Originally there was only going to be one article on 3D. I started writing it almost a year ago and found that a whole chunk of material relating to what 3D programs do didn't really fit in with the rest of the material that I was preparing. This we peeled off to become the first article in the series. The second article became so huge that it had to be split into two. The portion left over for article three began to swell up too. Many things that might have ended up discarded and published only here on our web site found their way into article three. I'm happy about that but I still think I put a bit too much into it. Mike and Talitha at Step-By-Step did, as usual, a great job of making sense of it all but I still think I crowded a bit too much in. Well, with any luck, that will be just the part of the article that people will like.
Every project is different. The examples used to illustrate my points in articles two and three could have been used to illustrate completely different points in a completely different article. In addition, the world of 3D modeling and rendering is so huge that to write, no matter how coherently about it, in just three short articles like this would be to do a disservice to the topic. That's why I chose this approach. Take a series of points, useful working techniques and show them in action on real projects. It is material that people can use immediately and, I hope, presented in a way that allows a more swift understanding of the concept than if conveyed in a more academic manner. Plus there is always the added benefit that some people might be inspired by other parts of the art work not directly mentioned in the article.
My sources Notes:Parts of this image have been used in a variety of ways.
Originally I created it for a small project I set myself years ago. I had
a small model of a jet plane I that I wanted to fly through a cityscape.
I wanted the camera to fly after it. It was just a personal thing and had
no particular purpose but to advance my knowledge of StrataVISION 3D...
that was in the days before it became StudioPRO. Creating the city was a
slow process that I pecked away at over a long period of time. I actually
created the sequence wherein the plane flies up through the crane. I never
rendered it at full 60 fps NTSC resolution, though. Later, when doing a
pitch for a Real Estate company, I used the cityscape for a flythrough and
it was this application that made it onto the RoboShop animation show reel.
The crane has also been used on a Canadian Acoustic cover as part of a
shipyard illustration. For this article I needed an opener and it seemed
appropriate to press the old cityscape back into service, though at a completely
different camera angle that I'd ever seen before.
Notes: There is little to say about this one that hasn't been
said elsewhere. For months I had this little sheaf of wheat I had bought
to use as reference on the job floating around my desk. Eventually, I think
Melody claimed it for her own office.
One thing I do recall about the illustration is that it was never actually
finished. Yep, astonishing as that may sound, it's true. Joe Shyllit, the
art director for the project, asked me to make some changes to the muscly
version on the right. He wanted to changed the shape of the muscles slightly.
By this point, I had done all the fine veins running through the leaves
that made it look like just like another leaf when you look closely. With
the revisions, all the vein work was blown away. It never got done again.
somehow, the final art went out without the new fine lines on the leaf being
inserted. This often happens if there is some large gap between the end
of the artwork and the application of the art in an ad. If you're interested
in more information on how the image was created, I wrote a Graphic of the
Month on it which you can see at
GotM009_Jan98.html
Notes: I had just come off doing the billboard illustration for
the flaming sign campaign. Everything was still on my computer. The client
called up saying that they wanted an overhead view of the board with grass
underneath it. "You can just take the billboard at and modify it, can't
you?" Urr, no, not exactly. That was a low angle illustration looking up.
This one is looking down. Still, I did have a model of the board and that
was a good start. I got the texture of the grass from the client and within
a couple of hours I had this image slapped together... which is good because
they had hardly any budget as it was destined for an internal publication.
There's a Graphic of the Month for the flaming billboard that you might
be interested in, you can see it at
GotM012_Apr98.html
Notes: Once again, the image never appeared anywhere in this form.
Positioning it flying across a Bryce desert was all my own invention. The
client did want a drag racing mouse in full colour against a white background.
I had a lot of fun illustrating this. Particularly enjoyable was all the
research in magazines that I would never normally buy. I'm now a drag racing
flame expert. This image has most often appeared as a two colour piece.
If you want to learn more about how this project was done, we have a Graphic
of the Month page devoted to it. Go see it at
GotM002_Jun97.html
Notes: This was for a full page magazine ad. The copy was to go
at the bottom , underneath the illustration. The job originally came in
as a retouch. The client was unhappy with the illustration they had created
by a traditional illustrator (in oils) and wondered if anything could be
done for it.
Notes: These were going to be black and white images eventually,
well, duotones, to be more exact. I did the artwork in colour as I usually
do because it is easier and, you never know when you may need colour. There's
a Graphic of the Month on this one and some related artwork at the following
link
GotM011_Mar98.html
Notes: This was a tricky one. As it turned out, the trickiest
part was creating the telephone cord that snaked through the inside of the
brochure on a clear pre-defined course. Naturally, I couldn't shoot it that
accurately so I shot a phone cord in a whole bunch of positions on the copy
stand and then edited them together in Photoshop. Doing the cover illustration
you see here was easy by comparison.
Notes: In the final, the centre of the image was die cut so you
never actually saw the view out the porthole. The image you see out of the
window actually came from a generic stamp image I created for the background
of a Pitney Bowes job where a stamp machine bursts out of a sheet of stamps.
You can see that image in our portfolio.
Notes: This was a case of me using my own work as clip art. The
microphone was created especially for this but little else was. Most of
it came from some stuff I had done for a Royal Bank job. I mentioned in
my Step-By-Step article that this was the second time that the little sand
dollar had popped up. Well, there's more to the story than that. If you
will excuse me, I will quote from one of my submissions to Mike (the art
director) and Talitha (the editor) at Step-By-Step....
Oh, about that sand dollar. Melody collected a bunch of them when she and
I were in Venezuela a few years ago. Over the years since, they have broken
or gotten lost. One of the remaining ones I brought into work to scan. I was
so careful with it, particularly as my dear wife had admonished me not to
break it just before I left for work that day. I put it on the flatbed scanner
first thing, with a little tissue over it. Left the cover open so no harm
would come to it. I did the prescan. Yup, looks good, that's a go for the
hi res scan. The phone rang for me just as I initiated the high res scan.
When I came back from my call the scanner cover was down which I thought
was strange. Iain, bless his heart, likes to keep the equipment around him
tidy and had slammed the cover down the moment the scan was finished. Fortunately
I had a tissue handy to clean the sand dollar bits off the scanner bed.
Whenever I see that sand dollar image I am reminded that that hundreds of
thousands of people have also now seen how it looked just moments before
it was literally turned to dust. It probably never even knew what hit it.
Notes: I was in a hurry on this one and fortunately, I had just
discovered this technique for doing a neat water texture in Painter. Just
lucky, I guess.
Notes: While I was getting my feet wet writing my own book on
Painter I needed an example to illustrate some point I was making about
sketched effects. So I came up with this. Its great when you make up your
own projects-- you can change anything, even the heads so that it always
looks good. This was one such project which looked neat when it was done
but it never really existed. Kinda like the book, actually. I wrote about
40 pages and then found that I would be unable to write at the speed that
most publishers wanted me to write. I have a day job that I'd like to keep
doing. After that I thought I should just stick to writing articles as no-one
ever seems to be trying to rush me through them and they are (while often
long) still of a size that I can comfortably handle in what little spare
time I have.
Okay, that's it for the notes for part 2 of my 3D series. Follow this link
to get to the
Appendix to Part 3 .
...Simon Tuckett Any comments on the above? Email them to me at: simon@roboshop.com
So many pieces of artwork were used in these articles from so many
different projects, I thought I might jot down some background notes for the pieces
as they appeared in the article.
Client: None Agency: None
Client: Novartis Agency: Kuleba & Shyllit
Client: RE/MAX Agency: Kuleba & Shyllit
Client: Netcom Canada Agency: Two Door
Client: Novartis Agency: Kuleba and Shyllit
Client: Royal Bank of Canada Agency: Gingko
Client: Pitney Bowes Agency: FCB Canada
Client: Sears Agency: Ostby & Pente
Client: Canadian Acoustics Magazine Agency: Direct
Client: Canadian Acoustics Magazine Agency: Direct
Client: Personal Agency: None
