2013 Catch-Up: 3D

Roughly 6 months is a long time not to update a blog; in Australia you can get your licence in 6 months. Also in 6 months you could complete a whole certificate at TAFE, or work a minimum wage job long enough to buy a car for your new fangled licence. All in all, when it comes to something like a development blog and you're artistically active, that's a hell of a lot of work.
What I'm going to (starting with this post) is do a catch-up of sorts dividing each post into categories. This one is going to be dedicated to 3D; my original passion when this blog was started oh so long ago.
Back then this blog use to be about getting a job in 3D, but eventually I ran out of things to write about so I decided to turn it into a development blog, wanting to keep the URL. In those original posts I talked about finishing my diploma and then trying for the various 3D visualisation studios around Perth. Perth is lucky when it comes to those; we have a lot of talent and a huge mining industry. Those mixing together creates a moderate amount of jobs.

I'm happy to say that late last year, I completed my diploma for Games Development and I'm working on my portfolio right now. Game dev might seem a bit odd for a 3D job, but between all the different classes there were excellent 3D units where I learnt quite a bit.

First off for this catch-up, my very last Mental Ray project:

This was a quick project (about a fortnight in my spare time last August) where I created a render of a house, like what you might see at a real estate agency.
Because of mining (which already creates a lot of 3D jobs) lots of construction is going on. Perth is regularly referred to as the city of cranes, and all these new developments require a visualisation of some sort. This was my first try at that, and it wasn't so bad for a first attempt I guess. I created everything you see except for the car, which I downloaded off a disk that came with an issue of 3D World.

Future attempts at this sort of thing will be using Vray, which brings us to to my next project in this catch-up:

This is a 1940's living room, and it was started in September and finished around October. It was my first Vray project besides from dabbling in it a long time ago (which I'm not willing to link since I wrote a lot of crap when I was 17).
It was a lot of fun getting to know the new renderer, and I felt like I was making progress in a career sense since it's usually the industry standard.

Next up, keeping with the period pieces is this early 80's programmers den:



This originally started on a plane to Vietnam for a holiday. I was suppose to be doing TAFE work but instead I modelled that old IBM instead. I don't really know why, but sooner or later this scene evolved into what it is now.
Its really the first scene I have created where I have tried to trigger some sort of emotional response. Whether it actually has or not is still up for debate, but some people have said it has given them nostalgia, so there's that.
This was started in December, and completed in January of this year, which brings us into 2013! Hurray!

Now for what I'm currently working on:



Not another period piece! 
Yes, well kinda. This is actually going to be a two-part render. Above is the WIP of the first part, where its in its heyday. The second part will be in more current times; it will be an abandoned sad relic of another era, where chain restaurants and huge interstate highways and free-ways rain supreme. Here is a little ditty I wrote up for it:

It's a very early mid 20th century morning at this New Jersey Diner. The night shift was fairly slow, but the staff are gearing up for the normal rush of morning traffic in an hour or so.
Things are going quite swell for this diner, and probably will for another 20 or 30 years. Sooner or later though, people are going to start going to big name chains instead, and the busy main road this diner is on will get cut-off when a huge highway it built nearby isolating it from most traffic.
This is when, sadly, it will close down and die like many other diners across the country just like it.

For minor updates check out my WIP thread on the CG Society, but I'll be sure to keep the major updates flowing on this blog too.
That's just about it for 3D for now, stay tuned as I (hopefully) post more 2013 catch-up posts to do with other categories in the next couple of weeks.