Audi A4 White

Another render from Maya and Mental Ray of Audi A4 B5

Audi A4

I finished my second car ever made finally. This one is Audi A4 B5 (1995-200). I did all in Maya 2011 from modeling, materials and lighting to render in Mental Ray. I would like to thank to Piotr Koczan for his help and supervising me in production of that Audi.

Speed Up Rendering in After Effects using GPU

Lastly I found good way to increase speed of rendering and preview in After Effects CS. Since After supports OpenGL and using GPU for many things it gives great opportunity to be faster and more efficient.

Here are few steps that you should know to use that feature.

Render with OpenGL

OpenGL is a set of standards for high-performance processing of 2D and 3D graphics for a wide variety of applications. For After Effects users, OpenGL provides fast, high-quality rendering for previews and final output by moving rendering from the CPU to the OpenGL hardware (GPU).

To use OpenGL in After Effects, you’ll need an OpenGL card that supports OpenGL 2.0 and has Shader support and support for NPOT (Non Power of Two) textures.

OpenGL in After Effects supports the following features:

• Shadows, except point light shadows (Colored shadows appear gray.)
• Lights (eight maximum)
• Masks
• Alpha channels
• Track mattes
• Intersecting layers
• Transformations for 2D and 3D layers
• GPU-accelerated effects, including Alpha Levels, Bevel Alpha, Box Blur, Brightness & Contrast, Channel Blur, Color Balance, Color Balance (HLS), Curves, Directional Blur, Drop Shadow, Fast Blur, Find Edges, Gaussian Blur, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Noise, Radial Blur, Ramp, Sharpen, and Tint.
• All blending modes except Dissolve and Dancing Dissolve
• Metal property settings for 3D layers
• Cone feather settings for light layers
• 2D motion blur
• Adjustment layers
• Anti-aliasing

Turn it on

When OpenGL does not support a feature, it simply renders without using that feature. For example, if your layers contain shadows and your OpenGL hardware does not support shadows, the output will not contain shadows.

To enable OpenGL for rendering final output, click the underlined text next to Render Settings in the Render Queue panel, and select Use OpenGL Renderer.

To enable OpenGL for rendering previews, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and select Enable OpenGL.

To see what features your OpenGL card supports, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and click OpenGL Info.

To modify the amount of texture memory, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), click OpenGL Info, and enter a value for Texture Memory of no more than 80% of the installed video RAM (VRAM) on your video card.

Summarizing

In my case I have real time preview and rendering time was 3 times more faster than when using CPU. If you have opportunity to use GPU do this.

Bosch Clasixx 6

Another model did for advertisement need. I used photometric mr Sky Portal lights.

Braun Silk Epil

It's been while since my last post but I was very busy because work. I did some models for commercial tv production. I did animation of models as well but I didn't have time to render them. I will post animation next time. It was modeled in 3ds Studio and render using Mental Ray. Lighting is HDRI. Color correction in Photoshop.

Butterfly Forest

I did't have a lot of time for doing my personal projects but final I found time to learn more expressions for After Effects and here is the result.
Butterflies have some expressions which control speed and angles of flapping wings. Rest is just mix of vectors and others footages.

3D Text Expression

Quite simple but useful expression for after effects which creates 3d text by offsetting layer every 1 unit in Z axes. It uses first layer index value which should be on top of stock.



Here is a expression which should be put in position parameter

offset = index -1;
p = thisComp.layer("your_layer_name");
[p.position[0],p.position[1],p.position[2]+offset];

After duplicating this basic layer the next will be offseted by 1 unit in space. Just copy around 15 to 20 layers and you will have 3D looking text in After Effects.

Interior Viz

I finshed this interior concept few minutes ago. Thats final render without post production in Photoshop. I found very useful references for furniture on IKEA home web page. Very helpful for modeling pipeline. I used only Final Gather method and Daylight system for lighting.

Pillows

I was working on interior visualization and I modeled some pillows. They were too simple so I added extra resolution and details in Zbrush by sculpting them. It was my first time in Zbrush but I'm happy because of final results.

Packshot Visualization

I tried some visualizations of dvd boxes which I modeled recently. I did compositing with ambient occlusion pass and color correction in Photoshop.

Packshot

My brand new design of cg blogger packshot. At first I designed covers in Photoshop. Than modeled dvd box, textured and rendered in 3ds Max 2010. Next I put everything into After Effects and composited together.

Katapult 3D

Speed modeling. I tried to model low-poly one.

Blogger Promo

Project for promotion of my blog.

Life of Motion

Short design I did for portfolio.