
- Loading color and control the behavior of the Mixer Brush
- Modifying surface texture
- Simulating the texture of canvas
- Saving tool presets for brushes
- Creating a painting from a photograph
- Painting from scratch with the Mixer Brush
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Transforming a Photo into a Painting with Photoshop with John Derry
Learn to think like a painter and render images from photographs that look like they were created with oils or acrylics, using the latest digital artist's tools. Author and artist John Derry introduces the process of interpreting a photograph into a painted work of art. He begins by explaining his system of visual vocabularies, which describe how to replace the elements of an image with expressive painterly qualities, and also shares the custom brush sets and actions he uses to achieve these results in Photoshop. The course also covers working with filters, layers, effects, and more to add further detail and texture.
Topics include:
- Understanding that resolution is in the brush strokes
- Understanding the subject
- Removing lens distortions
- Using the traditional paint color swatch set
- Making shadow and highlight adjustments
- Simplifying details with filters and Smart Blur
- Cloning layers
- Using custom actions
- Working with canvas texture
- Creating physical surface texture effects
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