Delighted to see my artwork used on the latest album by Kateboy.

A 3D scan was taken of the lead singer Kate Akhurst which I used to project the curves onto in Maya. Kateboy then art directed how they wanted the curves to look in relation to the original head scan. I then rendered the image using Arnold for Maya by Solid Angle. A more technical breakdown of the process can be found in this tutorial.

The album can be ordered here:

iTunes: http://po.st/KBODLFB
CD and 12″ Vinyl: http://po.st/KBOPFB

While I appreciate the functionality of the new Hotkey Editor in Maya 2016, I feel it could be improved. My main bugbears with it are:

• It takes far too long to open, much like the new Hypershade window.
• Its far too large and cannot even fit on my screen at lower resolutions.

• It cannot be resized.
• Changing the ‘Search By’ menu loses your hotkey so you have to add it again.
• No option to change a hotkey when creating a new Runtime Command (have to search for it afterwards).
• Can’t save settings for the window itself, so I have to keep changing the ‘Search by’ to Hotkeys every and ‘Keyboard’ to ‘Runtime Commands’ every time I use it.
• Im also getting lots of issues with having to press keys twice to get them to work (a conflict somewhere), but that’s another issue.
• It has a super ugly pop up window after saving a Runtime Command that has to be clicked on, which is almost as annoying as this window that I seem to see every time I open a scene and that interrupts everything.

Anyway I mocked up a couple of ways to improve the look and feel of the window. Rant over 🙂

Recently inspired by Chad Ashley’s test with the alCurvature shader by Anders Langland, I thought I would also give it a test. It seems very useful for creating ‘dirt map’ effects. In the examples below it has been connected to the Diffuse Roughness attribute of the alSurface shader.

The examples below show both Negative and Positive modes (Positive selects convex regions while Negative selects concave regions of the turtle’s shell).

They use decreasing Radius values (smaller values pick out finer detail in the model, while larger values give a smoother result).

Many thanks to Josh Alexander for the use of his very cute turtle model.

The slides from my presentation at FMX 2015 can be found here (35,191 KB).

I created a guide to sampling in Arnold with the help from my colleagues at Solid Angle.

It is also available in the following flavors – MtoA  SitoA  HtoA  C4DtoA.

Thrilled to be nominated 2015 Autodesk AREA artist of the year. Many thanks to those who voted for me!

Here are some tests I did last year using the alShaders by Anders Langland. Please bear in mind that they are by no means complete and some of the attributes may have changed (especially alSurface).

alSurface alRemapColor alPattern alLayer alInputVector alHair alGaborNoise alFractal alFlowNoise alCurvature alCombine alCellNoise alBlackbody

Very happy to see my artwork used for the new Kateboy single ‘Midnight Sun’.

Here is a test I did using the new multiple scattering in volumes available in the latest release of Arnold.

I increased the Volume Ray Depth to 6 and increased the Volume Indirect Samples to 10 to reduce the noise.

Here is a comparison when rendering with and without Volume Indirect:

Another example below, with and without multple scattering. The difference is huge!

If you haven’t done so already, I seriously recommend you check out the work of Oyonale. A true hero of mine and a huge inspiration.

His variations series of images are amazing.

Its incredible how much he has achieved during the 90’s/ early 2000’s and how far ahead of the game he was and I think a lot of his work still holds up today. I don’t know what he is doing today, but I know I would love to see more work from him.

Even more incredible is computer graphics was a hobby for him and his day job doesn’t involve graphics at all!

This blog entry is also great and he also has a great photographic eye.

A true master of his craft.